The question has been raised elsewhere, and for those of you who might wonder -- here's the story.
The Panamint Valley is the next valley west of Death Valley (eastern California), and in the Panamint Valley there's a (ghost) town called Ballarat. Nestled in the hills, with enough gold here and there to support a little town back in the day. A bunch of saloons, a bunch of whorehouses, and a general store or two -- I think that was the commercial makeup of the town. Anyway, in the first half or so of the 20th century one of the folks that "lived" in Ballarat was a skinny old guy named Charles Ferge, but since he was pretty skinny -- folks called him "Slim". He was a true desert rat -- supposedly didn't have much acquaintence with bathing, and, according to his tombstone, he said "Me, Lonely? Hell, no, I'm half coyote and half wild burro." He'd stop in town for a while to get all liquored up and whored out, get a grubstake and then head back out into the mountains for weeks/months at a time.
The story goes on that now and then someone would come to town and ask of him: "Where's Slim?". The response would come back "Ah, he's seldom seen in these parts."
And now you know where the phrase comes from. For more information you can visit
www.seldomseenslim.com and see that he certainly looked the part of someone that had spent WAY TOO LONG out in the desert. There's lots of other interesting stuff about Ballarat on the Internet, too -- did you know that the Charles Manson "family" had a pretty nice hideout up in the hills behind Ballarat? I've got a photo of the townsite that shows the family "escape vehicle" still parked in "town" -- it's an old Power Wagon.
Well, back to the story. Nancy and I've ridden the Gold Wing to and through the Death/Panamint Valley area a few times, always stopping at the "townsite" to shoot the breeze with the caretaker that lives there. We sorta got comfy with the interesting desolation out there. In fact -- the "avatar" on my posts is a photo of me standing next to a portrait of Slim that hangs (well used to hang, at least) on the wall in the general store in Ballarat. So when Nancy and I got sorta serious about our land speed racing -- we decided that we needed a good name for the team (not that "Nancy and Jon Land Speed Racing" wouldn't have worked, but it just didn't fall trippingly off the tongue), and she - out of the blue, I think -- said "Why not Seldom Seen Slim Land Speed Racing?"
Hey it was great -- a real person, not totally unknown but dead enough to not object to us using his name, known to more than a few other racers, and alliterative enough to be easy to remember.
Better still, we've driven to Ballarat in the truck/trailer since -- and the reaction we get when we pull into "town" with all the stickers on the truck is great. "Hey, you've actually heard of him?" is the common refrain.
Does that answer the question? No, I'm not seldom seen -- I get teased all the time about being seen frequently. And the truth is that I'm not as skinny as I might be -- but I do work out, hoping to avoid having to change the team name to "Seldom Seen Lard-Ass Land Speed Racing".
End of story. Have a fine day, and do search around for information on Ferge. His funeral was covered on the national news, in fact.
