Skip to main content

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.  





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more