July 24, 2025
My father gave me a vivid dream. Like most father-son dreams, it was his dream and he passed it on down to me. Here it is in it's most primitive form.
Daily Whip Out:And, if you look close, you'll see a horseback vaquero on the trail home. You can just make him out in the twilight on the trail to that funky adobe on the ridgeline. This dream ironically dovetails with a project one of my neighbors is spearheading.
Even back in the beginning of my career, I had this dream house on the desert as my goal. But I had a couple false starts on the downpayment of that dream.
I had this goal to have a syndicated comic strip so I could live anywhere I wanted and then I would find the perfect desert dwelling surrounded by elegant saguaros. The name of my comic strip was "Lippo & Paguna," which was a nostalgic look at my grandparent's farm in Iowa and Lippo was my grandmother's brother-in-law and I thought the name was perfect. I spent over 600 hours developing the strip while moonlighting as a draftsman at Tel Engineering and playing in a rock band (Smokey and eventually the Razz Band). Here is a closeup of the cartoons I am holding in the photo.
I sent it everywhere and I received over 240 rejection slips—which I tacked on my wall as a badge of honor—and when I finally visited The Des Moines Register Syndicate not long after the above picture was taken I asked them point blank why they didn't buy it and the guy shrugged and said, "Farm strips don't sell." Okay. So, the lesson was finally clear: I should have called them before I started and asked them whether they even wanted a farm strip. Damn.
From that failure I gravitated to the idea that Arizona really needed a humor magazine. How could that fail? I wondered aloud if there was anybody crazy enough to help me produce that? And my roommate—from Kingman—said, "I'm that guy!"
"I don't think Bob Boze Bell is funny, period."
—Chiquita Rollins, Women Take Back The Night
I remember him from m Arizona Republic days. Used to work for that newspaper in the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteThat's a cool vision for the future! Building a dream house in the desert sounds like a real challenge, a long and winding road indeed. Almost makes me think of the , where you're constantly navigating unpredictable paths and trying to reach a destination. Hope you navigate the real-life obstacles as skillfully as you would in that game to bring your father's dream to life.
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