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Greetings family and friends! Today's vignette is about several memorable characters including "Handsome Brady" and "Whiskey Bill" pictured in the attached 1960's Knott's Berry Farm postcard......Bill
Memorable Character
CLAUDE BELL - Sand Artist, Sculptor and Big Thinker
OK, I’ll admit that I never actually met Claude Bell, but I have crossed paths with many of HIS memorable characters! Bell was hired by Walter Knott to create permanent sculpted figures for his new Ghost Town attraction in Buena Park, an unusual assignment for someone who up to that point had primarily made his artwork out of sand!
Bell’s dad had a glass blowing concession on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and as a teenager Claude drew pictures in the sand for loose change that people would toss to him. He expanded to other East Coast beaches and to the Long Beach Pike in Southern California creating temporary sand sculptures and where it’s likely where he met an impressed Walter Knott. I crossed paths with “Handsome Brady” and “Whiskey Bill” at Knott’s Berry Farm in the early 1950’s, Bell’s initial painted concrete and steel installations. The duo have been seated on the Gold Trail’s Hotel porch for three quarters of a century and very possibly may be the most photographed characters in the world. He went on to create “The Calico Belles” in 1954, Brady and Bill’s female counterparts Marilyn and Cecelia, former can-can dancers at the Calico Saloon. Other Bell creations can be found throughout the farm including “Slumbering Indians and Adobe Ruins” and iconic “The Pioneering Prospector and Burro” at the main entrance to the park, and large the “Minuteman” located in front of Independence Hall. Bell was happy as a Knott’s Berry Farm portrait artist between sculpting assignments but he was always thinking bigger...much bigger! He envisioned “Dinosaur Gardens” a prehistoric panorama roadside attraction populated by huge cement and steel creatures on land he purchased in the 1960’s for a planned truck stop in Cabazon near Palm Springs. His giant creations, visible for miles on San Gorgonio Pass, are “Dinney”, a huge brontosaurus that took twenty years to complete and cost more that a quarter million dollars, and “Rex”, a one hundred ton tyrannosaurus that have been enjoyed by countless travelers, featured in dozens of books and magazines, seen on the big screen, and are monuments that Bell intended to withstand the sands of time.
-Bill
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