The Horse Who Loves to Moonwalk

February 12, 2017
   Yesterday, Greg Carroll, myself and Hilda Huntress, motored  over to Wickenburg to ride in the annual Gold Rush Days Parade. Joining us, as usual was Mr. Crowd Pleaser,  Lee Anderson aboard Concho:

Lee Anderson on Concho in the staging area

For this year's parade, Lee wore his authentic vaquero gear. Spanish spurs, charro outfit and a tricked out sugarloaf sombrero to die for. He also made the saddle himself.

Moonwalking With Concho

The crowd, especially the kids, go crazy over Concho's Moonwalk.

"The American government resembles a burro, but on this burro lawyers will ride."

—Padre Antonio Martinez (1793-1867), Taos, New Mexico

A Rare Alchesay, Chief Rectum And Good Old Toggy Snoggy

February 10, 2017
   Thanks to our intrepid image hunter Rhiannon Deremo, I was able to dig out some very rare Apache photos this morning. Check out these beauties:

Chief Chino, at left, and his staff,  Coyotero Apaches

And here's a group photo with Alchesay (name written on vest)

Alchesay and a group of White Mountain Apaches

Alchesay was a Medal of Honor recipient, he is in the famous photo of Crook on his trusty mule and, thanks to Pastor Arthur Alchesay Geunther,  the high school in White River is named Alchesay High School in his honor. Here's another photo I have never seen, taken in Globe, Arizona:

A group of Apaches in Globe, Arizona, 1899

And here's a close-up of Alchesay from the above photo:

Alchesay and pony, 1899

   These photos and more are on a website: www.American-Tribes.com along with several pages of the "Apache Tag Bands of Fort Apache," compiled by Greenville Goodwin.  It lists many of the clans and tribes and their leaders. Some of the chiefs have weird monikers, for example, for Alchesay it says his Apache name is tsajn ("swollen one"). Reading between the lines, could it be that someone said he was "full of himself"? Another chief tcilki ane ("Rectum"), which I assume means Chief Rectum? Or, once again, reading between the lines, Goodwin asks the translator, who is that guy? And the Apache says, "He's not a chief, he's an asshole." And the Greenville says, write him down as "rectum." Another chief's name translates to "Angry He Waves Something Long Back And Forth." I can imagine the scribe saying, "Quit messing with me and tell him to put his pants back on."

But, my personal favorite from the list is Hacki-nay, also known as Toggy Snoggy ("Big Nose"). 

Good ol' Toggy Snoggy ("Three Noses" also "Big Nose") Hacki-nay

"You can't make this stuff up."

—Old Vaquero Saying

A Mule Savvy Vaquero Explains The Superiority of A Mexican Mule With A Donkey Mother

February 8, 2017
   Knee deep in Mule Skin Nation. And wouldn't you know it would involve the Father of our Country.

A Borax Mule Team Train On The Move

   One of the things most Western movies don't get right is the mix of horses, mules and donkeys being used for mounts. We have been conditioned by so many Westerns where everyone is riding a horse, we have lost site of the reality. Like this:

The Donkey Patrol, 1890s

   And, of course, in the real Old West the mules came in all sizes.

Andrew Jr. 217,  first-prize two-year-old American Jack, 1906

   One of the odd outcomes of the cross pollination is that the offspring are larger than the parents.

   Most people know a mule is the end result of a horse and a donkey making whoopie. But, the variations are tricky, and quite astounding. For example, in the mountains of Baja, California, the vaqueros there prefer a mule that is born from a female donkey who has mated with a stud horse (the offspring is known as a hinny). Why do they prefer hinnys?

"In the U.S. they prefer the horse mother with the burro father. In Baja, we only have mules from burro mothers. They are a bit slower, but they last longer. They don't tire like those of mares. They also have better, stronger hoofs. They walk carefully in the rocks. They are also easier to feed. They will eat mesquite. dipuga, palo verde. Almost any branches. Mules from mares will stop and leave you on foot. This mule [he's being interviewed while he rides] will go three or four days without drinking any water. And when it gets cold, he will last even longer without water. Muchos Dios (many days).

A Baja Jack Keeps Going And Going And Going. . .

"It can be hard on a mule born from a horse because his feet are spread out wider. That's not good on the rocks. In loose rocks, he falls on his face. And these (pointing to his mount), No. These are better because they handle the worst rocks—like a four by four. Like a Toyota."
—A Mule Savvy Vaquero, in the documentary "Vaquero Corizon" (Heart of the Cowboy)

"The ancestry of the ass may be traced to the wild ass of Asia and Africa. The males are usually termed 'jacks,' and the females 'jennets.'"
—Types And Breeds of Farm Animals, by Charles S. Plumb

How Do You Stop A Big, Bad Jack? By Baxter Black

February 8, 2017
   My father was a very stubborn Norwegian, and, according to my wife, the wing nut didn't fall far from the crankshaft.

   Speaking of being stubborn as a mule, I am hot on the trail of the history of Mules in the American West. And, if I have my way (see first paragraph), we are going to do an entire issue on these incredible, impotent, under appreciated, beasts of burden.

Mexican Muleteer with Armitas (leather leg coverings)

   Now, unlike the American cowboy, who wears his chaps, these leather leg coverings are attached to the saddle, not the rider. I have an excellent DVD on the vaqueros of Baja and there is a sequence of a rider mounting his trusty mule and then pulling the leather wings across his legs before taking off. 

   Okay, here is the sequence taken from the wonderful DVD "Vaquero Corazon" (The Heart of The Cowboy) which I highly recommend:

Saddling up Armitas #1

Saddling Up Armitas #2

Saddling Up Armitas #3

Very ingenious, those Mexican Muleteers.

   Thanks to Stuart Rosebrook, I was able to talk to the legendary Baxter Black the other day and we got to talking about mules. Baxter lives just down the road in Benson, and although he claims to be retired, he is busier than mere mortals like myself. Here is Baxter's take on how to stop a mule:

How Do You Stop A Big, Bad Jack?
People ask me how can you stop a mule. Well, out in California my Uncle Jack let Lon ride one of his mules. In no time they were kicked into overdrive in spite of the fact that Lon had the mule’s head pulled clean back to his boot top! The road turned right. The mule never noticed. He ran smack dab, flat into an orange tree! From Jack’s vantage point, it looked like the orange tree had been struck by lightening! A terrible crashing sound ensued as Lon flew off the mule and shot through the branches like a six-foot smoked salmon fired from a battle ship! It stopped that mule, but they say you can still see pieces of Lon’s hat, shirt and glasses embedded in the bark.

   A funny bit, but to me, here's the line that kills: 

"Lon flew off the mule and shot through the branches like a six-foot smoked salmon fired from a battle ship!"
—Baxter Black 


Now THAT is some funny imagery and is damn near poetry, to boot. And, finally, coming full circle on the stubborn Norsky subject:

Donkey Dynamite!

  When the Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz was traversing the Sierra Madres with a large pack train in 1890, he heard a noise above him on the switchbacks and looked up to see a donkey with its pack on come hurtling past him, "turning over and over with astounding speed." The donkey sailed over his head, and down to a pillar of rock below him. The donkey hit the base of the pillar, then rolled over twice before coming to a halt. The donkey then got up in the midst of its scattered cargo which turned out to be a case of dynamite. Two of the Mexican packers scrambled down the slope, repacked the dynamite on the shaken but perfectly fine little donkey and led it up the trail where it pushed on "as coolly as if nothing had happened." This is from Richard Grant's wonderful book, "God's Middle Finger."

   Of course, not everyone is in love with mules.

"A horse is a noble animal who performs his service with grace. A mule will wait his whole life for the opportunity to kill a man."

—J.P.S. Brown

He Searched Among the Rocks for The Body He Hoped He Wouldn't Find

February 7, 2017
   Working on a variety of things. Last weekend, I finally got to see "Manchester By The Sea," and I wasn't disappointed. I absolutely think Casey Afflect is one of our finest actors and it makes me want to revisit his stunning, dead-on portrayal of Robert Fort in the Brad Pitt Western, "The Assasination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford." Anybody who can make us feel sorry for that back shooter is doing something amazing.

   Meanwhile, went home for lunch today and finished a little study.

Daily Whip Out: "He Searched Among the Rocks Looking

for The Body He Hoped He Wouldn't Find"

  Yes, I poached that head-down cowboy from a certain movie poster.

Chris Casey's: "Vaquero In Sunset"

BBB's Obit Bits: One Sentence at A Time

   All my life I have tried to uncover the truth about the real Old West. I just want to know the truth, warts and all. I admit, I was offended by some of the hero worshipping but I also hated the opposite: the revisionist takedown. If I had my life to do over I would do everything exactly the same except I wouldn't go see "Dirty Little Billy."  In the end, I was disappointed to discover, most people don't want to know the truth. But I did.

"History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining."

—Chuck Klosterman

Staring Into The Abyss

February 6, 2017
      For the past forty-some years I have returned, time and again, to a theme that haunts me (see The Doper Roper, 1975). 

The Doper Roper Cliff Diving, in The Razz, 1975

Daily Whip Out: "Looking Into The Abyss." Or, "He's Down There Somewhere."

   And, this abyss view shows up in other stories as well:

Daily Whip Out: "Mickey Over The Top"

Here's a dead-on-accurate take on the current cultural divide in the U.S.

Our Settler Culture
   “Our founders built a new order atop specifically European
intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture,
Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.”
I reject the idea that today’s American story should be a Protestant
or Anglo-Saxon story (and Douthat does too). But his column makes a
crucial point: The universalist narrative that stirs passion and
patriotism in so many liberals has failed to win over most parts of
the country that don’t touch an ocean. The heartland instead prefers
an image of America more closely tied to the country’s cultural past.

The party would be wise to spend some time thinking about
how to construct a story about the country’s future that’s less
skittish about honoring its past.

If you think I’m being harsh, remember that many Democrats are no
longer comfortable naming events after Thomas Jefferson.

—The New York Times

"Everyone appreciates your honesty until you're honest with them, then you're an asshole."

—George Carlin

The History of Big, Bad Jacks

February 3, 2017
   Studying big, bad jacks:

Daily Whip Out: "Big, Bad Jack Sketch"

Whoa-Haws & God Damns

When the Shoshoni and Paiutes encountered their first white immigrants in 1846, they saw their first oxen and mules. Heinrich Lienhard remembered, "The Indian vocabulary in the Humboldt Valley was rapidly enlarged by contact with the white immigrants, for Shoshoni and Paiutes were soon referring to oxen as 'whoa-haws,' and to mules as 'god damns.'"

Daily Whip Out: "Mickey Free Rides A God Damn"

Mules vs. Missionaries

   "It is my honest opinion, founded upon much observation, that so long as and considerable numbers of mules are employed there, it is utterly useless for missionaries to go to the Rocky Mountains."

—Ernest Ingersol, 1870s

Daily Whip Out: "Mickey And His Big Jack Near Hell"

Three Times Is A Charm

"J.W. Wilson was thrown from his mule three times! Which excited a good deal of merriment and fun. . ."

—Madison Moorman, along the Platte River, June 6, 1850

Daily Whip Out: "Mickey Sees The Light And Makes The Switch"

The Superior Endurance of Mules

"The total distance today was 36 miles. The horses were now falling away in an alarming manner, but the mules seem to require the stimulus of distention, and nothing else: this the dry grass affords."

—Lieutenant W.H. Emory, a topographical engineer on Kearny's expedition to California, 1846

Daily Whip Out: "Mickey's Big, Bad Jack"

Free Falling

"Mule rolled downhill for five hundred feet, yet was uninjured."

—Charles Preuss, German cartographer on John C. Fremont's first, second and fourth exploratory expeditions, December 16, 1843

Daily Whip Out: "Mickey's Mule Climbs The Ridge"

Jackass Bill Cody

"Bill Cody, one of our scouts and one of the best shots on the plains,. . .gets $60 per month and a splendid mule to ride."

—George Armes, army officer

Daily Whip Out: "Mexican Mule Days"

"Horses were worth from fifty to one hundred dollars, and mules from seventy-five to one hundred and fifty."

—Dr. George Keller, St. Joseph, Missouri, 1849

All of these quotes are from the wonderful book "The Mule Alternative: The Saddle Mule in the American West" by Mike Stamm, Medicine Wolf Press

   We are going to feature the history of the mule in the West in an upcoming issue.

Holliday Insights & Docs Galore

February 2, 2017
   We are wrapping up our special issue on Doc Holliday. I think it's safe to say we've got the goods on the good doctor. We corralled the esteemed authors, Gary Roberts, Mary Doria Russell and Tom Clavin (we excerpted a chapter from his excellent new book "Dodge City") to weigh in on the legendary dentist. How good is the coverage? Well, I wrote a book on Holliday and even I learned new things I didn't know about the legendary gambler and gunfighter.

BBB Daily Whip Outs: "Docs Galore"

   And speaking of Docs Galore, my good friend and collector extraordinaire, Kevin Mulkins, just bought one of my monoprints:

"The Doctor Will See You Now" monoprint,  8" X 10" on rag paper, signed by me.

   Once again we kept our art director, Dan The Man Harshberger, busy, developing multiple cover ideas. Here are four of them:

Dan The Man's four proposed covers for the April issue of True West

The coverage inside is pretty impressive as well:

"When Doc Met Wyatt" by Tom Clavin

Mary Doria Russell takes on the challenge of determining who is the best huckleberry:

Doc Wannabes

   If you are a subscriber, this spectacular Doc issue will land in your mailbox in three weeks. If you are not a subscriber, you have four days to sign up, or you will miss out on this instant collector's edition. Good luck.

"He was one of the quietest and most gentlemanly men I've ever met."

—A Leadville reporter, who met Doc Holiday in the spring of 1883

Caught In A Crossfire

February 2, 2017
   Finished another storm picture this morning.

Daily Whip Out: "Crossfire Storm Rider."

   I love weather systems, especially on the desert. I'm also mulling over my hometown and what it did to me. Ha.

"The people we admire in American life tend to be those who don't forget where they came from."
—Dwight Gardner

BBB's Obit Bits: One Sentence at A Time
   "When I was a teenager, I couldn't wait to get out of Kingman, but even though I escaped, I never quite managed to get the Kingman out of me."
—BBB

   There is a certain band I admire that has some of the coolest song lyrics, ever. Just off the top of my head, here are a couple of my faves:

"Bet your mama don't know you scratch like that."

"She blew my nose and then she blew my mind."

"We shout out who killed the Kennedys, when after all, it was you and me."

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need."

   And, yes, it was the lead singer of that band, who wrote the lyric that led to the title of the above Daily Whip Out:

"I was born in a crossfire hurricane, and I howled at the mornin' drivin' rain. . ."
—The Rolling Stones, "Jumpin' Jack Flash

Chief of The Smartasses

February 1, 2017
    I am proud to say I grew up with a whole bunch of kids from the Hualapai tribe. Plus, we even had a smattering of kids from the Havasupai Tribe and the nearby Mojave Tribe. I found them all to be great friends, talented athletes, resilient survivors and almost to a person, very funny. In fact, I would go as far as to say, the one trait I admired the most in these tribal folk is that to a person, they were all flat out smartasses.

Daily Whip Out: "The Smartass"

   When you throw in my Mexican and cowboy friends, we even had smartass nicknames: Nay, Moon, Squibe, Chicken, Clink, Horny, Booger, Buns, Hubby, Salty, Punchy, Roaches, Pistol, Tinker, Hanky (yes, a girl), and last, but surely not least, Boxlip Darrell. They all had smartass haircuts to boot (even Hanky). I say all this because last week Judy Darbyshire came by the True West World Headquarters and we got to laughing about our days working on The Razz, a humor magazine founded by Dan The Man Harshberger and myself back in 1972.

One of the founders of the Hidden In The Hills Artist Studio Tour, Judy Darbyshire.

  Judy did cartoons for us and spot illustrations, including a series called "Classic Hair Doos" which featured, in one episode, a dead-on caricature of an Indian Blunt Cut Flattop:

Judy Darbyshire's masterful take on a Hualapai Flattop in the Razz, circa 1975.

   Judy wrote at the bottom that the above illustration is "a combo of Dayton and Delano Havatone." She is referring to my high school annual which I sent her home with and she extrapolated between my two smartass MCUHS classmates. I also wrote about this in "The 66 Kid," saying that nobody rocked a flattop like the Hualapais.

   In this day of severe tribal tendencies, count me in with the Hualapai Smartass tribe. Back in 2014, one of them, Alan Tapija, unofficially named me Bah-chuk, which he told me is Hualapai for "boy who made us laugh." I'm not sure I trust Alan because phonetically at least, it sounds like it means "bat shit crazy boy." But then, that's just me, being a smartass.

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."
—William James

Moonrise Saguaro

February 1, 2017
   On my way home from work a couple weeks ago, I caught this moonrise saguaro scene next to one of my favorite cactus. I see it every day on my way to work and every day I swear I'm going to paint it. Ironically, yesterday, a gaggle of plein air painters were on the scene with at least one of them pointing his eye at the big bad boy. I found myself muttering, "Hey, that's MY saguaro! Get the hell out of here!"

Moonrise Saguaro

"For a temple to be built, a temple must be destroyed."

—Nietzsche

Zane Grey On The Cover And Sarah Brava On Her Big, Bad Jack

January 31, 2017
   Our cover boy for March, Zane Grey, brought out a special guest today. We were honored to have the very talented Craig Bohmler drop into our Design Review session this morning at the True West World Headquarters in Cave Creek. 

True West Design Review meeting, 11 a.m. L to R: Ken Amorosano,

Dan The Man Harshberger,  Craig Bohmler, Rhiannon Deremo and Robert Ray.

Ducking out of the photo, at right, is Rebecca Edwards.

Craig picked up six copies of the March issue which features the history

of his new opera adaptation of "Riders of The Purple Sage" on the cover.

   As you will read in the March issue, the opera premieres in Tucson on February 25 and 26, and in Phoenix on March 3 through 5.

  Another cover girl is waiting in the wings.

Daily Whip Out: "Sarah Brava On Her Big, Bad Jack."

   I'm developing this idea for later this year along with a full blown bio by Paul Andrew Hutton.

"Man's bones yearn for the dust." 
—Zane Grey

Stop The Presses! Digging Up Billy the Kid

January 30, 2017
   I once did a New Times Weekly doubletruck on why I should be the publisher of the Arizona Republic (their publisher, Duke Tully, had just resigned over a false military medals scandal), and I warned everyone I would have a slightly different priority when it comes to what goes on the front page. 

Daily Whip Out: "Stop The Presses!"

   I have only had the privilege of saying this—stop the presses!—once and that was for a planned issue on Pancho Villa back in 2003. The week we were going to press, the digging up Billy news out of Lincoln, New Mexico hit the front page of the New York Times and I knew this was our story and we needed to own it. With several days to go, we ripped up our Pancho cover and, replaced it with, what our Art Director still likes to call, A Mexican Wrestling Cover:

August 2003 cover of True West: "Digging Up Billy the Kid"

   It sold like hotcakes. I happened to be in New York when this issue hit and I remember sitting on a couch in a Manhattan Barnes & Noble (at the time there were two B&N stores within sight of each other) and I watched with great interest—okay, with extreme glee!—as three different customers picked up the issue and walked to the checkout with this True West magazine in their little hands. 

   Yes, that is my scratchboard of Billy as a bucktoothed skeleton.

   Got up at 5:30 today and finished a little nocturne study.

Daily Whip Out: "Shadowy Character Study"

"Just the bare bones summary of a terrific story should move a listener to experience pity and fear."

—Charles Johnson, "The Way of A Writer"

Oof! How to Be A Boring Jackass And Other Non-Sequiturs

January 30, 2017
   Some observations on comics and narrative art, gleamed from a weekend of studying and reading about both:

Daily Whip Outs: "Oops! Wrong Date"

   Sometimes I draw random, disparate images on the same page with no goal in mind. But then, if I'm paying attention, I notice they start to create a narrative all on their own. Not sure what this is exactly, but it seems almost like magic when it happens. I've read somewhere that standup comics will take two random words out of a dictionary and then attempt to put them together in a non-sequitur kind of way. It probably has something to do with the fact that everything in our world is connected.

   Or, I could be fooling myself.

"One has fear in front of a goat, in back of a mule, and on every side of a fool!"
—E W Howe

   Speaking of mules and fools, guess who is going to be the grand marshal at the 2017 Bishop Mule Days in May? Hint: some jackass from Kingman.

Yes, the 66 Kid is going to ride a mule at the front of the Bishop Mule Days parade.

Oof! Bam! And Zap!
   Ed Ruscha tells why one of the words he chose [to produce in one of his word paintings] was “Oof”: “ ‘It had one foot in the world of cartooning,’ he explained, speaking slowly and lingering over a word now and then, as though to savor its quiddity. ‘You get punched in the stomach, and that’s “Oof.” It was so obvious, and so much a part of my growing up in the U.S.A. I felt like it was almost a patriotic word.’ ”
—The New Yorker

Nocturn Colors

“I have found that if you put silver underneath blue, the blue sits back, like night, or glows like moonlight."
—Chris Ofili

Conundrums And Things That Don't Follow
   Another thing I have learned is that if you start out in one direction on a drawing or painting, and work very fast, at some point, if you reverse directions and try to accomplish the opposite, it creates something really dynamic. For example, one time when I was on a tight deadline at New Times Weekly, I was drawing an Apartheid figure standing in front of a barbwire fence. My plan was to simply fill in the entire figure and make it all black, but as I was quickly trying to do this, I noticed there were some wonderful highlights in the face—unplanned—and I stopped and marveled at how loose and dynamic it was. If I had started out trying to achieve this, it wouldn't have worked.

   Here's another example of the same phenom, also from The New Yorker:

“When I leave the studio at night, I take a photo of the picture I’m working on,” Ofili continued. “This morning when I woke up, I looked at the photo and thought, I’ll change his shirt.” The barman’s shirt had originally been white, but Ofili had painted it black, to make the figure recede. “It looked ghastly,” he said. “So this morning I decided to make the shirt white again, but the black was still wet, and the paint wasn’t going on the way I wanted. I started to blot it with this”—he picked up an old green T-shirt to demonstrate—“and it left this amazing texture. I got lucky. Until that moment it was all panic and despair, because I thought I was going to lose it.”

"He was just short of being a con man, but no more than anyone in the art world, or for that matter in the world of finance—which, of course, was his whole point."
—Lawrence Weschler on J.S.G. Boggs, the artist who created money and spent it but never sold it

"Art is whatever you can get away with."
—Old Gallery Owner Saying

"To be free you need to be willing to sacrifice everything, to be unafraid."
—Nicola Barker

   If you've ever heard or seen Stevie Ray Vaughn play the guitar, you know what she means.

BBB's Obit Bits: One Sentence at A Time
He hated haters, but loved a non-sequitur

Or, is that a conundrum?

"The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out."
—Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

More BBB Obit Bits

January 28, 2017
   One of my Christmas presents from Kathy was a book by Elia Kazan On Directing. In it, he challenged me:

"Study 20 plots of your favorite movies for their story, their fundamental plot, as it could be told in one sentence. . ."
—Elia Kazan

So, I did my 20, which included:

"The Godfather": A king had three sons, who would succeed him? (full disclosure: this is actually Francis Ford Coppala's version of a one-sentence description of Mario Puzo's best selling book)

"Tombstone": Two rival gangs collide in a frontier town.

"The Unforgiven": Turns out Audrey Hepburn is an In-din.


"Theeb": Do not trust wolves.

   There are 17 more, but you get the idea. After I had completed my list I Googled the concept and got these little gems:

• "Mrs. Doubtfire": Divorced man discovers he's trans and loses custody of children.

• "Star Wars: The Force Awakens": Emo teen can't live up to his grandfather's legacy and takes it out on dad.

• "Frozen": After the death of her parents, a young socialite causes millions in property damage.

• "Twilight": A love triangle between an 18-year-old girl, a 100-year-old guy and a dog.

• "JFK": Everyone killed Kennedy except Oswald.

• "Bullitt": A car chase and 96 minutes of other stuff.

• "Jaws": An endangered aquatic creature is killed by a small town sheriff.

• "The Shining": A family's first Airbnb experience goes very wrong.

• "Titanic": A great-grandma tells a group of strangers about the time she screwed a bum.

BBB's Obit Bits
   If you praise everyone, you end up praising no one. This is especially true in obits. "Everyone loved him," is so ridiculous and over-the-top, everything that follows is going to be suspect, if not outright unbelievable. Here is a real obit that makes use of specific pettiness and humor in a humanizing way.

"She became a devoted Southerner by choice when she finally defied the wishes of her mother (who was by all accounts and evidence, the Meanest Woman Who Ever Lived) by marrying and following "that hillbilly" back to Mississippi, where they lived happily until Mr. Conner's untimely death in 1982, after which Mrs. Conner never gave so much as a thought to another man."

End of quote. I have a suspicion it helps if one of your daughters is a good writer. See more right here:

A real fine obit