Cow Town On Wings

Payson is located in the cool mountains of northern Gila county in the center of a great scenic region.

Cow Town

Smack in the middle of some of Arizona's most colorful geography swaggers Payson, population 342*. Ringed about with place names like Dead Cow Canyon, Single Standard Mine, Lousy Gulch and Boarding House Draw, Payson prides itself on being America's last frontier.

It doesn't depend on its brightly threaded history for this title. Payson is a practicing frontier town. A casual question about traffic laws elicits a drawled "Up here a man can do whatever he's big enough to do." Only a frontier town's deputy sheriff, like Payson's Howard Childers, would report that the all-night dance at Kohl's had been pretty tame only three fights an attitude entirely suitable for the town that was on the high road to the Pleasant Valley war and was a retreat for the feuding cattle and sheep men.

Yet this most typical of cow towns with its two saloons, two cafes, one street is riding hell for leather into the Twenty First Century at such a rate that it has

On Wings

That averages. oldtimers boast. more than 100 feet of runway for each family in town.

The front porch of the Pioneer Saloon the social center of town is still full of Paysonites rocking and swapping tall tales. But there is a difference in the gestures. Instead of sighting an imaginary rifle and taking a reminiscent pot shot at the Apaches or the sheepherders. oldtimers discuss horsepower, and the pantomine is the familiar sweep and swoop of hands describing the flight of an airplane. The oldster who wants to tell about "forting up" against the. Indians in the old adobe house across the street hasn't a chance. Too many voices are recounting how Steve Hathaway outflew the stork to get his passenger an expectant mother to the hospital 80 miles away.

The friendly, lank Westerner who answers to “Steve Hathaway” is the sparkplug of Payson’s air mindedness.

This is what the visiting airman sees when he climbs over Mazatzals and approaches Payson. Mogollon Rim, north of Payson, is in the background with Hathaway's landing strip shown in valley. Arizonans find Payson's weather delightful.

Born in Milwaukee and educated at Princeton, Steve is a Westerner by adoption. He started to fly in 1926 and has been at it ever since. Beginning in Maryland, each move took him a little further westward. By 1941 he was in Arizona, and when the Air Force rejected him for being underweight, he went to work as a flight instructor at Falcon Field, near Phoenix, helping to convert the British boys into RAF pilots. There is an over-abundance of the famed Arizona sunshine near Phoenix in the summer, and Hathaway and his wife Lucinda started looking for a place to spend week-ends. They discovered Payson, a town that happily combines what remains of the old West with areas of great natural beauty, trout fishing, lion hunting and a fine year-round climate. And a bad road. By the time the war was over, Steve and Lucinda had decided where their post war home would be. They bought enough land in Payson for a guest ranch, sketched plans for houses and went to work clearing a runway. That was in September, 1945. In 1946 more than 500 planes landed on that strip. A dozen will fly over Mazatzal Peak (altitude 8,065) and land at the Hathaway strip (altitude 5,448) over the weekend. Cinda greets them, helps them with their fishing rods or rifles, sees that they are comfortable and turns them loose to angle for trout, ride Rim View's horses or hide from mountain lions. She directs sightseers to Zane Grey's old stomping ground and tells them how to get to the many scenic places in the vicinity. There is plenty for the visitor to do in and around Payson. Fifteen miles north is the Tonto Natural Bridge, owned by the Randall brothers of Pine and reported to be the world's largest travertine arch. Driving down the narrow, steep road to the bridge, the visitor exclaims over the pastoral beauty of the house, farm and orchard below him and wonders where the bridge is. At the house he will be told: he is standing on it. Spanning Pine Creek. the Tonto Natural Bridge comfortably accommodates a five acre "second-story" farm on its top. Not until he scrambles down the trail to the creek bed, looks up 183 feet to the top of the arch and climbs a few of the ladders to the caves within the arch can he believe the immensity of the bridge. And then he will never forget it. About ten miles northward of the bridge, past the gable-roofed houses of the summer resort and fall hunting village of Pine, is the turn off for the scenic road that follows the edge of the Mogollon Rim. Called simply "The Rim" by residents, it is visible from the entire Tonto Basin, was made famous by the Apache raids that took place near it and by Zane Grey who gave it a more popular and pronounceable name: Tonto Rim. East of Payson a good gravel road leads to the public camping area of the Tonto National Forest and some of the best fishing in the state. (Note to advanced fishermen Sunday drivers (airways) land at Payson. Aviators find the town a convenient stop on pleasure trips.

check with the State Fish Hatchery in the Forest before you unpack your reel. If they have just let loose a school of fish accustomed to being fed at the hatchery in the stream you intend to fish, there will be no sport except for the neophyte Isaac Waltons.) A little persistence will reward the seeker with Zane Grey's cabin. Oddly enough, in a country where the working place of notables is heralded as a tourist attraction, the home in which Zane Grey wrote To The Last Man and Under the Tonto Rim does not have a marked highway leading to its door. The determined sightseer must leave his car, cross a pasture and follow a dim trail to the cabin immediately under The Rim. The tremendous view of the Tonto Basin is, unfortunately, the only beautiful thing left of the house. The steps are crumbling, the walls covered with scribbled initials, the floors blackened from impromptu campfires. But the picture window at which Grey wrote frames an inspiring scene of blue skies, pine trees and distant purple mountains.

But the seasoned Payson visitor will have little time for sightseeing. He will go to Payson the third week in August for the rodeo which has been an Arizona tradition for 63 years. Although it is no longer held on the main street, it retains enough of the air of the old-time rodeos to attract some professional rodeo performers, cowboys from miles around plus some three thousand visitors. For three days and four nights Rodeo rules Payson.

That is that of A. H. Davidson. He keeps his Taylorcraft primed for any prospector with a wild idea and an itching palm. When the prospector has a hunch that there's “gold in them thar hills,” Dave stuffs him and his pick into the plane and takes off for the hills. When they spot one with a likely outcropping, Dave finds a smooth spot on the ridge he is the only pilot in the United States with a rough definition of smooth-lands and plods off with the miner to reach the ledge. Visions of quick gold and no burros to feed!

Steve Hathaway's best friend in Payson is Bob Cham bers who, despite only two years' of residence, looks as though he grew up in Payson. He has lived and worked in Arizona all his life, and has fitted into the frontier life so well that he is now one of Payson's first citizens. He looks like a cattleman, but since he first found that the airplane was here to stay he has been making a plan.

It was a dream of an airport: individual T hangars, a landing strip bordered with pine trees and a real estate sub-division bordering on the strip. Lots sprinkled with the homes of air-minded folks, a club house, swimming pool and all the trimmings that mean comfort, service.

Trimmings, in Bob's vocabulary, include projects such as a fleet of jeeps, so the air traveller can land, rent ground transportation and drive off to the best fishing grounds. scenic areas, hunting sites.

When Bob saw Payson, he decided that was the place for him. With characteristic directness, he interested a realtor in the idea. Now the Payson Air Park is well under way: several of the lots have been sold, a bulldozer has cleared a 4000-foot runway, and the landing strip had its baptism of fire during Payson's annual rodeo last year when 50-odd airplanes of the Arizona Airman's Association landed there and held a barbecue.

The third airport in Payson was constructed by nativeborn Alf E. Randall, and is now the home of the Payson Flying Service. It has a 2900-foot runway-And if three landing strips are not enough, Jimmy Cox, a hotel owner in Payson, has another. Since horse races have been moved from the main street to the rodeo grounds, he has on occasion landed and taken off from the highway.

The air age has come to the last frontier with a wide open throttle.