From this packet you get Old Timers' Tall Tales

Desert Wit Humor Banter & Philosophy

LIMINATING LEM

THE PACK RAT IS A SCOTCHMAN

The pack rat is honest. He totes off things, but he never steals anything outright — he merely trades with you.

After years of study I say he is not only honest but Scotch, very, very Scotch, and may I be found in a desert gulch — turned to dusty bones with a pack rat's next in my chest and a rock under my head — if anyone can prove to me that a pack rat ever got badly stuck on a trade. If my pencil had an eraser on it I would rub out that "nest on my chest" business. —H.O.

MINING LAW

In the good old days of Tonopah, Nevada, a miner was up before the Judge for Highgrading gold. "Guilty or not guilty?" thundered the judge? "Gosh I dunno," said the miner, "I ain't heard the evidence yet."

TIME OUT

Old Dry Wash Smith will be eighty-three years old in July. He says he'd be eighty-five, but he was in jail for two years in Carson City, Nevada.

DON'T FENCE ME IN

That whip-snapping old Whiffletree, Ex-stage coach driver almost bit his tongue off trying to climb into one of them little Jeep Station Wagons.

Page 2     DESERT RAT SCRAP BOOK

_{This paper is not entered as 2nd class mail. It's a first class newspaper.}

  Packet Four of Pouch Two

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^{Smallest newspaper in the world and the only 5 paged one.}
Published at Fort Oliver
1000 Palms, California
Four Times a Year

ON THE NEWS STANDS 10¢ A COPY
But sometimes they don't have them.
ONE YEAR BY MAIL — 4 COPIES 50¢
Darned if I am going to the trouble of mailing it for nothing.

10 Years .....................  $5.00
100 Years .....................$50.00
    (Something  to  think  about)

Published by
HARRY OLIVER
Fort Commander, Publisher, Distributor, Lamp Lighter, Editor, Artist, Gardener, Janitor, Owner

---

Pictures are by the author, many of them are woodcuts. I Did All but the Spelling.

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We printers at Desert Magazine where this packet was produced are not sure whether Harry Oliver is the world's greatest philosopher, the desert's champion humorist, the biggest liar who ever came through Buzzard Gap — or just plain crazy.   —Randall Henderson

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Not a one of these names or places is COINCIDENTAL.

THIS IS IT!

THE MAIL

The 24 copies of the last packet sent to W. Dart, Old Time Desert Trader of Goldfield, Nevada, came back . . . marked ... Deceased.

Remember his story in packet two of Pouch One . . . he had great faith . . . he was sure Goldfield was slated for another boom.

EDITORIAL

My aim is to prowl this South-West country and dig up as many Desert Tall Tales, as much Desert Rat Wit, Humor and Folklore as these pages will hold. I am going to whittle out woodcuts of the Old Time Desert Rats and set it all up in my collection of Old West Type (kind'a as a garnish. Always liked that word . . . to me it means something someone added with fellow-feeling), and I don't aim to stop till I stumble down my last hill.

This paper is not going to get bigger. I am only going to have 10 ads in it and they got to lean toward being entertainment, or telling about good Old Western Fun.

You ten-year subscribers don't worry about the last hill . . . I am only 60 . . . and some of the men folks in my family lived to pass 95.

Money Is Always Trouble

I GET POST OFFICE Money Orders, checks, stamps, Express Money Orders and more stamps. Everybody sends 3¢ stamps and I don't write letters so they are a nuisance. (I can use 2-cent stamps if your climate is not too damp.) Post Office Money Orders are bad too because there is a beer joint right next to the Post Office and your 50-cent P.O.M.O. just buys 2 beers. An Express Money Order means I have to drive over to Palm Springs to cash it. (They have beer there too). It's O.K. when you send a check. It goes in an envelope to San Francisco to the Wells Fargo Bank and pays for the next printing, so send checks, please, unless you own stock in a Brewery.

P.S. Might as well make it $1.00 for 2 years.

You Get What You Vote For

In the days before I went into the hermit business I did not have time to think much. I use [sic] to work 18 hours a day to do my small part in making moving pictures (didn't have time to vote). In those days there was a market for originality, and some of the pictures lasted as long as two months. Today radio needs a tip before it's too late. On the radio there's a hundred programs that should use as a title "It Pays to be Ignorant," or "Something for Nothing."

ROOSYFEL lived long enough to plant that something-for-nothing bug, and today the nit-wits turn on the radio and set by the hour and listen to someone two or three thousand miles away making the right guess to get some gadget for nothing — dreaming, hoping, setting.

  SOMETHING FOR NOTHING . . .

Well, that's what they voted for.

To have what you want is riches. But to be able to do without is power.

              ——————————
 "I find that with the passing years,
 "My pace is just a little slowed.
 "I may not go as far nor fast,
 "But I see more along the road."
                   —Don Blanding
              ——————————

WILL ROGERS

Seems to your editor that the new Will Rogers stamp could have been by an artist. I had hoped it would be the stamp of the year.

Your Editor has had his first whack at television. An outfit came down from Los Angeles to shoot the story of this paper. You may have seen it. My dog, Whiskers, and Snowball, the baby burro, stole the show.

Peg Leg Lost Gold

The Borego Desert Peg Leg Lost Mine Hunt was a great affair this year. Your Editor is happy that no one found th elost mine so we can have another try January 1st, 1950. (Wouldn't it be hell if someone found it?) The Monument is getting to be quite a pile of rocks, as every searcher places ten stones on the Peg Leg Monument. Ray Hicks, a Desert Hot Springs poet, was winer of the Tall Tale Derby prize, donated by Knott's Ghost Town. As Master of Ceremonies, your Ed. was not in the contest, but retold the story that won me the Oscar at 29 Palms May 29, 1948, which I will defend April 1st (the most appropriate day) at Lonesome Squaw Canyon.

HANDS UP
_{A Proclamation by the Editor}

This paper has revolutionized the newspaper business. I am the only Editor (not locked up) that says the next packet will be printed "when I am good and ready to print it."

That I have just about all the subscribers I want, and there will be no more notices of subscriptions run out. You worry, not me.

That I like new subscribers best because I can use my old jokes again on them.

That you that sell this paper on the newstands an don't send in your checks pronto are dropped off my books. (Book, not books.)

That I give you fuddy-duddies a lot of typographical errors to pick at, and that all my news was news once.

That's a lot of thats, but you advertisers, the ads you pay for for a year you'll get to see in 4 printings. May take a year and a half to do it, and the stuff above (just between you and me) is just to make 'em talk about this paper.

Everyone is ignorant — only on different subjects. —Will Rogers

And I print a newspaper. —H.O.

Packet 4 Pouch 2     Harry Oliver's DESERT RAT SCRAP BOOK     Page 3

GOLD

Gold, Silver Used for Many Things Besides Money Base — Gold and silver, the precious metals which set the monetary standards for most of the world, also serve many other uses, according to the Bureau of Mines. Industrial and medical requirements for gold include salts and solutions for stained glass, gilding liquids and electrogilding, photography and medicinal salts and solutions. Silver is used in medical and dental supplies, mirrors, sterilizing water, indelible inks, hair dyes, coloring porcelain and in engine bearings.   —Outdoor Rambler, Ione, California

How Editors Get Rich

A DESERT BRIEF
Santa Fe, N.M.

Like finding a gold nugget, was the thrill of digging this item out of an old copy of the Santa Fe magazine:

How Editors Get Rich — I have just learned of an editor who started poor twenty years ago and retired with a comfortable fortune of $50,000. This was acquired through industry, economy, conscientious effort, indomitable perseverance and the death of an uncle who left him $49,990.

Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, is the oldest city in the United States, there being evidence to show that it was inhabited as early as 1325, or 300 years before the Pilgrim fathers landed on Plymouth rock. I like its narrow streets and old adobes. Today as I strolled near the church of San Miguel, built in 1710, I saw an old man seated outside an old adobe with all his furniture around him.

"Poor old soul. What's your trouble? Evicted I suppose,." "No, sir," was the mournful reply. "It's just my old woman whitewashing agin'." From a Daily Desert Column I wrote in 1938.

GOOD LISTENIN'

I asked Old Holladay, Borrego Desert Prospector, why he was always talking to himself.

"Well, in the first place, I like to talk to a smart man; and in the second place, I like to hear a smart man talk."

The Sad Tail of Arty Packrat

When Sir Harry Oliver, President of the Packrat Publicity Project, made the assertion that a packrat always gets the best of the bargain, he had never heard of my friend Arty.

Arty was a budding genius, a designer and interior decorator who used to frequent our cabin in the Santa Rosa mountains. That his I.Q. was above packrat par I learned early in our acquaintance after observing his relish for the printed page, not merely as an article of diet but as a source of mental inspiration. Each evening when one of us read aloud, Arty would slip in and sit on a shelf of the dish cupboard, his whiskers quivering with pleasure and his eyes bright and bulging with interest.

All his heavy work had to wait till the literary session was over and lights were out. Then he took up his arduous duties of moving the contents of the woodbox to a more suitable place, by way of the open rafters — naturally a hazardous operation. It was not his fault if some sticks proved too heavy and fell noisily to the floor or dropped on the face of some sleeper. Buy my aunt was unreasonable about it.

Sensing ill-will, Arty left a peace offering. One morning we found carefully centered in a soup plate, a round doily of white paper lace discarded from a candy box. Upon the doily was placed a flat rosette nipped from a plant which bears a cluster of five silver-gray leaves, and in the middle of the leaf-rosette was a large and perfect acorn. It was as charming and original a piece of designing as any artist ever executed.

I was captivated. Even auntie relented, — but only until a series of disasters revived her wrath. Then one night when Arty trustingly left the cupboard before the lamp was out, she threw a pine chunk and hit him on the side of the head, injuring him so that he could run only in circles. Someone had to finish the evil deed and since she wouldn't, I did. — blinded by tears.

Poor Arty! For his sake I have forgiven all the depredations of his kind. What a career he might have had in a kinder world! May his story live to immortalize his genius. Nina Paul Shumway

BURROS

Low Down On Big Horn
By GEORGE PIPKIN of Death Valley

A wise man changes his mind while a fool never does. I'm speaking for myself, but do not get me wrong — I'm not a wise man by a long shot. In fact the more I study — the more I beat into my lame brain — the more I know that I do not know. It pays to be ignorant — ignorant people are the most happy.

What has this to do with the big horn sheep and burros? Well, I'll tell you. Since the Park Service inaugurated the control of wild burros back in 1939 in the Death Valley National Monument in order to preserve the pitifully small band of Nelson Big Horn Sheep, Ovis Canadensis Nelsoni, commonly known as the Desert Bighorn, a lot of unjust criticism has been directed against the park service for killing the burros.

The controversy pro and con has reached a crescendo where many cons are writing their senators in protest. I, myself, have been on the con side, though I never have written any senators because they are mostly all Republicans who would not listen to a Democrat.

You may wonder what caused the champion of the burros to have such a sudden change of heart. Well! to be more explicit and to get right down to brass tacks, it was my ignorance of the facts. I — like a lot of other people — only believed what I heard and what I read in the newspapers.

The other day my conscience on the subject began to bother me, so I thought to myself, "Pipkin, there's always two sides to a controversy, why don't you get on the pro side?" No sooner thought than done. Hoisting myself up the canyon to the park office I explained my mission to Mr. Keller, the naturalist, who obligingly dug into the files and presented the facts. After perusing the authentic records for hours, I reached the conclusion that I was on the wrong side of the fence. My sympathy was with the sheep.

This is what I learned — the facts. Maybe you too will have a change of heart after reading them.

The Nelson Bighorns are natives of the Death Valley country and of the mountains of Southern Nevada, Southern California and the northern border of Lower California. They were here long before the Spaniards brought in the burros. Like the Indians they are native, but they have been subjected to the same treatment by the burros that the Indians received by the white man. As the burros multiplied like rabbits they poached more and more on the bighorn domain, starving them out and pushing them into rugged isolated areas where the nimble sheep could only partly survive starvation. So that today there are thousands upon thousands of burros and only a few hundred bighorn.

There's no question but what burros are a serious menace to the bighorn. One of the significant causes of friction between the burro and bighorn lies in the refusal of the latter to use water sources which have been fouled and trampled by the burros. Since the burros have few natural checks to multiplication and are increasing by geometrical proportion — as more and more burros become old enough to bear foals in their turn — the tendency is for the burro population to occupy every spring from which they are not physically barred by dry waterfalls or other formidable obstructions. Since the majority of the best permanent springs are in the lower foothills below such dry waterfalls, the bighorn are forced more and more to depend on the small irregularly flowing seeps in the most rugged parts of their range.

As regards forage, the competition offered by the increasing burro hordes is even more serious. Much of the forage around the springs has been denuded and the specious [sic] flats below these springs are also suffering. It is true that in summer the bighorn tends to seek the highest, coldest, most rugged parts of their range where competition with the burros for forage is not so keen. In winter, however, when the bighorn comes down to the foothills in search of fresh succulents stimulated by the winter rains, they are again placed in direct unfavorable competition with the roving burro bands.

The question involved is, do we want the exotic burro or the native bighorn? It's a cinch that we cannot have the bighorn sheep unless we protect them.

Your Editor had a little story in the Ford Times (October, '48) and the editors of the Times gave us a plug (three pages) which brought new subscribers from every state in the Union. So you see, all in all, 1948 has been a great year for this little Desert Newspaper.

The Gila Monster is not as dangerous as reputed. Scientists have discovered that if they would brush their teeth they would not be poisonous at all.

Three types of persons are bitten by Gila monsters, according to the poisonous animals research laboratory at Tempe state college: laboratory workers who handle the Gila monsters so frequently they become careless, visitors who are attracted by a brightly coolred [sic] lizard and pick it up, and those who are just plain foolish. According to the laboratory, it is not necessary to cut off the big lizard's head before its jaws can be loosened. Hold a match under its belly or slit either side of its jaw and it will let go. Only the largest of the Gila monsters have enough venom to kill a person.

The Navajo Indians use the markings on the back of the Gila monsters as a pattern for their rugs.

An old timer here has a pet Gila monster with a swastika on it's back, and says it's "Sure pizen."

Where Are We? Why!
GILA BEND, ARIZONA

Desert Rats Teched in the Head

Frenchy from Slap Jack Gulch went berserk during World War I — and he even tried to walk on the waters of Salton Sea, but his faith wasn't quite strong enough, so they draggem him out and sent him to the Insane Asylum. In a few years they let the harmless old fellow out, checking his medical report and gave him discharge papers.

Nowadays when anything comes up about Desert Rats being nuts he always up's and says, "Well, ya know ther's a heap of crazy folks in this Desert, but I'm O.K. I got the papers to show I'm sane. Don't know anyone else around these parts that's got real proof they're sane." Must thank my sister, Frances, for this story. Gee I wish I had some of those papers to show.
—Your Editor.

DESERT ROUGH CUTS

TARANTULA HAWKS AN' AEROPLANES

From the Editor's book, Desert Rough Cuts, a Haywire History of Borego Desert (out of print ten years). These are the yarns the old keeper of the "Busy Bee" store told.

One day a young fellow came along this way from Brawley, a pert looking cuss, kinda inquisitive. I could tell from the way he walked in that he wasn't figurin' on buyin' much, so I deep myself busy behind the counter till he wanders over to tell me what's on his mind. He asks me about Trapdor Lewis, the old guy that was always huntin' up them trapdoor spiders so's he could watch 'em work their little doors and figure how they made them silk hinges.

Thinkin' about Trapdoor made me feel kinda sad. He was a queer duck, and I sure miss him. He used to sit on the counter there and tell me his recipe for happiness. He was a lot older'n Lem, but he sounds a lot like him when he'd say, "Son, I ain't got nothin', an' I'm happier ;cause I ain't."

He was downright sorry for people that inherited a farm or was tied down to grindstones such as houses, lots, cars, jobs, radio sets, and the like. He said they was bound to be squashed under the load sooner or later, that appropriatin' folks and storekeepers like me was so busy with the cares and labors of life that we didn't have time to live.

But there stood the young fellow, askin' questions. "Where is he?" he asks me. "I want to find him."

"He's gone," I says, an' not feelin' any too happy about it. "He's left Borego."

"I'm sorry," says the young fellow. "What happened to him?"

"Well," I says. "After years of bein' happy and content in this valley, the old boy gets all stewed up with a new idea. It was this way: One night the mail plane gets lost in a fog on the way to San Diego and lands in Borego near Trapdoor's shack. The pilot is a fine young fellow with an altogether different slant on things, havin' seen lots, an' not all from the sky, either. He and Trapdoor sets up most of the night arguin' tellin' each other how to live this here life so's you get the most out of it, each of them thinkin' different.

"They sure locked horns, from what I heard from the boys over the counter. The pilot tells Trapdoor that what he needs is to be educated up to modern ideas, and before he takes off the next morning he says he'll drop him a newspaper from the plane if Trapdoor'll be right dutiful about readin' it.

"First thing we knew that steady old-timer gets to comparin' the speed of airplanes with the speed of tarantula hawks, and high-powered automobiles with tortoises and tarantulas. He kind of got off the subject of trapdoor spiders and horned toads. Never saw a man change like he did. Well, one day he turns up at the store with his beard all trimmed and says goodbye to me and Borego. Guess that son-of-a-gun of a pilot sold him his idea all right."

I looks at this stranger from Brawley and sees he has a queer expression on his face like he wants to do some of the talkin', so I stops and asks him did he know Trapdoor, too.

"I'll say I did!" he comes back at me quick. "The old duffer was a great philosopher. A reformer."

"A reformer?" says I. "Say, you can't tell me he ever took to religion."

"Hell, no!" says the stranger.

"Well, a reformer's a kinda preacher," I says to him, gettin' riled.

He appeared not to notice I was mad. He stood lookin' off thoughtful-like. Then he turns to me an' says, "He was a great old fellow. I'm sorry I talked so much. If there's no objections I'll move into Trapdoor's shack. I'm takin' to Borego for good."

"Who are you?" says I.

He looks at me like I shoulds understood. "Me?" he says. "Why, I'm the pilot."

Old Bill "Calico" Jones, who knows all about meteorites . . . sez, "Once I seen two falling stars hit one another and throw out sparks just like modern fireworks." Sez "It was in 1888," and he remembers right where he was standing at the time.

California, the state of swanky-sleek cars with rust-riddled, smog-smudged license plates.

AGE and antiquity give an added value to everything except an egg.

QUICKSILVER HUMOR

Dry Camp Blackie sat folded up like a Praying Mantis, — he looked at his shack as he mumbled to me — "Everything I get is worn out or empty" —I was thinking of grub and his old flivver, but just then a tourist came along and asked Blackie, —"Is it lonesome here in the desert?" He answered — "It's lonesome everywhere, my friend, but you can get back packets of Oliver's Scrap Book most any place in the Desert and they're chuck full of Quicksilver Humor," as the somewhat bemuddled tourist left, Blackie turned to me and repeated, —"Worn out or empty covers a lot, don't it,— then back to his mumbling — "I thought I remembered the look on her face — yes, it was the same look my gray mare had for weeks after she had become a mule's mother." —Then he went on— "Some people think being lonesome and being sober is the same thing" — "Say, Harry, that Spanish food does something to your brain, let me snap out of it, and we write something for this column, a gag or something, shall we?"

Editor's Note: — It wasn't the Spanish food because it gives one a nice warm contented feeling. Might be Quicksilver. You can get awful, awful mad at Quicksilver.

TEXAS CHAMPION

J. Frank Dobie, who admits he can be the biggest liar in the Southwest, says "The lies I tell are authentic lies. An authentic liar knows what he is lying about, knows that his listeners, unless they are tenderfeet or greenhorns, know also, and hence makes no pretense of fooling either himself or them."

Page 4   2nd Anniversary Packet   This Page is Dedicated to the World's Greatest Optimist -- The Desert Prospector

Harry Oliver's
DESERT RAT SCRAP BOOK

The Pack Rat's Nest

By ALLEN J. PAPEN, Glorieta, New Mexico

I camped with an old "desert rat" prospector, one night a few years ago, near Beaty, [sic] Nevada. While sitting around the campfire that evening he told me an interesting story of a pack rat.

He said he was pocket mining, as he called it. He occupied an old rock cabin close to his work. A family of pack rats lived close by. They often raided his cabin and following the habits of their kind, generally left something to replace what they had taken.

One night he left a quartz crystal lying on the table. The next morning the crystal was gone and in its place he found a gold nugget. The next evening he placed another crystal on the table. In the morning that was gone but a second nugget had taken its place. He then placed several crystals on the table. In the morning one crystal was missing but, there was another nugget. For several days, each moning a crystal was missing and a gold nugget had taken its place.

"By gosh," he said, "I got nervous. I thought that that rat had located a cache of gold ore. One nugget a day was too slow. I tried to locate the nest from whence these nuggets came but without success."

"How long did this replacing of crystals with gold nuggets continue?" I asked him.

"I got eight of them," he said, "before the rats were scared away by my search for their nest."

PASS THE GRASSHOPPERS

It is very true that what one does not know will not harm him.

The California Indian probably had great fun in selling a kind of meal to Fremont's men in 1845, which the purchasers relished well. Bidwell, in his memoirs wrote, "It was rich, spicy and pleasant to the taste."

It was so well liked by early pioneers that demand for it grew until the Indians became careless in its manufacture.

When the travelers found in it the legs, wings and heads of grasshoppers, the demand was killed.

The "rich, spicy" meal was nothing more than grasshopper meal.

LAW OF THE DESERT

In the trackless waste of the great Nevada Desert, it is often difficult for the most experienced desert rat to find water for himself and his burros, and in many places throughout the desert the whitened bones of man and beast bear grim testimony to this fact.

In the hope of providing for the desert sojourner in an emergency, the Nevada Legislature passed a law soon after the building of the first transcontinental railraod, requiring trains to stop at the signal of a distressed desert traveller and provide him and his animals with water. It is recorded that in 1906, when a train was speeding along from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, it was flagged by an old prospector with three staggering burros in the heart of the hot dry desert in Nevada. Fortunately for the old man and his burros, the engineer was acquaited with the statutem and pulled his train to a stop. Water forr man and beasts was handed out by the bucketful, and the train moved on. —Outdoor Rambler, Ione, California.

If a fellow works hard an saves his money by the time he is 50 he can afford a nervous breakdown.

ACTING NATURAL

Arriving home very late, Frisco Freddy sliped off his shoes, entered the house very quietly, even got into the bedroom without disturbing the "battle axe."

Just as he was easing himself into bed, however, his wife slightly aroused and groaned, "Is that you, Fido?"

Thinking quickly, quicker than he ever did before, Freddy licked her hand.

Perplexed Oriental: "Our children velly white. Is velly strange."

Spouse: "Well . . . Occidents will happen."

From the Brewery Gulch Gazette, a little weekly newspaper printed in Bisbee, Arizona, that you can get for $2.50 a year. Just send them the money and you learn of the West.

What the New Yorker is to the East, the Gazette is to the Gulch.

GHOST TOWN

A Great Collection of Relics, a Faithful Reproduction of a Composite Old West Ghost Town

Open Daily, 12 noon to 9 P.M.   Come and have FUN and a GOOD DINNER

KNOTT'S BERRY FARM

BUENA PARK, CALIF.
22 Miles Southeast of Los Angeles

How To Get Along In Mexico

Is just one of the many interesting bits of information contained in

  Sonora Sketchbook

by JOHN W. HILTON
_{(Illustrated by the author)}
Chapters have such titles as:

The Love Life of the Jumping Bean

The Social Aspects of Carrying Water

The Illiterate Book Seller

        And

The Begger Who Smelled Like Violets

$5.00 at your Book Store
THE MACMILLAN CO., NEW YORK

How To Rub-Out An Earthquake

IF IT'S PALM SPRINGS IT'S NEWS

Palm Springs had three spots in the news in 1948: a rain storm, a little earthquake that knocked a few bottles off slippery shelves (mostly whiskey and perfume), but the third "whoopee" was a wild story — "Palm Springs, Wind, Sand and Stars" in Harper's Magazine for August, '48. Seems the writer, Cleveland Amory (a very proper Bostonian) talked to a Palm Springs girl, Priscilla Chaffey (for 11 years editor of one of the Palm Springs newspapers). Priscilla was quoted as saying, "Our climate here is sexy."

All your Editor has to say is that our Desert Folks have always been very, very healthy and very friendly. Priscilla, I wish we could have the expert opinion of the old Desert Pioneer in the picture in the next column. —>

Then too, the answer may be in John Hilton's . . . "How To Be a Desert Rat and Like It" . . . on page 5 of this packet.

WHERE IS THAT EARTHQUAKE?

"Cactus Slim" Moorten says things are different in Palm Springs than they used to be. Even the weather doesn't work the same. Along in the fall of the year when days are getting shorter they take a spurt for a week or two of being a few minutes longer. Reason — the sun finding notches in the mountains.

Slim says "Another curious fact is that it freezes a 8 degrees higher in Palm Springs. When the radios says it's going to be 40 degrees before sunup, I look out the window and see frost on the ground and ice, too, in spots.

WALKING TALKING ROADRUNNERS

Just read a very interesting article on birds and found something that you ought to know about. It seems that most birds have four toes on each foot, three in front and one behind and that birds of the Parrot family are a little different, having two toes in front and two behind . . . Now a Roadrunner's foot has two toes in front and two behind, so that ought to make it a member of the Parrot family . . . What I am getting at is that you ought to catch yourself a Roadrunner and educate him — then you would probably have the only talking Roadrunner in the world for your Museum.

LEE LINDLEY  

DESERT RAT SCRAP BOOK         5

There are as many deserts as there are people in them, just as there are as many worlds. Being a "Desert Rat" is like being a lover, for the desert is like a woman with a million faces.

Her flowery make-up in the spring is like a your chorus girl. There's real beauty there if you can get past the sand verbenas and cloying perfume. Most visitors see only the surface charm. She's in a flirting mood then is anybody's girl. If you want to be a "stage door Johnny," you can pay a high price for a cheap thrill and feel a bit silly afterward, carrying home a mass-produced flashy painting of the desert in bloom like a Paris postcard.

The desert possesses a rich dowry and some woo her for that alone, but the money leaves a bitter taste with a secret hatred for its source. For business reasons or to cover up their frustration, such persons may try to act and talk like real desert rats, but it won't work! Even if they ride silver-saddled Palominos, wear embroidered shirts, teach their butler a western drawl and serve champagne in tincups.

Anyone can be a desert rat who can see and love the beauty of the desert in all her moods. There's beauty and wild music in a desert sandstorm. he lightning and thunder of a summer cloudburst are the flashing eyes — the emoting and tears of a high-spirited, beautiful actress "putting on a scene." They are soon over. There's beauty in crisp cool winter mornings and hot sultry summer afternoons, but most of all there's the intimate beauty of being alone with her on long walks on lying on her warm breast on balmy summer nights counting the stars in her hair — listening in the silence to your own heartbeat as it matches hers.

Being a desert rat and liking it is like being in love — you just can't help it.

All text was lovingly hand-entered (no OCR scans) by RIC CARTER who stakes a claim to the copyright for the layout and markup, but not to the contents, which remain the property of the heirs and estate of Harry Oliver, wherever they may be. Hopefully all the original typos were preserved and not too many new ones were introduced, but y'know how it goes...