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.
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Doc Holliday - Doctor John Henry Holliday - Frontier Gunman

Famous for his frontier gunfight with the Earp party in the OK Corral in Tombstone, many do not know much about the Confederate Dentist before the famous gunfight.
     Folklore has the Georgia native schooling at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Not true. Grab pen and paper folks - here's the lowdown. Doc Holliday got his book learnin' at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia at the School of Dental Medicine located at 4001 Spruce Street in west Philadelphia 19104.
     Myownself graduated from Penn's Wharton School and unknowingly passed by that very same original building numerous times not knowing it's western history. It still stands and is now a library.
     A call to the head librarian will most likely give you some background on Holiday's residency there. Doc was the oldest son of a Confederate Colonel from Valdosta, Georgia, stricken with a debilitating lung disease, that part of history, very true. The liquor bad for him, the sunny, dry air of the southwestern US was perfect for his weak lungs.
     Tucson had been a haven for " lungers" back in the day,one of the original hospitals - St Mary's - still operates on the western edge of the city. Some say Holliday was an occasional visitor. He certainly was in downtown Tucson's gambling and bordello haunts.
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