This is my updated profile as of Jan. 6, 2025.

 

My wife, Peggy, and I have lived much of our married lives Oklahoma towns like Oklahoma City (3 years), Laverne (3 years), Stroud (about 14 years), and Edmond (19 years). We left Edmond in 2013 and as of this writing we have lived in the paradise-like area of Bradenton, Florida for 11 years. We are retirees from way back.

 

Peggy and I spend a lot of time traveling across the country by airplane and/or car to see family and friends. The airplane part of that travel was/is thanks to my wife who worked for an airline long enough to qualify for their lifetime free flight privilege (via "standby," of course, but that usually works for us). We used to say, just a few years ago, that if Southwest Airlines did not fly there, then we wouldn't go there. The fact is that at our present age (I am 83) and health status, we unable to whiz around the USA as much as we once did. Still, we have enjoyed trips to Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, and many more.

 

Wherever we are, we both like to take photographs with our digital cameras and, the last few years, mainly with our iPhones. For many years, I used a Kodak EasyShare camera with a 24-power zoom. Then I used a larger Samsung WB1100F camera featuring 16.4 mega pixels with a 35x power zoom, and after that for 3 or 4 years I just carried my terrific pocket-sized Canon PowerShot G9X Mark II. However, as of October of 2024, I seldom carry anything else but my new iPhone 16 which produces excellent photo resolution numbers for my purposes.

 

I began writing and performing cowboy poetry in 1990 while we lived in Snyder (Scurry County), Texas for 6 years. I was fortunate enough to be asked to perform at Western festivals and cowboy poetry events from Arkansas to California and from Texas to Montana. And along the way, thanks to my pal Jim Garling in Guthrie, Oklahoma, I learned to play a few chords on my guitar. Eventually, I often added a few cowboy songs to my performances. There was a long period of time when I could easily (or sorta easily) perform by myself on a stage for an hour or more with no cheat-sheets in front of me. But by 2018, I was having trouble remembering chords and making all of my poetry rhyme, as I had written them. So, in 2019, I "sold my horse and saddle" and retired from public performances after my last appearance at the National Cowboy Symposium & Celebration in the Civic Center in Lubbock, Texas. That was a stretch of about 29 years in which we got to know lots of wonderful entertainers and fans, and in which we got to see some beautiful country. The only two states in the USA that we have yet to visit are North Dakota and Alaska. Heck, we might still get there before we're through.

 

For more than a dozen years I built up my "Cowboy Directory" web site until it was the world's largest internet database of photos and biographies of many hundreds of Western writers and entertainers. I shut that down in 2012, as I found it harder and harder to maintain it and to keep up with the changing technology.

 

My wife and I really enjoy Western (cowboy; Western swing) music, but we also like Bluegrass and Southern Gospel, as well as some country, Spanish, jazz, and pop. We just don't like those songs that are essentially negative, full of self-pity or that put other people down. And we have little tolerance for "drinkin' and cheatin'" songs.

 

We also love our country, the good ol' USA. We have traveled to several other countries and enjoyed the experience. But were always happy to get back to the land of the Free and the Brave.

 

I started writing books in 1965 by either printing them myself or through a regular publisher. The year of 2012 marked my entry into the wonderful world of self-publishing eBooks, paperbacks, and hardbacks through such Amazon PDF, Smashwords their new owner, Draft2Digital.com. As of this writing (Nov. 10, 2024), I have . . . count 'em . . . a total of forty-six (46) books to my credit.

 

I'm naturally pleased with how most of my books turned out. The ones that mean the most to me are also mostly the ones that I had to spend a great deal of time researching them and sometimes an equal amount of time carefully writing them and often illustrating them with my own photos. Here are some I recommend:

 

1. Woody GUTHRIE: SONG WRITER, POET, FOLK SINGER & MORE

 

2. S. OMAR BARKER: LAS VEGAS NEW MEXICO'S LEGENDARY COWBOY POET

 

3. BIG BOOK OF MANATEE COUNTY, FLORIDA: AMAZING FACTS & PHOTOS

 

4. AMAZING OKLAHOMA: CELEBRATING OUR HISTORY & CULTURE

 

5. SIMPLE CHRISTIANITY VS. CHURCHIANITY: THE WAY FORWARD IS BACK TO BASICS

 

6.

 

His Life, Music & Myth

 

(2) The Day Jesus Died

 

(3) Jim Shoulders: Oklahoma's Rodeo Cowboy

 

(4) Quotes for Today, Version 1.0: A Resourse for Writers, Thinkers & Speakers

 

(5) Clara Luper: The Mother of Oklahoma's Civil Rights Movement

 

(6) Rootin' Tootin' Cowboy Poetry: 100 Poems That'll Make You Laugh, Cry and Think

 

(7) Guy Logsdon: Award-winning Folklorist

 

And I have several more E-books simmering on the back burner of my mental cookstove. Some of them I hope to expand beyond the Kindle format to make them also available for the iPad (Apple) and as a "print on demand" book format or maybe even through a regular book publisher, though the latter is far more complicated and time-consuming.

 

Guess that's about it.

 

Thanks for dropping by. Hope you enjoy my photographs.