Jeanne Dean

            By Tuesday I still hadn’t heard from Facebook a response to my appeal of their unpublication of my Serge Gainsbourg page. I have a couple of things ready to post there but can’t do it.

            I washed a little more of my living room floor. There are a lot of little spots of white paint that aren’t noticeable from a distance that I had to scrap or sand.

            My back started bothering me in the afternoon. I wonder if it had to do with the floor washing work.

>            I took a bike ride around the neighbourhood in the afternoon and when I got home I did a few exercises for my butt muscles.

            I got three envelopes from Services Canada. One was just my access code for Services Canada online but another was related to the Canada Pension and contained another access code for the same service. I received an assessment of what my pension would be and it’s about $241 a month. Obviously I’m going to need more than that. I’ll have to apply for the Guaranteed Income Supplement. The other envelope contained the application for both the Canada Pension and the Guaranteed Income Supplement.

            I looked at three videos from 2017 of me playing Serge Gainsbourg’s “Jeunes femmes et vieux messieurs”. I think I’ll go with the one from July 28. In the one from July 24 my hair is uncombed and in the one from August 3 the zipper on my shorts is showing.

            I had four small potatoes, some sautéed peppers, and a slice of roast beef with gravy while watching two episodes of Stories of the Century from the second season. The timeline as usual is all over the place and they don’t seem to care about continuity. Frankie Adams, who had been Matt Clark’s partner as detectives for the railroad bouncing back and forth in events over five decades is now replaced by Margaret Jones in the same time periods.

            The first story was about Burt Alvord, who is a deputy marshal for his father the sheriff. Unbeknownst to his father, Burt leads the other deputies in a gang of train robbers and extortionists. They’ve stolen several cases of dynamite from a train and are using it to extort money. They destroy a woman’s house after she refuses to pay. Burt hides the explosives in a warehouse in town. His father finds out that his son is crooked when a pregnant woman named Molly from another town shows up with money that Burt had given her from a train robbery. Burt’s father tries to stop him but Burt shoots and wounds him then sets a fuse to blow up the warehouse. Burt’s father is rescued. Burt and his gang are captured and sent to prison.

            Molly was played by Fran Bennett, who attended the University of Miami as mathematics major. After getting married in 1957 she withdrew from film acting.

            The real Burt Alvord was born in 1867. His father had been a prospector, a mining mechanic, a constable and a justice of the peace. Burt grew up in Tombstone, Arizona. He became a deputy in 1886 but he was an alcoholic and a gambler and quit. He worked as a deputy in several other towns. In 1896 he moved to Cochise County and married Lola Ochoa, bought a ranch and settled down. He became a deputy again. After his father died in 1898 and a year later he resigned, left his wife and formed a gang. They committed armed robberies. He was captured and escaped twice. In 1902 he helped track down Augustine Chacon in exchange for a reduced sentence and part of the reward. But when he saw Chacon hang he decided not to surrender. He was captured, escaped and captured again until finally he spent two years in Yuma Prison. Upon release he moved to Central America where he became a canal operator. He was last seen in 1910.

            The second story was about Tom Bell. He starts out as a doctor in California but the money is no good. He robs a railroad surveyor and kills him when he reaches for his handkerchief. He takes the man’s credentials and poses as him. He is captured after being shot in the desert. He hardens in prison and leads a bloody escape, after which he forms a gang. His girlfriend is Elsie Dean but he loses her in a poker game. Tom Bell becomes the first stagecoach robber. His headquarters is the bar where Elsie works and he is captured there. Elsie breaks him out of jail and has him hide under a tarp on the back of a wagon. But she drives him directly to a lynch mob that hang him.

            Elsie was played by Jeanne Dean who starred in Radar Patrol vs. Spy King in 1949 but she is more famous as one of the Vargas girls of the 1940s. She was 15 when she started and posed for Vargas for four years. Her image was used as the symbol on the nose of the first fourteen 747 planes of Virgin Atlantic. She was also a poet.

            The real Tom Bell was known as “The Outlaw Doc” and he really was the first stagecoach robber in the United States. He was born Thomas Hodges. He worked as a surgeon in the Mexican-American War. He became a prospector and doctor during the gold rush in California. His first arrest was for stealing five mules. He took the name Tom Bell when he identified himself to the police with that moniker. In 1855 he escaped from prison and formed a gang that began robbing stages. In 1856 a female passenger was killed as Bell and his gang tried to rob a stage. The citizens were angry and formed a mob of vigilantes that lynched Bell before he could be arrested.