Working the night shift at a nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., few people would have thought Traywick would go on to become the official historian of Tombstone.

"I became a writer because I couldn't stay awake," said Traywick, who was working in research and development of nuclear fission at an Oak Ridge facility.

Traywick said he volunteered to work the night shift at the facility because it would give him freedom and he wouldn't have to work under the day-shift supervisors who, he felt, were calling all the shots despite not knowing as much as they thought.

"I knew there wouldn't be (supervisors) in there between twelve and eight, so then I was the boss," he said. Working the night shift wasn't without drawbacks, though; when Traywick was preparing to begin his shift, his body was preparing to go to sleep.

Traywick's job as a chemical engineer involved monitoring equipment, which he found to be a monotonous chore.

"All the walls were covered with dials and gauges," he said. "When one of them went off, I could look at it and tell where it was." If an alarm went off, Traywick would go to the scene with the head of security and the fire chief, instruct workers on what to do and head back to his office. "It might be three or four days before anything else happened," he said.

To combat the fatigue of working uneventful nights, Traywick read anything he could get his hands on.

"Believe it or not, back in the early 50s reading material was hard to find," he said. "You just didn't go out and pick up books— people couldn't afford them and libraries didn't have many."

"I was reading a particularly bad magazine one night and I threw it in the wastebasket and I said, 'I can write better than that.'" Later that evening, Traywick decided to create himself a character.

"His name was Leroy McCoy," Traywick said. "I wrote this in the hillbilly language, rednecks they call them now."

Traywick decided to draw on his six years in the Navy as a source of inspiration for his character. After he had the character join the Navy, he started calling him "Saltwater McCoy."

Traywick continued to write Saltwater McCoy stories for some time.

"Every morning when I got relieved by the day man, I would take this episode of 'Saltwater McCoy' I had written, throw it in the wastebasket and go home," Traywick remembers.

As it turns out though, that wasn't the end of Saltwater McCoy's adventures.
One day, his shift replacement suggested Traywick send some of his stories to "Our Navy" magazine. Traywick was surprised. "How do you know about 'Saltwater McCoy?' " he asked. "I write him just for my own pastime."

His coworker had not only been taking the stories out of the wastebasket and reading them, but was also saving them. "He opened his locker and he had 38 stacked up in there, one on the other," Traywick said. "We picked out two and I sent them to the editor of 'Our Navy.' "

"Now this was 1954; money was not very plentiful," Traywick said. "I made $640 a month."

"He sent me a check for $60, $30 a piece, and a note that said 'Have you got any more of these?' " Traywick said. "It was a lot of money for just writing stories I was writing anyway. So that's how I got started."

Traywick's passion for writing certainly didn't end with Saltwater McCoy. Near the end of the 1950s he wrote his first historical article, about Cherokee Indians. He has since written hundreds of articles and dozens of books on Tombstone and Arizona's history.

Traywick discovered Tombstone while traveling through the region. Citing a nice climate, good schools, proximity to Mexico and a storied history, he decided it would make an excellent place to retire. Moving to Tombstone marked the beginning of a new era in Traywick's life.

Now, at 82, he runs a bookshop, Red Marie's Bookstore, in Tombstone. He regularly writes for the "Tombstone Epitaph National Edition," a historical journal, and continues to publish books. His most recent article was about the Chandler Milk Ranch, a historical fixture near Tombstone.

"If you do something 41 years, you learn how to handle it," he said. "It's not that difficult."