#(40) AMERICA:

Edition of 1300 of which 200 are signed 1-200, 26 are signed A-Z as artist's proofs, and three sets are signed as progressives.

April 28, 1974 12 colors 18" x 24"

Client: Hastings Men's Clothing Store, 101 Post Street, San Francisco CA 94108. 100 copies to Hastings 99 copies to Thackrey & Robertson 1 signed copy to Charles Shere A-Z: artist's own use

(Print September/October 1974: Print's Poster USA 74; Images of an Era: The American Poster 1945-1975; The National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, 1975; Print: 50 Years of Graphic Design: The Shape of the Decades: November/December 1989) (facsimile)

One time Dad and I was a'ridin, and we was a good fifty miles from home. Dry-I don't think it had rained in three years.

I heard somethin', and I held up my hand and Dad says, "What d'yuh hear?"

"Drums."

And he listened and said, "Yeah, I hear 'em. What is it."

So I listened, and I says, "It's a rain dance."

Dad says, "Let's go."

So we headed in that direction, riding pretty hard. Maybe five miles. Before we got there, we dropped our reins and tied our horses. The ol' man there he untied his slicker from back of his saddle. We was up within three hundred, four hundred feet from where they was dancin', and we walked on in.

There wasn't an Indian there that didn't know Dad, and me as well. It was the Hopis.

As dry as it was, both of us had our slickers. I looked at that raincoat when he was takin' it off his saddle; the old man was always ribbin' me about Indians and coyotes and me. That rain dance lasted for about an hour, and they wasn't no more a cloud in the sky than there is now for that matter. Nowhere.

All of a sudden it begin cloudin' up-and you can believe it or not, we had to wait a day and a half to cross an arroyo that had been dry, the water raised so high. The bottom just fell out, and I mean it rained.

They don't prepare for that rain with a raincoat-they will take off their clothes and enjoy that rain.

Every Indian that was there come around and shook hands with us because we'd had faith.

Excepted from a 1968 oral history of my grandfather, William Odus Burch, who was born before the invention of the airplane, and died after men had walked on the Moon.