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Bill Webb, the assistant superintendent of schools here until next Monday when he retires, told me two weeks ago that his old friend Steve Frazee was on his last legs.
Is Steve up to having company?
I asked.
Sure,
Bill said. You ought to drop by
sometime. He'd be glad to see you.
But something always seemed to come up, and Steve Frazee died Friday, five weeks short of his 83rd birthday.
Frazee wrote a lot of varied stuff during a career that also included stints as a boxer and a vaudeville performer, but most memorably he wrote westerns during the 1950s and '60s.
It is one of the gross inequities of American publishing that a hack like Louis L'Amour, who wrote the same book at least a hundred times, became rich and famous while better writers toiled in relative obscurity.
Steve Frazee didn't seem to mind the personal obscurity,
but his work deserved better. He had a rollicking sense of
humor, he created characters who stepped outside the
cliches of the genre, and he kept his plot moving.
Rendezvous
and A Gun for Bragg's Woman
are my
favorites; some others, like Many Rivers to Cross
and Running Target,
became movies.
Frazee also wrote of contemporary times, which brings us
to his classic, More Damn Tourists.
Bill Williams of
Sterling (author of Sex and the Senile Man,
among
other things) describes it as the funniest book I ever
read
and says it is well worth the $25 it now commands
in the rare-book market.
To that I can add little. More Damn Tourists
is
not only side-splitting humor, it is also the premier
exposition of the sociology of little mountain towns.
My encounters with Frazee generally came at the post office, where he shared his attitude problems.
His favorite modern western writers were Edward Abbey
and John Nichols, both hilarious and both seditious. He
enjoyed the work of revisionist western historians like
Patricia Limerick at C.U. One of our last meetings was last
spring; I took a line from him and used it in a column:
George Bush promised never to meddle in the domestic
affairs of any nation, and that includes the United
States.
He was crusty and cantankerous, yet always encouraging to other writers. His mere presence was an inspiration -- it told me that yes, you can live in remote Salida and still sell your work in New York and Hollywood.
There will be no funeral; I wish it were otherwise, so that I could meet some of the many others who knew and respected Steve Frazee.
But mostly I wish I'd gone by and seen him last week, to talk about the wonders of Homer and Dickens and the perfidies of Reagan and Bush, to learn more of my craft from a past master, to hear some well-told tales of life in the Rockies.
Now it's too late. Folks, don't put things off.
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