Stan Lynde Interview

The October issue of True West published an interview with author/cartoonist Stan Lynde in its popular What History Has Taught Me feature. Like most interviews of this type it was edited, and Lynde has published the entire interview on his blog.  Here are some excerpts:

On my father’s ranch I learned to sit a horse, and to work cattle and sheep. I learned that no task was beneath me and that if a job needed doing somebody needed to do it. As the “kid” of the outfit that somebody was often me. “Whoever you work for, ” Dad said. “Make them a good hand.” That piece of parental advice became a work ethic that helped me to succeed even at jobs I didn’t like all that much.

We lived in every kind of dwelling  I was born in the very heart of the Great Depression. Jobs were hard to come by, and Dad considered himself fortunate to find work herding sheep at $30 a month on the open ranges of the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana. With my mother and myself, Dad followed the sheep to new grass and a variety of temporary homes–sheep wagons, tents, dugouts, cabins, and ranch houses.

My dad always told me  I received a leather-bound autograph book for my twelfth birthday, and asked my dad to make the first entry. He looked at the page thoughtfully for a moment, and then drew a series of elk tracks diagonally across the page. Then he wrote, “As you go through life, you will make tracks. Be sure to make yours plain and clear.” Dad didn’t explain his entry, and I didn’t ask him to. But as I thought about it over the next several days I came to recognize it as fatherly advice and a lesson for life. “Live in such a way that you have nothing to conceal,” it seemed to say. “Leave your mark on the world boldly and clearly, with honesty and pride.” I haven’t always followed Dad’s advice, but I have tried–with varying degrees of success–to make my tracks “plain and clear.”

Read the entire interview here