Exchanging Stock for Hops in Bisbee

Once upon an earlier time, Bisbee was the largest city between San Francisco and St. Louis. Of course, the cities along the Mississippi and up and down the West Coast were not so large themselves, in those days.

But there was money in Bisbee. "Do the name Phelps-Dodge mean anything to you?" Bisbee had its own appropriate version of the Flatiron Building.

It has its own stock exchange, seen here when Daniel and Elliot and I stopped for a beer after a strenuous workout on the Child gym bars at the City Park. Its big-time fiscal days behind it, it is now put to more refined use.

We sat out on the patio, bordering Brewery Gulch where, later in the day, we had lunch at another soul-satisfying restaurant in another grand, old building.

Before we left Bisbee, headed back through Tombstone, of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp fame,
to say nothing of Big Nose Kate's one-time bordello and (now) restaurant, we drove to the section of Bisbee, on the other edge of the monstrous Lavender pit, to see the second oldest extant baseball park in the United States. Only Fenway Field, in Boston, has had long use--and truth be alternatively told--Warren Park is actually older, but as a multi-sport field. The New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians (I think it was) played there, last, in 1947.

It would be hard to convince a professional ball player to play there today, if a stroll across the outfield suggests anything, but it would be a dream better than the Field of Dreams in Iowa. There is a delicious smell of authenticity about Warren Field.

The Tucson Old Timers baseball team should challenge someone to a game there someday, before the Tucson Old Timers become the even-older-timers.

The TOTs, founded just a few years after the last major league teams played in Warren Field--well, a bit over twenty years later--are a pretty old gang of baseball enthusiasts themselves: 1968, and still playing three times a week. They could bill themselves as having played there after the Giants played the Indians.

Seventy years after.

We, less interested in copper than in hops and good food and the architecture and verticality of Bisbee, loaded up the car, and drove to Tombstone, where there was rumored to be a gas station.

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