HAL EMPIE WAS HERE

At one time, he was the youngest licensed pharmacist in Arizona. Later, he was the oldest continuous resident artist in the state. In between, Hal Empie was a regular contributor to Arizona Highways. In a new book, his daughter Ann commemorates his remarkable legacy.

Hal Empie always smiled and always whistled. Sweet little songs, known and unknown. And that fact among many other happy memories - is the barometer by which the artist's daughter, Ann Empie Groves, measures her childhood.

"That pretty much says it all," Ann says. "He was a classy, happy, unassuming gentleman."

But there are other measures of Hal's magnitude, too, both as a man and as an artist.

Born in 1909, Hart Haller "Hal" Empie was, according to his daughter, "a child of the Territory, who grew up with the state."

Indeed, in the preface to her 2019 book Way Out West: Hal Empie's Kartoon Kards, The Collection, the Arizona Historical Foundation asserts, "Empie was born to humble circumstances in a oneroom, dirt-floored adobe house in the rural reaches outside Safford, Arizona, where he took instruction in a country schoolhouse inclusive of all grades. He relocated to the town proper in 1920, when his parents opened the New York Hotel. The times were such that a boy was expected to help earn his keep, and he did so through a variety of colorful means ranging from animal trapping to door-to-door sales of homemade cheese and mail-order salve."

Before the age of 21, though, Hal was issued a special license to practice pharmacy, making him the youngest licensed pharmacist in Arizona history. He'd studied pre-med at the University of Arizona and graduated from the Capitol College of Pharmacy in Denver. But he also was a self-taught artist: When he wasn't filling prescriptions or making cherry colas, he spent fleeting moments sketching and painting. Soon, those sketches garnered a lot of attention, and Hal's work was in demand. He registered his first "Kartoon Kard" in 1936, making it the first postcard copyright by any Western cartoonist. By 1938, his work - clever black and white illustrations, all created using a pen dipped in India ink - appeared in the pages of this magazine. Editor Raymond Carlson wanted more. And more. And more. Finally, Ann says, her dad had to recommend another Arizona artist and his friend, Ted DeGrazia, to help fill the pages. "The drugstore was just too busy," she says. "He couldn't keep up. But because he was a friend of Mr. Carlson, he felt comfortable saying so."

And when his friend went off to fight in World War II, Hal was required tostay home. “We have scrapbooks filled with WWII newspaper clippings, Dad’s registration and classification cards, letters and even V-E Day photos from a hometown soldier,” Ann writes in the book. “Dad wrote everyone he knew that was serving. You could bring anything and everything you wanted to mail to a soldier and he would package it for shipment as a courtesy. ... Dad was prepared and willing to serve, but in those days he was ineligible because he was one of the few pharmacists within so many miles.” We don’t know if Hal ever wrote to Mr. Carlson while he was overseas, but chances are good that he did. That said,

Ann estimates that her father published nearly 40 illustrations in Arizona Highways over the years. But that’s not his entire legacy. Or even the start of it.

Tubac is quiet on a gray Thursday morning in November, the skies heavy with past rain and the suggestion of more, the creosote ripe with desert perfume. Inside Hal Empie Studio and Gallery, though, Ann Empie Groves is listening to music and walking among the dozens of oil paintings that hang on the gallery’s walls. There are dozens of Western scenes, paintings so rich with color that they seem edible.

“Look at the clouds,” Ann says. “He would paint them with his hands. You can see his fingerprints in so many of them. The way he’d create a silver lining, too.” Silver linings seem a thing with the Empie family. The town of Duncan where Ann and her brother, Joel, and sister, Halene, grew up is nestled in the Gila River Valley, just miles from the ArizonaNew Mexico state line. Hal and his wife, Louise, had settled there in 1934, purchasing the town’s drugstore in the process. With an area of just 2.2 square miles, the town has long been ravaged by floods, and it was the Gila River that drove Hal and Louise to Tubac in 1984, after 50 years as the town's stalwart pharmacy family. And after too many floods.

"There was a flood in the late 1970s where the water line on the outside of the drugstore was 9 feet deep," Ann says. "It just got to be too much for my parents to put the store back again. The move was hard on all of us. We were losing our childhood home and that feeling of going home for the holidays."

Today, though, she finds that silver lining: collecting and preserving her father's paintings and drawings - and sharing them with a whole new generation of admirers. It's easy.

"One thing my dad taught me is that you'll always find the time to do what you want to do," Ann says. "We were always welcomed into his studio, and I think that speaks to the quality of my parents. Sometimes, I'd ask my dad what something was. He'd say, 'It's whatever you want it to be."

Hal refused to copy photographs in his work. Everything was original, sprung from his own experiences and imagination, and his only "formal" training was a six-week stint with European master Frederic Taubes.

His paintings were exhibited across the country. His postcards were sold in 38 states. And, once, "I went with him by train to a one-man show," Ann says. "They took down Norman Rockwell and hung up my dad."

Today, his work is housed at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution, as well as the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Columbus, Ohio. And, of course, at the studio in Tubac.

"When he passed in 2002, Dad was the oldest continuous resident artist in the state," Ann says. "I hope people recognize that he was here, what he did and what he contributed to Arizona. He was like an ambassador through his work. But he didn't paint to sell or paint to be recognized - he wasn't in any clubs or organizations. The pleasure for him was simply in creating."

Outside the gallery, the clouds build again, gray and gold and silver. AH Hal Empie Studio and Gallery is located at 33 Tubac Road in Tubac. It's open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and from noon to 4 p.m. Sundays (call for summer hours). Way Out West: Hal Empie's Kartoon Kards, The Collection is available there and at the Arizona Highways gift shop in Phoenix. For more information, call 520-398-2811 or visit halempiestudiogallery.com.