Legendary Zonie Storytellers

 April 4, 2026

   Here's a new whip out because I just couldn't leave well enough alone. . .

"Reworked Daily Whip Out:

"The Birth of Ghost Riders"

Songwriter Stan Jones recalls being just a lad sitting atop a windmill outside of Douglas, Arizona in 1924 when a big storm blew in and an old cowpoke, Capp Watts, was working on the windmill with him and said, “Don’t be afraid, it is only the clouds stampeding and the Ghost Riders will get them rounded up soon and everything will be alright.” From this experience Jones wrote ”Ghost Riders In The Sky.”

The Day I Met Gail Gardner

  Thanks to the late, great editor of Arizona Highways, Don Dedera, I met one of the best tellers of tall tales in Arizona history. Don gave me my first illustration assignment for Arizona Highways in February of 1985 for a story on everyone's favorite home town. I traveled to Prescott to meet and draw several Prescott living legends, among them Budge Rufner and Gail Gardner. 

My Gail Gardner sketches

February, 1985

   When I got to his house in downtown Prescott (a block east of the Hassayampa Hotel on Gurley), Gail was in a wheel-chair in the living room with a hand-knitted afghan on his lap and chain-smoking. As soon as I came in he started with the stories and the whole time I was there, it was just one story after another, and they were all good. At one point, his caretaker leaned in from the kitchen, and yelled, "Gail, he's here to draw you, not interview you!" He didn't give a rip, and he never even slowed down. He just loved to spin tall tales. And, he never stopped smoking. When I joked he wouldn't live very long if he kept that up (he was in his nineties!) he just laughed and lit another one. As I continued drawing him he told many stories complete with outrageously funny locations, which I jotted down in the corners of my sketchbook, above; including "Fart-Knocker Flats," "Skin-Chin Canyon" and "Freeze-Ass Ridge." There were more, but I couldn't write them down fast enough. When I asked him how a place got the name "Fart-Knocker Flats," he laughed, gave the location, and said, "These flats had big, round rocks all over the place and when you'd come ridin' hell bent out on to those flats, your horse would stumble and it would knock the farts plumb out of you." Even his asides were hilarious and I could have listened to him all day long. Here's the kicker: not once did I think of him as a BS-er. True, the stories were laced with tall tales, but he somehow rose above that.

Daily Whip Out:

"Gail Gardner at Fart Knocker Flats"

   "Nobody's had more fun than I've had."

—Gail Gardner's parting comment to me