Sgt. Mom

Air Force veteran, historical novelist, and cat-person

History Weekend: The Charming and Notorious Billy

by

(As a break from current events, herewith this offering. It was rather curious, examining the history of one of the bitter range wars of the old west. This one didn’t pit rival families against each other, or even big ranchers against small ones… but was rather a case of a corrupt mercantile and banking enterprise with close ties to the territorial government making war on those who objected to being skinned economically and bullied politically. All this – and a famous gunslinger, too.)

One of the most well-known western gunslingers of the post-Civil-War Wild West if not one of the most storied – is also the one of whom extraordinarily little is known. His life was also brief, which continues to give all kinds of story-telling latitude to writers of pulp fiction, movie makers and musicians. An impulsive sociopath, or just an unfortunate teenager with extremely bad luck in choosing friends? Even his name and date of birth are open to considerable question; his given name was William Henry, later shortened to Billy, but his surname varied between McCarty, Antrim or Bonney, depending on the year and circumstance. His mother was an immigrant Irishwoman, Catherine McCarty, either a single mother or a Civil War widow. After the War, Catherine married, or married again to William Antrim, who took his wife and her son west to Wichita and then to Silver City, New Mexico. Catherine McCarty Antrim kept a boarding house there until she died of tuberculosis in 1874. It appeared that William Antrim had no interest in family life; Billy and his younger brother were left more or less to their own devices.

Read more

Stories

by

(This afternoon I am working through my archives for materiel to post on the Watercress Press website blog, and I came across this post from … well, a while back. I thought it might be relevant, in these unsettled days and in light of various Boyz reminiscing about Tolkien and heroic days of yore. It might also serve as a departing point for a train of thought, especially when we need more inspiration than ever.)

I am not one of those given to assume that just because a lot of people like something, then it must be good; after all, Debbie Boone’s warbling of You Light Up My Life was on top of American Top Forty for what seemed like most of the decade in the late 70s, although that damned song sucked with sufficient force to draw in small planets. Everyone that I knew ran gagging and heaving when it came on the radio, but obviously a lot of people somewhere liked it enough to keep it there, week after week after week. A lot of people read The DaVinci Code, deriving amusement and satisfaction thereby, and some take pleasure in Adam Sandler movies or Barbara Cartland romances – no, popularity of something does not guarantee quality, and I often have the feeling that the tastemakers of popular culture are often quite miffed – contemptuous, even – when they pronounce an unfavorable judgment upon an item of mass entertainment which turns out to be wildly, wildly popular anyway.

Read more

Establishment Media

by

Yes, I know very well that that is; to be the in-house media functionary. Not quite the so-called ‘real’ news media, but to be an employee/technician/writer/personality for the in-house public affairs media of a large government element the US Air Force. I wouldn’t be so bitchy as to call the various offices that I worked in base Public Affairs, the stint with a couple of production detachments focusing on informational elements for various departments of government, and for the largest part of my service life as a low-level minion of the keeping-up-the-morale-of-our-overseas-stationed-troops effort as an in-house claque … but yeah. I’m almost two decades retired from the game, so maybe I can. Yes, I and all the other AFRTS, PA pukes and military videographers we were hired, paid and maintained in order to further the public affair goals of the US military. No shame in admitting that. Good outfits in the main; paid only moderately well, and a smidgen of a retirement after all that but good on the whole to work for, and any number of former military public affairs personnel have used the experience as a stepping-stone to careers in journalism, television, and politics, to name just a few fields.

The thing is we all knew who we worked for; the military. And one of those lessons was that we should never reflect discredit on the military in our productions or in our actions in uniform. Fair go, being employees, we could not be seen to wash the institutional dirty laundry in public, and all. Public Affairs’ mission in the event of the dirty laundry coming out, was to spin so as to make it seem somewhat less dirty.

Read more

As of this Weekend…

by

I am a business owner. My partner and founder of Watercress Press has always intended that I should take over the business eventually … and as of this weekend, the papers have been signed. Oh, there are a couple of more things to be sorted out, and essentially I have been the active partner for more than a year … but here I start on the next big part of my life, as a business owner and raving capitalist. Although I do promise not to starve and flog the employees while chuckling manically and swan-diving into my pool of gold coins.

Too much. The blood spatters get everywhere after a good flogging, and the stains never come out.

This is by way of apologizing for no History Friday post from me. There was just too much going on, I didn’t have the time to sit down and focus on the post I was thinking about – Billy the Kid, a definite contrast to the last Wild West frontier character that I posted about on History Friday. I did manage to finish a chapter in the next book, and start another adventure in my reworking of a certain popular Wild West character, so the week hasn’t all been given up to real life in this present world.

If and When

by

I see from a couple of different websites that there was another episode of the ‘knock out’ game in the last few days; this one involved a white disabled military vet on public transportation in the city of Cleveland, attacked and beaten in public by a group of black teenagers. There have been so many of these incidents reported in the last two years or so usually appearing briefly on the surface of the mainstream news metro section like a bubble, popping and vanishing. Very often the color of the perpetrators is not even noted in the ‘official’ statements, but so cynical are we consumers of news becoming that we know that this means the perpetrators are of color, just as we know that when the political party of a miscreant in the news is not mentioned, (or mentioned very far down in the story) that the miscreant is a Democrat. These stories are, in the parlance those who track pop music hits, bubbling under. Not in the top forty or in a manner of speaking at the top of national news.

Read more