I'm an Old Cowhand

Jim Williams had tried just about everything -- cowpuncher, railroad fireman, mule skinner, tattooer, prize fighter, machinist. None of these tries had brought him much of a living. In his spare time in smelly bunkhouses, roundhouses and ma chine shops, he had even drawn cartoons. One day he sent N.E.A. a drawing of a fire chief too fat to get out of his chair for an alarm. N.E.A. wired him from Cleveland to come in. When Williams got back home to Alliance, Ohio, he had a contract to draw cartoons.

Last week, 25 years later, the 1,000th paper (the Portsmouth, N.H. Herald) was taking James Robert Williams'* Out Our Way. His homely handiwork was the biggest drawing card on N.E.A.'s list. His panels (single pictures) tell an anecdote but no continued stories. Like the soft light of a kerosene lamp, they light up, with humor and understanding, the quiet corners of everyday life that are passed over by the searchlights of the news. The runny-nosed children and distracted parents of "Born Thirty Years Too Soon," "The Worry Wart" and "Why Mothers Get Gray" are gently comic memories of many an American childhood. "Bull of the Woods" goes all round a machine shop to show that there, too, human nature runs triumphantly rampant. And Williams' slackjawed, dust-caked cowhands, Curly, Stiffy, Wes and Soda of Out Our Way, have some of his friend Will Rogers' half-sad drollery. They are the working cowhands that Williams knew as a rancher ("when I was healthy an' didn't have this big belly").

Plain & Fancy. At 59, grey Jim Williams is as pale and paunchy as one of his machine-shop characters. He lives, somewhat apologetically, in a fancy 2O-room Tudor mansion with a $30,000 swimming pool in San Marino, Calif. He sits down at his drawing board as early as 6 a.m. and waits, with a fisherman's patience, for an idea to strike. Sometimes it takes hours. When he really gets one hooked, he finishes a panel in a hurry. If the fishing is good, he can polish off four panels in a morning.

Jim Williams would rather chin with old cronies than work, so he sometimes falls behind schedule, despite prodding from his wife. Then his old cartoons reappear, "redrawn by request." "I couldn't work without talking to people," says Williams defensively. "I always have people here--cattlemen from Texas, publishers from New York, workingmen from Detroit. They kid me when they see me in this big house--I'm pretty untidy and I wear sweaters and jackets. Looks funny to see someone like me in this place." And sometimes the cowhands get a little mad about Williams' making all that money out of them.

Broncs In Bronze. As he pumps visitors for ideas, he shows off his treasures: fine saddles, ship models, bronze figures of cowboys on bucking broncos, cast from clay he has modeled. Usually he brings out. a bottle, though he no longer touches the stuff himself and sticks to cigarettes --the tailor-made kind.

"I got so I couldn't do my work," he says. "I'd sit at my board an' think about an idea for a while, an' then go to the closet for a nip. Then I'd go back, think a little longer, an' go back for another nip. Pretty soon I was nippin' myself too far an' I couldn't think." He wound up at a sanatorium, "same one W. C. Fields went to in Pasadena. The other people enjoyed watching me. They never saw a cartoonist work before."

In his drawings, he tries to be as accurate as a blueprint. Machinists, who like to paste his "Bull of the Woods" panels on shop walls, jack him up for any mistakes. Recently, his fans have also caught him up for showing dogs caught in a bear trap. Readers thought this cruel. And last week N.E.A. turned down a cartoon because it showed a cat in a bag. That sort of criticism riles Williams. He likes animals (he once had seven dogs), but he knows that animals, like people, get into trouble.

There have been other complaints from those who could not understand some of his cowboy talk. So Williams plans to stop calling a rope a rawhide riata and not use words like hackamore, tapaderas and cinch ring. Then "even a Wall Street banker can understand me."

*No kin to Cartoonist Gluyas Williams.

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