 Cover of True West, July 2005 | |
| Categories | American Old West |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Monthly |
| Founded | 1953 |
| Company | True West Publishing |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | Cave Creek, Arizona, U.S. |
| Website | truewestmagazine |
| ISSN | 0041-3615 |
True West Magazine (alternate title: True West) is an American magazine that covers the Old West.
Started in 1953, True West is headquartered in Cave Creek, Arizona, and publishes monthly. It is the world's oldest, continuously published Western American magazine.
True West began publication in 1953 under founder Joe Small of Austin, Texas. The idea for True West originated from a monthly feature in Small's first publication, Sporting Magazine. The magazine's recurring "Bad Man" article, about outlaws of the West, was the feature that generated the most reader mail and interest. [1] True West was born to satisfy the readers' hunger for Old West history.
True West was the largest Western magazine on the market in the 1960s, selling hundreds of thousands of copies monthly at newsstands. The magazine benefited from an era featuring popular television western series such as Bonanza , The Lone Ranger , and Gunsmoke . At least one episode, "The Hunted" (1958), of the ABC/Warner Brothers series Sugarfoot is based on a True West article. Fans interested in the lives of real cowboys and cowgirls found those stories in True West.
After that, the early era of television westerns faded during the time of the Vietnam War and disco music. In 1979, Small sold the magazine to Chet Krause of Iola, Wisconsin. Small stayed on as publisher, with Krause as assistant publisher. The magazine saw a few moves—to Perkins, Oklahoma, then Stillwater—before the 1999 move to Cave Creek, Arizona. Among its new owners was Bob Boze Bell, who first discovered the magazine as a nine-year-old at Desert Drugs in Kingman, Arizona. The publication sparked a lifelong interest in the Old West. As the January 2000 issue was being edited, Bell flew to Stillwater to design the cover because he, "wanted to own the millennium."
Bell felt the magazine needed to change with the times or it would not survive. One of the first changes he made was switching the magazine from pulp paper to gloss, as True West was one of the last remaining publications using pulp. He also expanded the coverage of Western movies, since so many people developed a love of Old West history after being exposed to Westerns on television or the big screen. He added, and still writes, the successful "Classic Gunfights" department that has featured more than one hundred gunfights of the Old West. [2]
In 2007, Ken Amorosano joined the team as associate publisher. In 2011, he became True West's publisher and set the magazine in a new direction, catering the publication more toward its core history aficionados and expanding the magazine's readership globally.
Executive editor Bob Boze Bell is regularly featured on True West Moments, which airs on Encore's Westerns channel. He responds to inquiries from around the world.
In 2012, in honor of Arizona's centennial, True West created and released the show Outrageous Arizona, an irreverent and humorous look at the history of Arizona, hosted by Bob Boze Bell and True West contributors Jana Bommersbach and Marshall Trimble. [3] The show aired on select PBS stations in the Southwest. [4] Outrageous Arizona received an EMMY Award [5] from Rocky Mountain Southwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) in 2013.
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, was an American outlaw and gunfighter of the Old West who is alleged to have killed 21 men before he was shot and killed at the age of 21. He is also known for his involvement in New Mexico's Lincoln County War, during which he allegedly committed three murders.
John HenryHolliday, better known as Doc Holliday, was a dentist and later a gambler, gunfighter, and a close friend and associate of lawman Wyatt Earp. Holliday is best known for his role in the events surrounding and his participation in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. He developed a reputation as having killed more than a dozen men in various altercations, but modern researchers have concluded that, contrary to popular myth-making, Holliday killed only one to three men. Holliday's colorful life and character have been depicted in many books and portrayed by well-known actors in numerous movies and television series.
Virgil Walter Earp was both deputy U.S. Marshal and Tombstone, Arizona, City Marshal when he led his younger brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and Doc Holliday, in a confrontation with outlaw Cowboys at the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881. They killed brothers Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton. All three Earp brothers had been the target of repeated death threats made by the Cowboys who were upset by the Earps' interference in their illegal activities. All four lawmen were charged with murder by Ike Clanton, who had run from the gunfight. During a month-long preliminary hearing, Judge Wells Spicer exonerated the men, concluding they had been performing their duty.
This Old House is an American home improvement media brand with television shows, a magazine, and a website. The brand is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut. The television series airs on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television network and follows remodeling projects of houses over a series of weekly episodes.
Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 20th century and Louis L'Amour from the mid-20th century. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the popularity of televised Westerns such as Bonanza. Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and reached a new low in the 2000s. Most bookstores, outside a few west American states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books.
John Peters Ringo, known as Johnny Ringo, was an American Old West outlaw loosely associated with the Cochise County Cowboys in frontier boomtown Tombstone, Arizona Territory. He took part in the Mason County War in Texas during which he committed his first murder. He was arrested and charged with murder. He was affiliated with Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan, Ike Clanton, and Frank Stilwell during 1881–1882. He got into a confrontation in Tombstone with Doc Holliday and was suspected by Wyatt Earp of having taken part in the attempted murder of Virgil Earp and the ambush and death of Morgan Earp. Ringo was found dead with a bullet wound to his temple which was ruled a suicide. Modern writers have advanced various theories attributing his death to Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Frank Leslie or Michael O'Rourke.
KSLX-FM is a classic rock radio station serving the Phoenix, Arizona, area. The Hubbard Broadcasting, Inc. outlet broadcasts at 100.7 MHz with an ERP of 100 kW and is licensed to Scottsdale, Arizona. KSLX simulcasts in digital HD Radio. Its studios are located on North 52nd Street west of Papago Park and its transmitter is in South Mountain Park.
Martin Goodman was an American publisher of pulp magazines, digest sized magazines, paperback books, men's adventure magazines, and comic books, launching the comics magazine company Timely Comics in 1939 that would eventually become Marvel Comics.
Popular Publications was one of the largest publishers of pulp magazines during its existence, at one point publishing 42 different titles per month. Company titles included detective, adventure, romance, and Western fiction. They were also known for the several 'weird menace' titles. They also published several pulp hero or character pulps.
The Tombstone Epitaph is a Tombstone, Arizona, monthly publication that covers the history and culture of the Old West. Founded in January 1880, it is the oldest continually published newspaper in Arizona.
Honkytonk Sue: The Queen of Western Swing is a comic character that first appeared in National Lampoon in 1977. It was created by Bob Boze Bell. Honkytonk Sue later appeared as a weekly comic strip in the Phoenix New Times from 1978 to 1980. Four comic books culled from these weekly strips were self-published by Bell, the first being published in 1978 and the fourth in 1980.
George Washington Coe (1856–1941) was an Old West cowboy and a gunman during the Lincoln County War.
Jeff Kidder was an American lawman in the closing days of the American Old West. He was most noted for his service with the Arizona Rangers.
The Shadow was an American pulp magazine that was published by Street & Smith from 1931 to 1949. Each issue contained a novel about the Shadow, a mysterious crime-fighting figure who had been invented to narrate the introductions to radio broadcasts of stories from Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. A line from the introduction, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows", prompted listeners to ask at newsstands for the "Shadow magazine", which convinced the publisher that a magazine based around a single character could be successful. Walter Gibson persuaded the magazine's editor, Frank Blackwell, to let him write the first novel, The Living Shadow, which appeared in the first issue, dated April 1931.
The O.K. Corral was a livery and horse corral from 1879 to about 1888 in the mining boomtown of Tombstone, Arizona Territory, in the southwestern United States near the border with Mexico.
Wild Bill Hickok is a 1923 American silent Western film directed by Clifford Smith and starring William S. Hart, Ethel Grey Terry, Kathleen O'Connor, James Farley, Jack Gardner, Carl Gerard, and William Dyer. It was written by William S. Hart and J.G. Hawks. The film was released on November 18, 1923, by Paramount Pictures. It was the first film to depict Wyatt Earp, although in a very brief role, and the only film made before he died in 1929 that included his character, until Law and Order was released in 1932.
John Carlos Frey is a six time Emmy Award winning Mexican-American freelance investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker and published author based in Los Angeles, California. His investigative work has been featured on programs and networks such as 60 Minutes, PBS, NBC News, CBS News, the Weather Channel, Dan Rather Reports, Fusion TV, Current TV, Univision, and Telemundo. John Carlos Frey has also written articles for the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, Salon, Need to Know online, the Washington Monthly, and El Diario.
Columbia Publications was an American publisher of pulp magazines featuring the genres of science fiction, westerns, detective stories, romance, and sports fiction. The company published such writers as Isaac Asimov, Louis L'Amour, Arthur C. Clarke, Randall Garrett, Edward D. Hoch, and William Tenn; Robert A. W. Lowndes was an important early editor for such writers as Carol Emshwiller, Edward D. Hoch and Kate Wilhelm.
Wyatt Earp was an American Old West lawman and gambler in Cochise County, Arizona Territory, and a deputy marshal in Tombstone, Arizona Territory.