Gordon Ray Young - Author, Cowboy - Autobiography in Saturday Evening Post, March 7, 1942

Gordon Young was one of the top writers for Adventure magazine. Here's an auto-biographical short article from him on that originally appeared in the March 7, 1942 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

Gordon Ray Young

GORDON RAY YOUNG, having written his first Post serial with Tall in the Saddle, goes back over his own early days to see what makes a writer of Western stories:

" I regret that I’m no youngster, but I’m glad that as a kid I caught a fading glimpse of the Old West, I was born in Ray County, Mo., 1886, near the home and stamping ground of Jesse James and grew up thinking of him as a hero, though later information modified that. Forty-two years ago I began working through the summers on the XY, owned by Fred Harvey, known as 'the eating-house man.’ His ranch lay about thirty miles west of Granada, Colorado, near the Kansas border. Mr. Harvey also owned a big alfalfa ranch at Granada, and the cows were brought in off the range for winter feeding. Such cowboys as stuck it out rode fence with a sack of staples and a hammer instead of a six-shooter, or loaded hayracks from the stacks and scattered the hay among the herds. Going to school seemed the lesser bad job.

"In school only two things interested me: girls and poetry. I can count a cribbage hand at a glance, but I couldn’t then, and I can’t yet, add a column of figures and get the same answer twice. I’m not much better at spelling. I took up public speaking.

“ I had no more interest in public speaking than I had in raising spinach, but I knew a lot of Kipling and through the summer I’d tell it to the cows. In 1906 I won the state oratorical contest at Colorado Springs— and haven’t made a public speech since.

"After three years of riding I heard about the ocean and got curious—about the South Seas particularly. That is another story; I have since had seven or eight books published out of that one story. My father had a friend who was an editor on the Rocky Mountain News, and the friend put me to work at $5 per week.

" The star reporter was a very quiet young man who never took any interest in me; yet, in a way, he is responsible for the thirty-odd years that I have been writing, I know—I saw the check—that he got as much as $50 for something; and in one month he had five poems and stories in national magazines. The News was proud and gave him a writeup. He wrote as if it wasn't any trouble at all; as if he merely tipped the ink bottle and the words smoothly flowed out onto the paper. He still writes that way. His name is Damon Runyon.

“Once hunting was a passion. Now I won’t shoot at much of anything but black spots on paper—and sometimes miss them. Any marksman will know what I mean. Revolvers are a hobby and I have some of the best. I believe I am the only fellow to blow up a .357 magnum revolver with a reload, or any other way. It was wholly unintentional. The manufacturer traded me a new gun because he wanted to see what the wrecked one looked like. Not pretty; not when you think of where all the flying pieces might have hit.”