THE
FAMILYOn Christmas Day 1928 Nellie Elizabeth McCalla was born to a large, cheerful family living in Pawnee City, Nebraska (2000 pop. 1,033) . One confusing photo of her first home published in the August 52 issue of Night and Day, and reproduced in Black and Feret's biography, claimed she was born in Seneca, Kansas and later moved to Pawnee City (see Other Childhood Photos below). However, in the interview with Irish on the Audio-Visual page, Irish confirms she was born in Pawnee City. I suspect that Irish's father, who had a restless streak (see below), moved the family to Kansas for a year or two when Irish was very young before moving back to Nebraska.
Irish's mother, Nettie Geiger McCalla, was Swiss-French and her father, Lloyd McCalla, was Irish. When Nellie arrived the couple already had four children - two boys and two girls. The family would eventually grow to eight offspring: three brothers - Bill, Frank and Jack - and five sisters - Mildred, Anna, Nellie, Florence and Mary (see photos below). "We were a typical, big Irish family," recalled Irish. "We could fight like cats and dogs, but if you picked on any one of us, you'd have all of us on your neck."
Nellie's father, a skilled butcher who progressed to become a meat inspector, was a giant of a man standing 6 feet 3 inches (190 cm) tall and weighing almost 300 pounds (136 kg). Sadly, he was an alcoholic and Irish confessed that she wasn't very close to him. This obviously put a greater burden on Nettie and Irish later recalled that her mother ran the house very well, so it appears she was probably a very strong woman. Her father liked to always be on the move, which meant that the family relocated frequently (Prevue). In 1939 the family moved to Des Moines, Iowa, and Lloyd commenced work at Condon Bros meat dealers. Nellie's older siblings attended North High school while she went to Washington Irving Junior High, where she completed the year's schooling before the family's next move. In November 1941 the family lived in Marshalltown, Iowa after her father had decided to leave the meat packing industry to take over his father's ranch to raise horses (Starweek). As usual, the venture didn't last very long and in September 1942 Lloyd moved the family back to Nebraska. They settled briefly in Omaha before returning to Pawnee City where Nellie finished high school. She said she was neither good nor bad at studies and loved dances (Black and Feret).
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The combination of having three brothers and spending virtually all of her childhood in small towns and semi-rural settings meant that Irish eventually grew into quite a tomboy. She had a mean tackle, loved to play softball, baseball and football with the boys, and served as an assistant lifeguard. She also confessed that dolls didn't interest her and that her happiest moments were spent running through the woods and climbing trees (Tease). When I first read that as a child Irish had loved to swing in trees "like her favourite comic character, Sheena" I was initially very dubious. It smacked of the kind of publicity concocted by the PR department to convince the viewing public that the star was "tailor-made" for the role. My suspicions evaporated, however, when I read that on learning that Irish had been selected to play the part of Sheena in 1954, her mother had exclaimed, "They're paying you for what you did as a kid?". Publicity published when the series was screening said that all of the McCalla children were avid Sheena readers ("I used to play among the trees and make believe I was Sheena, and that my brother was Tarzan.") (TV Radio Mirror) Irish believed she was about about 12 when she read Sheena comics and, because she loved drawing, liked to copy the drawings of Sheena in the comics (Prevue).
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ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT Her artistic temperament developed early as she loved both art and music. She was attracted to drawing from an early age and has always described art as her principal interest. When she was 14 one of her watercolours was chosen for an exhibit at the Joslyn Museum in Omaha (Ultra Filmfax). Irish only studied art in her freshman year (first year of high school) at Omaha and felt deprived when she moved back to Pawnee City because there was no art institute there. In high school she drew copies of Vargas-girl pin-ups with coloured chalk on big sheets of newsprint and traded them at gas stations for fuel for her boyfriend's car. All of the gas stations in town, apparently, had Irish McCalla Vargas copies hanging in their offices. When interviewed in 1994 she said that she still had an old sketchbook that was full of idealistic drawings that included Sheena-type jungle girls. Irish also played tenor sax in the high school band and said that she ended up with that instrument because all of the kids in the family took all of the other instruments. It is also a large instrument that obviously matched her height ("I always knew a boy liked me when he carried my sax home from practice.") (Prevue). |
When she was about 15 Irish began working as a waitress in her aunt's restaurant in Marysville, Kansas. One afternoon she and some of her girlfriends decided to go swimming down at the river and they all stripped down to their panties ("I had already developed, but most of them looked like boys."). They went to a spot where there was a rope tied to a tree where kids could swing and flip into the water. It was a pretty secluded spot, but there were train tracks nearby. Her girlfriends were paddling around in the water and Irish decided to swing out - just as a slow train was passing by! All of the hollering and whistling of the young guys on the train flustered her and instead of swinging out over the water she swung out over a dirt embankment and was unable to drop and had to swing all the way back ("They probably saw as much of me as my family doctor.") She was so embarrassed she almost couldn't go back to the restaurant because she knew that the railroad men ate there sometimes. She did go, and of course the men were there and they did recognise her. The girls had all sworn to secrecy because they didn't want their parents to know and Irish couldn't tell her aunt or she would have sent her straight home. As she went to take their order one of the young guys began to make a comment, but one of the older guys, who probably had kids of his own, looked at him and firmly said "Quiet!" Irish said that things were different then and decency was much more important, and the older guy's comments did the trick. No one ever said anything ever again ("My aunt never did find out how much of a jungle girl I really was.") (Prevue). It isn't surprising that she won a school beauty contest about this time (TV Star Parade).
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BOYFRIENDS
It should now be obvious that all of the elements that would would eventually make Irish McCalla a convincing Sheena were falling into place during her childhood - the love of the outdoors, the lofty physical stature inherited from her father, the Amazonian facial characteristics, the try-anything mentality and and those abundant curves. She would be well prepared when the opportunity finally came knocking at her door.
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| IRISH BIOGRAPHY INTRO | HOME |
• Prevue Pin Up Special 2 magazine, Aug-Oct 94
• Starweek magazine, Aug 82
TV's Original Sheena Irish McCalla by Bill Black and Bill Feret, Paragon Publications 1992
• Tease magazine No. 3, 1995
• Ultra Filmfax magazine Apr-May 98
• TV Star Parade magazine Feb 56
• Femme Fatales magazine Jan 99
PHOTOS
• The photos of Irish aged 7, 14 and the photo of her aged 18 months sitting in the Flying Dragon wagon with her puppies in the Other Childhood Photos section are from Point magazine, Mar 54
• The studio photo of Irish wearing a white dress is a vidcap from my DVD of the Where Are They Now? documentary (see Page 2: The Personal Appearances Circuit - Again in the Final Years section). Sorry, no age given.
• All other photos on this page are from Night and Day magazine, Aug 52
SHEENA
© is the property of Sony Pictures Corporation
This independent, fan-based analysis of the Sheena material is copyright
© 2005-2007 Paul Wickham
This page was updated August 2007