Shootin' Shetlands

January 17, 2012

Just got off the phone with a foundry in Prescott Valley that wants to convert my painting "Not So Gentle Tamers" into a bronze statue for the town. I've never done sculpture before, but I am honored.

Still cleaning my studio and finding little gems like this Empire Magazine, from The Denver Post, dated March 27, 1983:

Didn't know Jay Dusard at the time. Just really dug the pics. I met Jay in 1986 while on assignment for Arizona Highways. He was living in Prescott at the time. We are still friends to this day.

Meanwhile, I had forgotten that I documented my big break in show biz. In July of 2002 I attended a writer's conference in Gunnison, Colorado and on Saturday we got on a school bus to drive up to a ghost town called Tin Cup. On the way up, I was sitting in the back yakking about the movie Tombstone. Halfway up the mountain the bus stopped and we all got off. A woman was setting up a camera in front of an old crumbling cabin. A guy named Jeff Hildebrandt was setting up the shot.

This Jeff guy turns and says to me, "Bob Boze Bell, come over here and look into that camera and tell us what you know about Wyatt Earp and the movie Tombstone."

Twenty minutes later he told me to shut up and we got back on the bus.

What I didn't know at the time—this was my audition for what became True West Moments on Encore Westerns. I've been doing them ever since (almost ten years!).

Of course, some of the things I found in my studio made me cringe. Here is a photo of a certain friend of mine shooting a Shetland pony in the neck.

While I certainly don't condone this kind of animal cruelty humor, I also don't think it's fair to judge people from a different time by the standards of today. As you know Shetland ponies can be quite mean and I've seen them bite little kids, more than once. Still, to take a Flintlock rifle and shoot a Shetland pony in the neck is really deplorable and I strongly object to airbrushing any photo that would imply that this actually happened, in a photo essay in the Razz Revue, circa 1974.

"Every exit is an entrance."
—The theme of my next book to be written with Charles Jaurez

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