Monday, October 26, 2009

October 26, 2009
Did some serious reflection on Saturday. One of my heroes, Charlie Russell died on October 24 at the age of 62. Same age as I am now. Remington died even younger in his early forties (41?). Is it cheating to be blessed with extra time to catch up to them? In my Lutheran-guilt laden brain stem, that's the way it's stored.

Speaking of manic-ego-mania and today's date, I woke up Sunday to a huge spread in the Arizona Republic:



I knew they were expanding the story and layout because I got a couple frantic phone calls on Friday afternoon from my editor, Ken Western, asking me about certain stats and headline choices. When he told me they were running a photo of Wyatt and Doc and a photo of re-enactors in Tombstone, I blurted out, "How are you going to fit this on a page?" Ken laughed and said, "We're running it on the jump." Which means, in newspaper parlance, they continued the article on another page. This is not typical behavior on the Op-ed page. Opinion pieces are invariably short and usually run four or five on a page. The big scratchboard of the fight, which runs border to border, totally dwarfs the Benson cartoon on the other page. Eat that, Ex-Mormon Dog (not that I'm competitive with other cartoonists, or anything).

Got a quote from Jana Bommsersbach, too late to go into the article, but a wonderful postscript:

"All of Arizona politics can be seen through the prism of the OK Corral."
—Jana Bommersbach

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