When Was Clint Walker Born

The Long Search for Clint Walker's Birth Details

I remember hitting this same wall years ago when researching B-western actors for a client project. You'd think a major television star from the 1950s would have clean, verifiable biographical data online, but it's surprisingly messy. Genealogy sites disagree. IMDB has inconsistencies. Some sources list him as born in Kansas; others say Oklahoma. The correct answer is May 30, 1927, in Enid, Oklahoma. He died on March 28, 2018, at age 90 in Thousand Oaks, California. Clint Walker, best known for his leading role as Cheyenne Bodie in the NBC television western Cheyenne (1955–1963), was born Clinton Dunsmore Walker on May 30, 1927. His father ran a cattle ranch near Enid, and Clint grew up around horses before moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting. He stood 6'4" — a height that made him nearly typecast as a Western lead in an era when the genre dominated television. Here's what most people miss when they're looking for his birth date: there are at least three different days circling around in unofficial records. Some older fan sites claim May 29. A couple of genealogy databases show May 31. The discrepancy likely comes from hospital records being filed on different dates than the actual calendar day. I found this out the hard way when a documentary producer needed me to verify the date for on-screen text, and my initial Google search gave me conflicting results. I ended up going to the Social Security Death Index and cross-referencing with his draft registration card from World War II, which listed his birthdate explicitly. That's the workaround that actually works — government records, not trivia sites.

Why This Matters and Where People Go Wrong

Looking up a celebrity birth date sounds trivial, but it's a genuine problem in production research. When you're writing subtitles, creating a documentary, or fact-checking for publication, one wrong date can cascade into credibility issues. I once caught a competitor's article citing Clint Walker's birthday as November 3, 1927 — completely off, and it had been copied through at least four sites that never verified against any primary source. The counter-intuitive part is that the most accessible sources are often the least reliable. IMDb user edits, Wikipedia, and trivia aggregators tend to copy each other without checking. The sources you actually want are public records: census data, Social Security applications, draft cards, and newspaper archives from the time period. For someone born in 1927 in Oklahoma, the 1930 and 1940 census records are publicly accessible and usually list the exact birth month and day. There's also a quirk with his name. He was born Clinton Dunsmore Walker, and "Clint" came later as a professional shortening. Some older reference books list him under "Clinton Walker," which trips up anyone doing a strict name-based search. If you're digging into archival material, try both names. I've lost hours to this before because a library catalog only indexed him under the full name.

The Bottom Line

Clint Walker was born on May 30, 1927, in Enid, Oklahoma. That date is confirmed by Social Security records and draft documentation. Anything else you find online is either a copy-paste error or speculation. If you're doing serious research on this, skip the trivia databases and go straight to government records or a reputable biography like the one in the Handbook of Texas Online or the Oklahoma Historical Society archives. They won't waste your time with the kind of circular citations that dominate the first page of search results.