July 30, 2009
As a kid I always dug Western movie star Tim McCoy. He had a steely gaze, mostly wore black and had the biggest hats in the biz. In the 1970s I met his son Terry McCoy who grew up in Nogales, Arizona on a ranch his father had in his last years.

We met several times at Durant's in downtown Phoenix where Terry held court with others in Phoenix who loved the old Westerns (I think there were five of us). I asked Terry what it was like growing up with a famous father, and he told me the quote below.

Yesterday, in the mail I got a DVD of Col. Tim McCoy's The Silent Language of The Plains, directed by Terry McCoy and shot in 1973. A pamphlet inside gives a short history of Tim McCoy complete with photos of Tim and his beautiful second wife Inga. All of this played into yesterday's sketches:

That's Tim and Inga across the bottom, the others are poached from an 1896 Illustrator's Journal, including the nude.

The 12 sketches a day regimen is exhausting. Worked last night until nine on these twelve.

"They paid me to make 'em, not watch 'em."
—Terry McCoy quoting his father, about invariably being asked to name his favorite Western