Sheep Chaps and Mexican Equivalents

I've been doing some historical study on the town in which I live. The fact always mentioned about North Olmsted is the famous bus line which was the oldest transit system in the nation until it was gobbled up by Cleveland's RTA in 2005. What I didn't know was that the mayor at the time of its founding was a chap who was more famous for writing western novels, Charles Alden Seltzer. I'm not a big fan of reading westerns, although in general I like western films, so I'd never heard of the man through that connection. He's most famous for being the father of Louis B. Seltzer, erstwhile editor of the now-defunct Cleveland Press.

I found a short auto-biographical piece online which served to endear Mr. Seltzer to me. His writing is quirky and self-deprecatory with dead-pan dry humor. I don't know of whom that reminds me. Here's part:

I have no regular working hours, but I try my best to turn out at least two full-length serials each year. I still try to make an occasional trip to the West. I like to go over the old ranges. I do not like to have any one refer to Western stories as "wild and woolly," because, while I concede that the West was wild, it never became woolly until the advent of the sheep -- and that was after I lived there. I never saw a pair of sheep chaps; I never heard a cowhand call another "cowboy," "cow-puncher" or "waddie." "Hand," or "rider," or "cowhand" was the radius of the terminology as applied to the regular ranch employee. "Straw-boss," "wrangler," "buster," "range-boss" were others -- all understandable and universal in the Southwest. To be sure, there were Mexican equivalents used.

I have made some trips into the country which I have written about in Gone North. Fishing, hunting and observing. My hobbies are hunting, fishing, trap shooting, pistol practice and politics. I have broken ninety-two out of a possible hundred clay targets. In a pistol shoot in competition -- with a thirty-eight Colt -- at twenty yards I have made a ninety-one and a quarter per cent target. Last November I rang the bell in North Olmstead politics by being elected mayor of the town -- and I am now serving my sentence. North Olmstead is a suburban town on the edge of Cleveland and has a population of twenty-five hundred people and by the end of my two-year term I expect they will all join in chasing me out of town.

I have been married thirty-five years. Five children. One girl married, one at home. One boy Louis B., is editor of the Cleveland Press; another, Robert M., is a star reporter; the third is an advertising man. I am grateful that they did not attempt to follow in their father's footsteps.

Is he stone-cold serious with that sheep remark or what? Fortunately for Charles Seltzer, Zane Grey and other western writer guys, they were allowed to pass on to the Great Dude Ranch in the Sky before the advent of Brokeback Mountain.


Maybe I'll pick of one of the man's novels one of these days and read it with some sipping whiskey out in the shade of yonder tree grove, jes' south of the western sheep pasture.