D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2008
Brick and Mortar Memories
Page: 3Moving on north up Pope Street, on the very edge of the Big Ditch, where the Life Quest parking lot and the small municipal park are now located, we used to eat fine meals inside The Spanish Inn. When the old narrow Pope Street Bridge was finally replaced by a newer, wider structure (itself now rebuilt and widened again), The Spanish Inn — its high, maroon wooden front living in my memory like a storefront in a movie Western — was simply pushed over to make room for bridge and park construction. Chicken-fried steaks, even when one allows for variety, have never been the same, and seeing that building on its side was a bit of a shock.
Immediately across the bridge, on the location where Ridgewood Motors now stands, one found the Silver Auto Court and, in the next block, where Med Square now rises, Jack Hill's Court and Store. Both "auto courts" had seen their best days before I was born, but both filled a genuine need, catering to occasional tourists and people who were on temporary work assignments in Silver City.
Beyond them, at the southwest corner of 12th and Pope Street, the immense galvanized sides of Pennington Brothers warehouse extended all the way back to Grant Street, from where the Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy now stands to where the car wash ends across 12th Street from the Snappy Mart. The Snappy Mart and Wells Fargo Bank had not been built in those days. Indeed, that entire city block where they now stand was dusty open space, a huge empty lot where boys my age later played baseball. Eventually, when Heaston-Langendorf Ford moved out of the building on Bullard that now houses the Army-Navy Store, they moved into a huge, new, block-length building that ran parallel to 13th Street with the showroom facing Gough Park. Later, when that business sold, Safeway moved into the front of the building while the bowling alley took up the rear. Eventually, the building was dismantled in order to make room for the American National Bank (now Wells Fargo).
Gough Park did not exist while I was growing up. Instead, the land upon which it was built contained the Welfare Office, immense cottonwoods and a huge metal garage for housing Grant County road equipment. One often also found wide mounds of gravel and asphalt that were to be used for the repair of Grant County's roads. Several of the blocks behind Gough Park, fronting what is now Hudson Street, were also vacant, gathering places for pick-up baseball games, occasional carnivals, traveling shows and other unusual activities. Dust devils ran riot on those empty lots, and tumbling tumbleweeds were a fact of life.
Other fixtures from the Forties and Fifties have also disappeared. Near the head of Bullard, immediately south of Morning Star, Maggie Banks' un-plastered adobe home, the house in which young Johnny Banks grew up, has disappeared in order to become the Morning Star parking lot. A mite farther to the south, the Western Stationers parking lot once housed two immense brick boarding houses where, for about $2 a head, one could eat delicious, filling meals served "boarding house" style around a table that seated approximately 14 people. Western Stationers itself was, in those days, the home of Clifton Chevrolet, and the lots immediately across 8th Street to the south were partially filled by a fine, three-story yellow-and-white brick home that was attractively surrounded by a yard filled with flowers and enclosed by an expensive wrought-iron fence. Eventually, Newt Clifton purchased the property, and the house was replaced by Clifton Chevrolet's new headquarters, the large building built by Dick Tatsch that now houses The Hub, Alotta Gelato and several other businesses.
Across Bullard, what is presently Domino's Pizza gave space to the office and showroom of Foxworth-Galbraith Lumber. Farther down Bullard, Bear Creek Herbs and Shevek's housed, respectively, Bingaman & Snyder Insurance and the Railway Express offices. The Food Co-Op building was devoted to the Studebaker agency and, later, to an auto parts store.
Aside from the Training School, St. Mary's Academy and St. Vincent's, most of the public education in Silver City was conducted on Sixth Street in the Sixth Street and Washington Public School buildings, now gone, and in Stout Junior High, now transformed. The Lincoln Street Public School on Cooper Street was also in full operation, but North Silver Elementary (now Jose Barrios) only went up around 1949; at the time, of course, it was considered to represent the height of modern construction. La Plata, Silver High and the Gila Regional Medical Center are located on what were formerly the extremities of Silver City's very primitive golf course and adjacent ranch land.
The "Mom and Pop" grocery stores — Y. Toy's, Tackett's, Bow's Market, Hing Lee's, Little's and Gene Hall's Grocery — another fixture of the old days, have also disappeared into memory. I had a special attachment to Gene Hall's grocery; I worked there for four years, on Saturday mornings only. I started when I was 10 years old; child-labor laws were more flexible in those days, and I wanted to earn some money, so Mr. Hall gave me a job. It was a fairly simple job: I swept the store, put soft drinks in the cooler, sacked groceries, placed cans on the shelves, and made a few deliveries with my wagon. At 25 cents an hour, I was rolling in dough. Movies in those days cost only 20 cents, but if one took in a Saturday-afternoon Western at the El Sol, one paid less than a dime. Hall's, of course, is gone; by my reckoning, the foundations may be discovered directly beneath the pavement where Hwy. 180 on its way to Cliff intersects with Virginia Street.
The T & H Drive-In is also gone. Located on Silver Heights Boulevard, directly across from the Woman's Club, the T & H during the late Forties and early Fifties was one of the busiest restaurants in town. They served a very good hamburger and later a very good enchilada, and being the only drive-in in Silver City until the Hilltop (forerunner of the present China Gate Restaurant) was built in the mid-Fifties, they did a brisk business in fast food. Originally built by Frank Tatsch and his one-time partner, Harold Hammack (later, mayor of Silver City), the T & H building still stands, much remodeled, slightly to the east of J.D.'s Feed and Supply.
When Tatsch Construction was contracted to build the Gila Theatre in the late 1940s, three small gray-stucco office buildings — two-room houses, really — and several beautiful cottonwoods had to be removed. One of those offices belonged to my family doctor, Dr. Guthery, a frontier physician who had settled in Silver City in order to arrest his case of tuberculosis and who had formerly made his rounds by horse and buggy. Dr. Guthery's own house still stands at southwest corner of D and Market Streets and is now owned by the Hedges family. The new medical office he built to replace the one torn down is now a private residence on the northeast corner of the same block, across the street from the St. Joseph Apartments.
One could, perhaps, go on interminably with a piece like this because memory seems an almost infinite thing. But at some point, one must reach a limit, and it is with The Limit that I should close. Situated on precisely the spot where McDonald's now stands, The Limit Bar was one of a kind. The bar was named The Limit because, in the Forties, it was erected on a line that was thought to measure Silver City's northeastern limits. In fact, in high school, those of us who were thrifty (or cheap, if you like) used to drive to the dilapidated Texaco station just beyond The Limit, about where the Phillips 66 Station now stands, so that we could buy our gasoline for six cents a gallon rather than pay the hefty seven cents a gallon that was then the price in town. (In view of the current price I now find this truly painful to remember but nevertheless colorful.)