George/Nick: Texan Charm #12

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I found a lovely article about George on Temple Daily Telegrams website:

http://www.tdtnews.com/index/news/show/76038

BELTON — Flick on CBS’s hit show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and there’s Nick Stokes: a hunky Texan, introspective and sometimes troubled.


But pick up a Belton High School yearbook from the 1980s or talk with those who knew him, and you get a different picture of George Eads, the Belton native who plays Stokes.


Not long ago, Eads was just your typical Texas teenager, a jokester who drew caricatures of friends, left a trail of doting girls in his wake and, according to one neighbor, drove perhaps one of the ugliest cars in town.


Funny though, the beefcake actor — once named one of TV Guide’s Sexiest Men Alive — may not be the most recognizable name from perhaps Bell County’s most famous family.


“Most people will say, ‘Oh, that’s the house Cappy used to live in,’” laughed Roland Flentge, who bought his home in a quiet neighborhood of north Belton in the early 1990s from George’s parents, former Bell County District Attorney Arthur C. Eads, or “Cappy,” and Eads’ mother, Dr. Vivian Baker, recently retired Belton ISD superintendent.



Flentge never met Eads. But the Hollywood celebrity probably was about 5-foot-7 or 5-foot-8 inches in high school, according to a couple of faded pencil markings left on his kitchen wall that once tracked the height of someone with the initial “G.”
“We’re not sure it’s George, though,” Roland Flentge’s wife, Helen, said.



‘I thought you’d never ask’

But that’s where George lived, all right, said Robert Gosney, a longtime neighbor who lives two lots down from the Flentges.

Gosney’s face lights up thinking about him.
“He was just the funniest little boy I ever seen in my life,” Gosney chuckled.


Eads and a buddy used to stop by on weekends or summer afternoons, he said.



“I’d hear a knock on my door and there’d stand George and his friend,” he remembers. Which happens, of course, when you own a pool table down the block in an era before video games.


Eads would never intrude though, Gosney remembers. Eads and his friend, maybe 10 or 11 years old, just sort of stopped by to say hello.
Sometimes, Gosney would play dumb. He knew why they knocked on the door, of course. While the boys, most likely, were just itching to run downstairs for a round of pool, Gosney would talk about the weather or something else.


“Finally I’d say, ‘Hey, George, would you guys like to come in and shoot some pool?” Gosney said.


And, like clockwork, in a polite, aw-shucks kind of way, Eads would shoot back, “I thought you’d never ask.”


“That was always his response,” Gosney said with a laugh.



‘Happy-go-lucky type’
You’d be hard-pressed to meet anyone with a bad word to say about the young Eads.


Not from neighbors like Gosney, and especially not from former coaches, the ones who watched an affable boy squeeze every ounce of athleticism from an undersized frame.


“He had the heart of a champion,” former Belton Tigers football coach Dick Stafford said. “He didn’t shirk work at all.”


Short and skinny, Eads is usually pictured in the front row of his team photos throughout middle and high school.


Despite his size, Eads still had the respect of his teammates for bringing tenacity and a work ethic that transcended his playing time, Stafford said.


Those like Eads — “They earn the respect of their teammates,” he said, “and he certainly had that.”



A different picture
With his straight blond hair and bright eyes, strong jaw and dimples, in some areas of life, Eads didn’t have to work too hard.


“Yeah, the girls kind of followed him around,” said Shelley Cheatham, a close friend who went with Eads to his senior prom in 1985.


There was an “air” about him, she said, that made him one of the popular guys in school. Always a jokester, Eads was your “typical teenager,” she remembered, and a budding conversationalist — “he could talk about anything at any time.”


Her friends outside Belton look at her sideways now when she says she once dated the hunky actor.



“Yeah, none of them believe me,” she said, laughing.
And like other people who knew Eads as a young man, Cheatham was surprised by Eads’ interest in acting. In high school, he was more or less your everyday jock, she said.



“I would never have thought he would be interested in it,” she said.
His character on “CSI” is far different from the wisecracking teen she knew as a youngster.


“When I watch him on TV, I just wait for him to crack up or something, because he’s such a jokester,” she said. “He’s just a happy-go-lucky type.”



Hollywood success
The road to Hollywood success wasn’t all happy. After graduating from Texas Tech University (unlike his “CSI” character, who graduated from Texas A&M) and honing his skills in a Dallas acting school, Eads rolled the dice on Hollywood.


His former high school track and field coach, Robert Murphy, remembers Eads once living out of his car on a Southern California beach.


His former English teacher, Peggy Hughes, said Eads told her students about his early hardships during a visit to the school a few years ago.

“He didn’t know where he was going to get his next meal,” she remembered him saying. But the story, of course, was framed in a moral about following your dreams.


And that tenacity and work ethic, once demonstrated on the football field, served him well fighting the odds of a Hollywood career.


Murphy saved a paper, maybe 25 years old, that Eads once wrote about his goals for the upcoming athletic season.


“And I won’t give up until they have been achieved,” it ends.



‘Nicest young man’
Years ago, Gosney, his old neighbor, ran across Eads at a function in Salado.

Gosney, 30 years later, struggled to remember that phrase Eads used to say all the time on his front porch.

“What was that thing you used to say all the time, George?” he asked.


Eads smiled like it was yesterday: “I thought you’d never ask,” Gosney remembered.



He laughs retelling the story, remembering the same polite, charismatic boy who poked his head out from the doorway whenever an errant pool ball fell off the table and hit the tile.
The Gosneys would just pretend not to notice because they were such good kids. It’s something many in Belton still remember, and notice.


“George hasn’t changed a bit,” Gosney said. “He was always just the nicest young man.”



On the same website, I found another article with a mention of George:

Several years ago George Eads, a star on “CSI: Las Vegas,” autographed a picture for Burns.


“Come to Hollywood,” it says. “We need a pro!”


Eads grew up in Belton and, thanks to his father, was a client before his career as an actor developed.


To read the full article, click on this link:
http://www.tdtnews.com/index/news/show/76067?free_trial=true
 
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Wow, that's super nice. And not surprising. Whenever I hear him do that cute little laugh of his, I always think he seems like a sweet guy. :)
 
Thanks for posting that Sookie!

What a nice article!
I think the thing that made me :eek: the most was the reference to straight blond hair. Was he ever really a natural blond? Not counting the Evel role, I've never seen him any lighter than a medium brown, and some of his older episodes it looks almost black.

I'm sure someone here can fill me in :devil:
 
Thanks for finding those articles, Sookie! That was so nice what everyone said about him.

As for the hair, he probably had light brown hair, some with darker brown hair when they're old had very light blonde hair when they were younger. A friend of mine was like that.

I could just imagine little George. His parents brought a kind, respectible man. :)
 
Thanks for posting that Sookie!

What a nice article!
I think the thing that made me :eek: the most was the reference to straight blond hair. Was he ever really a natural blond? Not counting the Evel role, I've never seen him any lighter than a medium brown, and some of his older episodes it looks almost black.

I'm sure someone here can fill me in :devil:

yes Sookie thanks for finding that article :)

I've got no idea about the hair but I know my husband had blonde hair when he was little. He now has dark brown hair with a slight smattering of grey :) So I'm assuming in the article is correct.

And George being a prankster :) I would love to hear about some of the hi-jinks that go on around the set :lol:
 
Speaking for myself, I was blonde up until puberty hit. Now it's sort of light brown and just to make my life interesting curly and frizzy.

So, I can believe George's hair was lighter when he was younger.
 
I've gone from a very light blond to a very dark blond. I've always had a good bit of red mixed in, now there's just a lot more brown than there used to be. :lol:

I think it was Jorja who once said he was the prankster on set. I think there are still a few video's on youtube with some of the (more minor I'm sure) pranks he's pulled on set.

You read that stuff from his coaches (about not shirking work) and realize that he's the same way now as he was then. Only now he applies it to his acting. How many actors would have stopped filming in season 9 going through what he went through with his back.


“George hasn’t changed a bit,” Gosney said. “He was always just the nicest young man.”
12 years later on CSI and people still say the same thing about him. :)


Susan

ETA: After getting some theme pics out of photobucket and coming across Neverland:
Short and skinny, Eads is usually pictured in the front row of his team photos throughout middle and high school.
Reminds me of that story Nick told Doc Robbins about being small for his age. :luvlove: Wonder if George put that in or if it was part of the script. :thumbsup:
 
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Awwww....that was an awesome article! Makes me love him that much more. :adore:

I'm not too sure about the hair tho. He's very swarthy, and we've seen a couple of high school pics where it's dark. Maybe he was just out in the sun a lot as a kid. :lol:
 
Interesting insights everyone, and thanks for the input :)

I do know that hair is a funny animal, I have a swatch of my birth hair in my babybook, and it was auburn red colored. Apparently it changed to the lightest of blondes by the end of my first year and stayed through high school, but it has now spent a lifetime darkening to a dark blond. Our son had my blond hair at birth, and it was so fine you could hardly see it for years :lol:
Now its a medium dishwater color and he hates it. :lol:

It was just one of those wondering moments, because even the youngest of his pics that I've managed to see, he was dark haired. Of course, I think it's the dark hair and smokey chocolatey eyes that caught my attention in the first place, not to mention the voice. :adore:

Coming from California, it's easy for me to become bored with blond hair and blue eyes. If my husbands hair wasn't gray, it would be George's color, but he has light eyes. :p
 
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I wish we could see more of his funny side on CSI. It's always nice when we get to see that side of him in the pictures DLA posts - he's always making funny faces or in funny poses.
 
For those who don't go into the spoiler lab - CBSPressExpress updated the CSI front page for season 12. Their description of Nick fits him perfectly. :luvlove:

Nick Stokes, the conscience of the team, often driven by his emotional connection to the victim to always get the job done



Susan
 
Yep, it sure does. I am really getting excited about the new season. Love the picture of George with Carrot Top. I hope we get to see a lighter side of nick his season.
 
I hope we get to see a lighter side of nick his season.

I know many people would like to see a lighter side of Nick and the show in general but I must say that I personally don't want it too be as light as many want. It should be lighter to be more like in the earlier seasons, I agree but I don't want it to be too light.

I sure loved episodes like Appendicitement a lot but I don't want to have more than one or two in one season... because it really would take away the seriousness of the CSI'S work... I mean what they deal with every day is normally no fun at all.

As for Nick... he sure is good and just cute in those fun episodes and who doesn't love his smile :)adore:) but in my opinion he shines more in the more serious episodes :) I would like to get one of those again this season :) Episodes like Gum Drops and Turn, Turn, Turn are the ones where George shines! And besides I love emotional Nick so much :adore:
 
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