The Hotshots Who Saved All Our Houses

May 19, 2020
   I mentioned in yesterday's post that we survived the Seven Sisters Fire, and that we weren't evacuated and that when we woke up in the morning the fire was out. All true, but here's the rest of the story.

Big flames over the Seven Sisters

The Hotshots Who Saved The Day
   My neighbor Bob Hoss was about ready to leave on Sunday night when he looked at the fire one more time, and he told me he saw a big swath of flames coming down over the mountain, but then he noticed that some of it disappeared. There were no air drops so he wondered what was going on so he grabbed his binoculars and, he told me,  "I could see these tiny white spots moving in front of the flames. I soon realized that it was firemen in shiny white suits with head lamps and they were fighting the fire head on!"

Bob Hoss's photo of the fire. He maintains

those little white spots at middle right are fires, but I wonder if those aren't firefighters?

    Bob Hoss continues: "I watched them fight the fire for about two hours. They would strategically get ahead of the fire and then seemingly surround it and let a tree burn for a while and then they would somehow douse it. Chunk by chunk they fought that line, pulling back here, getting aggressive on another side. I stayed up until midnight but by then the fire was stopped dead in its tracks. There was a flare up at one point in a straight line and I assumed it was a backfire, behind the main fire line. I counted about 45 guys on the fire line."

   The fire was set to overtake several houses, but they stopped the fire just short of each one. You can see them in the photo, below.

   Here is how the Seven Sisters looked this morning.

Six of the Seven Sisters With Burnt Tops

"When I was in the army at Fort Ord, we were volunteered to go fight a fire and they put us in these suits and we had to run up into a canyon and dig out a six foot fire line. With all that heavy equipment on and trying to hack and dig out the undergrowth we were completely exhausted in two hours flat. We were so tired we could hardly move. How those hotshots do this for hours on end, is nothing short of amazing."
—A friend of mine marveling at the bravery and stamina of the hotshot fire fighters

Up In Smoke

May 18, 2020
   What eight things would you save? That was the question last night when our neighbor, down on the creek, said they were evacuating.

   Earlier in the evening we had dinner with the Aughertons on their patio. We brought our own food, and wine, and sat apart and even wore masks at the appropriate times. At that time the fire was over the ridge and we could only see the smoke.

Smoke on the west side of Cave Creek.

   After dark, we started hearing the sirens coming from all directions and by nine, they were blocking the roads and we could clearly see the flames.

Fire On The Seven Sisters

Kathy and I drove up towards Morningstar and there we saw an alarming sight: the flames were coming down the draw to the creek.

   At this point we knew it was serious. The creek bottom is choked with cheat grass, especially in the bladed areas where crazy, invasive plants have taken hold. I knew that if the fire got down there, it would shoot down our river bottom canyon like a cannonball.

   So we went home and did the drill: what are the eight things you will save if your house is about to be burned to the ground. I always thought I would be partial to all of the paintings in my studio, but no, I looked at them all and found myself saying, "I will paint other paintings." I grabbed a couple days worth of clothes, our mini-fireproof safe with our birth certificates and all that crap, toiletries, medicine and my computer and charger. Oh, the phone charger. What a strange priority, but, I need that charger! After I put those in the Flex, Kathy put a big cardboard box down in front of the closet where our family photos are stored.

    Nope.

   "You're kidding me?" My wife of 40-plus years said, looking at me like she had never really ever known me. Sorry. It's just paper and most of it is online anyway. This was a strange sentiment to hear coming out of my mouth. Now, full disclosure, I did have an inkling that the chances were good that we would be spared, but still, this was an eye opener to me since I consider myself an archivist and my wife considers me a hoarder.

   We woke up this morning and the fire is all but out, although we still have slurry planes flying over and a few hot spots can be seen burning on the hillside across the creek.

   One thing is clear: everything in this life is transitory and so damned fragile.

"Funny how blessings brighten as they take their flight."

—Old Vaquero Saying

On The Hunt for El Pendejo

May 17, 2020
   Stepping up my game, what there is left of it. Ha.

Daily Whip Out:

"On The Hunt for El Pendejo"

   Meanwhile, Grandma Goose has been busy.

Grandma Goose In Her Personal Cactusland

   Back to my sketchbook. Lots of ideas and notes.

Daily Whip Out: "Head Down"

   And, always a little bit of dust to share.

Daily Whip Out: "Dust Up"

   And, here's a concept I am hot on the trail of.

Daily Whip Out: "Rifle at The Ready"

   This is a sketch for a much more ambitious piece I'm doing for the Battle of Agua Prieta.

   Speaking of ridiculous, one-sided battles, I cannot believe the dust up over wearing a face mask. In a Target store in Van Nuys, California, an employee ended up with a broken arm while helping to remove two customers who refused to wear masks, or leave the premises.

    In Perkasie, Pennsylvania, a cashier was punched in the face three times for refusing to sell a pack of cigars in a convenience store to a guy refusing to put on a mask.

   On a public bus in San Antonio, a man who was told he could not board,  shot and wounded a passenger on the bus who was wearing a face mask.

   A security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan was shot and killed by a customer for simply asking that he put on a face mask.

   Here's the deal: the masks are to protect others, not yourself. You don't have a right to infect other people, people. And, more importantly, you don't have the right to kill someone who wants you to protect others.

   Crazy times.

"You should not honor men more than truth."
—Plato

The End of The Pandemic Formal Portrait

May 16, 2020
   Last night at midnight, the governor of Arizona's officially mandated stay-at-home order expired. I swore I would not shave until this was over, and while history warns us there will be two more spikes, with the upcoming spike—probably in the fall—being the worst, I have honored my "official" commitment and intend to shave off this itchy symbol today.

   So this morning, I asked my long suffering, live-in photographer, to take a photo of me to commemorate my pandemic facial hairs.

The official BBB Commemorative Pandemic Photo by Kathy Radina

   While so much of our lives are now viewed from the waist up, Zoom meetings for example, Kathy insisted on capturing my entire pandemic outfit.

Not-so-formal, not-so-Western,

 from the waist down.

   And, just for grins, I asked Kathy to take this insurance shot, with a different hat.

"Wait for me, Wild Bill!"

   Some of my friends, okay, one loud mouth in particular, insists I actually look like a certain old time sidekick. Well, do I?

Gabby Hayes

"Nice try, but Gabby was better looking."
—John A. Aragon

Let's All Support The Don Dedera Memorial Library in Payson, Arizona

May 15, 2020
   Not many guys get to write their own obituary, but then Don Dedera was not your typical guy.

Don Dedera's obit in the March 10, 2020

Payson Roundup

   It is hilarious, especially when you are in on the joke that he is writing all this from the beyond, with clever asides like, "he grew up despising all Yankees except Lou Gehrig, and hunting for stewpot squirrels where the Pentagon sprawls today."

   Last summer a select few of the True West staff motored up to Payson to hang with the legendary writer and editor for a weekend of fun and brainstorming. Don had been lobbying me for several years to bring the staff and come up and stay in his tree house. In actuality, he had a spare house across the street from his real house which had a tree house in the backyard. Don told me how the best thing he ever did at Arizona Highways was to get the staff out of the office and go see some real Arizona landscape and come up with new ideas. So we finally did just that.

The True West Writer's Retreat. L to R: BBB, Sherry Monahan, Marshall Trimble, Kevin Schrimer, Stuart Roseberook and the ring master himself, Don Dedera

   Here's what Sherry Monahan has to say about that weekend:

   "Sharing stories, ideas, and friendship with the likes of Don Dedera, Bob Boze Bell, Marshall Trimble, and Stuart Rosebrook is something I will always cherish. Don and his lovely wife welcomed us into their home and made us feel like family. Don was a real treasure. He held nothing back and came off as a curmudgeon, but deep down was a soft teddy bear. I always smile when I remember him 'zinging' BBB and then winked at me. I'm happy to have had the chance to know the man behind Arizona Highways."

   And here's Stuart Rosebrook's memories of our retreat:

   "The first annual Don Dedera Writers Retreat with Don and Nancy, Bob Boze Bell, Marshall Trimble and Sherry Monahan is one of my highlights working for True West magazine. I first read Don Dedera in the Arizona Republic in the early 1970s and have admired him as a writer and historian ever since. I first worked with Don as an associate editor at Arizona Highways, and I admired him for his knowledge of the state of Arizona, his love of writing and telling a good story. He shared with me a tip on writing a good column: first, hang your facts through the article, like clothes hanging on a taut clothesline, and tightly build your story around them. But always start with the facts. A man of letters, a true storyteller, a dedicated journalist and historian who loved his community and the state of Arizona. I am a better man for knowing him and will miss him.

I am just glad I was able to spend time with him again." 

  Don's wonderful wife Nancy with her man. She is now leading the charge to have the Payson library honor her late husband with a name change to The Don Dedera Memorial Library.

   And here is Marshall Trimble:



   "Don was a historian, journalist, editor, publisher, photographer and editor of the world-famous Arizona Highways magazine. For eighteen years his popular columns in the Arizona Republic enabled him to take up many causes on behalf of the people of Arizona. For example, the citizens of Payson had no doctor and he wrote about it. Soon a doctor hung his shingle in Payson. When the Zane Grey cabin burned during the Dude Fire, Don, as President of the Payson Museum, helped raise enough funds to build a replica in Payson. He proposed in his column, the creation of several state parks, including Tonto Natural Bridge, the Tombstone Courthouse and Fort Verde.   "Don’s generosity reached far and wide. He donated his collection of Nikon Microscopes to the students at Payson High School. Recently, he gave the Young Historical Society publishing rights to his popular book on the Pleasant Valley War, A Little War of Our Own, considered to be the defining work on the West’s most famous feud." 

Marshall, Don and myself at his

89th birthday party.

    I'll post a link to where you can go to support the library name change.

Don Could Be A Little Booger

"Marijuana is now legal. Haircuts are not. It took fifty years, but the hippies finally won."

—Old Hippie Observation

Pondering Pendejos & Hutton's New Book

May 14, 2020
   I'm having fun with my son noodling characters for a joint project we are working on. Here's one of them, a perpetually crying caballero:

Daily Whip Out:

"The Crybaby, or, Weeping Tomas"

   And speaking of the Top Secret Writer:

Paul Hutton Defends Balanced History 

Brilliant, as usual. Nobody spins it back into the face of Political Correctness better than Paul. He charmingly turns the tables on the "we were awful" concept and gives it right back with a sweetness undergirded with clever hostility.

Daily Whip Out: "Pondering Pendejo"

We Get Mail

Dear True West,
   I just wanted to thank you so much for my new Geronimo Book From Bob Boze Bell. I have to say the quality of the writing and layout of the book is fabulous. The art work inside is outstanding, and I love the chronology that runs through the book just as in the Wyatt Earp Book.

   I can’t thank you enough for such a speedy service. All of you at True West magazine are fabulous.

   Please stay safe in these crazy, unprecedented times we are living through.

Sincerely

Mike Geoghegan
London (UK)

Tres Hombres Greeting Pendejos

"Con el permiso de ustedes, senores, voy a cantar voy a contarles las historia del pinche pendejo"
—Old Vaquero Saying, (With your permission, Gentlemen, I shall sing, telling you the story of El Pendejo)

Two Months Worth of Pandemic Facial Hair And Pendejo Apparition

May 13, 2020
   It was two months ago today we went on full quarantine. Kathy and I went up to Bashas' grocery store in Carefree this morning. They have a special senior hour between five and six A.M. for old people to shop safely during the pandemic. A security woman met us at the door and I said, "I suppose you want to card me to make sure I'm old enough to get in," to which she said, "You do look pretty young," which is a nice way of saying, "Get your ass in here and quit hassling me you old geezer."

      And speaking of Geezer-ness, someone asked how my pandemic beard is coming along.

Daily Grow Out: "Eight Week Itch"

   Meanwhile, we have had seven Zoom calls and here's what the one yesterday looked like:

Carole Glenn On Staff Meeting Zoom Call

   We're actually on Slack, but Zoom has become the word to describe the work from home conference call.

Border Crossing

   He's coming across the border. Can you see him? 

Daily Whip Out:

"Pendejo Apparition Number One"

"Pendejo Apparition Number Two"

"We're making the airplane while it's flying."
—Bill Irwin, on his new lockdown show, "In-Zoom"

El Pendejo Es Muy Sympatico And Post Pandemic Postulating

May 12, 2020
    Digging deep into the psyche of a certain border wanderer.

Daily Whip Out:

"El Pendejo Es Muy Sympatico"

   Yesterday, I knuckled down with six concepts and did 12 sketches.

   Still, at the end of the day, the boy can be a little elusive and lofty.

Daily Whip Out: "El Pendejo On High"

Post Pandemic Postulating
   Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed in the New York Times about his new stand-up special, "23 Hours to Kill," on Netflix, and he was asked what he thinks will happen at the end of the pandemic, and Jerry said, and I'm paraphrasing—Hollywood won't find the new path, Washington won't find the new path, stand-up comedians will find the path because they go out and they know immediately if something is working, or not. Within three nights they'll know where it's all going.

   Some major truth right there. And here. . .

"What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents have not lived."
—Carl Jung

Homeland And Buffalo Bill

May 11, 2020
   Kathy and I are binge watching "Homeland" and we usually watch an episode a night. Last night we were on season five, episode 2, when a scene stopped me in my tracks. One of the main characters, Quinn, below, is at a bus stop and behind him is a poster, for what appears to be a movie.

"Hey, Bob Boze Bell. Yes, you. Look at me. I'm supposed to be Buffalo Bill."

   Is that supposed to be someone playing Buffalo Bill, in a play or a movie? Is it a real movie? So, here's what I found out when I posted this on Facebook:

   At the 15 minute mark, while following Fatima, Quinn is seen standing next to a movie poster for a title called "New Old Country". Although it even has a tagline which reads "Is this the land worth dying for?", the film appears to be fictitious. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4791472/trivia Must have caught a lot of people's attention. It's really a good poster.

   Thanks Tom Betts and Carole Glenn! This same site, link above, has another little tidbit, which I love:

Graffiti artists employed to create slogans for a refugee camp actually wrote anti-Homeland slogans such as "Homeland is a joke, and it didn't make us laugh" on the set in protest at the show's portrayal of Muslims. The show's creator Alex Gansa commented that Homeland always strives to be subversive in its own right and a stimulus for conversation and that he couldn't help but admire this act of artistic sabotage.

   Speaking of artistic sabotage, I worked today on 12 scenes with six goals: 

Daily Whip Outs: "12 Pendejo Scenes"

"Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points."
—Kevin Kelly

Happy Mother's Day to All You Mothers

May 10, 2020
   Well, it's that day. Here you go:

Three Mothers:

Bobbi Bell, Kathy Radina and Betty Radina

   Love them all madly. And here are two of them from another time and place.

The Radina Clan, 1963:

L to R: Debbie, Betty, Brad, Earl, Kathy

and Don

   And, so today, I made breakfast for the mother of my children.

Mother's Day Huevos Rancheros

   Yes, that is Hatch green chiles, and yes, that is a photograph of Thomas Charles graduating from NAU and that is his grandmother, Betty Radina, giving him a big, fat hug and that is his sister, Deena C. rooting them on.

   Meanwhile, I've got a certain pendejo on my mind.

Daily Whip Out: "El Pendejo Takes A Stroll"

"I've got to be a court jester, but a court jester's got to make sure that he doesn't get executed as well. I've got to make all the peasants laugh at the king,  BUT the king's sort of got to like it."
—Ricky Gervais, on his second season of "After Life"

Bandoliers And Dust And The Return of The One-Eyed Captivo

May 9, 2020
   I have some friends who can be rather snotty when it comes to stuff they don't think is accurate in Westerns. I know, I know, I can be a bit of a snot myself, BUT, dammit, these cats can take it too far. For example, I've heard some of my "clothing expert" friends go off on bandoliers not being worn until the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Well, okay, then what is this?

An 1879 photo of scouts with bandoliers.

 That's Captain Jack Crawford on the right.

So, when you show these guys a photo like this they invariably retort, "Well, that's just one photo."

Well, okay, here's another one, same time period:

Gus Gildea

Now granted, it's not crossed bandoliers, but obviously the style or the function of carrying belts of cartridges over the shoulder was around long before Pancho Villa.

   But enough snotty, historical nitpicking. I've been having fun working on some serious dust effects.

Daily Whip Out: "Through The Dust Storm"

And here's another one, I just finished this afternoon.

Daily Whip Out: "Courier In Dust"

And a slightly different kind of dust effect I finished last night.

Daily Whip Out: "Pendejo In The Shadows"

   Meanwhile, I have to say, I've missed this guy.

Daily Whip Out:

"Mickey Free On The Rocks"

   Half decent effects. Overdone in a couple spots. Can't get it back. I agree with Yeats:

"Difficulty is our plough."

—W.B. Yeats

Foxfire Is So Bad It's Almost Good

May 8, 2020
   All my life I have heard about a movie filmed in Oatman called "Foxfire" (1955), starring Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler. Thanks to a heads up from my Kingman compadre, Dan The Man Harshberger, I finally got to see it on Turner Classics last week. 

Jane Russell fixes a picnic for her Apache husband.

    Other than the stunning scenery, like this picnic scene, above, it is one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life.

A brand new '54 Ford honkin'

down Old Highway 66

    Yes, it opens on the old alignment of Route 66 between Kingman and the California border. That's Sitgreaves Pass in the background and Ms. Russell is in the turquoise Ford, in the middle distance, heading eastbound, when she has a flat. I thought the car might be a 1955 Ford, but David Mills (True West Maniac 1985) tells me it was a 1952-54 Ford. This would make sense. The movie came out in 1955 and the cars would be, at the latest, 1954 vintage. 

   For one thing, it was obviously written about the area around Globe and San Carlos and the Apaches are the tribe in question (Jeff Chandler plays an Apache mining engineer here, and this is not long after his turn as Cochise in "Broken Arrow" which is kind of funny because he's Jewish), but, for some reason, they filmed it in Mohave County and, so we get, what I assume are Hualapais playing Apaches?

"You got jack? No, we no got jack."

    Someone from Kingman has just informed me that the driver, above, was in the Kingman jail when the movie came out, but he was allowed to go to the State Theater to see the movie.

     A few choice scenes in downtown Oatman almost made it worth watching. . .

Dumb dog, dumber dialogue, great cars

   What's the deal with all the turquoise cars in this scene? Also, allegedly, that hotel in the background is where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon, according to the hotel's later owners. This was based on the thin logic that the two movie stars were married at Saint John's Methodist Church in Kingman (which they were) and the first stop on the way back to Los Angeles might have been Oatman. But, later research has the two Hollywood love birds going north to Boulder City, so even that local legend has been shot down.

Oatman four years before "Edge of Eternity"

and eight years before "How The West Was Won." All three films utilized this Old West street.

   The final scene and the final blast at the Tom Reed Mine?

A dynamite ending, at least on paper.

   I wish I could say I enjoyed it, but damn it was bad. I feel like Zero Mostel who, when asked if he had his life to live over what would he do differently and he said something like: "If I had my life to live over again I would do everything exactly the same, except I wouldn't go see 'Foxfire.'" I believe he actually referenced another movie, but I love the angle and intent of the joke.

   Speaking of jokers I admire:

“I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit.” 
—Mel Brooks