The American Spectator

p> ASTONISHING COLOR br> Re: Bill Croke’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West : /p> p>Thanks to Bill Croke for the portrait of one of America’s most colorful characters, Wm. Frederick Cody, whose partially Buntline-conjured story I loved as a child (there was some authentic heroism in Cody’s early years as well). I sometimes think of Buffalo Bill’s 1917 death in Denver as a sort of historical marker: My father was born only five months later in Kansas. My maternal grandmother lived in a North Platte, Nebraska, house rented from the Plainsman himself; she remembered him riding horseback into town with his long yellow mane billowing from under his hat. (For that matter, my paternal grandmother remembered an on-the-run Frank James staying overnight at her house in Kansas.) Just another reminder of what an astonishing, breathtaking span the last century was. br> — K. E. Grubbs Jr. br> Irvine, CA /p> p> FRISKY DEMS br> re: The Washington Prowler’s McAuliffe Frisks Frist