Go East, young man

I recently had a student at Boyer Valley visit Phoenix, Arizona, my hometown, to take a girl to her prom there, and visit a sick aunt. He enjoyed it, especially “Cooperstown,” a restaurant by the baseball park owned by seventies heavy metal rocker Alice Cooper, a Phoenix native.

“Mr. Mallory, that town is SO cool, it’s so modern and clean and there’s so much to do… why would you ever want to leave a place like that?” he asked me.

“A woman,” I answered. The real answer is certainly much more complicated, but I thought this one sounded edgy and mysterious and its certainly true in part anyway.

This kid’s girlfriend and her family had obviously only shown him the best parts of Phoenix because as much as I love and sometimes miss it, it’s far from Nirvana. For one thing, its several million people bigger than it was when I was a kid, not that there’s anything so wrong with that, but people change and so do cities. The Phoenix of my childhood still had dirt roads and was zoned for livestock, at least where we lived. The city mountain preserves provided plenty of desert wilderness for kids to play “Cowboys and Indians” without having to stretch your imagination too much. Especially my best friend when I was five was Juaquin Luna, a Maracopa Indian who lived two houses down in our Paradise Valley subdivision, up near the corner of Cave Creek Road where Cactus Road turned into Thunderbird Road .

For my birthday I’d beg my parents to take us to “Rawhide; Arizona’s 1880’s town,” a dude ranch complete with boardwalks, gun fights and stage coach rides. There was something cool about having all the businesses all on one street and not having to drive your car across town if you had to go to the barber, blacksmith and mercantile all in the same day.

A few years ago I read about how Wyatt Earp was actually from Iowa, originally, before he shot up the OK Corral in Tombstone Arizona- by way of Dodge City, Kansas, before he ended up in L.A., consulting on Tom Mix Westerns. I liked to imagine that I took the reverse path of Marshall Earp. Arizona to Iowa, instead of visa-versa.

Recently, I crossed paths with someone out on the frontier of the Wild Wild Web who knew what Charter Oak was like many years ago, perhaps not as far back as the wild west days, but certainly back in our town’s boom time.

Bob Lyons lives in Mesa, AZ. His grandparent lived around Second and Cedar in Charter Oak. He had found a picture of their house and wanted to do a little research, so he was on the internet and ran a “Google” search of Charter Oak, he found St. John Lutheran Youth Fellowship’s web page and decided to email me.

“With your church work I'm reminded of our Coach in Charter Oak,” Bob wrote. “Mr Evans, who also taught Sunday School at the Methodist church. He later became Superintendent of the school. Also reminded of my classmate Eldon Monte whose father was Superintendent of the Lutheran school. We graduated in 1939.”

The Charter Oak that Bob Lyons grew up in had two Banks, and a newspaper, presumably “the Charter Oak Times.” Charter Oak had a jewelry store, a post office, a lumber yard, and a bowling alley- sounds like Denison.

They had a pool hall- uh, oh, that spells trouble with a capital ‘T,’ and that rhymes with ‘P,’ and that stand for “pool.” I wonder if Meredith Willson had ever been to Charter Oak.

Bob mentioned a telephone office, electric office, and an opera house. That was more than Rawhide had.

Bob said that there was freight and passenger service at the rail road station. I knew they called it “Rail Road Street” for a reason. My farmer-in-law, Allan Neddermeyer tells a story about how he got on the train for his class trip to Chicago right here in town.

Bob’s Charter Oak had an ice house, I guess I’m not sure what one of those would be. There was a grainery, not surprisingly. There was a “produce house” where customers bought eggs, milk, cream, and chickens from farmers.

There was a ladies dress shop, Doctor Huber M.D., a Dentist, a drug store, and count ‘em- TWO grocery stores. Not to mention a meat market, a bakery, and a harness shop. There was a hotel, a soda fountain, two car dealers, and of course, an implement dealer.

Did I mention the Furniture Store? How about the Mortuary? Well, I guess we still have one of those. There was a Photo Studio, a restaurant and a café (well, at least we still have Citgo).

"The Smoke House was a frame building on the West side of Main Street,” Bob explained to me, “which was one large room with a small caged area in the back right hand corner. In the caged corner the owner made and sold cigars.” That got my attention, even though I haven’t lit up a stogie since college.

“The rest of the room was all open with tables used by clients to play cards,” he continued. “Needless to say, the room was always smoke filled.” Wyatt Earp probably would’ve felt at home, but Doc Holiday probably should’ve avoided it, what with his tuberculosis and all.

Bob retired after 40 years with the Valley National Bank of Arizona. That was interesting to me since my mother-in-law, Marge Neddermeyer has put in around 30 years at the Wells Fargo (formerly Norwest, formerly Northwest) in Denison.

Black Bart had held up the Valley Bank in Rawhide.

Bob got my start in Charter Oak cleaning the spittoons in that bank where his dad had worked until he died of lung cancer from smoke, even though he didn’t smoke. That sounded more like a cantina than a bank.

When Bob lived here there was both a Lutheran and a Catholic school, 1 thru 9. He told me that he took piano lessons from a Catholic Nun. For the time being we still have our public school and I for one want to hold on to our Lutheran preschool as long as we can.

We still have one bank, the Ag, a few seed stores, repair shops, trucking services, a cabinet maker, several hair salons, a graphic design studio, the Hoffman insurance Agency, and of course Staley’s Catering. We may not be booming, but I love that you can walk across town and almost everyone will smile, wave, and say hello. Without fear of a gunfight or of stepping in horse apples.