May 9, 2008
On my daily walk this morning, my neighbor Bev ran out to meet me and told me she hadn't heard about my heart attack. She asked me if I was following my doctor's orders and I said, "Yes, he told me I need a haircut." Going next Tuesday at noon.

Got a call this morning from the new manager at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Don Taylor. If his name sounds familiar it's because he was at the Tombstone Courthouse for many years. He wanted my permsission to use the two fire maps Gus Walker and I created for Classic Gunfights, Volume II: The 25 Fights Behind The O.K. Corral. Don paid us the ultimate complement: "Nobody has explained it better and we want them for our new museum." Gus and I worked hard on those two maps, pouring over contemporary newspaper accounts to delineate exactly where the two fires started and how much real estate they burned.


Speaking of Classic Gunfights, I worked with Robert Ray this morning on Isom Dart vs. Tom Horn layout for the next issue.

My good friend Jim Hatzell sent me a book I've been wanting to read: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare And How It Changed America. I started it last night and am really enjoying it. Kathy is reading The Mapmaker's Wife by Robert Whitaker and I perused it this morning and fell on this passage:

"Nearly all of the visitors were quite taken by Peruvian women, entranced in particular by the mestizos and mulattos who were mistresses to the rich. In Lima, reported Pedro de Leon Portocarrero, a Portuguese trader who lived there in the early 1600s, such women liked to 'display themselves strolling about in public,' and had a ravenous 'desire to satisfy the carnal appetites.' In 1714, the Frenchman Amadee Frezier similiarly marveled at the lusty Peruvian women. They would sneak out from their homes at night under the cover of their veils for 'immodest' purposes, he wrote, performing 'the part which men do in France.' At societal events, he added, they favored risque dresses that left their 'breasts and shoulders half naked,' and they were pleased to field 'proposals which a lover would not dare to make in France without incurring the indignation of a modest woman.' When it came to 'matters of love,' Frezier concluded, Peruvians,'yield to no nation.'"

Now that's history worth reading! I'm going to recommend this to my son Thomas. I wonder if there is any vestiges of this behavior leftover in Peru? Hmmmmm.

Got this comment on the photos of Kathy and I with Deena 28 years ago:

"What genuinely pisses me off is you look the same age twenty-eight years ago as you do today. And why do we dads all have pictures of us asleep and holding our babies? What kind of a Richard Pryor fire-trap shirt are you wearing in that picture? Good thing you weren't freebasing when you wore it.
—ALAN C. HUFFINES

The shirt, which New Times head honcho Jim Larkin gifted to me, is a shiny, 1920s-style-Western shirt with a classic, white bone yoke. I loved it at the time, but yes, today it could be mistaken for a freebasing, fire-trap shirt that Richard Pryor would have loved.

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending."
-Maria Robinson