Please raise your hand if you think the Internet is the most overhyped subject since thigh creme. I certainly do, and yet this is a tale of one technologically spastic man's conversion from web-hater to, well, web-liker. True love takes time.

Born in 1958, I have been trapped between the Computer Generation and Pencil-and-Paper Generation. As a young journalist, I was given the option of learning the computer or learning how to drive a delivery truck; I reluctantly chose the former, and I've remained skeptical about how much time computers really save us.

One example: my first book was written on a Smith-Carona typewriter which had no memory and ran out of correcting tape at page 176. Later, I purchased a fancy computer and began work on the Great American Novel. Making revisions was a breeze, and I could even move paragraphs around with the click of a mouse. In fact, I had so much re-writing freedom that I never finished the book; I just rewrote the same 130 pages over and over. Of course I blame the computer.

Just as I became reasonably computer literate, the Internet comes along and I am at another technological crossroad. Should I jump in? Or is this like going to see the big, lousy blockbuster movie just because you feel like you're "missing out" if you don't?

Colleagues reminded me that as a publisher, I should be progressive, so I got hooked up. Excuse me, on-line. Here's what I found out about the Internet: it was complicated to set up, more expensive than cable TV (and no movies!), and extremely slow going. I mean extremely slow. If you had asked me a very important question about, say, the origins of chicken fried steak, I could easily drive home, kiss my wife, wander into the library, select the proper volume of our seldom-used Encyclopaedia Brittanica, study every facet of rural cuisine and then return to my office fully briefed about this noble entree before the computer could navigate its way to the subject "Cows: Foodstuffs Derived Therefrom."

Just as I was becoming a confirmed Internet cynic, the impossible happened. My mom became a hacker. That's right, my finishing school valedictorian mom who collects those little antique teacups and still listens to Perry Como went out and bought a computer, went on-line and got her own e-mail address. I fully expected the earth to stop rotating.

I watched her giggling with delight as she discovered the computer with the same sense of wonder my two-year-old son gets from watching Mary Poppins. She recently called me and squealed into the phone, "I can get golf scores!" (Yes, she and Dad like to watch golf. That's how wildly hip these people are).

Soon after this I started "browsing" on my own, and I realized that for all of its millions of offerings, the Internet didn't have a really great Western website covering all the cool stuff and great Western heritage that say, Cowboys & Indians covers. Opportunity was knocking.

After some research, I contacted two of the best in the Internet business. David Rohr and John Tollett of West of the Pecos are phenomenal website designers and since their company is based in Santa Fe, they agreed to design our site. For our server (I still don't know what that means, but you have to have one) we went with Jerry Gatlin and Joe Stanke at Texas Trading Post, and they have an incredible array of clients who carry Western market products. The bottom line is that we are now up and running at the address above and we hope you'll stop in for a visit, even if it is electronic.

The American West is a very large place, and it makes sense to utilize something which can bring us all a little closer. I still prefer a hand-written letter or a face-to-face chat, but this is a new generation and the website gives us a chance to do some new and different things you won't see in the magazine. I think mom will be proud.


Copyright ©1997 Cowboys & Indians

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Illustration by Philip Chalk