IS SAID every laborer in the vineyards of advertising/promotion is a larcenous such laborer and plots only to steal an account (or two or three) from his employer – and then set up shop (or vineyard) on his own. This was not strictly true in my case: I was content to get a paycheck every week and forego some of the mental duress of “hunting new bizz”, etc. But events were to conspire (as they say) and once again instead of striding on my own into the life of an independent operator – I was pushed forthwith into same.

All that matters on Mad Ave is talent. And that’s all the president of an agency ever buys: talent. Not loyalty, not faithfulness. Not dedication, even. Just talent. And this talent as they used to say, “…went down the elevator shafts every night when his employees left...” The agency workers own nothing, have nothing – and leave nothing behind. If they come back in the morning, they pick up where they left off. If not – they are likely out somewhere sweet-talking the onetime client into “coming with me direct” and how much more they will get for their dollar.

The other side of the coin, is the dispatch with which dispatch is dispatched in these halls: pink slips and hiring and firing all the same day mean nothing at all, really. Folks from the outer world sometimes wonder at the “job terminations” so frequent in this field – but all we onetime players can say is “it goes with the turf” and has none of the personal opprobrium that “getting fired” has in other followings. Half the guys I rode homeward every night with out to suburban CT had their office belongings and silver water pitchers (staus symbols) crammed in their brief cases half the time. Our financial brethren from further down on Wall Street read the financial columns in the papers; PR men read the want ads and job classifieds…

Politics is of course, often at the root of it. Office politics. In my case, I had become a sort of wonder boy at CCC – the guy who could write and get anything published, so from the client’s point-of-view, I could do no wrong. And the agency left me alone: I was a milk cow as far as they were concerned. I had not yet got my Vice-Presidency however, though having long since passed the deserving mark for same in responsibility, staff, etc. I chafed at the bit, but this only got more, and more difficult, assignments dumped on my head here… with the promise that “if you can handle this one, Powell, you are really a shoo-in for VP… I would “handle” same – to find, perhaps like Hercules long ago, only one more Augean Stable looming ahead – and Agency Management always unreachable or in “conference” – or “Mr. Creamer is in Savannah today at the Southern Golf Players Seminar” or somesuch. Sigh.

(There was a PR Account Exec on our side of the house, who by common agreement, was the least capable guy among us. At the same time however, he commanded a salary considerable in excess of what most of us made – and this was a matter of some wonderment. He was a most crafty kind of guy, however, and whenever I or others were standing around bemoaning our lot and whether it was “time to renegotiate,” he would always have this sly look and say, “The time, fellows, is when you are going in! THAT’s when you cut your deal!” It was a long time before I really understood what he meant…).

But there was a snake in the grass. Jim Andrews was the snake’s name. A thin kinda guy on the “ad side” (“full-service” agencies like ours, you see, being divided into both “advertising” and “PR” sides of the house). Some accounts were “held” by virtue of both services, others partook of only one or the other. CCC had a huge ad potential that came with it – but so far, all they had bought from CCI was its (my!) PR services. Jim couldn’t get to scratch with pushing the Ad side… but he turned to another tactic: he began to cultivate Glen’s boss, a non-entity far as I was concerned – sort of an argumentive, stolid guy – first name was Ed is all I remember. But Jim weasled his way into this Ed’s favor (Ed controlled the CCC main ad budget you see) and to make a long story short, he poisoned the well against me – and against Glen, too – since Glen, while he ran the works over there, and in effect did all of Ed’s thinking and acting for him (so Ed and Jim could plot in the plush Manhattan bars) – together with his “Ex Marine Gung Ho” ways, had alienated not a few of his fellow CCC compatriots….

At this time, my PR account was billing something like $25-K a month and the agency was making money hand over fist out of it. (When I had taken over they were billing $2500/mo – a tenfold increase!). Nevertheless, Jim began to nitpick (he loved to call me from other side of the building floor we occupied) on his new-fangled “conference phone” and leave it on and echoing, with the implication that Creamer, “Ed” and who knows who all else, was silently standing by his shoulder and nodding “yay’s” to his brilliant interrogations of me and my staff. (You see, you have to understand that in agencies, there is sort of a “recognition” that the “ad side” somehow has “it” over the PR side. This is solely because the Ad side usually controls the biggest dollar-volume assignments, and is moreover usually staffed with “new bizz” types which are sort of the higher class equivalent of used car salesmen and ever a-prowl to win, convert, or steal accounts away from other agencies or each other. The PR side, by contrast, is usually “writers and showmen” – greater talents in my opinion, than the animal cunning of the business side – but withal having to stand down in any contest with the ad side always. Just the way it is.

So to make a long story shorter, Jim and Ed managed to connive and drink their way into a position where they were convinced (and convinced Creamer) that the CCC account was ready to walk – and it was all my fault! So the agency responded by “cutting me off at the legs.” This is the way it is described whereby one by one they take away your staff, then your secretaries (Jay warned me that one of mine had taken to sleeping with Creamer and it was death for me to make mention of anything at all around her anymore…) and so on, then they take away “privileges”, then they downsize you to smaller offices, etc. You get the picture. My empire was dissolving before my eyes! I mentioned all this to Glen, naturally.

He lay his finger alongside his nose (figuratively speaking) and said simply, “Don’t worry about it! The best is yet to come!” H-m-m-m-m. Then they fired Jay. Hell hath no fury like a homosexual crossed, I guess: he came back one night when everyone was gone and managed to shove our entire set of file cabinets through an open window into the air shaft where they fell 53 stories to the pavement and burst open like rockets hitting the Moon…. Papers everywhere down the Avenue. Then he took my silver water pitcher set and decamped for parts unknown. (They tried to find and arrest him but never did so far as I know). Long after, his “friend” called me once and asked if I would give him (the friend, whom I had never met) a “character reference” for a job (!). I explained I could not do this on various grounds which mattered to me – and he said he quite understood. I asked him if he knew whatever had become of Jay. “Oh,” he said, “He went to Florida you know – and was arrested for flashing a school bus.” I said no I hadn’t known, and wished them “all” the best, and rang off.

Some days after all this turmoil, I was called in and “fired” by Creamer, who said they were “restructuring the account” and my services were no longer needed.

That night, out in suburban CT, “…beside the yellow Tiber was tumult and affright…” as Macauley once put it (Lays of Ancient Rome), and no little distress, you can imagine. Next day, I called Glen.

“Listen!”, he said, “How would you like the entire CCC account direct yourself?”

I gulped.

“Because,” he said, YOU GOT IT!. We axed the agency yesterday!”

(Talk about sending the Marines to the rescue! “The Major” at that time (see further anon) still had the clout it seems over his “boss” – “Ed Blow-in-his-ear-he-will-follow-you-anywhere” McClure. (Just recalled! That was his last name: McClure!). Ed, who really didn’t know straight up or where the bodies were buried at CCC, deferred in the end, it seems, to Glen, and Glen walled Andrews off in a corner somewhere and terminated the agency account 1-2-3! Done deal!

Overnight, I had gone from PR-man-out-on-the-Street to head of one of the latest PR agencies to form (mine!), and with one of the most sought-after accounts on the Avenue in my pocket! Why, it was enough to make it seem like you knew what you were doing! LOL!

And so began one of my most productive periods for CCC. Working out of my home office in CT, and with Jean switch-hitting as secretary and general factotum, we had a glorious several years. And I didn’t need to go into the Big Apple each day either. But now more mindful perhaps of just one string to my bow – no matter how sweet it played – I decided to push more for some additional accounts. This led to a rather vacuous time when I “sort of” went on-staff with some agency down in Greenwich (whose name I simply cannot recall) – it was a fairly decent operation and I had an office there where I was due to show up two or three days a week or whatever. Meanwhile, I kept my CCC account as my own. The agency, in fact, was at one time “...the largest such in Southern New England” – a fact which the president of same was wont to characterize in talks around the ad game circuit, as “…not unlike being the world’s tallest midget…” – in deference you see, to Mad Ave and the “big boys” not far away down in the Big Apple…

I had two accounts: one a rendering works (would you believe it?) up in nearby Bridgeport – whose client visits (replete with droning flies in the client’s office – flyswatters were handed out for all visitors – and whose repugnant smells were really out of this world), I put off long as I could, to where one time he complained to the Agency at one month’s invoicing, that “We have not seen hide nor hair nor tail nor bone of Mr. Powell this livelong month…” which metaphor all unconscious with him I am sure, for his no-show PR flack, has got to be a classic considering what the “company product” was…LOL!

The other was a dreary sort of outfit – Dorr Oliver Company – up off Havemeyer Lane in Stamford. DO was (still is?) a giant company manufacturing equipment for the mining and sewage-processing industries, among others. The downfall here as I recall it was the Client PR Contact himself, Len Somebody I think was his name - Advertising and PR Director for the outfit - and who was most desirous of getting stories in the trade press about his firm’s products, and thought himself fit to do the job direct. But he couldn’t write for you-know-what, and he rubbed editors the wrong way as I recall – so he perforce had to retain an outsider like me, but felt it was his mission in life to question and nitpick everything I did. What a pain!

But I became a new “authority” once again: this time on municipal sewage disposal. Damn! I have toured every “shit works” in the nation and written – and published - articles on same in every relevant trade mag there is. But you shall have at least one anecdote from this period of my career. It came about that I had to do a plant sewage treatment story for a plant out in Mecca, California. Now Mecca is just a wide spot in the road, way down in the Imperial Valley right at the head of the Salton Sea. I believe its real claim-to-fame is that it is the locus of the only true date-producing industry in the U.S. I can tell you at any event, it sure looks like “date country” when you drive through it: vast sandy deserts with bright green (irrigated, of course), truck crop patches here and there, and the ever-present date palms, of course. All that is missing are camels and ragheads…

At this juncture, I was now an old hand at “doing” sewage plant stories, and so knew the drill the plant manager had in store for me: a tour through the incoming “macerating” equipment and the intricate valving and piping, and then the settling tanks (it was something about these settling tanks that involved DO – but to tell the truth I cannot recall just what). But when you finish a tour of a sewage works you see, there is sort of an obligatory little round-up the plant managers give you (not unlike the “Biergartens” at the end of every brewery tour): they show you their dried and drying “spoil piles” and to a man they always boast about their hygienic, germ-free condition (“You could eat this stuff on your cereal in the morning”) – to which I always murmured a polite “Thanks but no thanks!” But this is fact: many municipalities even make this stuff available to local gardeners and horticulturists, for it is ideal fertilizer, you see. One city as I recall, Milwaukee in fact, once commercialized on same and sold its dried sewage as “Milorganite” – which was the dried processed household pooo of its residents. Sigh. (It must be serendipity or something, but I saw on AOL just yesterday in fact, that Milwaukee had been named the “most drunken” city in the U.S. What relation this might bear to Milorganite, if any, I cannot say and thus leave it to your further imagination…).

The other thing plant managers love to point out at such times (if it happens to be summer) is the beautiful crop of tomatoes growing on their spoil piles. You see, it is a curious fact, that Americans consume large quantities of tomatoes, and tomato seeds go through the whole long arduous journey from human gut to Dorr-Oliver macerators and settling tanks virtually unchanged. Comes the first warm, dry day in Spring and up they sprout! Nourished by the rich fodder in which they root, by midsummer, sewage plant tomatoes are a wonder to behold, and they too are “up for the picking” among the local gourmets and cognescenti.

Now to my story: I arrived in Mecca after a long through-flight to L.A., and subsequent drive in a rented car. I found the sewage works at last, and was warmly greeted by the Plant Manager, Burton was his name, though why I should remember that now I haven’t a clue.. (Warmly is good word for this: it is not too far from Death Valley here…). Nothing would do though, but what we wait in his hot little office, drinking equally warm Nehi’s, or an equivalent soda pop, while his wife hurriedly brought over a clean shirt for him from home. You see, visiting potentates don’t come to the Mecca Sewage Works every day, and being as how the work around same is full of splashes and drips and drops…well, nothing would do but what he put on a spanking clean, starched and pressed, white shirt (with long sleeves!) in which to conduct his tour.

It was a very modern and well-appointed “works”, and not like many others I had seen. (I remembered one such back in western PA once, where I pulled up one dreary morning in a drizzling rain, to look up and behold a six-foot strip of toilet paper (!) waving out of an upstairs window! I leaned head down on the steering wheel and actually considered taking up another line of work…. The mystery was partly explained by the fact that this particular sewage works had been designed by an architect to look like the Colonial stone-walled buildings much favored in that region – really quite attractive, it was - with slate roofs and all. And the “homes” and “buildings” scattered about the grounds were anything but: they were sham fronts for the humming, macerating equipment inside – one of whose “infeed lines,” springing a leak upstairs near a phony window, was the explanation for the errant toilet paper strip flapping on the phony sill…

Seen it all in my time, buddy!

Back to sunny Californy now, and the “Mecca Works.” We passed a pleasant hour or two, while I took notes, interviewed and queried my host, snapped pictures and all to aid my recall when once again I sat staring at my “IBM Selectric” (state-of-the-art back then), and wondering if the copy would come.

Thus, we came at last to the drying spoil piles outside the plant door at the end. I stepped into the bright sunshine… and what was this? The spoil was covered with bright green plants – but no tomatoes hung pendant there from their boughs! They were covered instead with thousands of bright red peppers! Hot peppers! Chili pepper-peppers!

I looked in wonder at my host. “Oh that,” he chuckled, “Guess you used to tomatoes back East and around, right?” “Well,” he confided further, “you see, the population hereabouts is half Mex at least – maybe more – and these here chili peppers they all eat in that diet of theirs, why they go through the whole system just like the tomato seeds back East do!”

Dang! THIS was my storyline, of course, but for the stuffy old trade mags I could never use it! LOL!

Dang! ….Again.

In time, sort of by mutual agreement, I and the “world’s tallest midget” parted company and I drifted on. To Bethany, CT in fact – upstate maybe 50 miles or so from where I lived. Jerry Langler I think his name was… he had a full-service agency (as these things went in the hinterland – none of the sturm-und-drang of the Big Apple). But his PR capability was woefully deficient. So we began to rap. There was a cushy account that all the Nutmeg agencies were panting for: U.S. Electrical Motors down in Milford. The hitch was: USEM wanted industrial PR placements in the worst way. But they had a big (potential ) "space account", too. (Advertising "space" for those not in the “know”). But I could only handle PR – not space. And Jerry’s PR folks were strictly amateur night. But he could handle space.

We connived.

I would be an “affiliate” of Langler Stevens (How do I remember the name of such a schlock outfit across all these years! Sheesh!). So we pitched the account together – and got it! And so I added industrial electrical motors to my armamentarium of products and services au courant in the America of the 1970’s. Now U.S. Electrical Motors was a “biggie” in its field: Baldor Electric and GE being its only rivals. Editors in the Electrical Trade Press pricked up ears when you said you could get them inside stories from U.S. Motors.

But U.S. Motors came with some …baggage. They were a division of Emerson Electric – a raw-jaw outfit going way back, with a history of union busting and onetime salvation by "Sanctimonius Stu" Symington – whom some may recall as having fought tooth and nail with Joe McCarthy in the Communist Witch Hunt Trials of yesteryear, and later lost out to Lyndon B. Johnson as Kennedy’s final choice for VP.

Dang…

But USEM could make motors! And how! Its rivals were Baldor and GE. (And the American unions). Because of the latter they built all their plants in out-of-the-way places – like Mena, AK, or Durant, OK (huh?) and Prescott, AZ (more anon) the idea being that they could hire rednecks and rubes and chicken farmers who were independent folk resident in these backwaters, and not prone to turn to union bosses to solve their woes. A final debacle at Los Angeles (the National Guard was called out, I once heard) drove the whole Kaboodle cross-country to Milford, CT – and into Jerry’s and my laps.

Their big schtick was center-pivot irrigation. The motors for same, that is. CP is what you see when you fly over the Nation’s heartland and look down at the land below and you see all these circular farmed plots… no more square, fenced fields. The circularity comes from long strings of overhead pipe on ponderous wheels (each set of wheels driven by an electric motor) and attached to a central water well in the middle of the field. This modern way of irrigating revolutionized American agriculture a few decades back: one well per field and this continuously circling string of pipe spraying water on the crops…

CP was already famous: I made it moreso! LOL! I interviewed plant managers and electrical motors engineers (calculators were already au courant – but the engineers at USEM used slide rules yet – and wore white sox and thought that when you :suggested lunch” you meant you too had yours in a brown paper bag out in the car, and would join them in the company lunchroom (!). The Manhattan crowd they were not! Sheesh! But they outdesigned and outmanuvered and out-labor-bossed all their workers and competition. It was the 1940’s come to life all over again! So I flew out to Nebraska one cold winter day to get CP pictures (at the height of the off-season!...”Par for the Course": see my earlier tale on painting a house in mid-winter...) – as when editors wanted something they wanted it NOW! The plane landed at Lincoln (shades of my long ago first archaeology “dig” for the Smithsonian – described earlier). I rented a car and drove in a darkening night on up into the Sandhills country of Cornhusker Heaven. Deep winter nights in the Nebraska hinterlands are like the end of the world. I hit a huge snowshoe rabbit which jumped up in front of my headlights and looked as big as a collie dog! I kept going and finally made O’Neill – aptly named “Irish Capitol of the U.S.” (Some of my own ancestors were immigrant Irish who had lived in Omaha and across the river in Council Bluffs). They came for many decades, fleeing British oppression (as they saw it), potato blights – and (it should be told) sometimes the law and each other… and went to work on the railroads as they expanded west…. Man! It was one long, cold, dark hallaceous drive over snow and ice-covered highways! Not six hours earlier I had been sweating a traffic jam in the Big Apple and hoping my taxi could make it to Idlewild in time!

There was only one street light on down the entire main street when I got there about 9:30! It hung on a wall over a steamy window with a neon “Beer” sign in it – all stuck over with dried fly carcasses. Over the door was a lettered sign: “Grange Hall.”

This was my rendezvous point. I went in.

The “Grange Hall” was really just a saloon by another name: two patrons were asleep heads down at a wood table in the corner – the barkeep was watching TV at the back of the bar. Two guys in a booth got up and walked over.

Both were salesmen for USEM. The senior guy was my specific contact for tomorrow and had managed to sell one of his customers on a farm near here into letting him bring this “New York PR guy” out to his farm and “take some pictures” of his CP equipment and all. (And yes! He knew everything was hub-deep in snow till Spring – but the folks back East were pushing hard to get this story published that this guy was writing, etc. etc.). He himself, had driven all the way up from Hastings, I seem to recall – another distant town south of here. He had made reservations for us all at the only motel in town. We “crashed” soon thereafter.

The morning dawned gloomy and overcast and blowing snow obscured the road at times. We ate in a nearby ham and eggery and drove out to the farm over icy, muddy roads. There in the center of this frozen cornfield was the “laid up” CP equipment. My challenge: how to get a picture that said “Maintain your CP equipment at all times, and always do performance checks at stated intervals.” It went without saying that the picture had to “imply” warm weather or the “growing season” as that is when CP is used…

I stared at the huge frozen-in-the-snow driver wheel – my client’s motor visible at the backside. Then I had my inspiration. I called for a shovel and began to shovel away the ice and snow around the wheel till I had it clear and the surrounding ground bare. The salesman looked on , as did the laconic farmer (no imagination, you see). Then I called for a close-in setup shot of the tire and hub with the electric motor clearly visible. I guess I had retained a local stringer – I often did that. This far out in the boonies, probably some guy – maybe only one in town! – who owned a camera and shot local weddings and graduations for the town bugle. I don’t remember exactly: sometimes I took my own shots, but more often I retained “professionals” to snap the shutter. Anyhow, since I was to be in this shot, it was not taken by me.

No difference.

I asked the farmer if had a tire gauge. He looked at me dumbstruck with frosted eyebrows raised questioningly. “No,” he drawled, “I guess I surely do not.” Then he turned questioningly to the Salesman.

I said, “No matter...”

In desperation, I pulled my fountain pen out of my pocket and masking most of its barrel with my hand, I bent over and placed the end of it on the tire valve. Calling directions to the clueless photographer I had him "tighten down" till only my arm and leg showed (dark jacket sleeve and pants, so indistinguishable from farmer’s field clothes) and snap the shot.

Thirty days later, Mid-Continent Farmer (whatever – there were over 5,000 trade mags alone when I was hustling editorial PR in all of them way back then) was mailed to its "waiting audience" and "How To Maintain Your CP Equipment" was the lead article – and featured a cover shot (much coveted) of the rough and horny hand of a stalwart "son of toil" in America's great breadbasket farmland, checking tire pressures on his CP tires with his trusty fountain...oops!... tire gauge.

All in a day's work.

So USEM was a good bread-and-butter account. But stodgy and stolid. But it paid the rent. It was not the glamorous world of packaging I had known with CCC, and where the nifty types and sharp minds of the NYC ad world were concentrated – but it filled a niche and the techheads and engineer types were reminiscent of lessons learned at George Rhine's knee eons before.

Then came Hibbing. Hibbing, MN - ever hear of it? Talk about the boondocks! Wow! Way up in the "Upper Peninsula" as they call it out there - sandwiched in between Lakes Huron and Superior. Cold and forested and snowy damn near all times of the year (well, almost...). Site of the Iron Mountains of the Mesabi and Cleveland Ranges - where they mine (and process) taconite - a low-grade, but very plentiful, iron ore.

And USEM made the motors for the giant (two story high!) "wheels" or giant mills that ground this rocky orestuff permitting the iron extraction. The assignment: get out there and interview the PM (Plant Manager) and get some pictures of his operation and get the story placed in one of the leading mining mags.

The first obstacle to all this was: finding Hibbing! Jeezul! I almost had to swing in on a vine. The last few miles I had to drive over really endless, bad roads till I reached the plant. But there it was at last - a huge, modern monster housing these vast mill wheels whatever they were - and with only a minimum of human presence around the place - perhaps it was heavily automated - I don't really recall. What I do recall is that up there in the North Woods, I had no op to find a decent photographer - not even a "stringer" from a local paper (probably no paper! LOL!). So I was committed to taking my own pictures.

Which I often did - but where the budget would permit - or if I just outright insisted - I always preferred to hire a pro - that way if something went wrong, the pro was the one who had to backtrack or do the explaining - not me...

Well, anyhow, the PM greets me, tosses me a hardhat, and away we go. Up one catwalk and down another. Out on narrow passageways with dim memories now of boiling, grinding goo far below - should you slip or whatever. Machinery, faint dust fog everywhere, horrendous noise. Trouble was when I got back to my distant motel that night, for some reason I took alarm over my camera - I don't remember just what. But a doubt began to grow in my mind about exposures I had used, or the film rating, or something - whatever (this all pre-digital days, you understand). By about nine in the evening I became convinced I had blown the picture-taking some way - and I was due to fly out of there back to NYC the following day.

Only one thing to do: I would have to sneak back out to the miserable works and shoot the whole sequence over! (This same thing happened to me in a California fiberboard plant once - as you will see...).

So I went out to my rental car, hopped in, and now in the dark along those unfamilar roads, I drove once again through those dismal forests all those endless miles back out to the plant site. It of course, was a 24/7 type operation and fortunately the plant security was either non-existant or some opportunity presented - and I managed to slip into the buildlings unseen and unrecorded...

And so I began to retrace my steps. But at night the whole place took on sort of a Dante's Inferno aspect: great flickering shafts of light lit up the vast grider system spanning all the turmoil below and taconite dust rose in clouds, giant wheels turned and gears ground - and never another human in sight! Carefully, I inched my way out along the girder system far above - so dark at times I had to feel ahead with one hand, my camera in my other.

I paused just once and thought, "This is a god damn piece of foolishness here for sure! If I were to slip and fall into the ore crushing station below, I would be reduced to atoms in nothing flat and no one would ever know what became of me...". But of course, nothing did happen (or you would be spared the reading of these lines!). I got my pictures all undetected and managed to get safely down again and slip out of the giant robotic works and back to my motel.

Next day I was on my way again - and Yes! when I got back to the Big Apple - the prints came out just fine, Thank You! - and I did, and it did, and the editor did - and we made our coveted cover shot on the mining mag - and I was a hero once again! All in a day's (and a night's!) work!

One more memorable recollection before we move along:

In keeping with their building their plants in out of the way places, USEM had a plant at Prescott, AZ. Prescott is the last of the real Wild West. Really! (Like South Dakota when two decades before I had dug with the Smithsonian). Prescott is the absolutely true-to-life little cowtown out of the past, glimpses of whose railroad station if nothing else as best I can dimly recall, were part of the backdrop in Junior Bonner a memorable western back in the '70's starring that King of Cool - Steve McQueen, and which some of you, too, may remember. And so I had to go out to Prescott to do a plant story on the facility itself.

Who is there who can describe Prescottt rightly or do justice to its beauty? It lies at the upper end of Skull Valley way over near the Nevada line. To get there you got to fly into Phoenix I guess it is, rent a car and drive a zillion miles. But on the way you got to go through Sedona.

Sedona, AZ is not to be believed. There is a place there on the highway where you come around the bend and before you stretches this Red Rock country of fantastic sculptured forms that are so unbelievable that motorists regularly drive off the highway and have to be towed back up out of the gulch below! This is not an exaggeration – it is FACT!

I grew up in the West and have seen it all – but Sedona, AZ is just simply, actually, out of this world! It was late in the afternoon. The slanting rays of a setting sun illumined rosy cliff walls a mile or so away in front of me. Every little rock and crevice and juniper bush stood out sharp and crystal clear. Including a giant glazed window in the shape of a Cross set right into the cliff! The famous Sedona Cathedral I had been told about – and must not miss! So I drove straight for it, found the parking lot and entrance, and went in. At one end of the long narrow Nave behind the altar was this giant "Cross-Window" and the sunlight was streaming in – the only source of illumination in the Church, built right into the cliff! From my vantage point in the aisle near mid-center, I could in turn now look back out the "Cross" for miles and miles away over endless empty flats and even more distant cliff walls – and the sun sinking even beyond them to the horizon.

I'm not formally religious in any popular sense, but this "church experience" was truly awesome! Once on a furlough to Paris, I saw Easter services in Notre Dame, and more than once, while waiting for my evening's date, Jean (my future wife), who was a buyer for the famous, now defunct, Best & Co. Fifth Avenue Store - peeped in on Saint's Days' Masses in the Big Apple's famed St. Patrick's Cathedral.

But that Church of the Holy Cross in Sedona beat 'em all! I had a brand new 35 mm camera with me (bought for the occasion, since I had not brought a photographer this time, and had to do my own shooting for tomorrow's plant story...). I unlimbered it, and took a few shots – must still have them around somewhere.

Then I checked into a motel.

The gal at the desk suggested that if I had nothing else to do, to get up before sunup and drive up into a nearby canyon and see the sun rise and the weird shadows it would throw on the opposite canyon walls – which I thanked her for – and did just that! She was the ladyfriend of one of the local (many!) artists – a member of the Cowboy Artists of America, in fact. I knew something about them and when I mentioned that I was Paul Calle's model back East, she brightened right up, made a pot of coffee for us and we rapped for awhile. Paul's many pictures of me, Mountainman in my red blanket-coat (trapers' "capote"), set a standard for his depictions of the Mountainman Era in our Nation's Western history. He had been turned down for membership in the Cowboy Artists of America group... because he lived and painted in the East (!). LOL! And strictly, he also did not paint "cowboys" - his preferred subject matter the trappers of an earlier time. (By chance, on a recent (2007) visit down that way - Kerrville, TX - I happened to visit the Museum for the first time. Paul still does not grace its walls...LOL!). Too bad the somewhat stuffy proprietors I met there don't know that Frederic Remington did much of his work out of a studio at Ridgefield, CT - just above where Paul and I once lived - while Schreyvogel - famous Western artist of yesteryear - painted many of his scenes from setups on the tenement roofs of Jersey City -if I recall correctly...

Mon Dieu! I shall never forget that morning as the "Coffeepot", "Snoopy", and other fancifully named wonders unfolded in shadow relief across the canyon walls from me as I drove along the opposite rim. I cannot describe it in justice so shall stop.

(Decades later, my second wife, Millie, and I went back there to look at property with a view to buying a home. By then the g-damn hippies with this idiot vortex business Airheads and Anti-Science had invaded and it was largely ruined (people-wise, not visual-wise, that is). Would you beleive we actually had the misfortune to get involved with a realtor who was one of them (despite first denying it when I queried him closely). But he couldn't conbtain himself in the end and gave us one of their pestiferous "Vortex Maps" in his business folder! Jeezul! (But we all know what realtors are anyhow...!)