good talk

After the Civil War a young dentist in Georgia named John and his 18 year old cousin Melanie Holliday were in love and wanted to be married. The Catholic Church said you're first cousins and you definitely can't be married. Broken-hearted and wanting no other Melanie entered the convent where she lived to be quite an old nun while John drifted out West where he became a skilled and feared gunfighter known as "Doc Holliday." The nun and the gunfighter stayed in touch throughout John's life until he died from the effects of tuberculosis at "36." I went to Tombstone, Arizona 15 years ago, the site of "the Gunfight at the OK Corral," the most famous event in the Old West. Over 20 movies have been based on this gunbattle between Virgil, Morgan and Wyatt Earp and their ally Doc Holliday and Billy Clanton and the 2 McLaury brothers. To be there was very exciting, they have figures of the combatants set up in the exact location where this occurred , you can see where Billy Clanton stood and then died with his trigger finger twitching as well as where everyone else had been on October 26, 1881. It's a tourist town and it was really good with all these restored saloons and other buildings, I'm sure it's the same now as it was then. I bought 3 copies of the next day's "Tombstone Epitaph" and sent one to my brother Bob and gave one to somebody else and kept one for myself and I'm looking at it now. It says as a heading, "Three Men Hurled Into Eternity In the Duration of a Moment." It describes Doc Holliday as being "Cool as a cucumber." There were only 2 witnesses to what was a longtime feud between the 2 groups coming to a head, they said that Wyatt Earp yelled "Throw up your hands!" And both sides began firing simultaneously. President Garfield threatened to declare martial law in this boomtown which had only been in existence for 4 years founded by a prospector named Schieffelin who had made a huge silver strike after being told by the soldiers at Fort Huachuca that if you go out there all you're going to find is your own tombstone. Doc Holliday often said, "I'm your daisy," this was due to his fatalistic outlook regarding his tuberculosis, that he would be pushing up daisies. Some regarded Doc Holliday as a "derelict dentist," indeed there was another newspaper in Tombstone called the "Nugget" which saw the Clantons as honest cowboys constantly being harassed by Doc Holliday and the ruffian Earps (Ike Clanton died 6 years later while rustling cattle). Others saw him differently, Margaret Mitchell was related to Melanie Holliday and based the character of Ashley Wilkes in "Gone With the Wind" on John Holliday, a man of honor.