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HAL EMPIE — Small-town Artist With a Big-time FollowingArizona Highways, March, 2003
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It was March 26, 2002 - his 93 rd birthday. Hal Empie — his full name was Hart Haller Empie — was a major contributor to the early issues of Arizona Highways, and his illustrations helped develop the magazine’s international renown. He was born near Safford three years before Arizona became a state. Like many others in Territorial Arizona, Empie’s family lived for several years in a little adobe house with a hard-packed dirt floor. Growing up in modest circumstances in a rural community apparently contributed to his powerful work ethic and his intuitive sense of the look and feel of the Arizona landscape. He started drawing and painting when he was very young, eventually polished his technique and developed an unmistakable style. His only formal training consisted of two three-week seminars offered by Frederic Taubes, an artist and prolific author of how-to books. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who grew up on a ranch on the outskirts of Duncan, remembered Empie and his store in the foreword she wrote for Arizona’s Hal Empie, a biography written by Evelyn S Cooper. "Among my fondest memories of 'going to town,’" O'Connor wrote, "were the inevitable stops at the An Gallery Drug to see Hal, and often Louise, [Empie’s wife], to feel their warmth and hospitality, to have a root beer float seated at the soda fountain, and to look at the many Empie paintings displayed on the walls of the drugstore. The colors glowed. The scenes of local areas were dramatically depicted. On the way out, if we had a little money left, we would buy one of Hal Empie’s amusing “Kartoon Kards" Empie's cartoons for many years were as much his trademark as were his oil paintings. In his cartoons he had great fun spoofing cowboys, horses, cows, tourists and anything else that could be loosely associated with Arizona's flora and fauna. On November 3, 2000, he wrote a note to Cooper, who was at work on his biography. He included his "self-portrait: a cartoon character wearing a cowboy hat with a hole in the crown. Empie, using his own spellings, wrote, "Because I have russeled cows in my spare time, the sheriff often decorated my sombrero with bullet holes.” As an afterthought he wrote, "I am not serving time at present.” In the 1930s, Arizona Highways editors wanted to break up long columns of type, so they turned to cartoonists to liven the pages. Hal Empie's cartoons did just that. In the days before interstate highways, Empie’s drugstore in Duncan was on the main road between El Paso and Phoenix. His postcards sold for a nickel, and they went like hotcakes. For his first card, he drew a man running across the desert with a rattlesnake hooked to the back of his pants. Empie's caption read, "Duncan, Arizona. Just rattlin' through.” Empie’s reservoir of stories was bottomless. For all his success, Empie never became pompous. He said the greatest compliment he ever received came from a 5-year-old boy who was watching him paint. "Mister,” the boy said, "you sure stay in your lines good!"by Sam Negri
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LAST MARCH, HAL EMPIE, Arizona's acclaimed pharmacist-artist whose career spanned most of the 20th century, faced the easel in his Tubac, Arizona, studio, daubing his brush at a painting that was about two-thirds done. That night, his daughter Ann Groves stopped by to hear him describe in detail his plans for the next day. The notion that there would always be a next day seemed a natural extension of Empie’s wit and optimism, but the painting he was working on was never completed. The morning after his daughter stopped in to say goodnight, Empie collapsed and died. 
At 20 years old, Empie worked as both a pharmacist and an artist. The Arizona Historical Foundation says he was the youngest licensed pharmacist in Arizona history. In 1937, he purchased his pharmacy in Duncan, on the Arizona-New Mexico border east of Safford, later calling it Art Gallery Drug. The name made sense. His drugstore was also his studio. Between filling prescriptions, Empie painted landscapes, which he later framed and displayed over the soda fountain.