What a terrific thread. Jo_77 and Art Thieme - I really appreciate the chance to find out what's been happening in Okemah. WyoWoman:

Thanks for the Kerouacian allusion. You all at MudCat are my excuse for writing these stories down. I have written many of them but these on MudCat are ones that I haven't taken the time to think through before. Since they had a slender thread connecting them to the music I felt like sharing them with people who might find them interesting. I know they are long but I figure that people can skip over them if they're not interested. I certainly don't mean to hog bandwidth. Ultimately, these stories will be something I'll leave for my boys. My mother wrote poetry and, out of her entire seventy eight years, what endures with the most sense of her personality and presence is a small collection of about fifty poems that she wrote starting at age eight and continuing through her entire life.

I'm astounded by the depth of experience and knowledge available here. As I get more familiar with the site, I am starting to form personality pictures of some of the contributors and am learning to identify threads that I want to follow. There is so much going on here that selectivity is clearly in order. There is the great luxury of selecting by interest. There is so much quality stuff here that keeping up with it all is impossible so I am forcing myself just to pick threads that look particularly interesting. MudCat has muscled its way into my schedule, shouldering out I'm not sure what yet, to make room for these excursions along those threads that are deeply a part of my life, too.

You also mentioned Will Rogers. (Of course, I never met him but I would have liked him! ;-). However, one late morning on the Navajo reservation, just south of Kayenta, AZ, I got caught in a hailstorm (Yes, this is going to get to Will Rogers. You'll just have to wait to see how it happens.) I'd spent a chilly night sleeping out in the desert near where a hundred years before the Navajos had once had peach orchards. At that time, Kit Carson had come through and destroyed them in an attempt to break the power of the Navajo by destroying their food sources. Knowing the history of the land I was sleeping on probably made my sleep a little less than restful and I was up just as the sky lightened over the Sacred Mountains. I couldn't see the sun because it was seriously overcast. The wind was rising and the temperature falling. I had the sleeping bag rolled up, the tent stuffed and the bike loaded in a matter of minutes and was on my way. I was a long way from Tuba City which was the next town. I didn't make it before the weather broke.

The wind turned especially gusty and then hail started pounding down on the country. The stones were seriously large. They sang as they bounced off my helmet but they hurt when they hit the back of my hands through the gloves. I saw a rock overhang about twenty feet back from the road and figured that would be a good place to take cover. I was concerned about what the hail would do to my bike if I parked it in the open. I took of my leather jacket, a heavy brown, double breasted, belted coat that came down about halfway to my knees, and spread it over the gas tank to protect it from hailstone dings, then I ran for cover. Huddling under there, I wondered how many people in the past ten thousand years had hunkered down in this exact spot to wait out a hail storm. Ten thousand years... I couldn't be the first.

When the storm ended, I was chilled to the bone and not anxious to get back onto the bike and into the wind. I was delighted to discover that there was a small trading post along the highway and I lost no time pulling in there. This was my first trip into the West and the post at Tsegi Canyon was nothing like the trading posts I had seen in other places. There were no neon colored featehrs here, no tiny tom toms with paintings of idealized Indians on the side, no blalsa-wood tomahawks or model teepees. Here on the boardwalk porch in front of the store were Navajos seated quietly. Many of the men were wearing turquoise jewelry made from large chunks of that beautiful stone that is the color of the Arizona sky. The women were wearing velveteen shirts held to wide flowing skirts by silver concha belts as well as necklaces and earing made of turquoise and abalone shell beads. I was the only Anglo in sight. They watched me park the bike near the gas pump with as much interest as they would give a desert lizard who passed in front of them.

Inside the post, it was dark and even quieter. Old saddles, probably taken in pawn, hung on the walls. The main products for sale were sacks of flour, bags of coffee, salt and other basic bulk foodstuffs.

All of a sudden, the quietness was broken open by the appearance of the trader who turned out to be James D. Porter, known as 'Trader Jim' over much of the Southwest. He'd been in the back room and may have heard that a "billicanna" had come into the post. He was an Indian trader of the old school and he knew it. He dressed and acted the part. First of all, he looked like Burl Ives, complete with goatee. Only five foot five or six, he had a deep voice that sounded as though it came from a man half a meter taller. He had a bandly-legged, rolling walk that exuded cockiness. He was clearly the boss here. He began our first conversation without much in the way of a warmup. "Anyone ever tell you that you look like a young Eddie Rickenbacker?"

(Will Rogers is still ahead, really.)

For those of you who don't recognize the name, Eddie Rickenbacker was America's Ace during World War One. I don't remember how many planes he shot down but he led the list. He was well known before then because he was already a famous race car driver when the war broke out. He received a lot of publicity when he'd enlisted and became a combat flier and his achievements over France made him a legend among pilots as well as a hero to the general public. He later went on to a lifetime of accomplishments, any one of which would have distinguished a man but it was during this early period of his life, when he was flying, that Trader Jim had known him. Later I went to the library and looked up some pictures of Eddie Rickenbacker. I think the resemblance was the leather coat. It did look like a World War I flying jacket. The ironic thing was that I had bought it in Germany. I'd been caught in a snowstorm while riding with the Swiss Army's Motorcycle Corps to Appenzell to get some lace handkerchiefs for my mother but that IS another story.

Jim and his wife Caroline and I became increasingly better friends over the next twenty years until his death. I used to visit them at the trading post and then at their small ranch in Bluff, Utah. Jim was one of the best storytellers I ever knew and he certainly would never dream of letting a troublesome fact get in the way of crafting a good tale. Evenings spent with him were golden. They were also brandy-drenched. I discovered that like any good storyteller, even when he ventured into fiction, it was fact-based. He was always true to the subject and the spirit of truth even if he borrowed a piece of information from someone else's story. Eventually I gave up hope of trying to determine whether each fact in one of his stories was true and just enjoyed him for what he was, a great teller of tales.

Now we get to Will Rogers.

Jim Porter had gone to California and had picked up money as a pilot in some Hollywood films including an unintentional on screen crash in "All Quiet on the Western Front". One of his friends there was a stunt pilot named "Broken Neck" Grace. It was there that Jim and Broken Neck had met Will Rogers and Jim had worked on some of his films. According to Jim, Rogers never read a script. He would show up on location and ask to be told what the story was about and then would make up his own lines during rehearsal. The producers didn't seem to mind (I'll bet the writers were pissed though) because his dialog came out so natural. When Jim told me about the last time he saw Will Rogers, just before he and Wiley Post left on their around the world trip that ended in a crash at Point Barrow Alaska, he was crying silently.

I never knew how much to believe of this story about working with Will Rogers but two years ago I was in the California Gold Country at a Rendezvous held by some families up there who have claims and are working them along a number of creeks in that part of the Sierra Nevada. The father of one of the miners, a man in his late seventies, was visiting from New Jersey. I learned that he had been a B-17 pilot in the Eighth Air Force during their great air battle that included the bloody raids on the oil fields at Ploesti and the raids on the ball bearing works at Schweinfurt (I think that was the name). I was somewhat familiar with that campaign and regarded the physical courage of the participants to have been the equal of those men who had looked out the gunports of a wooden ship in the middle of the ocean into the guns of a similar ship and had stood there firing cannonballs at each other, ripping ship and sailor apart until one vessel or the other was destroyed.

The old man started talking about his flight instructor, the man who had taught him to fly a B-17 and to whom I felt he owed his life. Richard "Dick" Grace had been a small plane pilot when the war had broken out and had enlisted in the Air Corps to become a fighter pilot. The Air Staff ruled that he was too old and, against his will, he was turned into a multi-engine Flight Instructor. According to his student, when Dick Grace got his hands on his first B-17, it was as though the two had been made for each other. Grace treated it like it was a fighter plane and he discovered things that could be done with that airplane that the designers had never dared dream it could do. Grace taught his pilots some of these techniques and as a result he gave them an extra edge. This old man had no doubt that it was that edge that got him through the war when most of the other crews didn't get home.

I wondered about that Flight Instructor. Did he have a nickname, "Was he called, Broken Neck"? The old man looked visibly startled. "How in the hell did you know that?" So I told him about Trader Jim Porter and Will Rogers.

I suppose I should put some music in here so that this doesn't need a BS Label. Jim was born on a ranch near Bisbee, AZ and grew up there until he ran away at age sixteen. I asked him about cowboy music. I remember a couple of things he said. One was that he never saw a cowboy with a guitar but he'd known a number who could play the piano. As for songs, the ones he remembered were "Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage", "Daisy" and some Tin Pan Alley favorites of the "Teens". I was disappointed. I was hoping to hear about "Red River Valley", "The Strawberry Roan", "The Zebra Dun". One song he did remember and love though was "Tying a Knot in the Devil's Tail". He went through it with me describing reatas, swallow-forking and the proper use of a dehorning saw. It certainly made that song come alive for me.