Hearts gild, bleached or blackened, and one that comes to mind is Jingles. We’ve come a long way to become tender. Wise or wealthy is less important.
Stories about the mischievous…
“There must be somebody who hasn’t heard of Andy Devine, but that person sure doesn’t live in Kingman where Andy is becoming somewhat of a folk hero.
“Who would have thought on November 16,1906, when Amy Devine, Mae, her stepdaughter, and Tom, Jr., her son, stepped from the train in Kingman, that the year old boy she was carrying in her arms would turn out to be Kingman’s favorite son? Amy’s husband, Tom, had been a railroad employee in Flagstaff until a terrible accident had taken his leg. Unable to continue his work for the railroad, he took the settlement they offered and purchased the Beale Hotel.”
Dorothy Devine says the various versions of the “cat incident” make Andy sound awful, but she says the incident did indeed occur. What actually happened was that one of the local judges offered Andy and a friend 50 cents to get rid of a mangy old cat for him. He emphasized that they do so in humane manner.
Fifty cents was a princely sum in those days, so Andy and his friend undertook this assignment.. They knew where some dynamite was, so took cat, dynamite and a long, long fuse to the dump where they proceeded to carefully wrap the cat in dynamite. What could be more humane than instant destruction, they reasoned. They lit the fuse and ran like crazy.
They looked around and much to their dismay found the cat following them fuse burning vigorously. The boys ran by the Van Marter house and the cat ran under the house. Andy said he was terrified that the dynamite would blow up the house, but the cat ran out from under the house and into the woodshed. The woodshed blew sky high.
No one ever knew what happened until years later Andy, in a personal appearance in Kingman, confessed to the crime.