You can see me in the photo at the left kneeling by a headstone in a forlorn, weed-infested graveyard in a bad part of Dallas, Texas.  The remains below that headstone are none other than those of Clyde Barrow, the male half of the notorious duo who ravaged the the southern states in the late 1920s/ early 1930s, and who were made famous to our generation by the hit movie Bonnie & Clyde, starring Faye Dunaway  and Warren Beatty.  In real life, just as in the movie, Bonnie and Clyde drove into an ambush in rural Louisiana where they met their ends in a hail of bullets on May 23, 1934.

How I came to be in this dreary place on a rainy day started with a story my dad told MD and me on our last trip to visit the folks in Michigan.  I can’t remember now how it came up, but he started telling us about the time he saw the remains of Adam “Eddie” Richetti, the sidekick of Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd in a funeral home in Bolivar, Missouri.  My father grew up on a farm near a little town called Halfway, which is ‘halfway’ between Bolivar and Buffalo.  For the folks in Halfway, Bolivar was the closest ‘big’ town where everyone went to shop.  At that time, Halfway was basically a wide spot in the road.

In June 1933 ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd and Adam Richetti (shown at right) stopped off to get their stolen car fixed at Bitzer Chevrolet where Richetti’s brother, Joe, worked as a mechanic.  As they were cooling their heels there, the Polk County Sheriff who lived in Bolivar, William Killingsworth, wandered in.  My dad didn’t know if he just happened in or if he had heard the gangsters might be there.  I suspect the former since he didn’t come in with guns drawn.  Floyd and Richetti took him captive at gun point, took Joe’s car and lit out for Kansas City.  Along the way they ditched Joe’s car, stole another vehicle, switched their hostages (they had collected another along the way) over, and kept on traveling.  Before they reached Kansas City, they let Killingsworth and the other hostage go by the side of the road, and drove off.  They reached Kansas City, and there was where the story went murky.

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I have to confess.  I lied to you.  I said the next post would be part II of the Meat Eater or Vegetarian series and here I am sticking another one in in between.  But I at least have a good reason for this interloper post: it is time sensitive.

Due to other commitments tomorrow and Monday (see below for the Monday commitment) I more than likely won’t be able to get the promised post up before Tuesday.  I was working away on it this afternoon (actually alternating between writing the post and dealing with comments) when my bride came in and whined for me to go to a movie I didn’t really want to see.  But, being the dutiful and obliging spouse that I am, I went.  And I was glad I did.

MD just finished the book Julie & Julia and was hot to see the movie.  I hadn’t read the book, and don’t plan on it, so I was lukewarm at best on the idea.  But I’m glad I relented because the movie is one of the best I’ve seen in a long while.  MD and I related to it on a number of levels.  We written books and have been through all the publisher snafus that Julia experienced.  We know what it’s like to have a cooking show.  And we’ve been through the blogging experience.  But, unlike the heroine of the blog and book, we’ve actually met Julia.

In the summer of 2000, a couple of friends of ours who own Al Forno, a famous restaurant in Providence, RI, arranged for MD and me to be a part of a huge fundraiser for the Providence Public Library.  It got worked out in such a way that MD and I attended as – get this – celebrity chefs.  Chefs? I still don’t know how it happened because our cooking show hadn’t even been conceived of at that time and we had just published The Protein Power LifePlan a few months earlier.  But there we were as celebrity chefs with – get this, too – Emeril Lagasse, Jacques Pepin, and Julia Child.  And, as they say, that’s not all.  We were there with Billy Joel as well.  Yep, Billie, Emeril, Jacques, Julia, MD and me – the celebs brought out to raise money for the Providence Public Library.  It was kind of surreal.

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As most readers of this blog know, MD and I split our non-traveling time between Incline Village, Nevada (on the north shore of Lake Tahoe) and Santa Barbara, California.  We don’t have a house in the city of Santa Barbara but in the unincorporated town of Montecito, which is a sleepy little suburb of Santa Barbara (as if Santa Barbara is large enough to have a suburb).  We live on Park Lane, a street well known in Montecito, notably for the giant Eucalyptus trees that line it.  Although there are Eucalyptus trees all over the Montecito/Santa Barbara area, as far as I know, Park Lane is the only street flanked by them.

As most of you also know, I am a man-made global warming/climate change denier. I’m not as much a denier as I am a pragmatist who realizes that even if there is something to the phenomenon (which in my view is far from certain), it’s way, way too expensive to fix in the ways we’re trying to fix it.  And if all of us in the US and the UK (the two centers of GW hysteria) spend the fortune required to keep our respective countries green, we don’t have any control over the people in China and India.  These countries are going to continue to release CO2 in enormous amounts (as will any other populous country that enters its own industrial age) irrespective of whether or not we all recycle, drive electric cars and shut down all our factories.  But, that’s just my view.

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The grisly plaster cast pictured above of the flayed corpse of a hanged murderer has quite a history.

On October 2, 1801, Mr James Legg shot one William Lambe to death in the latter’s bedroom.  Apparently the 73 year old Mr. Legg had been nursing a grudge against Lambe for some time.  As Mr. Lambe was awakening on the morning of Oct 2, Mr. Legg, gun in hand, confronted him, thrust a second pistol at him and challenged him to a duel to settle their differences.  Mr. Lambe tossed the proffered pistol out the door of his room whereupon Mr. Legg fired upon Mr. Lambe, killing him instantly.

Mr. Lambe’s wife witnessed the murder, but Mr. Legg admitted to it as well.  His trial took place on Oct 28, 1801.  He was sentenced to death, and his execution by hanging took place on Nov 2, a month to the day after the deed was done.  Justice was swift in those days.

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