Letters to the editor

Proud of Scouts and their parents

I’d like to publicly thank all the Girl Scout and Boy Scout leaders who perform a multitude of service projects for our community each year. Just this week I received the following update from one of our dedicated leaders:

“On Oct. 6 the Girl Scouts spent a couple hours sprucing up the Scout Hut in Collier Park. Seventeen Girl Scouts and their parents scrubbed sinks, washed windows, polished the piano, dusted off cobwebs, cleaned toilets, shined mirrors, cleaned out drawers, swept walkways, and scrubbed floors.

“The place looked much better when the girls left.”

I’m so proud of the Scouts and their parents who dedicate their time to making our town a better place, and are teaching these youth to be productive citizens. Kudos!

Dawn Perfect

Ramona‘Law dog’ deserves higher rankingA recentSentinelarticle listed the levels of sponsorship for the Intermountain Volunteer Fire Department fundraising party, Nov. 16, in which various Old West characters denoted levels of support.Unfortunately, Wyatt Earp, the famous and amazing “law dog” of that era, was next to lowest in tribute. Belle Starr, an “also-ran” in Western lore, gets top billing, and second place goes to Matt Dillon, a fictional lawman, likely modeled after Earp, who debuted in a radio drama in the post-war era.Earp was an amazing guy: Born in 1848, he served as a mid-teen in the Civil War on the Union side and then served as a police officer in Wichita and Dodge City until 1877, when he was employed in wild and woolly Tombstone, Ariz., as an armed guard for Wells Fargo and Co.Eventually, he was hired as marshal of the town and brought his brothers, Virgil and Morgan, in as assistants. Together with the notorious gambler John “Doc” Holliday, the Earps met the drug-running and cattle-rustling Clanton Gang near the O.K. Corral in that town in 1881, and the shootout, which lasted less than a minute, destroyed the gang and became the fodder of several Westerns, none of which ever portrayed the incident correctly. The only accurate rendition was done by CBS News in 1962.In a conversation with Sid Wilson, the proprietor of the O.K., in 1963, he told me, “If they (the Earps) were around today, they’d be like the Mafia.”Controversy over the good/evil of the brothers will never end. Earp eventually became a San Diegan and told his life story to writer Stuart Lake, who resided in the U.S. Grant Hotel.Earp was invited to referee a major boxing match in the 1920s in San Francisco and received a huge round of applause and laughter as he stepped into the ring with his “Buntline Special” pistol on his hip.

Footnote: Sid Wilson drove the last six-horse stage from Tucson in 1899. He was still “rollin’his own” cigarettes in 1963.

A.G. Smith, Ph.D.

Ramona