Wyatt Earp Fights James Dean

As the proprietor of this joint, I like to check what the ‘Top Posts’ are (see the sidebar down towards the bottom). What astonishes me is that, along with and even to the detriment of some of my greatest works of literature, that pesky ‘Patrushka Shoots Wyatt Earp’ hits the list day after day. People really want to know more about the grim old lawman who lies at rest in Colma, California.

It’s a throwaway piece I wrote in the summer of 2006 as we were driving acoss the country. The map showed Wyatt Earp’s birthplace just off the road a few miles and we were tired of the stupid interstate. Which usually happens after ten miles. So we drove up there and I wrote a little comedy piece about it when we got to the motel. Strictly for laffs, understand?

Yet it’s become one of the world’s all-time favorite Pondering Pig pieces, right up there with “James Dean’s Jeans”, a complete throwaway with a catchy title. Here I am explaining the Bible or revealing my deepest soul and the crowds flock to read “James Dean’s Jeans.”

Well, I figure this post is going to top them both. Check out the title.

By the way, for all you serious Wyatt Earp or pig comedy fans, yesterday I refurbished another old post, even more ridiculous than the first , but pretty funny — called The Strange Case of Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone. And, while I was at it, I refurbished another comedy classic, The Pondering Pig’s Tour of San Francisco. Hope you enjoy them.

The Strange Case of Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone

SCENE I. A fancy cemetery a couple of miles south of the San Francisco county line.

1.Establishing Shot. Big granite sign:”Hills of Eternity Memorial Park”

2. Pull back to reveal workaday suburban traffic cruising by. It’s a normal day on a normal street in normal suburb…but something sinister’s in the air.

Teenager with baggy pants on skateboard misses curb and falls on nose.

Little girls in pink party dresses and holding balloons skip down sidewalk. A blackbird flies angrily into their midst and pops the balloons with his steely beak.

An armored Brinks truck passes cemetery entrance — and its wheels fall off.

Across the street from the cemetery stands…the First National Bank!

3. A ancient black Rolls-Royce enters LEFT, pulls around the corner and

4. CUT to DRIVER’S perspective as the limo rolls uphill into a city of the dead, a city crafted for the city’s wealthiest, most respected and distinguished residents, and one mysterious frontier marshal. A city of granite and marble and enduring peace…until today.

5. Apparently not noticing the caretaker gazing pensively at some pigeon dung on the sidewalk, an older pig steps from the Rolls. He is dressed in black, black silk hat, black cape, and he carries a cane adorned with an enormous, although glass, diamond. It is the Pondering Pig’s fabulously wealthy detective uncle, SWINISH McTAVISH. Intent on his mission, he hobbles down the walkway ahead.

6. POV of McT: (VO) Not this one…not this one…what has Josie done with herself and her rascally husband? Not here, not here. Oh, there’s someone who really missed his mother…”

7. McTAVISH spots a raggedy gardener making notes on which weed to pull next. They engage in conversation. “My good man”, the pig patronizingly begins, could you direct me to the grave of that glorious lady of song and story, the great actress and renowned beauty Miss Josephine Marcus?”

8. GARDENER: You must be myopic, old pig sir, the maiden you speak of resides here, in front of your tremulous snout, beside her husband, the fabled frontier marshal, Wyatt Earp! Yes, their ashes lie side by side, for, as the old poem says, “That nothing’s so sacred as honor, and nothing so loyal as love.”

9. “Strange,” replies McTAVISH – “I’ve never heard of that poem. Do you know who wrote it? Was it the great Robert Service?”.
GARDENER: Actually, it’s not a real poem at all. This isn’t even the orginal gravestone!
McTAVISH: Great Scott! Not the original gravestone! How can that be?
GARDENER: Some say it was the the work of the Clanton Gang, or what was left of them. All I know is one morning in 1957 I came to work with my notebook, planning to make notes on which weed to pull next, and the stone was gone! Evaporated into the night, the whole piece of granite plus 250 pounds of cement foundation! Why, it was the size of Mama and Daddy’s gravestone back behind there. Gone. Flitted away,like the souls of those two adventurous wanderers.
McTAVISH: Hmmm, I’ve heard of graverobbers, but never graveSTONE robbers. I wonder…
GARDENER: They lay there like that for forty years or so, then a year a two ago a mysterious stranger ordered this stone with specific instructions that it must contain the words,”Nothing so sacred as honor, nothing so loyal as love.” Go figure…
McTAVISH: I am. I’m figuring hard right now. I figure that was none other than Jimmy Clanton, last of the mean Clantons, stricken with remorse over his gang’s heinous deed. Or maybe it’s a code of some kind. If I could find old Jimmy, I just might find a clue to the whereabouts of the gravestone and its secret coded message.
The old pig paces the sidewalk excitedly. “I’m going to find that gravestone or my name’s not Swinish McTavish!”

10.WS: Suburban homes on the hillside looking down on the Earp’s’ grave. McTAVISH walks thoughtfully back to his 1948 Rolls. His driver, now revealed to be none other than McTAVISH’S daring and resourceful young protegee EMERALD LAKE, looks at him expectantly.

EMERALD: So what’s up with Earp, Unc?

McTAVISH: Emerald, have you been sitting in the car this whole time working on that line? Look, I’m on the scent of a crime so incredible, so fiendish that for 49 years the entire misbegotten act has been dismissed as a simple college boy prank. There’s something funny about this, Em, and I’m going to need your help!

EMERALD: 49 years? Thast’s the coldest case we’ve ever taken. Shall I head for the morgue? Newspaper morgue that is.

McTAVISH: Yes indeed, Emerald. But first, let’s make a little stop at The Whiff of Cyanide, the worst bar in the Tenderloin!

Big scarey music stab.

(Pondering Pig, pulling sheet from beatup typewriter: Well, that ought to grab ‘em. Big bucks, here we come! Gabbin, get off that feedbag and get this in the mailbag! Straight to Paramount Pictures!)

Patrushka Shoots Wyatt Earp

(Actually, she shot his house.)

There’s not too much to say about $4.97 Wal-Mart special Rand McNally road atlases, except they’re cheap — so you can draw colored lines on them without remorse, and they pack a lot of maps into a book you can throw in the back seat.

But I like the little red squares showing points of interest as you drive along. Like the location of the world’s largest ball of twine, the National Rollerskating Museum, or the…TA-DUH!…the birthplace of Wyatt Earp!

Yes, you’ve just read a sneaky entry into a post on the subject you’ve all been waiting for, the post that answers the question, once and for all, just exactly where was that fast drawing, sharpshooting terror of the underworld born? What little burg in this fair nation can point with pride to the humble cottage bowered in roses that sired the toughest lawman of all time?

For our European, and possibly even our Canadian contingent, I must explain that Wyatt Earp is one of those figures of American folklore famous for killing people, lots of people, faster than they could kill him. Earp was sheriff of Dodge City, the toughest saddletramp cowtown in Kansas and he kept the peace with a smoking Colt six-shooter. He was so tough only John Wayne could play him. Or Henry Fonda. Or Burt Lancaster. Or Kevin Costner. So tough he had to have his own television series in the 1950s and people round these parts still talk about his exploits as if they actually happened. Even though he’s been dead since the Year of the Great Crash..

After Earp cleaned up Dodge City and all those other badass rustler cowtowns, he headed down to Tombstone, Arizona, home of the Arizona contingent, where the snakes walked on two legs (present readers excepted, of course), where the dance hall floozies charged up to 15 cents a dance and where red whisky flowed from the Bucket of Blood Saloon all the way to Boot Hill.

You wouldn’t want to find yourself in Tombstone, Arizona after dark — unless you had Clint Eastwood on one side of you and Lee Van Cleef on the other. And they better be wearing their long black dusters too.

Well, Wyatt Earp walked right in to that pile of Gila monsters in human form and shot ‘em all in a trice. Maybe a thrice. Why, once he and John Wayne and Ricky Nelson got into a little tussle with the Clancy Brothers down at the OK Corral and, before you could say T-Bone Walker, they was all lying in the dust bleeding their evil guts out.

I hate to be gross but there it is. That was Wyatt Earp. And he was my neighbor.

Your neighbor, Pondering Pig? How can a tough hombre like that, especially one who died in 1929, have been a neighbor of a peaceful porker such as yourself?

Well, it seems that as an elderly gentleman, Earp retired to San Francisco, to live a peaceful life in a rooming house on the Barbary Coast surrounded by dance hall floozies and bumpkins who came to Frisco to dance the Grizzly Bear but ended up shanghaied on a slow boat to China. There were vamps in black mantequilla eye makeup and fat bankers in silk toppers, turkey trotters and drunken sailors in the foggy foggy night.

When Wyatt got tired of dancing with those floozies and saving the tin horns from a watery grave and tired of watching George Raft give Clark Gable a sneaky smooth laugh in his gambler costume, why Earp would just catch the streetcar out to Golden Gate Park and sniff the begonias in the Conservatory of Flowers. That was the life for the toughest lawman of all time. Doff his bowler hat for the ladies. Chuck little Buster Browns on their cheeks. Tell Clara Bow he really liked her “It”. Listen to The Shadow on his lonely boarding house radio until Mrs. Hudson announced a mysterious woman in green come to see him about a case nobody else, not even Sam Spade, could solve.

When Earp finally gave in to the Reaper back in 1929, the whole stock market crashed. No one had any confidence any more. The Beagle Boys broke out of jail and there was no one to stop them from robbing Scrooge McDuck blind.

All the big Hollywood stars like Tom Mix and Lash Larue held a benefit rodeo to raise money to put his tough lawman bones in a cemetery in Colma, a suburb mainly composed of cemeteries right on the outskirts of the City By The Bay and just about ten miles from where I living my life as a teenage punk hooligan. Except I wasn’t born yet, of course.

(Is that sentence long enough, or should I add more?)

No, a new generation of heroes had to come to set the world aright. Guys in capes and wearing tights. But that’s a story for another day. I always planned to hitchike up to Colma and put a cigar and a bottle of redeye on his grave. But I never did. And I wasn’t sure what it was.

Any more questions? OK, you, the little punk troublemaker in the back row. What? Oh yeah. His birthplace was in Monmouth, Illinois. Look it up yourself, punk. It’s on page 32.

For more about the legendary lawman see The Strange Case of Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone.

In The Shadow of the Babcocks

Sunday afternoon. Spring in New England. For something to do, Patrushka and I drove over to Westerly, a neighboring town where the Babcock-Smith House Historical Museum was having a little fete. It’s one of those eighteenth century mansions so beloved by New Englanders, where their prosperous sea captain ancestors copied the manners and styles they had seen on visits to England.

The Babcock part of the Babcock-Smith house is of special interest to the Pondering Pig because – well, they’re his ancestors too.

My grandma, Nana Meyer, used to tell me about the Babcocks, her mother’s people. Farmers, preachers, and wanderers, they were restless, eccentric folks who came over with the Puritans and slowly crossed America following the wagon tracks all the way out to Pasadena and San Francisco and now back to Westerly, Rhode Island all over again, at least for today.

My Nana Meyer was a no nonsense sort of grandmother, and when I was little I was afraid of her. But she improved immensely as I got older and she began to tell me stories about her girlhood on a farm in Lincoln County, Kansas. And about her family, the stock she had come from. Her Dad, Ferdinand, was a Prussian soldier who’d skipped out and caught a boat for America as soon as the Prussian army had finished beating up the French in the early 1870s. First he got a job building a waterwheel somewhere in Delaware, then he heard they needed carpenters to build the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, so he went up there. From Philadelphia he slowly made his way west, working on the railroad till he got as far as Kansas. At the end of the Santa Fe railroad line, in Ellsworth, toughest cow town on the frontier, where Wyatt Earp kept law and order with a smoking six-gun, he met pretty Amy Babcock, my great-grandmother and Nana’s Mom, and a direct descendant of the Babcocks of Westerly.

They got married in 1879 and drove a horse and wagon up to Lincoln County to homestead. First they lived in one of those sod houses. Nana was born there but later Ferdinand carpentered a rough wooden cabin from planks he bought from his railroad friends.

Nana had a picture of the cabin, just a shack really, and another of her family taken in the 1890s…Ferdinand, still young, bold and handsome with a big walrus mustache and Nana, called Mabel in those days, beautiful, 12 or 13, with thick dark hair like her Dad’s tumbling over her shoulder and sweet wistful expression. I would have fallen in love with the girl in the picture except I knew it was Nana Meyer. And there were her two little sisters – my pretty blonde great-aunt would get polio and have to make a life for herself in a wheelchair – and her brother who ran off west and was never heard from again.

Amy was dead sick. You could see it in that photo with her haggard face and dark circled eyes with the light gone out and bony emaciated face – she was fixin’ to die. Yet she was only 35. TB maybe, it roared through the country with scythe and skull’s head bared in those days. And Nana had one other picture she always carried with her – Amy’s Kansas grave.

Nana carried those pictures around with her because she had no bureau to keep them in – Nana had no home. She traveled around the country and up to Toronto, staying a few months with each of her children and sisters and then taking the train on with just two suitcases to hold her belongings. Her husband, my grandfather, had made the big bucks in LA in the Roaring Twenties, but he got shot down and she lost what was left of the fortune in the Depression. Now she was a wanderer, one more American with no home but just that restless standing on the platform listening for the whistle one more time.

I grew up with a sense of the myth-steeped history of my family. We were part of the great sweep of America. I would ask Nana to tell me about when she was a little girl and I could see it in my mind when she talked. I saw her little one room schoolhouse with its sixteen year old teacher. I saw Nana and her family riding through the wheat fields in their little buggy at dusk going to the schoolhouse for the big spelling bee. And how well Nana had done, taking second place in the whole county. My cousin has Nana’s little autograph book from that school – an album where her classmates wrote sentimental sayings and remembrances to her when she had to drop out of school. Nana kept it all her life.

Because after Amy died, Ferdinand packed up the cabin, filled his shabby battered suitcase and caught the train west to Pasadena, California to start over. He left his kids with Amy’s sister Aunt Neen up in the sandhills of western Nebraska.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it’s why we Americans are like we are, somehow. Restless, wandering Jack Kerouac Americans except years and years before he was ever born. My America. And my people have always been here. Nana was a Prussian soldier’s daughter. But she was also the daughter of Amy Babcock, whose ancestors had been original settlers in Roger William’s Rhode Island, birthplace of American freedom, and had scrabbled from there all the way out to the saddletramp cowtowns of Kansas by 1879. Her tough-minded great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Jabez Collver, had sided with the British during the Revolution and then had to fight his way to Canada with his six strapping sons on the dark forest roads of York State across the Niagara River, a damned Tory. But her grandfather Moses crossed the roaring river back again and strode on to Ohio along the forest roads preaching the gospel in every town he came to. With his little family in the wagon beside him wondering where they would ever find a home again.

Now the Pondering Pig and his princess bride Patrushka are heading west from Rhode Island – in just a few weeks, in our little gypsy cart. We aims to get to California if we can. I think I’m going to stop in Lincoln County and see if I can find Amy’s grave. If I do, I’m going to buy that girl a big bouquet of spring flowers.

And you’re all coming with us in the wagon, in a sense. I’ll be posting from the road wherever we can find a wireless connection out there in the great dark Johnny Appleseed forests of Ohio, along the wide rolling Huckleberry Finn Mississippi, in those saddletramp sixshooter cowtowns of Kansas. And down below along the great dark mesas of New Mexico and Arizona.

Once more into the breach, my friends. We’re Americans of the restless kind. It’s in my blood. But I’m glad we’ve got some friends on this journey. Makes it a little safer around the campfire at night when the coyotes are howling and Patrushka and I are singing “Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairee” and there’s a scurrying noise in the brush beyond our circle of light. Glad you’re along on this journey. Wagons Ho!