LOBBYING FOR A DOWNTOWN COWBOY POET

You can compile a cast of characters for any city that ever was. The “eminences,” as H. L. Mencken once called them, will vary in magnitude--the railroad-crossing guard in Penn Yan who once shook hands with William Jennings Bryan would qualify.

But Los Angeles has had more than its share of eminences, and as I drive those older streets where modernity and progress have not yet imposed their glassy and masking hands, I sense the ghosts of fact and fiction--Jelly Roll Morton and Aldous Huxley, concluding their days here, or Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe, looking for strays.

The other day, Hal Cannon, who runs the Western Folklife Center in Salt Lake City and who knows of my interest in cowboy poetry, sent me a book he has just edited. It is “Rhymes of the Ranges: A New Collection of the Poems of Bruce Kiskaddon” (Gibbs M. Smith Inc., Layton, Utah 84041: $14.95, 136 pp.)

Kiskaddon, Cannon says in his introduction, is America’s premier cowboy poet. An anthology of Kiskaddon’s work, then called “Rhymes of the Ranges and Other Poems,” was last published 40 years ago and was regarded as “The Book” by other cowboy poets.

What I find fascinating, and not a little mournful, is that Kiskaddon spent the last 25 years, the final third of his life, working as a bellhop in Los Angeles, mostly at the Mayflower Hotel in the heart of downtown.

“His homes,” Cannon writes, “were a series of pastel Spanish adobe houses in blue-collar neighborhoods on streets lined with tall palms. Every day he put on his pressed ‘monkey uniform’ and went to work. . . . Between calls, he sat in the corner of the lobby with a stubby pencil in hand and opened up a world of memory--of cow camps, horses and open land.”

Kiskaddon was born in Pennsylvania in 1878. As young men were urged to do in those days, he went west, to Trinidad, Colo., and became a working cowboy, riding what was called the Picket Wire district starting in 1898. He cowboyed around the Southwest and even spent some time working in Australia.

In the mid-’20s he and some of his pals heard that riders were making good money in the movies. They came to Hollywood in 1925 and got jobs driving chariots in “Ben Hur.”

Kiskaddon, at the urging of one of his Arizona ranch bosses, had published a slim volume of his poems the year before, but there wasn’t a living in it. According to Cannon, Kiskaddon and a bunch of the boys were whooping it up in an L.A. hotel one night, when Kiskaddon discovered what a bellhop made in tips for delivering one bottle of Prohibition hooch. He decided that that beat cowboying, either in the movies or on a ranch.

Thereafter, he wrote his poems between bellhopping chores. He sold them--Cannon guesses he received $10 each--to Nelson Crow, publisher of Western Livestock, a monthly magazine, which ran them with illustrations by Katherine Field, a young New Mexico artist. Some of the drawings are reproduced in the new book.

Kiskaddon married in Los Angeles and had a daughter. He died in 1950, still writing poetry.

He is, Hal Cannon says, “the epitome of the folk poet. He is absolutely unknown to the scholarly world of poetry.” Yet the people who still live the life Kiskaddon wrote about, including the new generations of cowboy poets themselves, recognize and cherish the exactness of his memories and the honesty of the recollected emotions.

His poems were written to be read aloud, and the strong rhythms and the clear rhymes carry a subtlety as you hear them that is less discernible on the page. Kiskaddon’s poems may have been written in downtown Los Angeles, but they’re a long way from the Hollywood cowboy West.

He celebrates the chuck wagon’s Dutch oven and the bunkhouse mirror and the faces it has seen. He remembers matters as ordinary and ornery as trying to pull on wet boots:

And you know when you’re older, there’s nothin’ to gain

from buyin’ tight boots if you work in the rain.

A good many of the poems are funny, shared recollections of the down side of cowboying, like standing the late watch over the herd:

Now you wish there was a country where they allus had good feed

Where there ain’t no buckin’ horses and the cattle don’t stampede

Pretty women and good likker, and where shootin’ cranks ain’t barred,

Where the cooks all make good biscuits, and there ain’t no second guard.

The poet, and the poetry, convey a powerful nostalgia for a different day, but, as Kiskaddon says,

Them good old days is past and gone. The time and the world and the change goes on,

And you cain’t do things like you used to do, when cattle was plenty and folks was few.

But the poetry goes on, and the Gibbs Smith firm has also brought out a cassette of readings from the 1985 Cowboy Poetry Gathering at Elko, Nev. Those cowboy voices, which somehow sound weathered, still sing, as Kiskaddon did, of treacherous broncs and chuck wagon breakfasts, of Christmas at a snowbound line camp. Now somebody might sing as well of the bellhop in the lobby, with a pencil in his hand.