Word: ranches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Between roundups, Rancher Williams sticks close to his natty, tile-roofed ranch house, pokes about his green alfalfa fields, hunts a little, and thinks up ideas for Out Our Way. When he has a batch of drawings finished (he has a hard time keeping ahead of his deadline) he ships them off in a swanky Cadillac 40 miles over rutted dirt roads to Prescott, where they are mailed to the NEA syndicate headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio...
...thing that surprises most people about Jim Williams' cartoons is the scope of their subject matter. He can draw a machine-shop scene one day, a cattle ranch the next, then a small-town home of the early igoos, and get all his details right, make his characters true to life in each environment. Reason: Jim Williams has, at one time or another, lived or known all his characters himself...
Born 52 years ago in Nova Scotia, Jim Williams was taken as a baby to Detroit, where he grew up, spent one year half-heartedly studying art at Mount Union College. At 15, big and husky as a man, he quit school to roam the Southwest as ranch hand, camp cook, mule skinner, tattoo artist. He was a crack rider with the 15th Cavalry at Fort Sill, Okla. Mustered out, he married, smashed baggage at Chicago's old Northwestern railroad station, got a broken nose as a professional prize fighter, finally settled down as a machinist's assistant...
...behind him, Jim Williams developed an uncontrollable nostalgia for Arizona, where he had spent his youth. When he discovered that he didn't have to stay in Cleveland to do his cartooning he sold a Cleveland home that had cost him $65,000, shopped around for a likely ranch, and finally settled down in the lonely, Southwestern cow country where he lives today. One reason he bought his ranch: four men had been killed on it, one is buried under the basement of his kitchen...
Today 52-year-old Jim Williams, top man of all NEA's cartoonists, can afford to live as he likes. Under his high-spending management, the ranch (it has never made a red cent) has become one of the show places of the region. But he is shyly conscious of being a little more prosperous than his neighbors, is afraid of being thought a showoff. Talkative and genial, he walks with the swivel-hipped, bowlegged, rolling gait of a cowboy, wears his heart on his sleeve, tells his most intimate business to anybody who happens to be around...