ANOTHER local individual was ‘The Keighley Cowboy’, the late Peter R Slack, a familiar figure around town 40 and more years ago.
Alas, given the state of modern society, the authorities nowadays would rightly disapprove of a man, however harmless, swaggering provocatively in public with his gun-hand poised ready for a quick draw of his replica Colt 45. The speed of Mr Slack’s aimed draw was three-and-a-half seconds.
He was equipped down to the smallest Western detail in authentic hat, bandana, chaps, boots, spurs, gun-belt and a deputy marshal’s badge from Tombstone, Arizona – “scene,” as the press liked to point out, “of the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral”. He had four replica Colts. All he lacked was a horse.
Occasionally, he would make a stylish entrance through the swinging saloon-doors of the reference library and lean an elbow on the long old-fashioned enquiry counter, as if expecting a glass and bottle to be slid along it! I would have liked his photograph in a prosaic Keighley street, but he preferred this Western backdrop from a Drill Street studio.
“I’ve got used to it,” Mrs Slack would say when asked about him. “He has his own hobbies and I have mine.”
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