Bill's Bird House

The present work was initially illustrated on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, on May 8, 1948, accompanied by the following explanation: "Bill, the Birdhouse Builder, lives and builds in Artist John Falter's home town, Atchison, Kansas, and his birdhouses must be famous from the rice fields of Louisiana, where the ricebirds congregate to the snow fields, where the ptarmigans hang out. For he gives the birds a joint painted so bright they could see it through a London fog. Bill, who is more formally Mr. William Kloeper, is eighty, and has built enough birdhouses for about 1400 pairs of birds. When the West was still frontier, Bill drove the stagecoach from Casper to Thermopolis, Wyoming, and served in two important public capacities in Thermopolis—as town marshal and bartender. But he told Falter that the Old West was safer and quieter than many a modern city." (The Saturday Evening Post, May 8, 1948, p. 3)