Still working on the the Toast of The Town assignment. This morning I whipped out a black and white of the two figures:
Getting there. Going to tweak a couple more times to get scale right and then go for the final. Need to finish this weekend. If you ever wonder what I use for inspiration, I keep a clip file and push pin snippets of artwork I'd like to emulate on my desk like this:
Great weather out today. February was the coldest month in a while, with average temps about 3 degrees lower. It was chilly for us. Not so today. Just a balmy day.
Also working on various legends of Route 66. One of the minor legends is of a precocious kid running the bases backwards in a high school baseball game against arch rival Needles. Turns out, like so many stories in these parts, it's not the entire story.
It seems that in 1963 Allen P. Bell opened a new Phillips 66 service station across from El Trovatore on Hilltop and the Phillips 66 company flew in the district manager and they festooned the place with balloons and flags. They even bought an ad in the Mohave Miner. The company men of Phillips Petroleum were big on having a clown to hand out balloons to the kids and they asked my dad if there was anybody in Kingman who was a professional clown. Well, Mr. McCleve had a day job and he couldn't do it. Ditto for Harry Nipple, although he had a night job. My dad couldn't find anyone so he asked if I would do it. I agreed. But when the grand opening came off, they found another clown at the last minute and I ducked the duty. But several kids at school started saying that I had in fact been the clown under the makeup—chief among them Arnold D. Thomas—and he never let me forget it. Every time I'd see him in the hallway of the New Building he'd yell out "Hey, look everybody, it's BOZO THE CLOWN!"
"So, now you know. . .The Rest of The Story."
—Paul Harvey
