A Horse's Ass Times Three

April 7, 2013
  On our last day in Sevilla, Spain, we took a carriage ride around the historic section of the city (50 Euros, $75). It was expensive, but very very cool. We glided by elegant convents and gardens and massive Moorish castles and the Geralda Tower which is 33 flights up ramps (so that a Spanish King could ride his horse to the top for a daily gander).

  Kathy took this photo. If you're counting, I spot three horse's ass. And you?

On The Road to Zafra

April 7, 2013
  We left Sevilla, Spain yesterday heading north by car into Extremadura in search of the Conquistadors and Cowboy Ground Zero. Traveling without reservations we took the turn to Zafra, a small ranching community of about 5,000 and landed at a Parador (an old Roman castle converted into a hotel). As I type this a drum and bugle corp are marching toward us. We can hear their martial cadence get closer and closer but we can't see them, yet.

  Kathy took this photo of me in the courtyard as we checked in last night:

On A Quest to Find Cowboy Ground Zero

April 6, 2013
  My wife of 33 years, Kathy Radina, dragged me to Spain against my will and against all that I find interesting—or fun. Or, so I thought.

  In the end, she makes me realize how fortunate I am to know her. She makes me lie down in Extremadura pastures where the very first threads of Cowboy life began. She books me into paradors I don't care to stay in, but once I'm there i'm enthralled beyond belief. She doesn't force me to drink the local wine, but I do that on my own. All this makes me think of Waylon Jennings. Why?

"The devil made me do it the first time. The second time I did it on my own."
—Waylon Jennings

Kathy and I left Sevilla, Spain this afternoon, heading north. I am on a quest to find Ground Zero of Cowboy Culture. I'm at Zafra, staying in a Parador, which I sense is close, but we'll see tomorrow.

"Your proposed project is 'vain, impracticable, and resting on grounds too weak to merit the support of the government.'"
—The Spanish government responding to Christopher Columbus's proposed mission to find a route to India via the Atlantic Ocean

The Bones of Columbus vs. The Boners of Cortez

April 6, 2013
  We extended our stay in ancient Sevilla where the streets are so narrow, we had to park our car in a garage several blocks from our hotel, then walk through a narrow maze of passageways to Hotel Murillo, cloistered in a small patio with a small courtyard in front with a bodega across from the entrance. A walk through the barrio stretched for miles and the encounter of a vaquero-sombrero shop made my heart soar (photos when I get home).

  We entered the main Sevilla cathedral yesterday and it's a humungous puppy, perhaps twice as large as Notre Dame, with massive column that rival the intake towers at Hoover Dam. On a prominent corner is a huge monument to Christopher Columbus and his bones are said to reside here. Evidently his bones traveled as much after his death as he did in life, with his remains crisscrossing the Atlantic to Cuba and several other stops before finally arriving here for a few days. The same fate befell Cortez but his bones, which are believed to be in Mexico, are kept a secret because he is so hated there were threats when it was discovered in the 1980s where exactly he might be.

  Sevilla became so rich because it was the first stop from the Indies and became a shipping point for all the goods coming from the East. The size of the churches and the castles are staggering. Of course it was here that Diego Velasquez came from so I came to honor him (we are going on a walk this morning to see his statue).

  In early Spain there were the Grandes and the Hidalgos, with the former being the big dogs and the latter, the up and comers. Hidalgo is from "hijo de algo", or, son of some substance. This is my new name for Thomas Charles Bell: mi hijo de algo.

  Much of the history of Spain is made by the collision of the three ethnic religions of the area: Catholics, Muslims and Jews who apparently actually got along at certain points of their history until the reconquest, when one religion trumped them all.

"In Spain you are Catholic or you are nothing."
—Franco

Seeking The Spanish Beast

April 4, 2013
  Perhaps because it reminds me of Kingman I have been enjoying Spanish history. So many ethnic groups fighting over the land, for so many centuries, with so many names, like the Visigoths (not to be confused with the Goths), the Romans, the Pagans, the Basques, the Vandals, the Franks (I'm not making this up. Go look it up yourself!), it goes on and on and it is all bloody and ridiculous to the extreme.

For example, between the years  531 and 555 four successive kings were murdered. Among them was a sex-starved ruler who screwed so many of his aide's wives they pounced upon him at a dinner and all stabbed him to death with their steely knives.

Like I said, it reminds me of Kingman.

"But you just can't kill the Beast."
—The Eagles, Hotel California

Spanish History With Cow Dung Added

April 4, 2013
  Took a road trip to Granada yesterday to see Alhambra, the historic and impressive Moorish fortress that was the last stand of the Moors in 1492. In fact Chris Columbus came to the siege to get the approval from Isabella to go on a road trip to find an western passage to India.

  Been avidly studying Spanish history and I must say it's gigglingly brutal. Here's a taste from the early history of Espana: "where women battled dwarves and the populace cheered at seeing people torn apart by wild animals." And then, there's this: "When a king failed to convert his new bride, a Frankish princess, he ordered cow dung be poured over here on the way to the church." Also, priests fought in vain to stamp out country dances and bawdy songs and many new Christians considered Thursday to be 'Jupiter's Day' and refused to work."

"Spain was Christian perhaps before Christ."
—Seneca The Younger

On The Beach at Rota

April 1, 2013
  Last Saturday Kathy and I stayed on the beach at Rota, Spain, where a local boy had the cajones to take the journey with Christopher Columbus in 1492. They, of course, discovered a new world. Standing on that beach and watching the angry sea pound against the shore made me realize just how brave those boys were.

The Real Roots of Route 66

April 1, 2013,
I'm on the road with three beautiful, and wild, women. Kathy and I picked up Cal and Fran at the train station in Sevilla yesterday then drove up into the ancient mountains where the village of Arcos hangs on the cliffs of a Sedona-like ridge. We rented a 350 year old house that is on a street so narrow pedestrians have to stand in doorways to let our VW Golf pass on the cobblestone streets.

The day before yesterday, Kathy and I stayed on the beach at Rota on the Atlantic Coast. In the old part of town there is a castle where there is a monument to the local boy who went with Columbus in 1492 to discover America. As I stood on the beach and looked out at the angry sea I really got a visceral feeling about just how brave those dudes were to not only venture out from their own safe harbor, but to keep going into the unknown until they struck a new place. The doubts and the attempted mutiny all made perfect sense.

As I tried to picture all that begat, I turned to look at the beachfront bars and there, front and center, was the Route 66 Bar. Later, at the train station in Sevilla I went into a bookstore and saw a rock and roll magazine with the name Ruta 66 (Ruta is Spanish for Route) and the famous highway shield I grew up under.

It was here, thousands of miles from my home, that I realized that Route 66 is more of an international legend than Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid and Jesse James combined.

"No history happened in Kingman, Arizona. I can't wait to get out of here and go see some history."
—A certain snotty kid who was also very stupid

A Contrite Yankee In British Air's Court

March 30, 2013
So the humorless lady at the Customer Service Desk at British Airlines in Heathrow Airport told me I needed to be through security by 5:20 the following morning or I would miss my 6:20 flight to Madrid and, thus, my connecting flight on to Sevilla, where my wife of 33 years was waiting patiently without knowledge of my problems because my iPhone could not find a carrier in the United Kingdom.

I was given a goodie bag full of plastic travel items and a white, extra-large T-shirt, and two bus vouchers and a comped hotel room with a comped dinner for my troubles. I instinctively knew the airline was not paying full price for the comped hotel room and I wondered what their sweetheart deal was. Incredibly, I would find out, but not in the happiest of ways.

I won't bore you with my provincial wonderment at how an entire nation could, somehow, someway destroy perfectly good cars by ripping out the steering columns and rebuilding them on the wrong side of the dashboard, but I never knew our cousins in Merry Old England did so many things so amazingly different than we do. For one thing, they don't count the ground floor of a hotel as the first floor. No, to the Brits, the second floor is the first floor. So, my comped hotel room, #1176, was on the second floor.

It doesn't stop there. I couldn't plug my computer into a wall socket because they've designed their own wall sockets which are incompatible with the Yankee plugs. I had to go down to the front desk to get an adaptor. If I didn't know better I would say they were doing this just to piss us off.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the comped dinner was only for the buffet, but the manager generously comped my salmon dinner (18 pounds, or about $22), which was a smart thing to do in light of what happened the next morning.

I asked for a four a.m. wakeup call because I wanted to catch the first bus at 4:30 to the airport and give myself enough padding to make it through security by 5:20.

I got the automated call at four, drug myself out of bed at about 4:05, dressed, cleaned up and was out the door by 4:25. But not quite. I noticed the bill slipped under the door and leaned down and picked it up. Glancing at it, I noticed the bill was for around 80 pounds. There were two internet charges of 8 pounds each, two glasses of wine at dinner for 15 pounds, a surcharge of some sort and then, at the bottom was the room charge of 40 pounds.

So now I knew what the sweetheart rate was for British Air but now I also had a bone to pick with the front desk. I got down to the front desk at 4:28 and asked the lone desk clerk the reason for the room charge and she defensively dismissed it: "that is a mistake, sir. Here, I will take it off your bill." Just then I nervously looked over my shoulder and I see the bus pull up. I step away from the desk. The desk clerk says, "Wait. It's printing out." I say, "He's not going to leave is he?" And I wave my arms frantically in his general direction to alert him I want to be on that bus. I turn back to the desk and she has the printout in her hand, I leap forward to grab it and turn to see the bus drive off into the night.

I started swearing and throwing my luggage on the floor. The frightened desk clerk calls the manager, who came out. He was about 12, but taller than me and he had a I'll-Take-You-Down-On-The-Floor-Right-Here-Old-Man look in his eye. He told me to calm down. I said as calmly as I could, "The Bastard drove off!" The manager says, "He is contract. He doesn't work for us." This makes me madder, not happier.

A crazy cab ride with a woman from Brazil who also got bumped off British Air ensues, and suffice to say, I made it through security and got on the flight to Madrid, but my first ever encounter with a Fascist Pig was yet to come.

In spite of all of this I somehow admire British Air. I don't know why this is. Perhaps it's a British trick. Is it the calming accent. An appeal to our roots?

"There is only the trying. Everything else is not our business."
—T.S. Eliot

I Made It To Spain!

March 29, 2013
After a disastrous day of traveling yesterday (thanks to a third party bungling and overbooking by the airline), I got up at four, got through Heathrow security at 5:30, made it to Madrid by 10:30 and on to Sevilla, Spain, landing at 12:30. Kathy picked me up, and she won't put me down! Ha. Great to see her after three months. Heading to Rota and the beach tonight.

Merry Old England? It's Just A Shot Away!

March 28, 2013
I booked my Spain trip through Expedia and flew British Air from Phoenix to London. Left last night from Sky Harbor at 9:10 p.m. After the all night flight I walked off my plane at Heathrow and went straight to the terminal (had to take that damn train) and I asked an attendant which gate my plane was at, and he said, "Around this corner, but you're not going to make it." I thought that odd, so I walked around the corner, only to see a big ol' line. I'm nervous now, but I wait patiently and when I get up there the woman says, "You missed this flight." And I said, "How could I have missed it?" It's supposed to leave at four, it's been changed from the three o'clock flight one." (I had the Expedia report  which was sent to me last night)

  And she calls a number and literally waits on hold for someone to answer for ten minutes. People are streaming by me and she finally says, gravely, "Sir, you were booked business and you are not. You'll need to go over there to that even longer line."

  Okay, she didn't say all that but that is the gist of it. I go over and wait in the longer, angrier line and finally this woman goes through the same procedure. Clicking around her computer with a grave face until she finally repeats what the other woman said. I say, "I don't understand. Tell me exactly why I missed this flight," and she tells me and I couldn't tell you what she said. it was ridiculous British doublespeak (which by the way they are brilliant at!). She says they are putting me up at a hotel just off the airport area and I can try again tomorrow.

  THEN I have to go through the god-damned immigration line, which was 45 minutes, but I meet a Phoenix couple who got bumped off their British Air flight as well and they were fun to talk to. Found about their early life, how they met, how many tax returns they have filed over the years. I had time to tell them about all of my books, how I met Kathy, the wedding at Pioneer Living History Museum, the research trips going back to 1991 and how much I enjoy Lincoln, New Mexico. When I get to the front of the damn Queue they tell me someone should have given me the immigration form to fill out and I say, "I'm going to a second class hotel for the night and coming back to maybe fly out in the morning, I'm not planning on farming the hedgerows near Eaton."). I had to fill out the form.

  Then to the bus downstairs where it was freezing. The only good thing that happened is that as I rolled to the final door (terrible signage!) a man was standing outside a liquor store with tiny shot glasses on a tray, and he says, "Anybody want a shot?" I laughed and took one and said, "You, sir, are the only good thing that has happened to me in this airport and this country today." It was whiskey and it was marvelous.

 So now I'm outside and it's flipping' freezing and I wait another ten minutes, then I get to my hotel and they comped my meal but after I ordered they said it was only for the buffet. I just laughed and said, bring me the salmon anyway. My waiter, East Indian, came back and said the manager comped the meal. That was the second best thing that happened to me in Merry Old England today.

"You sir, and your flippin' airline are Bloody Bastards."

—What I wanted to say, but never did

Sinking In Topock Marsh and Doing The Norwegian Jig

March 27, 2013

Taking off for Spain tonight. It's a long flight, 14 hours. Meanwhile, inventoried more of the old home movies I had converted into CDs last night. This is The Bell men, my father Allen P., my grandfather Carl Marin and me, in front of Glenn Marvin Bell's apartment in Long Beach, California in 1963:





I remember telling everyone this was a movie camera and we need to move around. So my grandpa starts doing a Norwegian jig:





About this time I had a recurring nightmare: I was walking with my grandfather at Topcok Marsh (across from Needles, California on the Colorado River) and the path we were on was full of quicksand and I kept sinking in up to my waist and my grandfather kept pulling me out. A couple days ago I painted the memory of that feeling:


 
Daily Whipout #499, "Topock Marsh"

"History is the inaccurate narration of events that shouldn't have happened."
—Old Vaquero Saying

Where The Boys Are (hint: where jawbreakders are sold)

March 26, 2013
   Sometimes I'm kind of amazed at some of the people I've met who have impacted the world in ways I had no clue about. When I was doing freelance illustrations for Arizona Highways in the 1980s I attended a patio cocktail party at the editor's house and met the author Glendon Swarthout, who wrote, what became John Wayne's last movie, "The Shootist." I knew he also wrote "Bless The Beasts And Children" but I didn't know this: in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, they ran a feature called "Who Made That" and it said that in 1958 Glendon Swarthout, an English professor at Michigan State University, heard the student buzz about Easter Break at Fort Lauderdale. So, he tagged along, came back and dashed off a novel called "Unholy Spring" (kids used to go home at Spring Break to go to church), but Hollywood persuaded him to change the title to "Where The Boys Are." The resulting movie and the Connie Francis song doubled the amount of kids going in 1960, then it tripled and now it's in the hundreds of thousands and is a national rite of passage. And the rest, as they say, is history!

Speaking of history, I recently had all of our home movies and DVDs converted to CD and last night I was perusing one of the discs and discovered a driving tour of Kingman with my father, Allen P. Bell, in 1996, two years before he died. I basically drove him through Kingman and videotaped him as he showed me where he got his first job (a Shell Station across from Desert Drugs), the houses we lived in and all the businesses from the Stony Wold Motel, White Rock Court, Arcadia Court, Jade Restaurant, Branding Iron, El Trovatore, Hilltop Motel, City Cafe, Bells Motel, The Kingman Motel (being torn down as we drove by), Al Bell's Flying A, Mo Vaughn's Chevron, Whiting Brothers, the Felspar explosion site and several other classic locations that figure prominently in our Mohave County history. It's a little historic tour of Classic Route 66 sites. He gives some dates, like it was February 15, 1956 the first day his Flying A opened for business. And he puts the City Cafe at the mid-forties for being built and said it was one of the first businesses on Hilltop. He also told me he had to sneak into the Lockwood Cafe because if the cook, and owner, saw him, he would give him too much food. Ha.




The Coronado Court Market (at right, above) is where many of the Hualapais kids, like Squibe, Moon and Alex Nish, would stop on the way to school and load up on fireballs and jawbreakers (huge gum concoctions that would, well, break your jaw, because they were so big and so full of sugar a normal person would go into shock upon chewing one).

Whipped out a little study this morning based on the photo of Lee Anderson I took this past weekend at the Festival of the West.

 
Daily Whipout #499, "In The Corral"


"Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it."
—Cullen Hightower







 

It's The Hat, Amigo!

March 25, 2013
   Fun day yesterday at the final day of Festival of the West. Check out this shot of Lee Anderson in our booth:


 
The Vaquero En Boxero

Going to do a drawing or two of this pose. May even end up on a cover. Great look by a great guy. Had some celebrities drop by. Here's Buck and Tammy Montgomery:





This ol' cowboy, George Williams came by and regaled me with stories about ropin' snakes and other cowboy windies. Fun guy. Knows my cousin Billy Hamilton. They roped and rodeoed and drank together.





And we had this bad boy show up as well, Buck Taylor from Gunsmoke and Tombstone fame:





We had dinner at Cartwright's in Cave Creek last night and tore up the art world with our theories. Ha. Buck also gifted me a photo from Cowboys & Aliens where he and his two sons, as scalphunters, open the picture, as they come upon Daniel Craig sitting on the ground. Buck told me they rehearsed the scene for two weeks with Craig's stunt double to block it out (I believe the photo below is of the double). I recently told Buck how much I enjoyed the hat he was wearing in the scene, since it wasn't the usual Hollywood-Gus crease that is so over done now.




So Buck signed the photo, "It's the hat!" Ha. Buck and I also traded Route 66 stories. He traveled it many times with his family going back to Oklahoma from Hollywood.

"You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world."
—William Hazlett

On The Road vs. On The Commode

March 24, 2013
 On Friday morning I read with interest Bill Goodykoontz's re-review of "On The Road" in the Arizona Republic and ran out on Friday to see it immediately. I really wish I could say I loved it. I think Bill was generous (he gave it three stars out of five) and I thought Bill overall nailed it, but I have to disagree with his opening line "Okay, it's not the book." The problem with the movie is, it IS the book, just the wrong parts of the book.

  The movie begins with the first lines of the book and ends with the very last paragraph being read in voiceover almost exactly—same inflections and pronunciations and gravel voice—as Kerouac read it on the Steve Allen television show. I would guess about 95% of the dialogue in the movie is straight out of the book (I recently read both versions, the cleaned up 1957 version and the Scroll Version with all the real names and real sex).

  The problem is they tried to tell the story of the Beats which is historically accurate but that's not the power of the book (Man, is this ever a warning tale for me and my historically accurate obsessed friends). The reason the book is such a thrill is Kerouac's poetic waxing of his adventures on the road. NONE of his wonderful passages are quoted or narrated in the movie! They took the heart out of the book and filled the void with the setups to getting set to go on the road. Okay, there are some road passages in the film and some scenes are inspired, but they go by quickly and we're back to the city and the relationships of these doomed characters.

  Way too much smoking, drugging and emoting and not enough road adventure is my take away. It may be fun to get high (okay, it's a total blast), but it sure isn't fun to watch people doing it, over and over.

Why would you have Dean Moriarity TELL a braggadocio version of a three-way with a virgin and a black guy when we have already seen what a cocksman he is in almost every other scene in the movie? That is just dumb moviemaking (Rule No. 1: don't tell, show). Wrong narrative choice and just overkill, and besides, by the end of the movie we are so tired of his BS and selfishness (all historically accurate by the way) that when we are supposed to feel for him in his last closeup the actual empathy we have for him is somewhere south of zero. It just plays like bad parody.

  Anyway, just really wrong headed. Oh, and it's way too gay (for mainstream success). Granted it's in the book, but mostly it's hinted at, even in the Scroll Version. I admit there is something perverse about Steve Buscemi playing an uptight traveler who gets his poop chute rammed in a hotel room, but do we have to see it? At that point I thought to myself,  "Well, you just lost the hetero-hotrod crowd." And what are they left with? An empty theatre at Camelview 5 with a cartoonist sitting in the dark wishing he was somewhere else. Now THAT is sad, because I loved the idea of this movie as much as the cats who made it (to paraphrase Jack).

 It's amazing to me how really smart, talented filmmakers (Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Salles!) can lose their way so badly. It's like a rocketship coming back into the earth's atmosphere. If the angle is off by a mere 5 degrees,  the spacecraft will miss the earth completely.  And they missed the magic of On The Road completely. Perhaps they should pull it out of circulation for a second time and retitle it: On The Commode.

   Just a thought.

"As in a dream, we zoomed through small crossroad towns smack out of the darkness and passed long lines of lounging harvest hands and cowboys in the night and were back out there. . .mad drunken Americans in the mighty land."

—Jack Kerouac, On The Road

The Legendary Lew Jones Hits A Milestone

March 23, 2013
After my appearance at Festival of the West today I motored up to Cave Creek for the legendary Lew Jones' 75th B-Day bash at a remote house on Lone Mountain. Here's the dreadlocked B-Day Boy himself. We did the Jones & Boze Radio Show live from the Mineshaft (1997-98) because of this crazy guy. The photo on the wall shows Lew in his racing days. All his former race car driver pals were at the party and told stories on him.



The dreadlocks are fake, the dude is not. The guy is real Cave Creek, before the Yuppie Scum moved in. Lew gave my son, Thomas Charles, his first job, raking the driveway of the Mineshaft. Here they are last year at a dinner party at our house:





Lew officiated the marriage of Thomas and Pattarapan. He also has a cabin next door to William Antrim's outhouse in Mogoloon, New Mexico so he is a God in our house. He is The Man and every story he tells comes back to Sperry somehow. His wife, Tara, is a Saint with a capital S and they broke the mold when he hit the ground. It's an honor to know the dude.

"If you're not confused and discouraged, you're not paying attention."
—Lew Jones

The Crazy, Beautiful People I Meet at Festival of the West

March 23, 2013
I am always amazed at the crazy, beautiful people I meet at the Festival of the West down at Westworld, in Scottsdale. These photos were taken at today's show. First up:



 
The "Please Lunge Me" Cowgirl

This pretty cowgirl has on a T-shirt that says on the back:
"The kind of girl that needs to be lunged. . ."
I don't know about you but that is kind of a turn on, no?

Meanwhile, these brothers from Maryland and Pennsylvania stopped traffic in front of our booth when they insisted on posing with me:

 
The Brothers From Another Mother: Quinn Massey of Harrisburg, PA and Charles Pryon of Upper Marlborno, Maryland flank me (I'm the white guy). We posed for so many damn photos I told them they need their own booth. ha.

Got lots of Maniacs coming by:


This is Harry Simpson as Wild Bill Hickok from Pembroke, Massachusetts. He's wearing his True West Maniac badge, which I am pointing at.

More pics tomorrow. Hey, we take you there.

"I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate."
—George Burns

Doc Holliday: The Legend in The Sky

March 22, 2013
   Whipped out another Doc Holliday painting this morning before I came into work.

 
 Daily Whipout #499, "Doc Holliday: Legend in The Sky"

This will be married to a panorama of Leadville by our intrepid Illustrator master Dan The Man Harshberger and composited into the opening spread for The Lost Years of Doc Holliday in Colorado" by Dr. Gary Roberts. Going to be a good piece. Lots of info on Doc's last years. He was much more active than most know.

"I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room."
—Blaise Pascal

Jeff Hildebrandt Gave Me My Big Break

March 22, 2013
Got the word yesterday that my producer at the Westerns Channel has retired. Here's how he gave me my big break in the biz. Back in 2002 I attended a writer's workshop in Gunnison, Colorado where there were more teachers than students. I called Kathy and told her the trip (I drove there) was a total waste of time. They put us up in dorm rooms and mine smelled like dirty jockstraps.

On Saturday morning they had a field trip and I was asked to choose between a farm visit to see a calf being born or a school bus ride up the mountain to see the ghost town of Tin Cup. I almost left at this point, but at the last moment I chose the school bus ride up the mountain. I sat in the back and talked to Corrine Brown about Old West stuff and she asked me about the movie Tombstone and I told her a couple anecdotes about being on the set. About halfway up the mountain, the bus stopped on a slope and we were all asked to get off. I saw a woman setting up a tripod next to a crumbling log cabin and a guy with the woman asked me to come over and stand in front of the tripod, look into the camera and talk about Tombstone, like I had been doing on the bus.

About fifteen minutes later, he told me to stop and we got back on the bus and resumed our trip. Here are two photos of that brief encounter:



The guy's name is Jeff Hildebrandt and he was the head honcho at the Encore Westerns Channel, and not long after this I started getting phone calls from people saying, "Hey, I saw you on the Westerns Channel." Really? Not long after this my friend, and legendary screenwriter, Jeb Rosebrook (Junior Bonner), was in Denver and he pitched The Western Channel on a film project. Jeff declined but somehow made the leap to having Jeb get me to do what became True West Moments. From that time on, Jeb always refers to himself as my agent. Ha.

The first batch were actually filmed in late 2002 at my house and studio in Cave Creek. Jeff was the producer and director on almost all of the Moments. Over the years we did many shoots at different locations, including Wichita's Old Cowtown, Tombstone, Tucson, Prescott, Festival of the West, Pioneer Living History Museum; Lincoln, New Mexico and Durango, Colorado.

Here we are in Prescott, at the Fort Whipple Buffalo Soldiers House filming a couple segments on The Buffalo Soldiers. This is my view of the camera with the teleprompter over the camera lense. The crew, like all film crews, is hamming it up:



And here's Jeff and I at the Buffalo shoot:





Altogether I think we produced about 75 True West Moments and the best were culled for a DVD, "Bob Boze Bell's Favorite True West Moments."



I'm not sure the Western Channel will continue with the popular feature (I've heard scuttlebutt the suits think there are enough in the can to run for another decade or so). So It may be awhile before I say this on camera again:

"I'm Bob Boze Bell and this has been a True West Moment."
—BBB

First Day at The Revived Festival of the West

March 21, 2013
   Had a meeting with Ed Reilly of Bronzesmith this morning, then tweaked cover ideas and sent them down to Dan The Man Harshberger, then I took off for The Beast. Dropped my Flex off at Power Ford (used to Lou Grubb Ford) to have my oil changed by Tommy Amorosano (Ken's nephew) and a tire checked. Ken picked me up there and we motored on to the first day of the revived Festival of the West at Westworld in Scottsdale.

  We've got a great booth right next to celebrity stage where I gave a talk at one. We are testing a cover I am curious about using. We put three real issues down next to a fake cover of a subject I want to test. I ask everyone who comes up which cover they would buy on the newsstand. Hint: the fake cover has the words "Soiled Doves" on it. Now don't cheat tomorrow when you come by. I want your honest opinion.

"I guess I just felt safer when Martha Stewart was still in prison."
—Mark Janetti