Wyatt Earp customs added to TV Westerns

I've just completed a major addition to my recent work on custom cards done in the style of Topps' 1958 TV Westerns bubblegum cards.

Presented here is my quartet of cards based on the long-running (1955-61) series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O'Brian.

The show was more "legend" than "life," but that's been the case for the past 140 years. I spent a lot of time on the internet researching Wyatt Earp and have come to conclude that much of what we have seen from Hollywood about the frontier lawman has been, shall we say, embellished. Even the first comprehensive biography, 1931's Wyatt Earp Frontier Marshal, by Stuart N. Lake, was largely made up of whole cloth. His fictionalized accounts have been picked up and reworked time and again ever since in movies and films.

The Wyatt Earp TV show drew heavily upon Lake's book. I've chosen to base my cards on the show, rather than strictly historical fact.

Fortunately for my process, there are lots of great color photos of Hugh O'Brian as the title character, so I had no trouble coming up with four cards.

Here they are . . .

While it is not at all pertinent to my TV Westerns Wyatt Earp custom cards, I want to put in a plug for the Hugh O'Brian Youth Leadership programs.

Inspired by meetings in Africa with Dr. Albert Schweitzer, O'Brian in 1958 founded an organization to inspire youth to take leadership roles locally and thereby positively affect the global future. You can read about it here: www.hoby.org/mission .

I became aware of HOBY when my daughter was a high school sophomore in the mid-1990s and was selected (heck, she may have been the only kid in her school interested) to attand a stateside HOBY conference.

That weekend seminar inspired many of the subsequent educational and career choices that have brought her to where she is today.

For that, I have to thank Hugh O'Brian.