Several months ago, I was contacted by Megan, the daughter of some friends in Tucson. She’s a journalism student at, dare I say it?, Arizona State University. (Cross state rivalries aren’t limited to the Huskies and the Cougs!)

She had been assigned to interview someone for a class project on “Growing up in Arizona.”   The project, complete with the resulting interview, is now posted: Growing Up Arizona – Memories.   I’ve posted it below as well.

1: Where in Arizona did you grow up (please include dates/ages)?

My family moved from South Dakota where my father had been a farmer to Bisbee, Arizona in 1949 when I was four years old. The previous year my father had spent a long period of time bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis. A doctor in Milbank told him that he needed to go a high, dry climate. My mother hauled out an old tattered geography book and opened it to a map of Arizona. “That’s high and dry,” she said, pointing to Bisbee. “We’re moving there.”

And we did, arriving in the early weeks of February in 1949. I don’t remember how cold it was (28 degrees below zero) when we left the farm in South Dakota, but I do remember that day in March when we moved into our new family home in Warren. I remember hanging on the ornamental iron fence in the side yard under the clothes line, looking up at a clear blue sky, and marveling at the sun all over my body.

2: What was your childhood like in the Southwest?

Growing up in Bisbee in the 1950s was nothing short of idyllic. Our house on Yuma Trail was on the last street in Bisbee’s Warren neighborhood with grazing cattle occasionally dotting the grassy desert landscape on the far side of the road which was then and still is referred to in our family as “up across the road.

We built forts from the dead branches when a string of dying cottonwood trees “up across the road” were cut down and hauled away. We spent long summer days clambering barefoot over the mounds of reddish brown lava found on some parts of the cattle ranch and searched for fossils in the parts that were full of gray limestone. There was a cattle pond where we waded and chased tadpoles. We saw a gila monster once, but we never saw any rattlesnakes when we were playing barefoot cowboys and Indians. (And I was stung on the big toe by a scorpion once, but that was in the yard, next to the house.)

Yuma Trail was a long, gently winding street that’s almost a mile long. We’d stack four kids in the Radio Flyer wagon–without a knee pad or helmet in sight–and go tearing down the street from top to bottom. Throughout the summer, the school libraries were kept open one day a week, and on Library day the Radio Flyer that held kids on other days was fully stocked with books as we hauled them to and from Greenway School about a mile away from the house. I was a little too young to be pals with my older sisters, and a little too old to be pals with my younger brothers, so reading was an important part of my childhood. Those summer library books were a huge part of We walked everywhere: To the drugstore for nickel cokes. To the snow cone stand. To the bus stop where, for seven cents on and seven cents off, we could catch a bus from Warren to Old Bisbee to see a movie for ten cents a pop. By the time I was in seventh grade, we were all concerned about the four girls who had been murdered in Alabama and about the terrible segregation in the “South” Strangely enough, we did so without EVER noticing that at the Lyric Theater in Bisbee, Mexicans sat in one part of the theater while Anglos sat somewhere else. Oh, and the one Black guy in our class sat with the Anglos because the Mexicans didn’t want him. (Go figure!)

Bisbee had Girl Scout troops and Boy Scout Troops. I had a whole collection of “perfect attendance” certificates from Sunday School, and the church youth group, Pilgrim Fellowship, was an important part of my life.

3: How did your family celebrate holidays in AZ?

Christmas in Bisbee started Thanksgiving weekend. That’s when the lights went up all over town, and they didn’t come down until sometime in January when the Greek Orthodox Christmas celebration happened. In Bisbee that was always referred to as “Serbian Christmas.)

There were nine people in our family–more after my older sisters married– but my mother cooked those complicated holiday meals and accompanying desserts–nut bread, divinity, fudge, pumpkin pies–in a kitchen that had no dishwasher and no microwave oven, either. Thanksgiving dinner was usually preceded or followed the Bisbee/Douglas football game, a longtime rivalry with the prize a miner’s pick turned into a trophy that moved back and forth between the two towns.

Christmas dinner was always served on Christmas Eve when everyone was allowed to open a single present. The rest of the presents were opened after breakfast and after breakfast dishes were done the next day. The rest of the day was spent at home eating leftovers.

As for what was my favorite Christmas present? Books, of course. Always! The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew or one of Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books.

4: Do you recall ever playing in the snow as a child? Please include any fun weather related stories.

Only once in my entire 13 years of school in Bisbee did it snow hard enough to close the schools. At the time, my mother was in the hospital having one of my younger brothers, so a neighbor lady, Harriet Smith, took me with her boys up to the top of the Divide so we could play in the snow. My remembrance of it was that it wasn’t nearly as much fun as I expected. It was too cold and too wet.

When my younger brother Jim, turned ten, my parents agreed to take us back to South Dakota to visit relatives for Christmas. I was in high school by then. On my grandparents’ farm near Marvin, I tried riding a sled for the first and only time after being old enough to remember it. I was too heavy for that particular sled, and it collapsed under me. I’ve never tried sledding again or skiing or ice-skating either. I believe that’s called one and done!

5. What is a favorite memory you have of growing up in Arizona?

In the early fifties with all of the kids still at home, my father bought a used Mercury station wagon–a woody. It was an eight-passenger car that could be turned into a nine-passenger with someone seated on the Scotsman cooler in the aisle that led past the middle seat to the far back. My father drove the car, my mother sat in the passenger seat, holding whatever baby was the baby then. From that spot she was able to wield a fly-swatter with great effect if a simmering batch of sibling rivalry got out of hand. The fly-swatter had enough reach to go from the front seat to the far back.

On a Thursday evening, my father came home from work and announced that he had a surprise three-day weekend. Did my mother want to take the kids and go to the Grand Canyon? Once the words were out of his mouth, it was hard to see my mother for the dust. In a whirlwind of activity, she got the whole bunch of us organized and packed and, early the next morning, off we went. After leaving at the crack of dawn, we paused somewhere along the way for a picnic breakfast that consisted of day-old sweet rolls and pineapple grapefruit juice. I don’t drink pineapple grapefruit juice to this day.

On that trip, we visited the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert and Meteor Crater, all of it done in a car loaded with nine people. Standing on the South Rim, my younger brother, Arlan, looked over the edge. Then he turned to our even younger brother, Jim, and said, “What do you think of that big ditch?”

Back at home after our three day outing, a local radio program, “The Arlo and Ray Show,” announced a contest. People were asked to write about their favorite vacations with the resulting letters to be read aloud over radio station KSUN. One woman sent in along a complex treatise on her European trip that took four days to read aloud. My mother wrote hers–a short and sweet recounting of our Grand Canyon Family Adventure? What happened? Evie Busk, with her seventh grade education, walked away with the first prize–a Bulova watch.

6. Where was your favorite place to spend your free time as a child?

Growing up in the Fifties meant that kids had plenty of unsupervised free time. We didn’t have the many kinds of organized activities that are available now. My favorite adult-free places were either “up across the road” or in the yard.

The house on Yuma Trail had a large fenced yard that was full of climb- worthy trees. Each house in Warren had two separate water systems–one with drinkable water for inside and one for outside which flowed with brackish “mine water.” Mine water, pumped out of the underground mines, was a: full of minerals and b: free. That meant the yards in Warren at that time were lush oases, filled with bermuda grass and fruit trees–peach, apricot, fig, and nectarine. We harvested enough peaches and apricots each summer that my mother was able to do plenty of canning with plenty of fruit left over to sell. Picking fruit to sell or can was NOT one of my favorite pastimes, but eating almost ripe nectarines? That was heaven!

We had a huge mulberry tree on the West side of the house, one that covered the grass with a thick layer of red and black berries late every summer. The mulberries weren’t great to eat, but they did a terrific job of dying our bare feet purple.

The yard included a summer house that was good for playing dress-up. We had a sand box made from a huge dump truck tire that my father rescued from a throw away pile at the open pit mine. There was a two car garage, complete with a plank covered grease pit, that we used once to stage a play version of Horatius at the Bridge. I’m amazed now that my mother sat unblinking throughout that daredevil performance without objecting to the fact that her two sons, Arlan and Jim, were duking it out with home-made wooden swords on a bridge made of three of those wooden planks. On either side of the bridge was six foot drop, but my mother never turned a hair. I believe mothers were made of sterner stuff back then!

The yard was a world apart, a magic place, that was available for hours of uninterrupted play until the neighborhood’s collection of apron-wearing mothers summoned us all inside for dinner.

7: Was there a specific area in Arizona that was special to you as a child that is still significant to you today?

Those were the days when, after church on Sunday, we went for Sunday rides and/or picnics. One of my personal favorites was what was then called The Wonderland of Rocks–now the Chiricahua National Monument in the Chiricahua Mountains. Those distinctive rock formations, with rocks balanced on slender spikes were surrounded by scrub oak and juniper, and they seemed downright magical.

We went there for picnics and for Girl Scout Campouts. The Wonderland of Rocks was also the scene of an ill-fated trail ride. I was on a seventeen year old horse named Lightning. On the way up the eight-mile trail, I almost had to carry my deadbeat horse. On the way down, however, sensing that I was an extremely inexperienced rider, Lightning lived up to his name. He took off at a dead run and was intent on scraping me off with a low-hanging tree branch when my cousin, Polly, an experienced horsewoman, charged up behind us on her appaloosa, grabbed Lightning’s reins, and saved me.

One of the last times I visited the Wonderland of Rocks was in 1986. In honor of their 50th anniversary, my parents hired three busses and took nearly a 100 guests on a three day trek that mimicked our Bulova watch-winning three-day excursion from all those years earlier. After driving throughout northern Arizona, we took my relatively new husband, a guy from Chicago, to Bisbee and later to the Chiricahuas for a picnic. In the Wonderland of Rocks, my mother–a woman well into her seventies–took to one of the oak trees in the picnic area, leading my then twelve-year old daughter on the most memorable tree-climbing experiences of her life.

Yes, the Wonderland of Rocks counts as my favorite Arizona spot.

8: What makes Arizona a unique place to grow up?

I think Arizona in general and Bisbee in particular are a reflection of America’s melting pot heritage. Many of the miners who came to work in Bisbee, bringing along their families, were of Mexican extraction. Bisbee’s dining establishments in the Fifties reflected that reality. Mexican food was a mainstay– tortillas and tacos and salsa and refried beans and enchiladas. Other miners came from other places–the declining tin mines in Wales brought the “Cousin
Jacks.” (Pasties were a big deal in Bisbee!) Miners from Eastern Europe–the Serbs and Croats–not only brought their preferred foods into the mix but they also brought their longtime grudges which continued to simmer in southeastern Arizona.

For Anglo kids there were mostly differences of religion–Catholic (Anglos at St. Patricks Church and Latinos at Sacred Heart); Greek Orthodox, Methodist, Lutheran, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Mormon, and any number of bickering Baptist congregations were lines that were seldom crossed in those days. When that happened, there were plenty of raised eyebrows on all sides.

As for the kids who grew up back then? Under the tutelage of the Bisbee school system’s cadre of excellent teachers, we all learned to get along. The rock hard prejudices that had reigned supreme began to soften and disappear. It was a sea change in Bisbee and in America as well.

9. Are there any Arizona-specific events (i.e the rodeo) that were important to you and your family growing up?

Bisbee’s Fourth of July celebrations was always memorable. Early in the morning came the Coaster Races down Tombstone Canyon followed by the late morning Fourth of July Parade, complete with floats, marching bands, horseback riders, and, of course, that year’s winning coaster. In the afternoon and evening, there was a party in the park that included gunny sack races and three-legged races. It was all good clean fun followed by fireworks at 9 o’clock. I’ve spent more than 30 years living in and aroiund Seattle, but I’m still having difficulty adjusting to a place where it gets dark so late in the summer that fireworks can’t be scheduled until 10 o’clock at night.

10. What was school like in Arizona?

The schools in Bisbee were excellent. With the exception of my kindergarten teacher who sent me to the teacher’s closet for screwing up my Japanese lantern project and turning the piece of construction paper fringe, I can remember each teacher by name. Mrs. Kelly, first grade, taught us cursive writing. Mrs. Spangler, second grade, brought me into the world of the Wizard of Oz and made me want to be a writer; Mrs. Gilbert gave me a bad grade in writing because my letters slanted in the wrong direction (They still do!); Mrs. Dye, fourth grade, taught all through the year even though she was battling a serious and eventually terminal illness; Ms. Stammer, fifth grade, a fierce little spinster who came from Chicago and drove a Studebaker; Mrs. Watkins who taught sixth grade and taught me to HATE outlining while also teaching geography.

Then there was the motley crew of junior high teachers–Mrs. Upton who was MEAN, Mr. Norton who was shorter than I was; Mrs. Hennessey who was ready to retire the moment our eighth grade year was over; and Mr. Rossette who insisted that we spend several days each October sitting in Greenway School’s auditorium watching the World Series Games, end to end, on a tiny and, to nearsighted me, almost invisible screen of a console television set positioned in the middle of the stage. Mrs. Watkins taught me to hate and outlining; Mr. Rosette taught me to hate baseball.

The teachers at Bisbee High reflected the population of Bisbee. Mrs. Riggins, Mr. Guerra, Mrs. Medigovich, the Dunn brothers–Charles and Robert, Miss Alford, Mrs. Winters, Miss Reavis, Mr. Smith. They taught us well. Someone who got an A. in Mrs. Medigovich’s senior English class at Bisbee High had a free pass to Honors English classes at the University of Arizona; Mrs. Riggins, a longtime widow, was the Journalism teacher and the newspaper advisor when my friend Pat McAdams and I were co-editors of the school paper, the Copper Chronicle. Mr. Biba taught history and typing, a skill I use every single day, even though I wasn’t all that good at it back then.

But the teacher who had the most profound influence on my life was Richard Guerra, the Latin teacher. As a high school sophomore and second year Latin student, I did what I later learned was a research paper on Servius Tullius, one of the five kings of Rome. I did the project for extra credit to help with my flagging grade in Latin. When my paper came back, at the top of the page in red pencil was an A+. On the back page, at the very bottom and also in red pencil were the words that changed my life: Research worthy of a college student.

I was a sophomore in high school at the time. No one in my family had ever gone on to a four-year college. Until I saw those words written on my Servius Tullius paper, it had never occurred to me that I might be college-worthy material. That sentence changed my direction and gave me a new goal in life. Thanks Guerra, I now have three degrees to my credit from the University of Arizona–a B.A, in English Education, an M.Ed, in Library Science, and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.

11. Was there something Arizona-related that led to your success as a writer?

After attending Bisbee High school for four years I attended the University of Arizona on a scholarship. Because I wanted to be a writer, I signed up to be an English major. In when it was time to sign up for upper division courses for my junior year, I was astonished when the Creative Writing professor wouldn’t allow me into his class. “Girls become teachers or nurses,” he told me. “Boys become writers.”

Barred from his class, I did become a teacher. Later I became a school librarian, and even later I sold insurance for ten years, but nothing ever convinced me to give up my dream of becoming a writer, something I set about doing seriously in the early eighties.

Fifty years after being refused admission to that class and almost that many books later, I am a writer, and I’ve come to appreciate the value of that long ago disappointment. I realize now that if the Creative Writing teacher had allowed me into his class, I would most likely have failed at it because he was clearly predisposed for me to fail. Had that happened, I might well have given up my dream. As it is, that professor made me the writer I am today because I’ve spent my entire adult life proving him wrong. He also gave me something else, a model of Andrew Philip Carlisle, the contemptible villain in my first Walker Family book, Hour of the Hunter

As I mentioned earlier, I remember the names of all my grade school and high school teachers with the exception of the one who sent me to the closet for that failed Kindergarten art project. Guess what? I don’t remember the Creative Writing teacher’s name, either!

12: What does “home” mean to you?

We moved to Bisbee in 1949. I lived there until I graduated from high school in the early sixties. From then on, I was there during holidays and summer vacations until a time in the mid-seventies when, during a difficult time in my marriage, my children and I lived there for two years while I sold insurance.

My folks resided in Bisbee from 1949 until they moved into assisted living in the early part of this century. None of my relatives live in Bisbee any more. For the last thirty plus years I’ve bounced back and forth between Seattle and Tucson.

Even though I wasn’t born there, and even though I haven’t lived there for decades, Bisbee always has been and always will be “home”

13. Anything else we left out that you would like to expand upon?

Years ago when radio was still king, there was a show called “Our Gal Sunday” that was all about the exploits of a “girl from a small mining town in the West.”

I’ve always related to those words because I was a girl from a small mining town in the West, too. She wanted to be the wife of a “titled Englishman.” I don’t know how her life turned, but mine is doing very well, thank you very much. I can only hope she was as lucky.