MAIL DOMINANT

Soon, Mimi Johnson's mother, who built a house there. Ernst and Tanning visited together at least once, in 1973. After Ernst's death in 1976 in France, Tanning moved back to New York to pursue her art, which began to include sculpture and, later, poetry and writ-ing. She visited her sister several times in Sedona, usually accom-panied by Mimi Johnson. “I think the last time she visited was 1998 or 1999,” Johnson says. “She used to say that the rocks were in the wrong places because there was no Interstate 17 or Highway 179 when they lived there. They used to come in through Jerome or Flagstaff.” Tanning died in New York last year, at the age of 101.

Ernst summarized their years in Sedona in Peter Schamoni's 1991 documentary film Max Ernst. “We had a wonderful life there,” Ernst says. “It was absolutely marvelous. Words fail me when I try to describe it. The climate was wonderful. The people we met there were so different from the sophisticated New Yorkers. They were simply terrific cowboys or artists.” The Phoenix Art Museum has several pieces by Max Ernst in its collection. Sedona Relief, a 1948 bronze, currently is on display. For more information on Dorothea Tanning, visit www.dorotheatanning.org. For more information on Max Ernst, visit www.maxernstmuseum.lvr.de. AH

LONG BEFORE Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, visitors to Grand Canyon National Park shared their experiences with people back home the only way possible - through handwritten messages. They sent postcards purchased at hotel gift shops or letters penned on hotel stationery. This aspect of Grand Canyon history could have been all but forgotten, gone the way of cursive, if not for Thomas Ratz.

A longtime resident of the South Rim, Ratz has worked as a server at El Tovar for 33 years, and he's obsessed with collecting correspondence. As a result, he's assembled an extensive archive of postcards and letters that provides a unique and intimate glimpse of what people in the first half of the 20th century had to say about their time in the park.

Ratz purchased his first vintage Grand Canyon postcard at an antiques store in 1983, and he says he's been “drawn to collecting” ever since. That's an understatement. His Grand Canyon postcard collection - perhaps the largest of its kind - numbers more than 1,600 cards, all sorted and meticulously filed in archive boxes. He's amassed the largest known collection of letters sent from the Grand Canyon, which are preserved in acetate sheets and sorted in binders. He also collects El Tovar menus, photos and brochures, as well as the hotel's signature china. “I like to find out what life was like for guests staying at the hotel in the early days, and to see how things have changed,” he says. “People were just as amazed by the Grand Canyon as they are today, but, in the early 1900s, women going down Bright Angel Trail wore special bloomers.” Ratz learned about the bloomers from a 1911 letter. Like most of the letters in Ratz's collection, it's written in cursive with a fountain pen on El Tovar's hotel stationery. “I'm all rigged up with divided skirt and bloomers ready to go down the mule trail,” a woman wrote.

Another letter was authored by a mule skinner to his family in 1909. “He mainly talks about how he's homesick,” Ratz says. “And he's very focused on how much things cost.” A letter from 1919 shares news about a drowning in the Colorado River. “Someone attempted to swim the rapids,” it reports. “The Indians [watching] all shook their heads and said 'no use.” “Sometimes, I come across love letters, but people mostly wrote about their travels and what they did at the Grand Canyon,” Ratz muses as he flips through the binders. “El Tovar was a good place to stop in the middle of the long journey by rail to California.” When El Tovar opened its doors in 1905-14 years before Grand Canyon National Park was officially designated - the hotel was owned by the Santa Fe Railway and billed as a luxury resort destination. The railroad company sought to attract visitors to the Canyon with the prom-