Stories by Bobby Hunter

• In 1956, Dad was a West Virginia State Policeman. We moved from our hometown of Fairmont to Williamson, which was a redneck town on the Kentucky border. It was right on the Tug river, ground zero of the famous Hatfield and McCoy feud. Dad was the law in the area. When it became clear that he would eventually be transferred to other small redneck towns, he decided that he wanted better things for his family. His brother, our Uncle Jim, had been in the Air Force and, while in Arizona, had heard about the new mine in Silver Bell. In early 1957, we loaded up a big trailer (no Uhauls back then) and hitched it to our 1956 Oldsmobile, which Dad had bought new the previous September. Six of us piled in the car and made the cross-country trip (see photo). We had to stay at a place called “Choate Ranch” for several months, while they were completing the “new houses” in Silver Bell. The ranch was east of the freeway, which was also just being completed. We all thought it was a big wild west adventure. Finally, we moved into our “new” house, number 155. I remember playing on the big hills of dirt which were dumped in our yards, before they were spread out to plant lawns. 

• In 1958, Dad was still a fairly new truck driver. He kept banging his knee on a metal rail in the truck cab. He complained about it, but nothing happened. Frustrated, he finally took matters into his own hands. He got a welding torch and cut out the rail. He was suspended for three days. Guess where we went.

•  Dad had bought our new family car, a 1956 Oldsmobile Holiday four-door sedan, before we left West Virginia. Uncle Jim was torn between a Corvette and a Golden Hawk. He finally bought the 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawk (see photo). Supercharged, it was quicker than the Corvette. Dad said they tested it once on a deserted stretch of Avra Valley road. They kicked in the supercharger at 120 mph, and it nearly tore their heads off. They got it up to 140 but were afraid to go any faster. (Top speed was about 160.) 

• Uncle Jim had a 1930 Model A Ford roadster. Dad and all of us kids used to pile in and ride out on the Old County Road. Once, we were out in the desert, and the car over heated. We all had to take turns peeing in the radiator to fill it up enough to get us back home. 

•  Over the years, Dad had a couple of Dodge pickup trucks, an old bug eye 1948 and a 1951. We all used to pile in the back of the truck or Uncle Jim’s Model A (see photos), and explore the desert along the Old County Road. Often our group would include Uncle Marvin and our cousins, the Fryes. We would sometimes stop in to see the Summerall brothers, two old hermits who lived in a small shack. Dad said they lived on peanuts and beer. They would come into town off and on to stock up at the store. Once we stopped in to say hi, and Dad noticed a rattlesnake nearby. He was going to get a shovel, but they said to leave it alone. It wasn’t bothering anyone. 

Once we saw a Gila monster crawling up the side of our house. Uncle Jim grabbed it by the tail and put it in a large jar. (It was actually a Mexican beaded lizard.) He took it to the Desert Museum.

We played outside constantly, all day long. There were no video games or cable channels. There were only three major network TV channels (black and white) and, if we were lucky at certain times of the evening, and with the antenna turned just right, we could maybe get a fuzzy fourth public TV channel.

• We were surrounded by high desert. There was even desert right in the middle of town. We ran and played in the desert day and night. I never remember seeing a rattlesnake or scorpion. We did have bees and wasps. I was bitten by a centipede at the pool once, no big deal.

•  Our neighbor across the street, Jerry Brown, had a little dog named Skipper (see photo). He was our constant companion while we were playing ball or running through the desert. He was a stray that they found and kept. He was a wonderful dog, except for one thing. If you pointed anything at him, even a stick, and acted like it was a gun, he growled and got very upset. We think he may have been shot at before. 

My brothers and I, along with the Sanchez kids and Jerry Brown across the street, were always playing baseball. When we didn’t go to the ball park, we would play in a little cleared out desert area behind their houses. There was a barbed wire fence running along what would have been first base and right field, so we all became right-handed pull hitters, always trying to hit into left field, to keep the ball from going over the fence. We had a makeshift backstop, made from pieces of sheet metal and bits of chicken wire. Our bases were old boards, or bricks or old pairs of stuffed jeans, whatever we could find.

Every Spring we had to clean our swamp cooler. Dad would climb onto the roof and lower the panels down to us kids. While he was cleaning the cooler, our job was to clean the panels. We would always save the old powdery white cooler pads to mark the baselines on our sandlot field.

We were always in need of baseball equipment. We would use a ball until the cover came off, then wrap it in black electrician tape and use it again. We used all wooden bats back then, and they would eventually break. And the taped bats would no longer stay together. One summer, we decided we needed a new bat. There was one for sale at the store. At that time, you could go into the store with a few coins and buy something. If you had a penny, you could buy a piece of bubble gum. A candy bar was 5 cents. A soda pop was 10 cents, but you had to pay a 3 cent deposit, which you got back when the bottle was returned. We combed the town looking for discarded pop bottles to turn in for the deposits. Finally, we had enough to buy the bat, $1.50!

Another sport we learned at Silver Bell was golf. Larry Spence was our baseball coach one summer, and he was a golfer. He would take me and my brother Jimmy down to the old Silver Bell golf course, and we would play 9 or even 18 holes (see photo). The fairways were somewhat cleared out desert, and the greens were sand, with rakes to clear the cow pies out of the way.

In the late 1960s, Larry was elected to the Marana School Board and was instrumental in getting evening activity buses for the kids and limiting practices to 6 pm.

When we were kids, we used to build soap box racers. We called them go karts, but they were just kid-powered pieces of scrap wood. We would straighten out old nails and reuse them. We used old toy wagon or tricycle wheels, whatever we could find. An axle was a piece of re-bar nailed to a board. Steering was with a piece of rope tied to the front axle. With enough pushing, we could get going fairly fast at the top of our sloping street. We made a brake lever from a board that was supposed to drag the ground. It was useless. Brakes were usually our feet or an obstacle we hit.

One Christmas, we got a real go kart (see photo)! And the Sanchez kids across the street got the same thing! For awhile, we had backyard races. Then we made larger race tracks along the alley and desert. Our racing helmet was a football helmet. The tires were solid rubber, with single wheel drive. We wore out more than one drive wheel.

 When we were kids, we all rode down to Lil’ Abners almost weekly, on the dirt road (now Twin Peaks Road) through “Rattlesnake Pass.” Dad and Uncle Jim would go to the bar (all there was then), and we would get our soda pops and go watch the rodeo. Eventually, they added a little dining area, complete with stone fireplace, which Dad and Uncle Jim helped build with stones they hauled down from Silver Bell. The fireplace and original bar are still there, and you can just make out the remains of the little rodeo arena to the north side of the property. 

 We usually caught the school bus around 7:30 am. Living at the top of the new houses, we were the first stop. If we got there early, we would set up cans in the desert and throw rocks at them from a high bank. We felt fortunate being the first bus stop. If we were late, we could always run down to the bottom of the new houses and catch the bus at the last stop.