Twice this week I’ve received broadcast e-mails courtesy of two friends who don’t know each other. Both bore the same information, each working “Tom Hanks’ Dad” into the title of the same basic misinformation.
My friends wanted me and a gazillion other people to know that the father of Tom Hanks was once the lead singer of that 1950s group, the Diamonds, and that this e-mail contained You Tube clips of the elder Hanks and the rest of the Diamonds singing their big hit, “Little Darlin’,” as young men in 1957 and then agin as old men in more recent times.
The problem with the thing was not the two performances. Fans of the Diamonds will love seeing and hearing them perform again. They were great, energizing, and guaranteed catalysts to that old hormonal jolt that some of us get from 1950s music.
The problem was with the false postulation that the father of Tom Hanks’s father sang with the group as their lead singer. If you look at the guy in the 1957 performance with no further information than I’ve given you here, it’s pretty easy to see the guy and think, “Yeah. That’s Tom Hanks’ dad all right. They look a lot alike.”
The problem is – the lead singer of the Diamonds was a Canadian fellow named Dave Somerville, who was born in 1933 and is still very much alive. Tom’s father was California-born Amos Mefford Hanks, born in 1924 and deceased since 1992.None of the DIamonds have ever used the name Hanks in their careers nor have any of them claimed a relationship to the Hanks family of any kind.
Check out the Snopes negation of this breezy claim at http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/tomhanks.asp
After a thousand years on the Internet, this is hardly my first rodeo with wild lies spreading fast into the more prestigious categorization as “urban legends,” but it still irks me that off-the-wall assertions need only to titillate the taste buds of mass curiosity to take on a life that easily finds unquestioning acceptance as “the truth” from people too tired to question their veracity.
I guess that’s why Elvis still lives.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
February 8, 2012 at 2:36 pm |
I’m not networked the same way but it actually is good for us in a small way that we are sometimes fed misinformation on the internet if, for nothing else, to keep a healthy skepticism when we get told things via internet. Even Wikipedia has a number of lies and slanted information in it which requires us to sift through more details before concluding whether it is true or false.
Particularly in a campaign season, a healthy mistrust of what anyone says about candidates or about the state of the economy or the changes government wants to make in our lives is a good thing so we can make up our own minds what is fact, what is fiction and what is true but misleading.
A lazy populous is a controllable populous. It is better to sift every piece of information for truth than to swallow lies unwarily.
February 9, 2012 at 2:04 am |
It was on the Internet… it must be true!
February 16, 2012 at 3:12 pm |
This particular email is interesting in that there seems to be no reason or motive to make up this foolish claim. It doesn’t even launch a story. I have been on the internet only 500 years, and have received many of the type of hoaxes that include the name of a celebrity to lend credence to whatever is being claimed, but this one makes me wonder if there is a possibility that clicking into the videos could trigger a phishing scheme. Anyone?
March 12, 2018 at 3:02 am |
Well darn it….It sure looked like Tom Hanks and enough so that I thought it was his father too! That’s okay, I still love Tom Hanks and the Diamonds! What’s not to love here!