Round Two: Robert Bell Is Deserving of The Dean List Mention

  June 1, 2021

   I have a crackerjack researcher named Gay Mathis. I have never met her but she has found so many long lost items for me it's not even funny. For example, when I was doing my memoir book, "The 66 Kid" (2014), nobody in Kingman had a photograph of our eighth grade teacher, Mr. Paul Lomasney—not the museum, not the Mohave County Historical Society, not the school, not the newspaper. So Gay went deep on the web and found a photo of him from the Las Vegas, New Mexico school where he graduated. Amazing. So, I sicced Gay on the Dean's List mystery and she couldn't find the actual Mohave County Miner newspaper clipping of me making the Dean's List (they haven't put the 1960s online, yet), but she did find this listing in the Tucson Daily Star that listed all the Dean's List Fine Arts students from the year in question (1966), including Robert M. Bell of Kingman! I'm Robert A. Bell, so they got his name right but gave him my hometown. Oh, the humanity!

Robert M. Bell Is A Good Student!

   Here's a question: how many of these stellar students listed in the article ended up with a career in art? In the eighties, I reconnected with some of my old classmates at the U of A Arts College, and one of them told me only two of us were actually still in the art game. Everyone else gave up and got a life. Not me. I have always relished being the weirdo kid from Kingman who didn't have the sense to give up. The one who made the Dean's List in the weirdest way. Some might say I didn't deserve it, but I agree with Jack.

"I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either."

—Jack Benny