Gila Bend Arizona

The population estimate for Gila Bend in July 1, 1998 was 1,754 and two old crabs.
When I was young Forey Hinderliter, Jr threw those crabs out of town once or twice
when he was on the police force but since the town was one mile long and just two
blocks wide back then they must have crawled back in.

About, oh, three or four miles as the crow flies from Gila Bend and just across
the river there is a long, sloping hill leading up to sheer cliff face on three side.
On the slope there are three rock walls about three and a half feet tall. Slick
Gatlin was running cows in there back then and we went honey hunting at the
bottom of those cliffs. Wild bees would build their hives right in the rock face.
Me and the Bowlan twins (fastest twins in the state of Arizona back in the fifties)
scrambled over that small area numerous times and with numerous parties of others.

There were so many rattlesnakes back then on the road to Painted Rock that cars went that way in the fall just to hear them pop. Just before you get to the dam at Painted Rock there was a ranch known far and wide as DenDor, or maybe it was DenDora -- I've heard it both ways. Bill Bates was the head cowboy there back then. The boss came down from Phoenix to visit him and ended up spending the night. About ten or so he needed some relief so Bill flipped on the outside light and told him which way the bathroom was. "Watch out for the snakes though."

"What kind of snakes?" asked the boss.

"I don't know," Bill replied. Helen Bates shook her head too. "I've never thought to ask them."

The boss stepped out on the porch and took off for the bathroom. Seconds later he was pounding on the door to be let back in and his pants were wet. "I don't know what kind of snakes them are either, but ALL of them are BIG!"

Bill Bates could cook better than any man I ever met. After he quit the Gila Ready Mix crew him and Helen headed to Fort Smith Arkansas where he started up a Mexican Restaurant. Bill loved to fish, and most of all he loved to fish in Mexico. He had a place down at Puerto Penasco. U.S. citizens could not own property down there but Bill had friends everywhere you looked and he could speak Spanish just like a native. His boat was named Miss Kim and he pulled it with a long wheel-based Chevy pickup that had a big six engine in it.

There would be times you came into Bill's station and he would be walking the floor, glancing out the window about every three steps, saying nothing. Sammy Lyons was straw boss there then and he'd say, "Golly Bill. You want me to wash your boat?"

"I'll be packed by the time you're done," Bill would respond. Before the hour was out Bill would be headed for Mexico.

Back then air conditioning was not standard equipment on most cars and Gila Bend service stations were doing a thriving business selling car coolers. There were two kinds. One kind fit on the passenger side window with a little cord dangling inside that you pulled to get the pad wet. A sculpted opening to the front funneled wind through the moist pad and made some people think they were cooler off. This kind sold for $19.95 installed and paid a $1.00 commission. The other kind fit over the drive line hump ahead of the front seat. It was electric and most of them had three speeds. They were designed to be plugged into the cigarette lighter unit. If a car didn't have a cigarette lighter there was an adapter set to make one. An internal pump kept water circulating on the pads. Bill would throw in a free bag of ice to anyone that bought one for $49.95. The ice cost Bill fifty cents a bag and the Merrit Brothers delivered it to him for free from their ice house. Bill always bought just enough coolers to get them through the summer months because they were so bulky to store.

One summer he misjudged because of milder weather than expected and as fall approached he still had more than twenty units left. It was a good time to go fishing in Mexico. The last thing Bill told Sammy before he left was, "That cooler man will be through here any day now. Don't buy any, I don't care what kind of offer he makes you."

Bill had been buying them for $12 each because he bought so many of them at one time. The cooler man showed up and saw there were still 20 of them left. "That's bad," he said. "But I'll tell you what, I'll sell this truckload to you for only $3 each cash money."

When Bill came back from Mexico there were coolers stacked to the ceiling in the office, two deep. Bill stared at them and went into the backroom to wash his hands. There wasn't room enough to get in because there were so many more boxes there. Bill came back into the office and stared at Sammy. His eyes strayed over to the boxes of coolers. "Golly Sam. Did he GIVE them to you?"

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There was one annual event that brought money fluttering into Gila Bend. This was the migration of monarchs into Mexico. When they came it would be in a swath about one mile wide and butterflies so thick it was a major calamity to hit it. The service stations on the east end of town would be selling radiator screens left and right, after blowing the butterflies out of the radiator. No one ever told the tourists that would be the last patch of butterflies they saw for 298 miles, the exact distance to San Diego.

By the time we got there it was a little after noon. I walked right up to the door and rapped. His daughter-in-law came to the door. "Yes?" I stared past her to where Les was at the dining table. "I want to see Mr. Narramore."

She almost moved to one side, then she glanced back to where Les was eating at the corner and caught some motion of his eye. "He's eating. You'll have to come back later."

I was hot on the spot. I was real hot. Me and the guy with me would have made a dollar each if we had stayed there and worked through the lunch hour as we usually did. "Okay," I said as I waved the deposit slip for her to see. "Just tell him I have $256,273.56 of his money in my checking account and HE can come see ME when he has more time."

At the time it was put in the Space Age Lodge was the most modern motel in the United States. We were all proud of it. Al Stovall traded with us at the Texaco right across the street from it. We helped him out so much (at his request) that he promised that after the motel and restaurant were open that we could have free coffee there any time we wanted it. After we got the concrete foundation built Al Stovall kind of disappeared on us and his son Jimmy Stovall was in charge of finishing up the project. Jimmy was the kind of guy you'd do anything for. He was hard working, shy, smiling all the time, and a good sport even after Bill Bates showed him the easy way to operate on a tom cat.

Finally the motel was finished and we never saw Jimmy or Al again. Al's brother (or brother-in-law) came down to run the place. Bill was okay too, smiling, happy. He came over all the time and only showed his fangs one time when he found out our night man was telling folks they couldn't get a room over there for less than $30 a night. "That's not true. Some of those rooms are only $15 a night; they just don't last that long."

And that was true enough. From day one and for the next five years that place was packed. Ray Lyons, the night man was pretty bitter about getting caught with those blasphemous words slipping from his tongue. "After all that work we done for them when they said we'd get free coffee over there any time we wanted it -- now they give free coffee to anyone that works in a Gila Bend filling station." Ray quit and headed out for Arkansas where he lives to this day. It was good coffee though, and except for an occasional drop in by Lucky Sikes we were the only service station men over there regularly.

The boss hired a one-armed cowboy name of Jim Wyatt to take Ray's place. Jim only worked there a few weeks but every night he worked somebody would come in needing wheel bearings. I'm not talking about Jim spotting hot hubs. I'm talking about a metal-to-metal fusion need for wheel bearings by every last one of them. After the third night the boss bought Jim a cutting torch and put me on nights with him to handle the extra business. It wasn't just wheel bearings coming our way, but heaters gone out, water pumps busting, fan belts coming apart, tires splitting their rims. "I attract trouble like a magnet," said Jim. He only worked there two weeks or so and he left us worn out and exhausted. The night after he left there wasn't a lick of trouble in any of the cars I waited on. If we wanted trouble after that we had to invent it.

The average summer day in Gila Bend usually hit right at 118 degrees officially back in those days. Back then the official thermometer was between two tall buildings. Jack Ballas had his own thermometer and he would argue with one and all that "they" ought to move the official thermometer out of the shade so it would register right. "Every time Gila Bend shows up as the hottest place in the nation people hear our name and want to come out here to spend the winter. The way they've got it fixed now the shade hits that thermometer right about 3:30, the hottest part of the day."

Jack and I were out at Arrowhead one day when his "almost official" thermometer hit 131 degrees. Ed Hunt was with us. "Jack," he said. "I think you'd better put that thing in the shade."

Gila Bend population began to grow when the United States Air Force put in its target range south of town. Eddie Stout was still running cows on the target range in 1970. He lost a few head of cows occasionally and Louis Nesbitt said he had to run for his life out there a few times because the Jeep he was driving looked just like a discarded salvage unit used for target practice.

The key to all the Federal gates back then was the same one that fit the gate of the Texaco bulk plant owned by Perry (PD) and Judy Holt -- but Bill Henry and all the rest of us that had duplicate keys were sworn to secrecy. Just inside one of the Federal gates, back in 1965, Jim Peterson found a 1912 Arizona license plate under a little pile of trash that looked maybe ten minutes old. We thought it must have been a fake because of that, and the fact Arizona didn't even become a state until 1912. So I wrote a letter to C. L. Sparks who was in charge of Arizona Motor Vehicle Registrations at the time. He verified that Arizona did indeed offer license plates back then and that Jim undoubtedly had one of them. There were no records left to indicate who the owner had been though.

PD Holt was a licensed guide on the side, well actually running the bulk plant was what he did on the side because he loved being out in the open country better than anything. From javelina to mountain sheep, he knew the best places to hunt. PD finally talked me into going deer hunting with him on one trip with eight other men. We must have seen a hundred deer that day -- and every one of them was a doe.

The trip wasn't wasted though because PD took us to a valley (about half way between Gila Bend and Ajo) where there were thousands of hummingbirds. None of us could believe it was natural for that many hummingbirds to be in one spot, but we figured there was no way PD could have held them there, right? But, on the other hand, I remember that PD quite often swore to the tourists coming through town that he had seen live jackalopes out there too.

PD's son Steve taught himself how to make Apache arrowheads and he was practicing to be a guide too when he grew up. Even before he hit his teens he took grown men out on field trips looking for Indian artifacts. "We never failed to find an arrowhead or two," he once bragged to me.

Steve was a great kid to go out into the desert with. He thought it choicest fun to catch lizards, snakes and Gila Monsters by hand -- even if we had to turn them loose. One time we decided to go out to an old railroad camp just past Sentinel. It turned out that Jim Peterson had taken both of us out there individually before to hunt for old bottles. We got out of the pickup and looked at the old site. I pointed north. "Jim said he has been all over that area and never found anything."

Steve nodded. "Yeah. That's what he told me too."

I looked at him and he looked at me, then both of us said, "Let's hunt on the north side." Thus it was we spent four hours in the hot desert, finding nothing whatsoever. We never did apologize to Jim for our suspicious natures.

===================

PD began selling fiberglass dune buggy bodies from Clyde Due's Texaco station and just to show how good the bodies were he put one on a Volkswagen frame for his other son, Mike who was slightly older than Steve.

About the second day after he had the dune buggy Mike came walking up to my house with his head hung down. "PD is going to kill me." (The boys always called their father PD, not Daddy, and Judy was Judy for that matter) He had gotten the dune buggy stuck in a sand trough. I had a V-6 GMC pickup at that time that would go anywhere so off we went. Mike stewed all the way there about how badly the dune buggy was stuck. "PD is going to kill me."

The dune buggy had gone down into a swale and then bottomed out in trying to get out. From the tracks I saw that Mike had spent an hour of more trying to extricate the dune buggy from the trap before he came to me for help. Them was sure two good boys. PD didn't deserve them.

We decided the best thing to do was pick up the front and turn it around so it was heading back towards Gila Bend. It was surprisingly light and easy to do. Once we had it turned around the buggy came right on out. There wasn't a scratch on it. "You won't tell PD I got it stuck, will you?" I promised I wouldn't, but PD must be gone by now.

Tom Harrison had the Arco across the street from us at that time, and his night man was an old man name of Joe, who had replaced Art Velasquez -- one of the best wrecker men that ever lived in Gila Bend. Joe and I became friends because there was so little Arco business at that time and he wanted someone to talk to.

About the third night I was working by myself two regular Mexican customers came in, but this night I was swamped with gas customers and I didn't get to them in what they thought was good time. So they pulled across the street into the Arco where Joe rushed out to meet them. They got out and went into the bathroom.

Now, these two Mexicans were in the fighting rooster trade and they were always hauling roosters in or out of Mexico when they stopped to see us. Well, Joe didn't know this fact. He sees these boxes in the back of their truck and he is just dying to know what is inside the boxes. Joe swears to this day that he only opened that one box. "The rest of them opened themselves."

In just a matter of seconds there were roosters going everywhere on this moonless night. Two of them were having it out on the roof of the Arco but the rest of them, were fluttering who knows where. Joe was nursing gas into the tank and whistling to himself like he hadn't seen a thing when the two sporting men came out of the bathroom.

It didn't take them long to catch on. They started screaming in Mexican, English, Spanish and I caught a few Yaqui words thrown in too. They threw their hats down on the concrete and stomped on them. They shook their fingers at Joe. Then they knocked each other down at the station door trying to get to the phone.

It turns out those roosters were almost priceless, and they were gone.

The fire department came down to get those two slugging it out on the roof. The police force was scouring the back alleys looking for more of the roosters. It was daylight before the excitement died down.

Joe came over and just as he got close he looked back at the Arco station. "What happened over there?" I asked him. "It wasn't my fault," he said. And that's the way it went down in history too.

=================

Not long after that Mr. Ashcraft's son-in-law came back to town from the college he was going to in Flagstaff. Raymond had bought him a brand new Citroen and Buel was showing it off everywhere in town. "It has front wheel drive," he explained. "It can go ANYWHERE."

For the next week or so I saw him going into washes, and coming out of washes, and spinning circles in the desert, and other reports were filtering in of just how good this Citroen was. Just before he left for Flagstaff again Buel came in and we serviced it up. "What a car. What a car!" he kept exclaiming.

A month or so after we'd serviced up his car Buel was back in town, but now he's driving an old rattle-brained Studebaker pickup. "What happened to your Citroen?"

He shook his head. Tears sprang into his eyes. "We were out in the country, just going through some washes, you know. Then we came out onto a dirt road behind some cowboys making a drive."

The tears got wetter. "They wouldn't get out of my way, so I kept getting closer, and closer, hoping they would. And then this horse, this big, HUGE horse, this stupid horse -- backed up to my car and SET DOWN on my car. He ruined it. The hood cracked in two. The fender crumpled. The fan went through the radiator, the front end came unhinged on that side. And the horse just kept sitting there."

I couldn't think of anything much worse. "What did Mr. Ashcraft say?" I asked him.

Buel shook his head and stared over past my shoulder. "I haven't told him yet." It was three years before I saw Buel in Gila Bend again. He was still driving that old Studebaker pickup.

Buel was one of them hard luck boys that never got a break, but had made it anyway.
I can't count the number of times I saw him with nothing to eat for days on end, but
hanging in there anyway instead of going back to work on a shovel handle, going on to
school hungry because he could see what a degree would do for him. Buel ended up
being in charge of many schools in Arizona for the state. He retired just a few years ago
and now lives close to the University of Arizona down at Tucson where he plays
basketball with the Mountain Coyotes. I almost believe I know the exact words he used
to get on the team.. "If you guys think I could be of any help to you just let me know."
It's strange that so many good kids like Buel came out of one little town named Guyla Bend.

Click on these other Gila Bend Resource links to discover what Gila Bend is like today. 1 2

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