swellhead

A. J. Liebling called him “Mr. Swellhead Bigmouth Poet,” while John Ahern, writing in The Boston Globe in 1964, mocked his “vaudeville” verse as “homespun doggerel.”

The Directorio Revolucionario, a student group backed by onetime President Carlos Prio, which had its own band of guerrillas in the central Cuban mountains, worried that adulation for Castro might turn him into a swellhead dictator.

Over the years he traveled thousands of miles along pioneer trails, tabulated the names of more than 57,000 old California settlements, came to know as much about Grizzly Gulch, Whiskey Slide, Swellhead Diggings, Loafers' Flat and Lousy Level as any man alive.