October 8, 2004
Went into Scottsdale at noon. Stopped at Arizona West Gallery on Main St. and signed my books (Greg Hays sells a ton of my stuff). Abe Hays showed me a very rare Lon Megargee painting of a hawk flying above Walpai cliff. Very modern. He also showed me a series of Lon's woodcuts (actually pen and ink done to simulate woodcuts) and they are so strong. And he had a letter to Buck Saunders with a great art quote, (below). Abe also had two wonderful maps, one by the U.S. Geological Survey of the Apache Campaign’s of General Miles, 1886, which showed all the troop movements between Fort Apache, San Carlos, Fort Bowie and deep into Mexico. Another map was also by the Geological Survey and showed a topo of Tombstone, 1903 with all of the buildings and mine locations. Really sweet. I asked Greg to shoot me a good photo of each and we’ll run them in the magazine. The Tombstone one had already been sold, sight unseen, for $500.

"To depict reality with a line or mass. Difficult. Requires invention. And a knowledge of drawing and design."
—Lon Megargee

Speaking of good design, our art director Dan Harshberger came out today to massage, tweak and teach the production staff the ins and outs of the new design. There is some strong resistance to the look, but I trust Dan will pull it off.

I was supposed to go visit Mad Coyote Joe in the hospital while I was in town but I got a call that he was checking out. That was actually good news, although Wonderful Russ was getting ready to go with me and we would have definitely caused some major zane damage on the fourth floor of Scottsdale Osborn ICU. When the three of us get together it can get rather zany, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Grabbed lunch at Pischke’s (chicken caesar salad and iced tea, $15 cash, includes tip). The head waiter invited me to their 18th Anniversary party on Monday, but I’m going to be working on a certain book and can't go. One of the waiters has worked for Chris for 22 years. Chris was a good friend of Steven Spielberg's when they were growing up and when the Oscar winner turned forty, one of Spielberg's friends did a parody of Citizen Kane as a birthday film, and they came into Pischke's to film Chris's part. He went to the party. Chris was in one of the 8mm films Spielberg filmed in Phoenix. Few know that Spielberg was arrested for breaking windows at the then brand new Chris Town Mall (I want to say this was in 1963).

Went up Scottsdale Road (traffic was horrible, slipped over to Hayden, even worse. Crawled up to Acoma) and landed at Mort Fleischer's mortgage company to go over a big feature we’re doing on his saddle collection. We went over the various photos of saddles and he'd say things like, “Oh, that’s a very rare Stagg, half-seater. It’s worth north of $50,000.” For a saddle! And he's got 300 others in his barn.

Got back to the office at 4:30. Lori from Wild West sent me their new issue. They have a photo on the cover of Sitting Bull and Cody. First time for them to use a photo. It looked quite strong, and it's always irritating to see your competitors do well, but I wrote her a nice note to that effect.

Donated a scratchboard of Joaquin Murrieta to the West Valley Art Museum today ($500 value, highly inflated for tax purposes of course. Ha.). Big show coming up on November 19.

"Just don’t clown out our world.”"
—Dr. Dre, giving advice to Brian Grazer on making the hip-hop movie 8 Mile