Yee-ha! Happy birthday Wister's Western!



"If you want to call me that--smile," said Gary Cooper
in the 1929 movie made from Wister's novel.

 On this day in 1902, MacMillan published Owen Wister's The Virginian, bestowing literary cred to what had previously been the province of pulp.  The next year the first "prestige" picture of the emerging motion picture industry would be Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery.  (And that was six years before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were reportedly killed in Bolivia--I say reportedly because, well, that's another story or two). 110 years, a lot of great movies and some really crappy fashions, political and otherwise.  On this Memorial Day, where might we be if a certain past president hadn't thought he was cowboy/gunslinger?   

Westerns are great, but on occasion, they've led
to unfortunate headgear and childish thinking.