Wyatt Earp in Everyday Life

I was washing dishes yesterday my wife is sick, and thinking about hum-drum things as I often do, this is what LIFE as I know it is really like. 
    Having written and published scores of pieces about Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral, it occurred to me his life was punctuated by a dozen dramatic events lasting just minutes but in reality he drifted languorously through 89 years or so of monotonous periods of average time. Just like me.
  Everybody knows he refereed the Sharkey Fitzsimmons fight in San Francisco for a long count. The public raised cain about it. He was carring one of his old .45 single six pistols that night. The police
   He washed dishes, shooed his horses, ironed clothes, bought groceries, entertained the neighborhoods kids, had a drink (never two) at the local bistro, a night out with the Mrs, in short - lived a life. At one point, late  in life, he and Sadie lived in San Francisco around 1906 during the San Francisco earthquake. Records indicate he used to sit in the square in front of that famous hotel and entertain the children that played in the park, Union Square. Wyatt would hand out little Chicklet boxes you remember the ones with two chicklets in each box. He carried handfulls of them every day. The kids called him the " Chicklet Man" and when he was out, he would settle down to read his paper each morning.  
    I thought to share some inside information I knew thanks to my knowledge and friendship with Glenn G Boyer, Colonel, United States Air Force, and inside historian on the " Earp Boys of Tombstone."
   Wyatt was the ringleader, although not the oldest. He ws the roughest, toughest of the bunch. He married or lived with some tough women, one was a call girl. He was, as my grandfather used to phrase - not well liked - by the female side of the family. Once in Tombstone someone came to his home shouting and screaming for him, and he hid behind the kitchen door for 45 minutes while another Earp wife argued with the caller knowing Wyatt was sweating his ears off behind the door. The intruder left, Wyatt collapsed into a chair and the family laughed at the joke.
     Wyatt and Ike Clanton chatted it up in the garden behind the Golden Nugget Saloon one afternoon right before the stage hold-up. Witnesses thought it was collusion, later proved innocent. Wyatt arrested Ike to prove a point.
     Only two people ever frightened Earp: his first wife drunk with a pistol, and the second was one gunman back in Dodge, who, when he walked into the saloon, Wyatt sat with his back against the wall with his Colt cradled on his lap.
    No matter what you hear or see, Wyatt Earp always carried Colts. Winchesters had to be broken apart on the top to re-load. When he cracked guys on the head, that had a tendency to weaken the toggle that snapped the parts of the pistol and eventually, it would break. The Colt single action is one piece - a solid piece of steel.
    Since he was known for cracking guys on the head more than shooting them, that's why he preferred Colt pistols. The longer the barrel, the better. His favorite was " My Little Betsy."
    He married a Jewish dance hall girl who he chased all over the west and caught up with in Denver. She was beautiful. Josephine Sarah Marcus daughter of a wealthy San Francisco Mercantile merchant. Earp was broke. Later, he gained some funds racing horses, buying an dwelling real estate, and various other ventures. He lusted after Gold Mining and came back to western Arizona for a while. Sadie followed him everywhere.
###

NEW YORK MAYOR DE BLASIO - SLAIN POLICE OFFICERS

I am exhausted listening to the feckless mayor of New York trying to talk his way out of the toilet he has dropped himself into with his Police Department. His big mouth and butt-buddy, left wing relationship with the race-baiter "Rev" Al Sharpton has gotten him into more trouble with his small army of Elite Police Department.

     His far left wing comments about his own cops threw them " under the bus" over a recent death of a large black man in New York, video tapping broadcast far and wide, the take=down done by five cops, overseen by an on scene black sergeant. 

     The left wing press in New York raged, the public, police hating crowds raged, DeBlasio never one to pass up a crisis followed along after the crowds waving his verbal hate speech at his own law enforcement establishment. 

     As I write, he babbles forth on live TV, trying to repair what is now known as a national catastrophe of gargantuan proportions, his own troops turning their backs on him as he marches into the NY Police Athletic League. Methinks he has alot of 'splainin to do.

     DeBlasio, long on words, short on meat, wanders the verbal landscape, searching for hard ground, finally stepping on emotional rocks which he delivers with the impact of pebbles. It is impossible to tell the length and breadth of the damage this incident has done to hizzoner.

     Slow, low applause. Chief Bratton, a Boston Brahman, stands by his side, reaps the adoration of his own troops, everyone knows it, he Dutch Uncles the Mayor, you screwed up sir. Polite, applause, Mayor exists, lesson learned? I don't think so. Bratton goes on the mic to extol his own and received the rave reviews from the troops. All is well from the hands on deck. 

     So far. 

###

Leave Gun Control to the Government, they know what they're doing

The Fathers in our Lives

The Hollywood version of fatherhood has always been glamorous, kind of dashing, hard working, Father-know-best. 
     No...maybe that's the TV version. I remember Robert Young like that, or other TV actors playing Dad, even the bumbling Ozzie of Ozzie and Harriet fame. When Oz stumbled out of the fog to step up to his sons when they needed some guidance, Oz cleared his head offered his best, hands in his pockets, maybe an arm wave, " Gee, guys, maybe
     I watched those shows. I listened to the Dads, My three sons with Fred MacMurry, listened to him, and others. I wanted to know how to act, walk, talk, think like a man.
     I wasn't getting it at home. My father was never there. He wasn't there WHEN HE WAS THERE. He was busy, busy, busy with the Atlantic Refining company, or the Atlantic Refining bowling league  4 nights a week, or the Redfield Street Card Club, or the US Coast Guard Reserve Officer Temporary Squadron 4 times a month. 
    My mother raised me. She did a wonderful job, more about that later. 
    The importance of fathers on the job being fathers is the keystone of a family. The effect on me, and the AFFECT on me is felt to this day. Large pieces of what should have been me are missing and I know it. I hate sports and I made up for it in other, strange ways. We never had a good relationship, never close, often antagonistic. He once attacked me with a golf iron. His passion for sports was re-directed towards my sister.
    Any semblance of normalcy in the family relationship was skewed from childhood on. My father's desire to be close to his children was never there. My sister and I suffered a deprivation until his death, then neither of us felt any great loss after his departure. That in itself was a great loss. 
    My emotional balance had been effected by all this turmoil from my early adulthood through most of my life, at the loss of a firm foundation that a relationship with my father could have provided. 
   I would encourage others to explore what ever counseling, psychiatric intervention into a bruised family relationship exists in repairing this problem before any further damage continues for the same of everyone involved.
###          

Fox News - Happening Now - 12/02/14

" The reality the American people have got to come to grips with is that most young black men, when they cross paths with their local police departments, they will more than likely be shot and killed."
      Thus spake an attorney and Fox News Contributor on Gretchen Carlson's " Happening Now" program not twenty minutes ago as a back drop on the continuing Ferguson debate. The attorney who is white unloaded on the ex-policeman from the town, now without a job, wife on maternity leave, both under threats on their lives for him doing his job.
      All evidence to the contrary, ( 93 % of black killings are done by black people) the Fox contributor continues to propagate the falsehood since debunked in the Grand Jury debate and judgement FOR the defendant.
      To all those losers in the Ethernet who continue to label Fox News - Faux News, this is a sterling example of ' FAIR AND BALANCED, ' as this person has witnessed. And as the WITLESS out on the net can gather, Fox should be a perfect place to gather BOTH SIDES OF ANY QUESTION.
###