Ballad of a Small Town, Adventures of Logan West »

Hal has lived and worked in Indiana, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, California and Nevada--he knows the rural life and the West. His life experiences are many and varied. A Navy Morse Code radio operator, he’s a veteran of the Japan Occupation Forces, and the Korean War. He’s worked as a musician, store clerk, security guard, disc jockey, reporter, and news editor. He’s gained national attention as a writer of Western short stories, and cowboy poetry. His book, “Cowboy Poems and Outright Lies,” published in 2001, is on the shelf of the Fife Folklore Archives at Utah State University, Logan, Utah, and is in the Dickinsen Research Center National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City. It also is in a section of the Washoe County Nevada Library, known as “The Nevada Shelf.” Many of his poems are on various websites, available by going to a search engine and typing in Hal Swift, Cowboy Poet. Although he’s semi-retired now, he still considers himself a writer and reporter of the human condition, past and present. He lives within a half-hour’s drive from Drytown--now Wadsworth, Nevada--where the events depicted in his novel, Ballad of a Small Town take place.

Ballad’s Genesis The idea for Ballad of a Small Town was born when I saw a copy of the Wadsworth, NV newspaper* from around 1869. In it was an ad for Shorty’s Lunchroom. Shorty’s Place grew out of that, and I put it in Drytown, which was still Wadsworth’s name in 1864--it was also called Big Bend, referring to the bend in the Truckee River as it headed north toward what we whites call Pyramid Lake. The Numa (Paiutes) call it Panunadu. In January of 1996, Dorman Nelson, editor and publisher of Western Tales Magazine, bought “Letter From Shorty,”--a short story based on Shorty’s Lunchroom--but he had to shut down the magazine for various reasons. He advised me to continue writing, but to put my western short stories into a collection, with a unifying theme or character and make them into a novel. Working on that idea, I found what I wanted in Logan West, a journalism graduate from Indiana, whose bride eloped with their best man. Logan heads west to write the novel he’s long thought about doing, takes his banjo along, and winds up working in Shorty’s Place. Before the first story was finished, the idea for “the ballad” manifested. As a troubadour of sorts, it seemed natural for Logan to write a ballad based on his travels, and “Ballad of a Small Town,” was born. Each chapter is prefaced by an excerpt from the ballad. Although I have a melody for the ballad in my head, I’ve left it to the reader to compose his or her own. Just remember, it’s being accompanied by a really mellow-sounding banjo. *Newspapers of the day often were printed on a Hectograph. A special gel was poured into a shallow pan--much like a cookie pan--and a paper “master” copy was laid on top of the gel, face down. The master copy was rolled gently with a rubber roller and the gel took on the impression of what was on the paper master copy. After the master copy was removed, blank paper was laid on the gel and it was gently pressed down with the same roller. The information on the gel was impressed on the surface of the paper. One-hundred copies could be made before the gel lost its efficiency. Hectograph comes from Greek. Hecto means one-hundred, and graph means “drawn”.