The Old West Photography of Dane Coolidge

BY: Kay Mayer

Hal Empie at 79

The red hair is white now, but the sidelong look as he waits for a laugh at the end of a story is as elfin as it ever was.

In his old "Norman Rockwell" eyeshade and painter's apron, he returns to the easel in his new studio in Tubac. He moves like a young man, and the years between our conversations drop away.

Perhaps only through clues in his paintings or in his own bemused commentsmight you guess that Hart Haller "Hal" Empie counted 79 birthday candles last March. "I've been around so long, ever'body looks familiar to me," he says with a laugh. "I think I've met ever'body at least once."

Certainly he's met almost everyone in his earlier, longtime haunts of Graham and Greenlee counties in eastern Arizona. Possibly most of the travelers, too, on U.S. Route 70 between Globe and the New Mexico border, because for 50 years Hal Empie combined his profession of painting with his profession of pharmacy in Safford, in Solomonville (now called Solomon), and later in Duncan in his Art Gallery Drug Store.

His light and spacious studio in Tubac is more than just miles distant from his first-a small square in the back of a drugstore-where he painted in 10and 15-minute intervals between customers. Working seven days a week as he did, there was no other spare time. Concentration came early. "Sometimes I'd have the picture clearly in mind, my brush all loaded, and here comes a prescription to be filled." He'd go out into another world, a realm of toothaches and ice-cream cones and hot-water bottles, and it might be the next day before he could return to his easel.

As Hal Empie speaks, he daubs at the oil painting before him, changing the position of the legs of a running horse, still making use of minutes though his interruptions now can be as many or as few as he wishes. Earlier his wife, Louise, had been invited into the studio for a look at this painting he calls "Making an Honest Dollar," and commented that one of the horses in the scene was not running fast enough. "She was right. She helps me a lot," Empie says, "always has. I don't always agree, but much of the time she's right."

He mentions that they were kids together, had married young. He still remembers when her family, "the Reinhardts from Texas," moved in down the road. His home at thetime was a one-room adobe house near Safford. It shows up now and then in an Empie painting. "The floor was dirt, packed hard as concrete." The water source was an outside well his father had dug.

Illustrations and cartoons began Empie's artistic career, and his early Western-theme postcards (LEFT) were a commercial success. (BELOW) "The Stragglers"; oil on board, 14 by 30 inches.

His father, Hart Dewitt Empie, who moved from New York State for medical reasons, had recovered his health by the time his son Hal was born in 1909. It was a quiet, happy time. The Indian troubles were past, and though Arizona was still a territory, statehood was to come in 1912.

Mostly self-taught, Empie began polishing his artistic skills at an early age. He didn't realize it at the time, but with his constant drawing, he was feeding a prodigious visual memory. That process continues. He still makes regular field trips and returns with sketches. Yet he rarely refers to them. His paintings are all from memory or imagination. He says there's a scroll in his head he can unreel at will. "I can even look at faces up close, if I want to."

Through his on-the-spot drawings, the anatomy of his subjects is etched in his visual memory, and when he paints, he puts them "where the painting needs them. Besides," he adds, "I found out early that there is no creative satisfaction in copying. So I don't do it."

He turns from his painting, pushes back His eyeshade, and looks out his studio windows through the golden light into the past. His memories are many and include watching the local militia when they entrained to counter Pancho Villa; crinkling his first one-dollar bill; riding with his family in his father's 1913 Model T Ford in the big parade on Armistice Day, 1918. "When the news broke that the war had ended, people left their homes to come together. They were rattling pans, tooting horns, laughing, crying; some were walking, some riding. They just kept coming until that parade stretched more than 20 miles, from Solomonville to Fort Thomas."

His first "serious" painting was done at age 14 when he was working for Amos Cook in the Best Drug Store in Safford. Hal used poster paint and drew palm trees ("They were awful!") on the backbar mirror of the soda fountain. He added blue water and a sign, "Banana split 15 cents."

"I wasn't very good, but I wanted to be." He says he kept on painting signs and doodling animals all through high school and well past the time he took his Arizona Board of Pharmacy exams.

It was while doodling in Duncan in the mid-1930s that he created his first Empie Kartoon Kard. "I made a drawing in the proportions of a postcard-a man running across the desert. Hooked to the back of his pants was a rattlesnake. My caption read, 'Duncan, Arizona. Just rattlin' through.'"

He had 100 postcards printed, put them on the rack with the other nickel cards, "and the tourists just hauled them off." One night after the store closed, he drew another, showing a dog running across a flat desert, not a thing in sight except distant low hills. "I captioned that, 'I think that I shall never see anything as lovely as a tree.'" Again he gives me that sidelong look, and we laugh.

and in fund-raising pleas. An Empie Kartoon Kard was discovered in a hayloft in Italy during World War II, another under glass at the registration desk of a Tokyo hotel. "I ended with about 127 copyrights."

The Empie Kartoon Kards supported all three of the Empie children-Halene, Joel, and Ann-and put them through college. His youngest, who is now Ann Groves and his business manager, recently revived the cards. She said the original drawings have been divided between two archives: the Carnegie Library at Syracuse University, New York, and the Empie Collection at the Arizona Historical Foundation, Hayden Memorial Library, Arizona State University in Tempe. Commissions began to come to the artist-who-was-also-a-pharmacist. In 1952 there was one for a mural in the Duncan High School cafeteria, in which he painted people of Greenlee County, the familiar land, and its historic procession of Indians, Spaniards, miners, farmers, and ranchers.

"I painted on linen, a single piece that I stretched by myself," Hal remembers. "The painting measures 8 feet high, 27 feet long. Local people modeled for me. In the background are familiar landmarks like Vanderbilt Mountain and Steeple Rock. Took about 580 hours of work." He adds that when he saw it last, the mural still looked fresh, and teachers continue using it as a visual aid.

Through the years, commissions and honors increased. His paintings are included in the permanent collection of the Carnegie Library at Syracuse University. The Arizona Historical Foundation has its special Hal Empie Collection at Arizona State University's Hayden Library. The Tucson Museum of Art includes several Empie paintings in its permanent collection, as does the George Phippen Museum in Prescott. He also has completed a series of religious paintings that are now in various churches.

Yes, he feels at home in Tubac, he says, because he's still in Arizona; but he does need to visit his beloved Gila Valley from time to time.

Asked about his plans for the future, Hal Empie says, "Every picture I do is one more inch toward my goal. Some day I'm going to do a really good picture-if the Almighty gives me time!" He pauses, looks around him and, as he gives me his sidelong look, adds: "Right now I'm as close to heaven as I want to be."