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Vol. 1 No. 1 |
January 2002 |
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One is the loneliest
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By Earl Kemp
When I was a kid (I was 11 years old in 1940), you could get an awful lot for a dime. The problem was coming up with a dime in the first place.
When I had that dime, the best way I knew of to spend it was to go to the Saturday afternoon matinee showing at the movie theater. If I was lucky enough to have another dime to spend, I could eat enough popcorn and drink enough soda pop during the run of that show to make me puke.
I finally figured out that if I wanted to have that dime, I had to work for it. I delivered handbills for the theater every week in exchange for free passes to some of the movies. There was only one theater in town, of course. The features changed five times weekly plus a sixth, midnight special showing every Friday and Saturday late night.
There was always this serial, too, something like Bela Lugosi as Chandu the Magician, Clyde Beatty as The King of the Jungle, Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, and their like, that kept all us kids right on the edge of our seats until the very last frame flickered across the screen.
My cowboy heroes were people like Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Johnny Mack Brown, Bob Livingston, Tim Holt, Lash LaRue, and the big-timers, Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers, and Hopalong Cassidy.
… matinee this Saturday….always a Western with banal dialogue and unreloadable guns and the next exciting episode of some raunchy cliff-hanger that never, somehow, started just where last Saturday's had ended. That, a Betty Boop, a newsreel, something unmentionable by Pete Smith, and Previews Of Coming Attractions. … That and the popcorn and the circus peanuts and exploration in the flickering shadows.
--Earl Kemp (33 years old), Editorial, SaFari Vol. II No. I, FAPA, dated 1962
I acquired a Western Americana heritage that stuck with me all of my life. It helped a great deal that I was what passed for a farm boy. I was surrounded by saddles and tack and the smell of alfalfa and leather. I had cowboy boots and hat. I had my own horse and could ride wherever I thought of going with my fellow preteen cowboys. In later life, it was just this background that stepped forward for years where I lived on mythical Rancho Viejo amid tons of soft black Italian glove leather and rode along with the biggest cowboys in the whole damned National Finals Rodeo arena, but that story will have to wait until later. This story started out trying to lead up to a point.
In the 1960's, after the Porno Factory moved to California and when I was boss, one of my biggest thrills was posing for the covers of some of our books. And, later, when we began using lots of photographs, I enjoyed that one as well for different reasons. The cover artists who worked for us quickly learned of my addiction and would occasionally conspire to involve me a bit more directly.
I remember one particular cover of one of our books that I was very proud of for a number of reasons. I seem to remember it as being an exceptionally good novel and one that I singled out for special handling. It was GC222, Song of Aaron, by Richard Amory, a sort-of sequel to his best-selling Song of the Loon from the previous year.
I had Robert Bonfils, our in-house Art Director, do a wrap-around painting for the cover. It shows two cowboys in the middle of forever (two hills over from Corflu Creek), stopping, dismounting, and stretching. I posed for both cowboys in this painting.
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Song of Aaron
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In the foreground, dressed all in Killer Kemp black, wearing my own cowboy outfit and my own six-shooter, I really felt like Killer Kemp, heading for the last showdown. Only I seem to be getting a bit ahead of myself again.
I was starting to feel pretty good about myself in 1961, and many things were looking up for me. In the world scene, my hero Major Yuri A. Gagarin, rode into history aboard Vostok I. At home, President Kennedy messed up royally when he tried to invade the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and, as if that wasn't enough, began sending "advisors" to Vietnam almost like we're doing in Colombia and Peru these days. Earnest Hemingway, the Pride of Paris and Havana, died inside the self-constructed closet he could never out himself from.
-- Earl Kempearlkemp.com |
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