NACO, AZ: POP. 1,046

LATE AFTERNOON, SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE OF BISBEE: It's too late for the galleries and too early for margaritas, so I ask my wife, Becky, "What about Naco?" "What about it?" she replies.

That's a fair question, and one for which I don't have a ready answer. Because I've never been to Naco. More curious than informed, I mumble something about Naco being a border town, and besides, the drive from where we are - near Jimmy's Hot Dog Co. on State Route 92 - might take only another 10 minutes. So, Naco it shall be.

We head south on the Naco Highway. It's a grand designation for a modest two-lane, 45 mph road that runs for all of 6 miles through the desert, with the southern horizon broken by the Sierra San José in Sonora, Mexico. Unless you're continuing into Mexico and the copper mining town of Cananea 30 miles to the southwest, Naco, population around 1,000 on the American side, is the end of the line.

There's no ceremonial entry. Signs announce drivers' imminent arrival in Mexico before the highway rounds a corner and parallels the border fence. We work our way to the center of town and find that if Naco has a faded glory, it's decidedly more faded than glorious.

The town's most impressive building is the Border Patrol station, a 1936 Pueblo Revival structure with protruding vigas and colorful trim that wouldn't look out of place on the Santa Fe Plaza in New Mexico. Along Towner Avenue, the main drag, we walk past side-by-side one-story buildings with false fronts and zigzagging Southweststyle rooflines. One building houses the Gay 90's Bar, which dates to 1931, according to the sign above the ice machine out front.

It doesn't look especially gay, in any sense of the word, and the patrons don't pay us much mind, barely looking up from their beers. It's a bar, like many others, where the pool tables command a place of honor.

ON THE MEXICAN BORDER MAIN ST. NAGO, ARIZONA.

Framed arrowhead collections and matching wall plaques of Plains Indians in feathered headdresses hang behind the bar, and I also notice a pair of photographs of a bola-tie-wearing Ronald Reagan and a beaming Nancy Reagan getting into a van. Unremarkable, perhaps, except that they were doing so here, in Naco, and right outside the Gay 90's. There's something about Naco. I'm just not sure what it is.

BACK IN TUCSON, I tell my sister Debbie about these first impressions of Naco. "Oh, you should talk to our friend Salim," she says. "His family owned the water company in Naco for years."

Salim Dominguez is a retired Border Patrol officer - and a still-active competitive pistol shooter. Tall and fit, Salim has a bare head and speaks in a rich baritone resonant of the frontier, like the heavy in an old Western. He pronounces "Naco" as "Knack-O."

He's also as close to royalty as it gets in Naco. Salim's grandfather, Sarkis José Dominguez, was known as the "Prince of Naco." A native of Basloukit, Lebanon, Sarkis came to Mexico as a teenager in the 1890s to join his older brother, who owned a dry goods store in Chihuahua. For business purposes, Sarkis took the name José - and, following his brother's lead, changed his last name from Habib to Dominguez. Hence, Salim's own mashed-up moniker.

""Salim' and 'Dominguez' don't appear together in nature very often," he says. A third Habib brother arrived from Lebanon and partnered with Sarkis to operate a Cananea store that later was robbed by none other than Pancho Villa. Sarkis then came to the United States, leasing a Naco property in 1905, and opened a dry goods store. The town had been established around 1898. A few years later, a spur of the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad's Benson-to-Douglas line began operating through Naco, connecting to a Mexican railroad that served the massive mines in Cananea, where 7,700 people worked.

Sarkis traveled to San Antonio for business, Salim assumes and met Agnes B. Cass, royalty in her own right. Her rancher and merchant grandfather José Antonio Navarro was one of only two Tejanos (Texans of Mexican descent) to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence, which in 1836 established the short-lived Republic of Texas. In 1911, Sarkis and Agnes were married by a justice of the peace in Douglas; a few years later, Sarkis became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Sarkis gained a reputation for generosity. Salim says he used to leave gold coins at the homes of families with newborns. There are accounts of a traditional Mexican barbecue during which he served 900 pounds of beef to 200 people, and of another event when he had 6,000 oysters brought to the remote desert town.

The Naco in which Sarkis and Agnes settled was a far more happening place than it is today. Separated by the width of a single street, and with residents moving freely between the U.S. and Mexico, Naco was one town in two countries. "Like all border towns ... Naco was rather wild and woolly with saloons and gambling houses which never closed their doors," according to one account in the Douglas Daily International. But there also were churches and the kinds of businesses a bank, a drugstore, a hotel and general stores that any respectable town should have.

Naco emerged as an important port of entry along the Arizona border as trade steadily flowed through: equipment going south to the Cananea mines, and thousands of head of cattle as well as some of the finest quarter horses in the world coming north from the ranches of Colonel William C. Greene, who owned more than a million acres in Arizona and Sonora and founded Cananea's mine.

Sarkis prospered. He ran a mercantile, eventually owned 15 residences in town and served as a customs broker while also operating the Jockey Club Café, a dance hall on the Mexican side with gambling and live music. The Jockey Club, along with other drinking establishments, boomed during ProhibiTion, and Sarkis took out an ad for the café that proclaimed, "For Fun, Life, Sport and Amusement It's Naco, America's Greatest Pleasure Resort."

He bought a 1921 Cadillac touring car gray with black trim and all the accessories and he and Agnes built a home, planting fig, olive and apricot trees in what Salim thinks was his grandfather's attempt to replicate the compounds he knew from Lebanon.

The Dominguezes entertained businessmen from all over the U.S. and Canada. Tough enough to grab her gun and chase away burglars who had broken into the Dominguez store, Agnes also cooked lavish meals. She made huge tortillas that she rolled up and served on the side; as family lore has it, Agnes came out of the kitchen one night and saw that an out-of-towner had taken the tortilla and tucked it under his chin, like a napkin.

"My granddad didn't want to embarrass his guest, so he took a tortilla and did the same thing," Salim says.

Sarkis gained a reputation for generosity. Salim says he used to leave gold coins at the homes of families with newborns. There are accounts of a traditional Mexican barbecue during which he served 900 pounds of beef to 200 people, and of another event when he had 6,000 oysters brought to the remote deseit town.

In 1920, after hearing that Army Chief of Staff General John J. Pershing planned to come through town, Sarkis went to Mexico and hired an orchestra to play for the legendary military leader at the Naco train depot. Pershing was so appreciative that he invited Sarkis to ride with him to Douglas.

Describing Sarkis, one article concluded, "He is a student of human nature and he has a philosophy of life that one might build an empire on.... The 'Prince of Naco' believes in America, in the border country and in Mexico as a future source of great wealth and progress. He invests his money into Naco in Ari-zona and Sonora and waits."

But on June 1, 1927, after missing the train to Naco while buying gifts for his sons, Sarkis died when the car in which he was riding overturned. The church was too small to accommodate all of the mourners. More than 100 people waited outside for the service to end before the funeral procession, stretching for miles, made its way to Bisbee's Evergreen Cemetery.

Sarkis' GRANDEST VISION FOR NACO never came to fruition. The town had been in the running, but Douglas got the smelter that would serve the mines of Bisbee. The repeal of Prohibition cut the flow of visitors to the Mexican side, and the railroad spur was abandoned after new lines began operating through Nogales and Agua Prieta. In 1926, a major fire destroyed much of Naco's downtown.

After his father's 1994 death, Salim began cleaning out his dad's office. "It was basically a time capsule," he says. "His business records, from the day he started to the day he died, all of his ledgers were in there. And everything the family had that they wanted to store, it all just went in there, too. Every file cabinet nine, 10, 11 file cabinets full of stuff. Soon as a file cabinet got finished, it went in there."

Buried beneath business records from 1966, Salim discovered photographs that his grandmother's family brought from San Antonio. He also found a collection of his grandfather's photographs and newspaper clippings.

As I leave the garage workshop where Salim repairs and restores firearms, he hands me an incomparable record of his family's (and Naco's) story: a thumb drive filled with scans of the materials he unearthed in the office. So, I travel into Naco's past. In one photograph, Agnes and Sarkis stand along a dirt street in front of a stalwart two-story building with four bay windows and an exterior painted with a sign: SARKIS JOSÉ DOMINGUEZ LADIES & GENTS FURNISHINGS, CANANEA & NACO. Much of the building burned down in the 1926 fire, but a section that survived now houses the Gay 90's.

A color shot shows a small, earth-toned building across the street, with bell-shaped alcoves on a Mission-style facade reminiscent of the Alamo. A tribute to the family's San Antonio heritage, it housed Salim's father's customs brokerage and the Naco Water Co. That building still stands.

From the collection of family friend Fred Valenzuela, there are photos of small-town life: a street scene showing a gas station, a billiards parlor and a meat market; a 1924 image of two men posing stiffly in a telegraph office. But I also find shots of Mexican revolutionary soldiers wearing Pancho Villa-style crossed bandoliers, lined with bullets, across their chests.

Naco wasn't just a border town. For two decades, it was on the front lines.

INSPIRED BY THE BRUTAL SUPPRESSION of the 1906 mine strike in Cananea, and ignited by attempts to topple dictatorial Mexican President Porfirio Díaz in 1910, the Mexican Revolution lasted for nearly a decade.

The border towns in Sonora turned into combat zones. The U.S. offered access to weapons and somewhere to potentially retreat, and major battles took place at Nogales and at Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas. During the revolution, border tensions further escalated following the discovery of the Zimmermann Telegram, a 1917 communique proposing an alliance of Germany and Mexico against the U.S.; the note's discovery helped spur American entry into World War I.

Starting in 1911, a series of battles were fought in Naco, Sonora, although the action often spilled into Arizona. To contain the conflict, the U.S. sent troops to Naco; they included regiments of the Buffalo Soldiers, the famed African-American cavalry units.

Naco was a town besieged. One photo captioned "On the Mexican Border! U.S. Troops Arriving at the Trouble Zone, Naco, Arizona" shows U.S. troops milling about the Naco depot. Other pictures capture artillery units moving into position, with lines of cannons poised on the border, and a quartet of grim-faced soldiers posing in front of a bunker on Christmas Day in 1914.

That photo was made during the Siege of Naco - at 119 days, the longest battle of the Mexican Revolution. No mere skirmish, it was a full-on war, with thousands of Mexican government soldiers deployed in three lines of trenches ringed

The hotel in Naco, with its 4-foot-thick adobe walls, earned a reputation as the world's only bulletproof hotel, and pictures show houses barricaded with boards, dirt-filled gas cans and sandbags to protect against stray bullets from the Mexican side.

By minefields. Vicious hand-to-hand combat, as well as the summary executions of 25 Yaqui captives fighting for the reb-els, happened right along the border, and the prospect of U.S. intervention grew as incidental casualties mounted in Arizona. The hotel in Naco, with its 4-foot-thick adobe walls, earned a reputation as the world's only bulletproof hotel, and pictures show houses barricaded with boards, dirt-filled gas cans and sandbags to protect against stray bullets from the Mexican side. Town residents dispatched a telegram to President Wood-row Wilson: "The American citizens of this border town ear-nestly appeal to you for immediate and adequate protection from the battle between the Mexican factions. Thousands of bullets are carelessly or maliciously fired into our streets and buildings, compelling us to abandon our homes and causing us to suffer great hardships and danger." According to an article in the journal Arizona and the West, Brigadier General Tasker H. Bliss warned the Mexican combat-ants that the next bullet that crossed the border would lead to "wiping the offender from the face of the Earth." By that time, U.S. forces at Naco had swelled to more than 6,200 men. "Every home in town was penetrated by bullets," Salim says. "I passed a metal detector over the outside wall of a house my dad owned, and it started going beep beep beep from all the bul-lets that had impacted it. At the home of friends of ours, they were moving a bed and found a pie plate. It covered a hole where a cannonball had come through the wall and through the floor. The cannonball was still in there."

DESPITE THE SIEGE OF NACO'S significance, if people know only one thing about Naco's military history, it's an incident that took place during a 1929 Mexican conflict known as the Escobar Rebellion. For a select segment of the borderland population, war meant opportunity. Among the mercenaries was the Yankee Doodle Escadrille, a loose group of pilots hired by both the rebels and the Mexican troops to fly missions. One of these fly-ers, Patrick Murphy, made history when Naco became the first U.S. municipality bombed from the air by foreign forces. Salim's father was there that day. In Tom Kuhn's 1994 Arizona Highways story recounting the bombing, he said, "I remember going to school, and there were machine guns on each of these sidewalks, on the corners, manned by American soldiers. And I remember that little plane coming over, circling around." Not a whole lot is known about Murphy. A native of Ireland who had lived in Oklahoma, he apparently had a bad leg. Or maybe just one leg, depending on the account. Murphy, as the story goes, was tippling whiskey in a Bisbee bar when he caught wind of the rebellion. Hired by the revolutionaries, Murphy flew his biplane over the combat zone, with a rebel soldier act-ing as bombardier. The makeshift explosives consisted of sticks of dynamite packed into suitcases, and the bombardier's aim was equally improvised. Instead of hitting Mexican Army positions, Murphy's bombs struck the Arizona side. A Dodge touring car, stashed for safekeeping on the U.S. side by a Mexican general, was destroyed, and a couple of buildings were damaged, including the Dominguez family's grocery store, which had windows broken. It could have been much worse: A dispatch from The New York Times said one bomb fell in a rail yard where bystanders were watching the action from the roofs of boxcars: "The town was thrown into wild confusion." A handful of minor injuries were reported on the American side. In reading both Kuhn's story and contemporaneous accounts of the 1929 rebellion, it's clear that Murphy wasn't the only pilot to accidentally strike the U.S. side. But Murphy's story had the stuff of myth: a one-legged (or bad-legged) pilot who not only survives after his plane is shot down but also disappears forever soon after, escaping prosecution. So, the legend belongs to Murphy, and Arizona's official state balladeer, Dolan Ellis, immortalized the Irishman in the song The Bombing of Naco.

THE WEATHERED BUILDINGS in Naco's commercial district scarcely hint at the dramas that played out here or the dreams Sarkis had for the town's future. Salim shipped out for Vietnam in 1968 and only briefly lived in Naco once he returned stateside. He sold the water company, and while he's interested in his family and the town's past, he's less than optimistic about Naco's future.

There's little happening economically. Turquoise Valley Golf Course, established in 1908 and home to “The Rattler” (at 747 yards, billed as the 10th-longest hole in the world), shut down last year. And while some of its buildings have been partly restored, 17-acre Camp Naco, on the edge of town, awaits someone with deep pockets to restore the compound and convert it to new uses. Built as part of a border defense system, the camp is Naco's most prominent surviving landmark. In the Gay 90's, you'll find a few reminders of Naco's remarkable past. A painting depicts Murphy's biplane, and you can see a binder full of historical photos from Salim's collection. “A lot of history buffs are really surprised and interested,” says Leonel Urcadez, a lifelong Naco resident who's owned the bar since 1986. “But some people, you show the pictures to them and they're like, 'Eh.' They don't want to look.” Times have been better for the bar, Urcadez says. A pool league plays here and motorcycle runs make their way down, but it's not like the days when people could more freely cross over from Mexico. “We used to say we had a three-gringo limit,” he says.

Urcadez is the guy shaking hands with Reagan in one of the photos. I tell him I had assumed the picture was taken after the president left office, probably in July 1989. That was when an Army helicopter flew Reagan to a hospital in Fort Huachuca after a horse threw him during a visit to a Sonora ranch. But then I had noticed that the picture was dated 1980 in the lower right corner.

Urcadez explains that Reagan was headed to the Cananeaarea ranch of Diego Redo, a longtime friend and prominent businessman. Reagan had recently won the Republican nomination for president, and a friend of Urcadez who worked at Fort Huachuca heard that Reagan planned to cross into Mexico at Naco. He told Urcadez, who ended up posing with Reagan on the Mexican side.

The security looked awfully lax for a presidential candidate, especially one traveling into a foreign country. Reagan had only a single bodyguard with him. “Can you imagine that now?” Urcadez asks. “And Reagan got searched at the border just like anyone else. He had a van with a little trailer, a storage trailer, and they searched everything. But, no, it was in 1980. I also saw Reagan [in 1989], the time the horse threw him. I hear they have that horse stuffed down there on the ranch.” AH