I had so many requests for the “Beatty
Connection” that I decided to have one more printing. Since then I have only
sold two copies! Its funny to me if I don’t have any books everyone wants one,
if I do have them nobody wants to buy a copy. Oh well, should anyone want a
copy they are $45 for the book plus $5 for mailing costs. It contains 235
pages plus an every name index.
If some of you people out there have a picture
that you would like to see in the newsletter just send it along to me and I
will see that it gets printed.
***
Springs Valley Herald (May 20, 1915)
Bob Flick arrived home yesterday evening after a two weeks sojourn with
Gentry's show. Bob was with them at Louisville and Indianapolis, where they
played a week's stand at either place, but grew tired of the tinsel and gaudy
equipage, the white lights, the glamour and especially the long hours of work
and the catch-as-catch-can style of sleeping. So when the show got ready to
put out of Indianapolis Bob tendered his resignation, thinking to draw his
accumulation of salary and return to his mother, but the show people gave him
to understand that he had forfeited his wages by having the presumption to ask
for it without giving at least two weeks notice. Bob says he thought the
position he was filling was not so important as all that, and he had to bid
farewell to the ponies, the tented field and brilliant arena, Dr. Dooley, Mr.
and Mrs. Snyler and the whole push as well as his two week's accumulation of
hard earned salary and pensively return to "Old French Lick". He is open for
engagement for the first legitimate job that turns up, but don't care for any
more circus.
When Bob joined the circus he was working for
the Springs Valley Herald as a printer’s devil but when he returned home that
position was no longer available.
***
When I was just a kid growing up in French Lick I had a
good friend named Chester Baxter. We spent a lot of time together. His father,
Arthur and his mother, Pearl, had a box car diner just about where Brownie’s
is now located. I think Chester was born with a guitar in his hands because he
could always play one. I don’t mean just strumming, he could pick with the
best of them.
I always wanted to play the guitar and when I was about
eleven years of age my Mom bought me one for Christmas from Sears-Roebuck for
three dollars and ninety-nine cents. I thought I could just pick it up and
start playing like Chester. I could not even tune the thing and never did
learn how. The only way it ever got tuned up was when Chester would tune it or
sometimes someone like Vern Albright or Ed Gromer would come in to play it.
One day my Mother heard Chester play and she asked him if
he would give me a thirty minute lesson once a week for a quarter. He readily
agreed. The lessons would consist of me watching Chester play for a half-hour
and then we would take the quarter and go down town and buy candy and ice
cream with it. That little scheme worked pretty good for awhile, until Mom
noticed that my playing was not improving any so she put a stopper on my music
lessons.
I have been told that Chester was a life long musician and
he lived in Butte, MT. He just died in February 2002 at the age of eighty
years. The amazing thing about Chester being able to play the guitar so well
was that he had short arms and stubby fingers. He had an older brother named
Duane who settled in Wisconsin. He was killed in a car wreck January 4th 1958
while taking his family on vacation.
Chester sure could play the guitar.
***