By Hilary Chigro
The restored 19th-century ballroom above Pizza Madness in Cañon City was lit by powerful spotlights. In front of a set made to look like an Old West trading post stood three men and one woman decked out in blue checked gingham with brown leather vests. The woman started singing in a rich full voice that filled the room.
Then two men came running out of the “trading post.” The first one began talking and I strained to hear what he was saying about a band called the “Rockin’ M Wranglers.” A woman in the corner of the room held up a sign reading “WILD APPLAUSE.” The audience of about fifty people—men, women and a fair amount of children—began whooping and hollering. I wasn’t sure what I was applauding—and neither was the audience.
We were watching the taping of the pilot episode of Cowboy, a variety show hosted by Cañon City writer and producer Don Bendell, together with his onstage sidekick Buck Taylor, and C&W singer Rex Allen, Jr. But only the sound engineer could hear Bendell, Allen, and Taylor as they recorded their show for Think B.I.G., Bendell Intermedia Group. “[‘Cowboy’] will be “like Hee-Haw on steroids,” Bendell told me, after the tape stopped rolling.
According to his frequent news releases and Web site, www.donbendell.com, Bendell is the author of numerous war and Western novels as well as the director of a low-budget, straight-to-video martial arts movie, The Instructor (screenplay by Don Bendell, starring Don Bendell, stunts by Don Bendell). He is also a former Green Beret officer, master karate instructor, tracker of lost persons, and a poet.
How does he juggle it all? “Be like a postage stamp,” he says: “Stick with it until the job is done.”
Born and raised in Akron, Ohio, Bendell says he started drinking alcohol at age 12, when he was already smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. He smoked his first joint of marijuana at age 13. By the time he reached 15, he was a full-fledged alcoholic. He flunked out of ninth grade and had to repeat it. During his youth, he broke into houses and stole cars. After graduating, somehow, from Tallmadge High School in 1966, he joined the Army, where his sometimes reckless, sometimes courageous “try-anything-once” attitude moved him to volunteer for everything that he could.
Leaving the Army in 1970 as a captain, he worked as a disc jockey, store detective, and planning coordinator for a community action agency. He also began freelancing articles for martial arts magazines.
In 1980, after his 11-year marriage to his first wife, Linda, ended, Bendell completed The Instructor. Shortly after, in 1981, he married his current wife, Shirley, the movie’s associate producer, negative cutter, stunt woman, and supporting actress, and adopted her three children to add to his three from his previous marriage.
Don and Shirley moved to Cañon City where he could live out his Old West dreams. He continued to teach martial arts and work on his film projects. In 1989, he decided to leave the film industry and start writing books.
Both of the Bendells are involved with the martial arts, but Don Bendell said at a recent reading of his work that he was three “secret” sayings for a good marriage:
1. “Yes, dear,”
2. “I’m sorry, it’s my fault—I should have been more sensitive.”
3. “Let’s go to bed, hon. I just want to cuddle.”
Bendell jokes that he often wakes his wife from a deep sleep just to read her his latest passage that he has written, thinking it is excellent. She will respond that she looks forward to hearing it after he cleans it up and it sounds better. He feels that only people who love you will tell you the truth—even if it isn’t what you want to hear. He advises that a person should marry someone who believes in them—that it can be the most important factor in a relationship.
Bendell first studied judo in 1966 and moved on to jujitsu and karate by 1967, competed in numerous tournaments, and began teaching martial arts in the mid-1970s when he returned to Fort Bragg in North Carolina and opened a karate school nearby. Civilian volunteers helped him to establish a tae kwon do program for the 18th Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, and Fort Campbell, Kentucky. In 1995, Bendell was inducted into the International Karate Hall of Fame. He continues to maintain an interest in his Cañon City school, officially owned and operated by his sons, Bendell Karate, but focuses more on writing nowadays.
Waiving his advertised $2,000 fee, Don Bendell read excerpts from his work at the University of Southern Colorado in April 2002. When he was little, he said afterwards, his father told him that he had diarrhea of the mouth. This was because, according to Bendell, he had a public speaker uncle who used “ten-dollar words.” This intrigued the five-year-old, who tried to use the new words every chance he got. It was when he was this age that he knew he wanted to write.
His advice to writers includes working hard, working for free if you have to, writing for passion regardless of outer success or even natural talent, and promoting yourself.
He also recommends that people write about things with which they are familiar. If a person isn’t really familiar with what they are writing, then they need to do research. Bendell finds himself doing a great deal of research on his books, he told me, but the majority of them are rooted in what he knows. He started out writing a series of science fiction book, the “Tracker” series, under the pen name Ron Stillman. When Bendell insisted that his real name be used, the publishing company found it easy to kill him off and find another writer to write as Stillman.
While he likes to say, “Crash away through the door,” he was unhappy writing for the “Tracker” Series. He claimed to be a “literary whore” during that time, meaning that he wasn’t writing what he thought he should be writing, he was just writing for pay. He needed to find himself an agent.
By procuring a lawyer friend to read his books and act as his agent, Bendell was able to obtain further book deals. It was only after he was widely published that he was able to find an agent. “It’s backwards,” he told me. “You have to have an agent to get a book deal, but you have to have a book deal to get an agent.”
Bendell’s first book under his own name, a non-fiction account entitled Crossbow, was based on his experience in Vietnam as an advisor to the Montagnards, or “mountain people,” an ethnic group distinct from other Vietnamese. He was assigned to an A-Team living at Dak Pek with the Montagnards in the highlands of Central Vietnam. Bendell led the secret Operation Phoenix program, which sought to assassinate Viet Cong leaders, for the immediate area of operations. For a year, Bendell risked his life many times, coming close to losing it. He was forced to eat whatever was available including monkey, rats, maggots, snakes, grubs, bats and the like. Eventually illness forced him to be evacuated to Tokyo.
Years later, in Cañon City, Bendell used his mountain experience to take up tracking. "When I was a kid my buddies always wanted to be the cowboys and I wanted to be the Indian," he said. He found the body of one lost hiker and a lost horse, and his Web site describes his unsuccessful searches for Jaryd Atadero, a 3-year-old boy who vanished from a hiking party in northern Colorado in 1999, and for the three Cortez, Colorado, cop-killers who vanished into the Four Corners country in 1999. (Two were found dead; one is still unaccounted for.)
He has some competition from the Department of Corrections’ fulltime trackers. When two recent escapees were captured, Bendell said that he could have found them faster.
“Recently, two fugitives escaped from a nearby prison and tried to hide in country that is very simple and familiar for my dogs and horse to search in. I offered to help but was told I was not needed, and in one sense, I was not. One fugitive was caught within 48 hours, but the second fugitive was caught after five days and nights on the loose. The fact that they were apprehended is great, but what if the second fugitive would have killed an innocent person, or more, during those five days? Not counting my tracking experience, my dog and horse would have easily run on their trail, and had them both within a couple of hours.”
The main character in his series of western novels about the Colt family also happens to be a tracker. Chris Colt is a town marshal and chief of scouts. Colt is a widower with two children. and a late wife. Many of the characters are named after people whom Bendell knows. He says that he considers it to be a way to work out his issues with people. Often times, he will name bad characters after people with whom he is in a dispute. And Chris Colt’s late wife’s name is Shirley. And while many people ask if Chris Colt is modeled after Bendell, he swears he is not. In fact Bendell says that when he created Chris Colt, he closed his eyes and pictured Tom Selleck.
Bendell’s recent filming of Cowboy was not his first experience in show business. In the early eighties, he hosted, with co-host and friend Tom Atha, a low-budget talk show. Shirley produced and directed. It boasted success with a limited audience in Southern Colorado. Later, in the mid-eighties, Don and Shirley were hired to produce and direct, respectively, another low-budget musical variety pilot. It was similar to Cowboy in that it featured Colorado talent, dancers and singers.
Shirley Bendell graduated from the University of Southern Colorado, majoring in mass communication with emphasis on television and film. She has won the Gold Seal Award at the Denver International Video Festival for the International Television and Video Alliance for business videos and a video documentary series that she wrote, produced, directed and edited. She also was a finalist for both the Horizon and Telly awards.
In the 1980s, the Bendells planned to film the sequel to The Instructor, which would be titled The Revenge. The film was being backed by Tri-Star Pictures. They had produced most of the picture on credit from various companies in the Canon City area. But their leading stunt man, Dar Robinson, who had planned a death-defying leap from the Royal Gorge Bridge, was killed while filming another movie, Million Dollar Mystery. Shortly after Dar Robinson’s death, Tri-Star Pictures was purchased by Columbia Pictures, and the executives dealing with the Bendells were let go.
Only time will tell. Only time and perseverance. Whatever it is that Bendell sets his mind to will most likely be accomplished. Bendell’s busy life has never proved a barrier to his furthering his long list of accomplishments, and though he doesn’t like it, he’ll tell you about it to promote himself and his image. The only way he can do this sort of promotion is to take things lightly. He tells me, “I don’t take myself seriously; I’m just a product I sell.”