Appalachian Figures
Most viewers who remember Julie Parrish see her framed in Technicolor. She stands in a helicopter beside Elvis Presley in Paradise, Hawaiian Style, or leans against a kitchen counter on the 1967 sitcom Good Morning World. Yet behind the stage name and the Hollywood lighting was Ruby Joyce Wilbar, a daughter of Bell County whose life traced a path that many Appalachian families knew well: from a coalfield border town to the industrial Midwest, from economic precarity to a new kind of work, and finally to advocacy for people in crisis.
Vital records and genealogical sources agree that she entered the world as Ruby Joyce Wilbar on 21 October 1940 in Middlesboro, Bell County, Kentucky, the child of William Robert “Bob” Wilbar and Gladys Marie Webb. Middlesboro, the “Magic City” pushed up against the Cumberland Gap, liked to call itself the “Athens of the Mountains,” a boomtown whose fortunes rose and fell with coal, timber, railroads, and the fantasies of northern investors. The Wilbars belonged to the working families who actually made that landscape function. Her father came from nearby Pineville and later appears in records tied to industrial work in Michigan, part of the broader mid twentieth century stream of Appalachian out migration.
The Completely Kentucky Wiki entry on Parrish, compiled from birth registers and family records, names five younger siblings and places Ruby’s earliest memories in Lake City, Tennessee, now Rocky Top. That move south from Bell County into the coal camps of East Tennessee fits a familiar pattern for families following work across the border counties of the Cumberland Plateau. Even before she became “Julie,” her childhood was already shaped by the mobility that defined many mid century Appalachian households.
From Lake City to Tecumseh
Around age eleven the Wilbars joined another major migration stream. They left the mountains altogether and headed to Tecumseh, in Lenawee County, Michigan, one of many small factory towns that drew Appalachian families during and after the Second World War. A Tecumseh city directory from the mid 1950s lists William and Gladys Wilbar at 210 East Chicago Boulevard, while Tecumseh High School yearbooks from the same period show Ruby in class photographs under her birth name.
These sources place her firmly in Tecumseh’s working and student life. She graduated from Tecumseh High School and, according to both Wikipedia and family linked genealogies, went on to attend the Patricia Stevens Modeling School in Toledo while also taking classes at the University of Toledo. Like many Appalachian migrants in the industrial Midwest, she experimented with new forms of work that did not quite exist in the company towns back home. For Ruby, that work was modeling.
By the late 1950s she was competing in pageants and modeling competitions attached to the Patricia Stevens school. The Completely Kentucky biography notes that she won a national “Young Model of the Year” contest in that chain. Los Angeles Times and Independent obituaries echo that story and connect it directly to her big break: a nationwide modeling contest whose winner would be featured in a Jerry Lewis picture. That prize would carry her a long way from Tecumseh’s yearbook pages.
Becoming “Julie Parrish”
The Hollywood that Ruby Wilbar stepped into around 1962 was hungry for new faces but also very willing to reshape them. According to the Los Angeles Times obituary, Jerry Lewis chose her as the winner of the contest and gave her a small role in his film It’s Only Money, where she appeared as a bridal shop sales clerk. For her next appearance with Lewis, The Nutty Professor, she took on a new professional identity and the name that would follow her the rest of her life: Julie Parrish.
Biographical summaries in IMDb, Memory Alpha, and Completely Kentucky all agree on the essentials. After those early film bits she found steady work in the mid sixties in the kinds of youth oriented pictures that filled drive ins and small town theaters: Winter A Go Go, Fireball 500, and smaller parts in films like Harlow and Boeing Boeing. The Independent’s obituary, which stitches together contemporary press coverage, describes her as a dark haired Swinging Sixties model turned actress whose image was tailored to the teen market but whose ambitions leaned toward more serious acting.
Tom Lisanti’s book Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema devotes an entire chapter to Parrish and builds it around an extended interview with her, treating her not simply as a pin up, but as a working professional with craft and memory. Through that oral history and others, a more complicated picture emerges of a young woman trying to navigate the pressures of studio contracts, typecasting, and the sexism of mid century Hollywood while still taking pride in the work itself.
An Appalachian in Elvis’s Hollywood
For many fans of Appalachian history, Julie Parrish’s most visible role is Joanna, the competent and long suffering helicopter pilot opposite Elvis Presley in Paradise, Hawaiian Style, filmed and released in 1966. The film is nobody’s idea of high art. Even sympathetic critics admit that it followed a familiar formula that Colonel Tom Parker preferred for Elvis pictures in those years. Still, for Appalachian viewers back home in Middlesboro or Lake City, there must have been a jolt in seeing a Bell County native sharing the frame with the region’s most famous son.
In a later interview with Elvis Australia, Parrish recalled how badly she wanted the part. As a teenager in Michigan she had been, in her own words, “a fan of Elvis for a very long time” and had joined every fan club she could find. When she did not land the role after an initial screen test, she pressed the producer for another chance and won it. On set, she remembered being nervous during their first scenes together, acutely aware of being close to a singer she had admired from afar.
The Independent obituary, drawing on these interviews and others, points out that Paradise, Hawaiian Style was not among Presley’s strongest films, yet Parrish’s performance stood out, especially in the often remembered sequence where Elvis sings to her in a helicopter while she wrangles a pack of dogs. For viewers in Bell County and across Appalachia who read about “local girl in Hollywood” stories in their hometown newspapers, this was a tangible, moving picture proof that someone from Middlesboro’s hollows could end up in the most visible corner of American pop culture.
Television work, Star Trek, and the stage
Julie Parrish’s career in the late 1960s and 1970s was not simply a string of Elvis related publicity stills. Memory Alpha’s production focused biography and the compiled filmographies on Wikipedia show her as a consistently working performer who toggled between film, television, and stage.
In 1966 she appeared on Star Trek: The Original Series as Miss Piper in “The Menagerie,” filming her scenes on Desilu soundstages in October of that year. Science fiction fans still remember her poised performance in that two part story, which cleverly repurposed footage from the unaired pilot “The Cage.” The next year she landed what should have been her big television break, playing Linda Lewis, the good natured young wife of a Los Angeles disc jockey, on the CBS sitcom Good Morning World. Although the series lasted only one season, she is front and center in promotional stills and reviewers noted her warmth and comic timing.
She also appeared in soap operas and dramas that reached living rooms across the country. In the early 1970s she played Betty Anderson Harrington on Return to Peyton Place and later turned up on Mannix, The Rockford Files, Capitol, Dallas, Murder, She Wrote, and Beverly Hills, 90210. In the middle of that work she kept a foothold in feature films, notably as June in the low budget heist picture The Doberman Gang and parts in television movies such as a 1978 adaptation of The Time Machine.
Perhaps most important for understanding her as an artist is her stage work in Los Angeles. Completely Kentucky, Wikipedia, and several film reference sites note that she received a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for her performance as Maggie in a Beverly Hills production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, a demanding role that confirmed ambitions that went beyond pin up posters. Theater reviews and trade coverage, stitched together in secondary biographies, portray her as someone who took technique seriously and was willing to step away from Hollywood formulas when the stage gave her room to do so.
Going back to school and changing course
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the roles on screen became less frequent, Parrish made a decision that many midlife adults from working class backgrounds will recognize. She went back to school. According to Completely Kentucky, Wikipedia, and reference entries that draw on her own later statements, she began undergraduate studies in her late forties and earned a degree in chemical dependency or chemical dependencies counseling.
Variety’s obituary and film database biographies agree that this was not a symbolic degree. She put it to work. For roughly nine years, until about 2000, she served as a full time counselor at Haven Hills Shelter for Battered Women in the San Fernando Valley, a domestic violence organization founded in the late 1970s. Haven Hills had grown out of grassroots feminist activism and by the 1990s provided emergency shelter, transitional housing, and counseling, including for women who, like Parrish’s former Appalachian neighbors, may have felt pressure to keep abuse “within the family.”
Other sources, including the Independent obituary and Elvis focused fan sites, connect this work to a broader pattern of advocacy. They note that she served on the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, eventually becoming its director, and that she spoke publicly about domestic violence, dating violence, and the ways coercion intersected with drugs and alcohol. For someone whose early press had framed her primarily as an attractive face beside male stars, this later period reveals a Bell County migrant who chose to spend her time listening to other people’s stories and trying to make institutions respond with more compassion.
Faith, food, and a different kind of fame
Several obituaries and reference entries mention changes in her spiritual and personal life at the end of the twentieth century. The Independent, drawing on interviews and correspondence, describes Parrish’s turn toward Buddhism and her adoption of a vegan diet in the 1990s, linking those commitments to her activism and concern for nonviolence.
Genealogical profiles and fan maintained sites devoted to Presley’s co stars point out that she also wrote essays and book reviews and contributed to projects like Worth Exposing Hollywood, which revisited the Elvis film years from the perspective of women who had worked beside him. Even in these later ventures the thread of storytelling remains. She was still searching for ways to describe what it had meant to work inside a mid century entertainment industry that could be glamorous and exploitative in the same breath.
The fame she held in these years was modest, the kind that surfaces when a Star Trek magazine runs a short remembrance or when a local Michigan blog invites readers to “visit Tecumseh, proud home of the teenage Julie Parrish.” In Middlesboro, she appears on lists of notable former residents alongside coal magnates and athletes. That kind of memory, tucked into city pride campaigns and fan forums, is another echo of the Appalachian migrant story: gone for decades, but still counted as one of ours.
Illness, death, and resting place
By the time those local histories and fan sites started looking back on her work, Julie Parrish was already facing a long illness. Obituaries in the Los Angeles Times, Variety, and the San Diego Union Tribune all report that she died on 1 October 2003, age sixty two, of complications from ovarian cancer, after a protracted struggle with the disease. The Independent gives her place of death as Beverly Hills, while other notices simply say Los Angeles or mention Tarzana Community Hospital in the San Fernando Valley, a reminder that even near primary sources can disagree on details at the margin.
Genealogical databases and cemetery records, including the Find A Grave memorial for “Ruby Joyce Wilbar Parrish,” note that she is buried at Brookside Cemetery in Tecumseh, Michigan, the town where her teenage years unfolded and where her parents are also buried. The teenager from Bell County who once posed in Tecumseh High School yearbooks, who then stepped into Jerry Lewis comedies, Elvis films, Star Trek episodes, and Los Angeles stages, came to rest back in the small Midwestern community that had absorbed so many Appalachian families.
An Appalachian legacy in popular culture and advocacy
What does it mean to call Julie Parrish an Appalachian figure when so much of her career unfolded far from Bell County’s hillsides. One answer lies in the shape of her life. Born in a boom and bust mountain town, raised for a time in a Tennessee coal community, and carried north by the search for steadier work, she represents a whole cohort of Appalachian women and girls whose trajectories took them into factories, offices, and in rare cases film sets.
Another answer lies in what she chose to do after the cameras stopped calling regularly. Parrish did not retreat into nostalgia for the sixties. Instead, she went back to school, picked up the hard daily work of counseling survivors of domestic violence, and used whatever name recognition remained to bring audiences’ attention to abuse, addiction, and the persistence of gender based violence in communities that often preferred silence.
For Appalachian historians and genealogists, her story also illustrates the value of layered sources. Birth registers and cemetery markers confirm the facts of her life in Middlesboro and Tecumseh. Obituaries in Los Angeles and London trace her film and television career. Fan interviews and oral histories capture her own voice as she remembered being a teenage Elvis fan, a working actress navigating the studio system, and later a counselor trying to make sense of harm and healing. Film prints, Star Trek episodes, and Good Morning World reruns preserve her work for new viewers. Local blogs and high school archives in Tecumseh and Bell County help communities claim her as one of their own.
In all those records, Ruby Joyce Wilbar of Middlesboro and Julie Parrish of Hollywood are the same person. Placing her back in Bell County’s story allows us to see how Appalachian lives unfolded not only in coal camps and courthouse squares, but also on soundstages, in urban shelters, and in the private conversations where survivors of violence begin to imagine a different future.
Sources and further reading
Find A Grave, memorial for “Ruby Joyce Wilbar Parrish,” Brookside Cemetery, Tecumseh, Michigan, including vital dates and burial information.Find A Grave
Completely Kentucky Wiki, “Julie Parrish,” biographical entry emphasizing her Middlesboro birth, early years in Lake City, Tennessee, move to Tecumseh, Michigan, and later counseling work at Haven Hills.Completely Kentucky+1
“Julie Parrish,” English Wikipedia, with structured summary of her early life, film and television career, stage work, and later education and counseling degree, including references to FamilySearch obituaries and press coverage.Wikipedia+1
Howard Mutti Mewse, “Julie Parrish: Model turned actress who played opposite Elvis Presley,” The Independent, 23 October 2003, narrative obituary drawing on interviews and describing her activism, Buddhist and vegan commitments, and work at Haven Hills.The Independent+1
“Julie Parrish, 62; Acted in Films With Jerry Lewis, Elvis,” Los Angeles Times, 8 October 2003, obituary noting her Middlesboro birth, national modeling contest, work with Jerry Lewis and Elvis Presley, stage award for After the Fall, and death from ovarian cancer at Tarzana Community Hospital.Los Angeles Times
“Julie Parrish,” Variety, 6 October 2003, trade paper obituary emphasizing her film and television credits and her degree in chemical dependency counseling and nine years of work at Haven Hills Shelter for Battered Women.Variety+2IMDb+2
San Diego Union Tribune obituary for “Julie Parrish,” 2003, accessed via Legacy.com, confirming her birth as Ruby Joyce Wilbar in Middlesboro on 21 October 1940, modeling school in Toledo, Elvis film appearance, and death on 1 October 2003.Legacy
“Actress Julie Parrish Dies (Updated),” ElvisNews.com, 9 October 2003, fan site obituary based on press reports, summarizing her childhood in Middlesboro and Lake City, adolescence in Tecumseh, and career milestones.ElvisNews.com
“Interview with Julie Parrish: Elvis’ Co Star in Paradise, Hawaiian Style,” Elvis Australia, 11 April 2021, oral history style Q and A in which Parrish recalls being an Elvis fan in her teens, auditioning for the film, and working on set.Elvis
Tom Lisanti, Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema: Interviews with 20 Actresses from Biker, Beach, and Elvis Movies, McFarland, 2001 and later editions, especially the chapter devoted to Julie Parrish, which reproduces a substantial interview with her about her life and work.Google Books
“Julie Parrish,” Memory Alpha, Star Trek wiki, production focused biography with details on her role as Miss Piper in “The Menagerie,” filming dates at Desilu, and a concise chronology of her wider film and television work.Memory Alpha
ElCinema, “Julie Parrish – Actor,” and related biography entries that independently confirm her birth in Middlesboro, stage award for After the Fall, and nine year tenure as a counselor at the Haven Hills Shelter for battered women and their children.El Cinema+1
Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen, “Julie Parrish Profile,” a compiled biography that draws on contemporary newspaper articles and studio publicity, useful for tracking publicity narratives from the 1960s and 1970s.Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen
Mike Settles, “Visit Tecumseh, Proud Home of the Teenage Julie Parrish,” blog post, 15 May 2021, which connects Tecumseh city directories, Tecumseh High School yearbooks, and Brookside Cemetery records to reconstruct her teenage years and later return in burial.Mike Settles+2Facebook+2
Tecumseh District Library, Tecumseh High School yearbooks and local history room holdings, including digitized pages that list “Ruby Wilbar” among Tecumseh students in the 1950s.Tecumseh District Library+1
Ann Dudley Matheny, The Magic City: Footnotes to the History of Middlesborough, Kentucky, and the Yellow Creek Valley, Bell County Historical Society, 2003, for context on Middlesboro’s civic history and self image as “Magic City” and “Athens of the Mountains.”bellcountyhistorical.org+1
Haven Hills, “Who We Are” and related pages, plus Los Angeles Times coverage on the shelter’s founding and expansion, for institutional context on the domestic violence shelter where Parrish worked as a counselor.Haven Hills+3Haven Hills+3Los Angeles Times+3