School was out for the summer. I don't even recall how we got there, but we met up with Uncle Robert at the Timbers restaurant north of Santa Barbara. He had been putting on a Wild West Show up there for quite some time, doing rope and bullwhip tricks. A few years before, Uncle Robert had been trying to make it in Hollywood but never did succeed. He had begun to grow his hair long like Buffalo Bill, even calling himself "Wolf River Bob" after a river south of White Cloud, Kansas.
He had been working for Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, and to realize how growing one's hair long before the hippie era was a problem, he was going to get fired if he didn't cut it. He even went on a Southern California TV station to publicly have his hair cut. But he eventually quit Douglas when he decided to grow it long again.
Before working at the Timbers restaurant, he worked at a ranch not far from there, which is where he met the owners of The Timbers and began his stint at the restaurant. But at the start of the summer of 1966, he decided he wanted to return to White Cloud, Kansas, to get his bearings. So when we met up with him there, it was to ride with him in his Ford station wagon to Kansas for a couple of weeks. The chef from the restaurant made a cooler full of sub sandwiches and we were off, first to Arizona. We stayed at a motel not far from the Grand Canyon teh first night of the trip, and then we visited the canyon the following morning. Ann must have taken the picture because the man in the background at the railing with the white cowboy hat is Uncle Robert.
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