Arnold, a foreign correspondent during the Spanish Civil War who once operated a two-man news bureau with Walter Cronkite for the International News Service in El Paso, was a well-known and colorful figure in Texas. A novel based on his war reportage, Reunion in Barcelona, was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine, and his short story "A Mission to General Houston" served as the basis for the 1950 Paramount film The Eagle and the Hawk, which starred John Payne and Rhonda Fleming. On January 3, 1964, Arnold's body was found at the Garza Ranch on Brodie Lane near Austin, Texas. The 46-year-old writer had fully dressed and packed a suitcase before firing a fatal shot into his chest with a British made .38-caliber pistol that he had asked a friend to sight for him a few days earlier. Several years before when he talked of living to be a hundred, Arnold wrote his own obituary, dated it March 11, 2016, and gave it to a friend for safekeeping. It read:"Jess Arnold, the centaur passed away today, The rootingest, tootingest, non-fightingest, runningest Texan that ever lived died quietly.... The Mighty Arnold died as he lived -- with his boots off. He never wore a hat. The Mighty Arnold never wrote anything of note, but did keep on living. He was always going to write a novel, but never got around to it.... 'Hell,' he would say, 'that takes work.'"
I've always been a big Western movie fan. Still am. And I'm pretty sure I've heard the name Jess Arnold before. I've seen his Westerns and I have to say he's great in every role he plays. He played the role of Jesse James more than five times on screen and played Billy The Kid three times. He also had his own Western movie series where he played himself. In a 1964 interview just before his suicide, Arnold was asked if he enjoyed the Western genre and if he could do anything else what would it be. He simply replied, "I love Westerns. And I'm thinking about writing a Western novel." When asked why he didn't write one before, Arnold claimed, "Hell, that takes work". When asked how he would like to die, Jess Arnold replied, "With my boots on. Like my heroes." Unfortunately, as this thread mentions, that didn't happen. Nobody knows this, but in my dreams, I'm Jess Arnold. So I can you can say I literally died and gone to Heaven only to come back and enjoy a happy life. But does that really make me Jess Arnold? No. That just means I found something I wanna do in life. I wanna be a cowboy. Like Jess Arnold. Happy Trails, Jess. You made the last roundup.
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