April 18, 2007
We are finishing up the final gunfight for CGIII, the book, this morning. The Salt War Siege Shootout has been a dilly to finish, but we have had excellent information and images from Paul Cool, the author of the forthcoming book on the war to be published by Texas A&M next year. Meghan is going over final changes in the maps and copy and then the whole six-page-deal will be eBooked to Paul for final corrections in about an hour.

The book, meanwhile goes to the publisher tonight.

Yesterday, after whipping out the night time scene of Chico Barela confronting Captain Blair's squad (I call the painting "Spooked!"), I was amazed and somewhat surprised at the excellent Frank Tenney Johnson nocturn effects in the painting. What actually happened is that I didn't have any clean boards to paint on, and since I had about 45 minutes to execute the image during my lunch hour, I grabbed a failed board on the Wham Robbery and painted over it. The end result being that all of the ground colors shine through the dark blues, giving the painting a very authentic night time glow. To me, the image (see yesterday's post) is very Remingtonesque with the color scheme looking like a bonified Frank Tenney. All in all a happy accident. If I had the time, I would have gone to the store, bought new board and the end result wouldn't have been nearly as thick and juicy. Hmmmmm.

Anyway, when I got home last night and started on my six sketches for the day I dipped into the pools of color left over from the Spooked! painting and ended up with a page of this:



Nappy-Headed Ex-Shock Jock
"Met Roy Oswald [from Kingman] in his Scottsdale store today, said to say hello. Was Don Imus from Kingman? I was his counselor at Orme summer camp."
—Jeb Rosebrook, screenwriter of Junior Bonner

Actually, Don Imus and his brother Fred lived for a time on a ranch near Ashfork, Arizona. In his book, "Two Guys, Four Corners" (a reference to Arizona's northeast boundary with Utah, Colorado and New Mexico), Don talks about living on the ranch and his relatives in Kingman. I believe his uncle was sheriff in the late 1940s. When I read this several years ago I called my Aunt Jean in Kingman and asked about the Imus family and why I had never heard about Don Imus being from our area. I knew of people named Imus, but they were Hualapai Indians. This is not uncommon as several Hualapais took the "American" name of the ranchers they worked for, such as the Grounds and others. Aunt Jean called me back about a week later and said she talked to the Imus's she knew and they confided to her they weren't real proud of the connnection. Imagine their horror today? Ha.

"My husband, Leonard Burgoon, 'Lefty', was an extra in Rio Bravo. He can be seen 5 or 6 times in the movie. He is the cowboy that rides in from the desert at the beginning. We would like to buy the uncut version where Leonard rides in with the Marshal at the end. We have only seen it once on TV. Our grandchildren thinks it is great that grandpa was in a John Wayne movie. Leonard laughed when he read Angie was the only star from Rio Bravo still alive. He said, 'They forgot about me.'"
—Janet Burgoon, Pataskala, OH

Onion Headline de Jour
New York Philharmonic Hosts Open-Mic Night

"Quality never goes out of style."
—Levi Strauss