Making Out And Aging Out

 February 7, 2026

   Seems like it was just yesterday that I was making out in cars.

Necking 101

   Yes, and if you ask me, I thought I was pretty good at it. True, I practiced the art of it for quite a while, seems like decades but it was probably closer to five years, tops. And you may squirm now, remembering your own perilous adventures on your own personal back seat cage match. 

   Here, as it relates to me, was the scene of the crime.

'57 Merc Makeout Machine

   And, for a time, the movies were all about making out in cars as well. . .

Two-Lane Bird Eyes The Driver

   

   At the end of the day, I can't complain though. I ended up with a couple momentos from the experience.

Dos BBB Bambinos!

   Those times are long gone and now even the cars we made out in, are headed for the scrap heap.  

Crawling Out From The Wreckage

"Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage

You'd think by now at least that half a brain would get the message

Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage

Into a brand new car"

—Dave Edmunds

One More Bravado Beale Backstory

 February 6, 2026

   Just when some of you were hoping I was finished with Beal? Here is another Beale on the brain drain.

Daily Whip Out: "Beale Washed"

   When to stop? That is the question. Here is an earlier wash version, born from the online slam that "all my paintings are too dark and overworked."

Daily Whip Out: "Beale Light"

“A camel’s back is broken by the last straw, but it bears many before.”

—Old Vaquero Saying

   And, speaking of last straws, just got this comment about my recent obsession with Ned Beale:

"The 'last straw' will be another blog post on Beale. Folks, see what happens when you whine about too much Wyatt or Billy?"

—Unknown

The Father of The Mother Road

   He crossed the country thirteen times in his storied career. He was the hero of the Battle of San Pasqual during the Mexican War. He carried the first proof of California gold to Congress and President Polk, toting a seven-pound gold nugget he purchased with his own money. He was in the Navy and rose to the rank of Lieutenant. After that he became a millionaire businessman in California. He served as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and surveyed possible railroad routes across Colorado and Utah. Oh, and then he became a brigadier general in the Californian militia. And then, after all that, President James Buchanan appointed him to survey and build a 1,000 mile wagon road from Arizona to California. And, on top of that, he was ordered to test a group of camels brought in from Tunis for the purpose of seeing if they could be of use in the American West.

   Kit Carson was quoted as saying, "I can't believe this guy Ned Beale."

On June 25, 1857, Edward Fitzgerald "Ned" Beale departed San Antonio with mules, horses, freight wagons, camels and a bright red ambulance wagon used primarily for supplies Among his crew was Hadju Ali, a Greek-Syrian who would become known to Americans as Hi Jolly.

The hardships of the journey were relentless.

His subsequent report, titled Wagon Road from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River, covers the road he surveyed, tested and proved and that later evolved into Route 66.

   How's THAT tease for the next issue of True West?

One More For The Road

   On second thought, given that Beale was a brigadier general in the California militia prior to the Camel Corps, he just might have worn a more military outfit on the expedition and perhaps he looked more like this.

Daily Whip Out: "Beale In Uniform"

“The more I see of them, the more I am convinced of their usefulness. Their perfect docility and patience under difficulties renders them invaluable.”

—Ned Beale on his camels

Beale On Seid Leads The Way

 February 5, 2026

   You might say I've got Beale on the brain. I am still pursuing the idea that Ned was the Father of the Mother Road. How do you take the image of an Old West guy and give it a design element that pays off everything he begat?

Daily Whip Out:

"Beale Begat A Neon Highway"

   Not a bad idea. Needs work. I may flip him horizontally, looking to the right. Need to tweak those car lights a bit. Meanwhile, we know that Beale rode a white camel.

Daily Whip Out:

"Beale On Seid Leads The Way"

   After the outbreak of the Civil War, the Camel Corps was totally scrapped. It didn't help that the project was the brainchild of Jefferson Davis, who was the Secretary of War, but when the war broke out and he became the president of the Confederacy, anything he had anything to do with was suddenly tainted. Ed Beale even offered to keep the camels on his property but the Union Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, rejected the offer. Many of the camels were sold to private owners. Others were taken across the border and sold to Mexican circuses. Even others escaped into the desert and roamed, like wild burros. Beale's favorite white camel "Seid" got into a fight with another male camel during rutting season and was killed by a blow to the head. His bones were sent to the Smithsonian. Reportedly, the last reported sighting of one of Beale's camels was near Douglas, Texas in 1941.

“A camel’s back is broken by the last straw, but it bears many before.”

—Old Vaquero Saying

A Better Beale Rides A White Camel If I Can Get to The Printer On Time

 February 4, 2026

    We are making our last minute additions to a very fine issue.

   Yes, we are finishing up the March-April issue this week and all of the heavy lifting is over, but there are always those pesky little hangouts that drive our production manager crazy, and that would be requests like this:

   My frantic layout sketch to change the last spread of the cover story to include copy that wasn't in the original piece. As I reread the layouts I realized we needed to know about how one of the last camels cashed out. Dan turned my sketch into this:

The Final Demise of Red Ghost

   Also, one of my regrets on this issue is that I kind of missed on the portrait of Ned Beale on the cover. I actually think he resembles this attempt which I did today, but it's too late to do anything about it now. 

Daily Whip Out: "A Better Beale"

   I also wanted the cover back to put Beale on his favorite white camel "Seid" which would have made for a stronger cover image, but that is also water under the bridge. I often have to let these things go or I'd be following the plate makers into the dark room in Liberty, Kansas to "improve" an image, or two, before they went on press. Believe me, I have considered it!

"If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done."

—Old Vaquero Saying

A Collage of Difficult Western Historians

 February 3, 2026

   Sometimes I get very constructive and inspiring suggestions from this blog: "How about a collage of difficult western historians?" That is a very funny twist on the History of Difficult Women, which I intend to use as a title for an upcoming art show.

   Okay, so if I was going to execute a cascading collage of difficult Western historians, what would that look like? Here's a start.

Daily Whip Outs:

"A Cascading Collage of Difficult Western Historians"

   So, for starters the collage would be color-coded with the real difficult historians in red and the counter-historians who were helpful and did battle with the difficult ones, would be in blue. And, if you'll hang around I'll ID all these "difficult" cats and explain why they were so damn difficult, as we go along. Yes, I have a story for each of them.

   Meanwhile, here is the ad Dan The Man came up with for the inside back cover of the next issue of True West magazine which goes to press a week from today.

Your mileage may vary. . .

   "Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

—Wernher von Braun

Red Ghost Reign of Terror Comes to A Hilarous End

 February 2, 2026

   One of the enduring, outrageous legends in Arizona is that a demonic, rogue camel with a skeleton on its back, killed and terrorized the countryside for a decade in the 1880s.

Daily Whip Out: "The Legend of Red Ghost"

Here are just a few of the alleged "sightings":

• A ranch woman heard women screaming and rushed to a window to see a "huge, reddish colored beast," ridden by a "devilish-looking creature." She locked her doors and waited for the men to return. When they did they found another ranch woman had been trampled to death and they found red hair in a nearby bush.

• A group of prospectors reported a beast tearing through their campground and one witness said it was "30-feet tall" and knocked over two wagons.

• Another report claimed this same red creature ate a grizzly bear.

• Still another report claimed it disappeared into thin air when they tried to approach it.

• Two men were sleeping in a tent when they were jolted awake with their tent crashing down on them and were horrified when giant legs were stomping down on them. They thought it "was a giant horse" which galloped away.

• In 1893, a farmer, Mizoo Hastings found the creature in his garden eating his precious tomatoes and got his rifle and shot the beast dead. When he approached the dead body he noticed leather straps on the side with much scarring.

The “Red Ghost” demonic camel was allegedly finally killed in a farmer’s garden in eastern Arizona for eating prized tomatoes.

  I also asked Kathy if she would like to blurb our book, The 66 Kids, for an ad Dan The Man is creating and she said:

"Please don't encourage them."

—Kathy Radina

Ten Sleep Cowgirls, The Surveyors Who Wrecked Everthing And Joe Banana's Retirement Plan

 February 1, 2026

   Hard to beat a quartet of cowgirls posing near a cryptic cowtown name:

Ten Sleep Cowgirls

(as in Ten Sleep, Wyoming) 

   So called because to the Native Americans it was ten sleeps—ten days—from Fort Laramie (Hub Whitt says it's Casper), Wyoming.

  Way back in the nineteen-hundreds, I was a land surveyor and I worked on a variety of Arizona projects that turned into sprawling subdivisions and an infamous interstate highway.

A Survey Crew Slightly Before My Time

(but the surly attitude is timeless)

   Our efforts may not have wrecked our present time, but the end results sure did take a sledge hammer to so many of the things I loved and thought were inviolate.

"66 Wreckage"

   So, it has been with some effort that I have tried to save as much as I can from those old times.

The old A-1 Sign off of The Nogales Cafe

Wyatt Earp in a rocking chair

on the door to my studio

A Victorian Beauty With Airborne Skirts

In Old Arizona

   One of the first mafioso to immigrate to Arizona was Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno who landed in Tucson from New York in 1943. He claimed he came to Arizona to retire but he almost immediately invested in land, a parking lot and an Italian bakery. 

Joe smiling near Arizona Savings in Tucson

   In the late sixties, when I drove by his modest house in the Catalina Vista neighborhood just off Speedway and Campbell Avenue he held, with his wife, some $329,823 in Pima County real estate. Some estimate he was worth $1 billion. Not a bad retirement plan.

   In the late seventies, a good friend of ours was engaged to a guy who got busted for drugs and was doing time at a minimum security prison near Safford, Arizona. One weekend, I agreed to drive her to visit her fiance, and as we were standing in line to check in, a short woman with a cane, ahead of me, was asked for her ID and the woman seethed, "You know damn well who I am." Turns out it was Mrs. Joe Bonanno, visiting her son Bill, who, according to my friend's fiance who was spending quality time there, ran the place. Small world, no.

"I'm sorry I had to cut your hand off at the wrist, but you reached for your chips."

—Robert Ringer, Winning Through Intimidation

The History of Difficult Women

 January 31, 2026

   In case you were wondering, at the end of the day I am still drawn to difficult women.

Daily Scratchboard Whip Outs:

"Old West Females Galore"

   Maybe not exclusively "drawn" but certainly rendered—in this case "scratched"—into semi-immortality. This is assuming these scratchboards survive the coming world-wide meltdown.

Daily Scratchboard Whip Outs:

"Old West Females Galore II"

   Back in the summer of 2022, during the production of our book "Hellraisers & Trailblazers: The Real Women of The Wild West", which I co-wrote with the late, great Jana Bommersbach, I got this idea to do a cascading collage of Wild Women. Here is one of the first sketches I did of the concept.

Daily Whip Out:

"Sketches for The Early Cascading Concept"

   I shared the above sketch with the boys down at Cattletrack Arts Compound and that led us to here.

One-Half of The Cascading Collage

Held Up By Brent Bond And Mark McDowell

      Then we got serious and started to nail down and permanently adhere the images to two giant boards. . .

   And, after we got the bigger version collected and mounted. we hauled it outside and Uno helped me add some finishing touches to tie it all together.

Uno Gives That "Whatever" Look

He's So Famous For

   When we finished it, the Cattletrack boys then motored the whole thing up to The Phippen Museum outside of Prescott where they put it on the wall for an art show we held to premiere the Hellraisers book.

Real Women of The Wild West

Cascading Collage

   The premiere of the book and the opening of the art show came off on November 5, 2022 at the Phippen Art Museum in Prescott, Arizona and the show was a roaring success. We sold six cases of books and almost all of the artwork.

Thanks to the curator, Tricia Loscher, the Cascading Collage was unanimously accepted into the Sigler Art Museum's permanent collection in Wickenburg, Arizona. The massive piece will appear in a forthcoming art show to open the new wing of the museum in the fall of 2027. I intend to add some more pertinent subject matter to that show, like this work in progress:

Daily Whip Out:

"Writing In The Eye of The Storm"

 

   Inspired by the life of Jana. Meanwhile, let's give the last word to someone who knows a thing or two about the subject.

"It actually doesn't take much to be considered a difficult women. That's why there are so many of us."

—Jane Goodall

Daily Whip Out: "Cascading Collage of Women"
as it appears in the "Hellraisers" book.

The Benefits of Not Knowing History & A Vaquero Riding The Whirlwind

 January 30, 2026

   Some themes stay with me for a long time. This is one of them.

Daily Whip Out:

"Vaquero Riding The Whirlwind"

   Kathy and I drove into the Beast today to have lunch with the Hawkins at their favorite Mexican joint, Via Delosantos in Sunnyslope. Lots of talk about old Phoenix and the Kemper Marley story. Mike told me he has an ASU annual with a photo of John Harvey Adamson with the caption "killer." Prophetic, indeed.

Life Lesson #1941

   For everything you and I think is important to know, there is another benefit from not knowing. Case in point:

"I don't know anything about history, and I can tell because every history movie I watch, I watch on the edge of my seat. What is gonna happen? I watched Pearl Harbor. I was as surprised as they were."

—Nate Bargatze

When Anglo Apaches Roamed The Drive-Ins of America Unchallenged

 January 29, 2026

      They were a curious breed, born in the Hollywood Hills and because of their good looks and devious ways they left a swath of torn tickets (some of them scalped!), far and wide.

When Anglo Apaches Roamed Free

In Drive-ins Across America

   Yes, somewhere between fact and fiction and racial convenience, there roamed a whole tribe of white people portraying native peoples in movies. Some say it was because there were no In-din "actors" at that time. Whatever the reason, Hollywood gave us a blue-eyed Geronimo.

Chuck Connors Is The Blue-Eyed Geronimo

How! Indeed!

    It was a strange time, but—come on!—not really any stranger than the one we're living through now. Know what I mean?  There were patches of irony and insightfulness, like this 1971 ditty. 

The Raiders Nail The Issue

   Wow! Thanks to our Westerns editor, Henry Parke, for sending me this link. I had forgotten how cool the song was and I have to say it stands up. Unlike some other classics I know, which seem a tad ridiculous today.

The villain Scar in "The Searchers" is portrayed by Henry Brandon (born Heinrich von Kleinbach in Berlin, Germany.)

   Okay, that didn't age well. Meanwhile, certainly the women were portrayed more accurately?

Gives New Meaning to

"Buffalo Girls Won't You Come Out Tonight!"

Donna Reed IS Sacajawea in this tanning drama!

Curse of The Anglo Indians

    Ironically, boarding schools fixed that problem because when our In-din brothers and sisters learned to write they created their own stories and then starred in them. And they also could write critically about all these movies before them with some grace and wit. Who says, we have made no progress?

"We need to give out portrayal of ourselves. Every non-Indian writer writes about 1860 to 1890 pretty much, and there is no non-Indian writer that can write movies about contemporary Indians. Only Indians can. Indians are usually romanticized. Non-Indians are totally irresponsible with the appropriation of Indians, because any time you have an Indian in a movie, it's political. They're not used as people, they're used as points."

—Chris Eyre, Cheyenne and Arapaho

What's With The Weird Crazy Cowboy Hat? (I'm Talkin' to You Billy Bob)

 January 28, 2026

   Let me be perfectly clear: I dig crazy, big hats, especially those aerodynamically designed Sugarloafs from south of the border, circa 1910-1930.

Sugarloafs Galore Down Mexico Way

   And, to be honest, I have been accused of exaggerating the style and scope of these broad brimmed chapos.

Daily Whip Outs: "The Sugarloaf Series"

      I get accused of making the brims too big. "You can't show me a sugarloaf with a brim as big as you are drawing them," my critics say. Okay, then, what do you make of this photograph?

A Doozy of a Sugarloaf in the Wild

   Yes, you can't get too large or too crazy for my tastes. That said, for the life of me, what in the hell is this?

Billy Bob's Current Headgear

      A Sugarloaf on acid? An homage to a tarot card reader? Here's another view:

Gypsy Rose Billy Bob Does Calipso?

   Did I miss a meeting of the Headgear Club? Okay, I am being snotty and if push comes to shove, I have to grant Thorton the priviledge and right to wear this, and, I admit I personally love Billy Bob in Landman and he's worn a lawman's hat, or two, quite well I might add.

Billy Bob portraying Big Jim Courtright

in the series "1883"

   So, I am going to lighten up and give the man his due. To each man, his own head gear and besides, I've been caught wearing headgear I wouldn't want published.

The executive editor of a certain magazine

on a certain day in October

"I can see by your outfit, you are not a cowboy."

—My Kingman Cowboy Kin when they see me coming down Beale Street

It's A Miracle to Behold That Some Things Are Still Standing

 January 27, 2026

   At this stage of my life, every day I am still here is a miracle to me. I have lost so many friends in the past couple years it's a bit of a drag.

Santa Fe's oldest building and Arizona's oldest cartoonist. It's a miracle, both are still standing.

(November 20, 2020)

   When you hit your late seventies a couple things start to come into focus: for one thing, some life lessons turned out to be the opposite of what I thought. For example. . .

   If things are going to remain the same, something has to change.

Things I Wish I Had Known Earlier

   If your art teacher hates what you are doing it's probably a good sign.

   All success does is give you a ticket to a bigger problem. With Fleetwood Mac's humongous success, Stevie Nicks admits she snorted a million dollars worth of cocaine up her nose in one year. Put another way: Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money. 

   Do not abandon the past. It leads to where you want to go. Put another way, I couldn't wait to get out of Kingman, but today, almost all of my art and heart lead straight back to that dusty berg.

   It was a lucky boy who grew up with these kids.

   Whatever you believe, the opposite is also true. For example to think there was once a time when adults wanted me to take a nap! Ha. Don't push me, I'll take two!

"The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting it go."

—Carl Jung

A Headline I Never Thought I Would Live to See

SIDNEY SWEENEY DID NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO CLIMB THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN AND HANG BRAS

I Admit, Some Curses Hit Me Where I Live

"There's nothing stronger than an unwritten book's fascination with its author."

—A.J. Hackwith

Daily Whip Out: "Old Pueblo Hitcher"

"There are two kinds of men in the world. Those who have a crush on Linda Ronstadt and those who don't know who she is."

—Willie Nelson