The boy in the 1948 snapshot on our card was 8 years old and had not yet spoken a line on the air. Ricky Nelson was still just the younger son of bandleader Ozzie Nelson and singer Harriet Hilliard, whose radio show used hired actors to play their boys. That changed on February 20, 1949, when Ricky and his big brother David joined The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet as themselves, and America spent the next 17 years watching him grow up. Decades later, it was his own sons who stepped forward to set the record straight about the rumors that followed his death.
Ricky died on December 31, 1985, at 45, when his DC-3 caught fire and crash-landed in a field near De Kalb, Texas. He left four children with his ex-wife Kris Harmon, and a fifth boy his will refused to recognize. All of them are grown now, and even the youngest is 45. Two of them nearly boarded that plane, and a phone call from their father is the reason they didn’t.
How Did An Ozzie And Harriet Son Become A Rock And Roll Father?
Ricky turned the family sitcom into a launching pad. He sang on the show, the songs became records, and in August 1958 “Poor Little Fool” became the first No. 1 on Billboard’s brand new Hot 100. By the time the series signed off in 1966 he was a husband and father himself. He married Sharon Kristin Harmon, daughter of Heisman winner Tom Harmon and older sister of a future NCIS star, on April 20, 1963. (Her brother’s own boys are in our story on Mark Harmon’s sons.)
The marriage produced four children in eleven years and ended in divorce in December 1982. Kris, a painter and actress, died of a heart attack at her home in Santa Fe in April 2018, at 72. The tragedies that shadowed Ricky and David are told in our look behind the Nelsons’ perfect TV image, but the children’s stories begin with the oldest, who was in front of a camera before she started school.
Tracy Nelson Grew Up On Camera, Then Beat Cancer Three Times
Tracy Kristine Nelson was born October 25, 1963, in Santa Monica, which makes her 63. She was 4 when she turned up in Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. As a teenager she landed the role most of our readers remember, the valley girl Jennifer DeNuccio on Square Pegs in 1982. She later played the sleuthing Sister Stephanie opposite Tom Bosley for three seasons on Father Dowling Mysteries, and in the mid-1990s she took on Rizzo in Grease on Broadway.
Her toughest role came off the set. A month after she married actor William R. Moses in 1987, she was diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation put it into remission, but thyroid cancer followed in 2005 and breast cancer in 2010, and she came through a double mastectomy as well. She became a spokesperson for lymphoma research. Tracy and Moses divorced in 1997, a decade after that diagnosis, and they share a daughter, Remington. Tracy’s little brothers, meanwhile, were about to put the Nelson name back on top of the charts.
How Did The Twins Get The Family Back To No. 1?
Matthew and Gunnar Nelson were born September 20, 1967, and the identical twins are 59. They were 18 when their father died, and they were already chasing record deals with their own band. Then their 1990 debut album, After the Rain, sold more than three million copies, and “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their grandfather had topped the charts in the big band era, and their father had two Hot 100 No. 1s of his own, which put the Nelsons in Guinness World Records as the only family with No. 1 hits across three successive generations.
What fans didn’t see was the bill their father left behind. “He never threw in the towel [in a bankruptcy], but he died $4 million in debt (in 1985 dollars!),” Gunnar wrote in their memoir, What Happened To Your Hair?!, released in December 2025, “leaving me and Matt to pay it off for him over the 10 years following his death,” as Fox News reported. Today the brothers tour as Ricky Nelson Remembered, a tribute show to their dad, and they still rock as Nelson. In April 2026 the band announced it was returning to Frontiers Records with new music, according to Blabbermouth.
The book is also where they finally answered the rumor. In the weeks after the crash, reports claimed federal investigators were looking at whether free-basing cocaine had started the fire. “That was the hardest thing that I ever had to deal with, having to turn on the television and seeing the lead story on the main networks having to do with freebasing and drug abuse on the plane, knowing that wasn’t the case,” Matthew told Fox News. In the book, as People reported, Gunnar writes that people still come up to him in autograph lines asking whether the rumors were true. The 1987 investigation was reported under the wire headline “Free-Basing Ruled Out in Nelson Crash,” and the safety board never pinned down how the cabin fire started. Matthew said a lawsuit kept the family quiet for years, and their little brother found a different way to look after the family name.
Sam Nelson Kept The Family Show Alive, And A Fifth Son Stayed Out Of Sight
Sam Hilliard Nelson, born August 29, 1974, is 52, and he was only 11 when his father died. He grew up to be a musician, but his biggest job has been as keeper of the family archive. His uncle David passed the Ozzie and Harriet legacy to him, and Sam spent years tracking down the original film for the show’s episodes and restoring them. The result was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet: The Official Restored Complete Series, a 50-disc set MPI released in December 2023. He has talked through the family’s history on the Rarified Heir podcast, which revisited his interview in 2025.
There is one more child in Ricky’s story. Ricky met a woman named Georgeann Crewe while performing in New Jersey, and her son, Eric Jude Crewe, was born on February 14, 1981, which makes him 45. Published accounts of Ricky’s life report that a blood test in 1985 showed Ricky was the father and that he agreed to pay child support. His will, dated August 22, 1985, still left everything to his four children with Kris and specifically left out Eric, whose paternity it called disputed, United Press International reported in January 1986. Eric has lived privately ever since and has never spoken publicly about the Nelsons. That will was signed just four months before the last phone call Ricky ever made to his twins.
What Did Ricky Tell His Sons On That Last Phone Call?
The plan had been a holiday adventure. Ricky had invited the twins to join him in Alabama and ride his DC-3 to a New Year’s Eve show in Dallas, and the boys had never flown on it. The night before they were due to leave, he called. “He didn’t sound like himself,” Gunnar told Fox News. “He sounded different for some reason. And he was resolute.” Then Ricky told them, “I’ve decided I don’t want you to fly on the plane,” and when they pushed back, he wouldn’t move. “Listen, I’ve made up my mind. That’s final. Guys, either fly commercial to Dallas or don’t come.”
“We were a little salty,” Gunnar admitted. They never saw their father again, and Matthew heard the news on the radio while Gunnar saw it on TV. “That call did save our lives,” Gunnar said. He has wondered ever since whether the plane was acting up or whether his father simply sensed something. “Maybe Pop just had a feeling. He was very intuitive,” he said. “And he didn’t go into great detail as to why he didn’t want us to go down there and be on that flight. But he was absolute. There was no budging. Maybe one day we’ll get a chance to ask him.”
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