A Chapter on Lumbering

Crossroads of the Cow Country

They tell around Phoenix of an old gentleman who, in his salad days, had enjoyed high prosperity as an Arizona mining promoter. Such were his enterprises and affluence that he brought people out from the East in special Pullmans to inspect his properties, with an eye, of course, to investment.But he slipped from the heights, and in his later years was reduced to living in a shanty near the state fairgrounds. Some friends, their compassion aroused by the old man's plight, rustled together a few dollars to keep him from starving. Instead of buying food, though, he promptly checked in at the Hotel Adams, which had been the scene of many of his early day triumphs-social as well as business-wise.

The friends reproached him gently. Wasn't this a rather unseemly self-indulgence for someone who was living on the ragged edge of hunger? The old gentleman drew himself up with prideful defiance.

"If I'm a-gonna die," he proclaimed, "I'm a-gonna die in the Adams Hotel."

The story may be apocryphal, but it illustrates the feeling of Arizona toward one of her most enduring institutions-Phoenix' Hotel Adams. For 53 years, with time out for a quite thoroughgoing fire, this sturdy caravan-sary has been a center of life in Arizona and, in fact, the whole Southwest. It has served and still serves as the time-hallowed gathering place for cowmen, mining tycoons and the political gentry, not to mention uncounted hosts of just plain travelers come to tarry in the sun.

The Adams has afforded a haven for Presidents, senators, governors, empire builders, industrial magnates and luminaries of the screen, opera and stage. It has sheltered denizens of the race track, gentle folk and scoundrels. fancy ladies and some not so fancy. It has accommodated eccentric characters like the rich young man who rode his horse into the bar and kicked the door to shreds, and the crochety old man who bequeathed $10,000 "for my wife to go to hell." And it has provided a metropolitan bunkhouse for practically every cowboy who ever punched a steer on the Western range. It is as a sort of unofficial headquarters for the cattle business that the Adams has gained particular renown. The high-ceilinged lobby, with its massive pillars, is a veritable Western stock exchange, where thousands of head of cattle are traded, whole ranches bought and sold and millions of dollars change hands. Stockmen are a peculiar breed, strongly addicted to the informality of doing business whilst slumped in a deep leather chair, with battered Stetson tipped lazily down over one eye.

Comes rodeo week and the Adams lobby resembles the old Bar-X at roundup time. The place is teeming with cowpokes, in their vivid shirt and boots still heavy with the dust of the arena. You can always find three or four of them perched loosely on the steel railing at the stairway leading to the basement. Perhaps the Adams had it put there for just that purpose as a sophisticated substitute for the old corral fence. Time was when the Adams required that cowboys check their six-guns with the bartender. This regulation has fallen pretty generally into disuse, since, contrary to the impression conveyed by the Western movies, the modern cowpoke has little truck with shootin' irons.

But rodeo week still makes for spirited goings-on at the Adams. True, they may take a slightly synthetic form, as when a group of local Jaycees, a mite over-zealous in their efforts to publicize their rodeo, staged a mock battle in the lobby. One called another a naughty name. Revolvers were jerked out and shots blasted the quiet of the afternoon. The bullets happened to be blanks, but the Jaycees had neglected to notify the hotel management, and the management thus had no opportunity to warn the guests, and one old lady fainted plumb away. So the hotel made another rule no more feudin' in the lobby, synthetic or otherwise.

The Adams hasn't been able to protect its guests against all exigencies, however. One of its patrons not long ago was a cowboy from Wyoming, a rustic and guile-less innocent who fell into the hands of a sharper. He soon found himself the possessor (for a consideration) of a machine guaranteed to convert $1 bills into $100 bills.

The bunko man, obviously gifted with a sense of humor, stipulated that the machine had to be operated in the bathtub. And so, all that night, the cowpoke toiled in his bathroom, grinding $1 bills into one end of the machine and wondering why they didn't come out $100 bills at the other.

The Adams is renowned not alone as a cowmen's headquarters but also as a mecca of politics in Arizona. Here the law-makers and the lobbyists and sundry hang-ers-on foregather when the legislature is in session. Po-litically-minded Arizonans like to say that that there are more laws made in the Adams Hotel than at the statehouse.

It isn't necessary to have a doctorate in political philosophy to be a bellboy at the Adams, but it helps. For even the bellboys find themselves mustered into service as impromptu political sounding-boards, summoned to a conference room to provide water, ice and a layman's opinion on some bill under consideration. The Adams can even claim some kind of distinction among U. S. hotels in the fact that one of its bellhops, John Hunt, was himself a member of the State Senate. There is no doubt but that the late J. C. Adams, venerable founder of the hotel, intended it to play precisely the role which it has played in the political life of Arizona. He reasoned that if the Adams became the center of politics, it would become the center of everything. For politics is an important business in an infant state just commencing to get its stride.

Once, when a fussy manager threatened to clear the lobby of its "loafers," J. C. restrained him. "Let 'em all loaf," he insisted. "I want this to be the headquarters of town."

And that's the way things have turned out. The Adams is at the same time a headquarters, a rendezvous, a bulletin board and, somewhat incidentally, a hotel. The hotel switchboard serves as a handy dispenser of information about anything that is going on in Phoenix, whether it's going on at the Adams or elsewhere.

Many years ago, in an expansive moment of civicpride, J. C. Adams made it known that anybody could have a free meal at the hotel on any day that the sun didn't shine in Phoenix. Most folks have forgotten that, but not all of them. Today the hotel still gets an occasional call on a cloudy day from someone calculating to collect his roast beef on the house.

It is a curious fact that the Adams was built originally because there were two lawyers in Phoenix. The year was 1896, and J. C. Adams had come to this raw and primitive territory with his family from Illinois, where he had been first a traveling salesman and then a practicing attorney in Chicago.

In Phoenix, he discovered, already had two attorneys and that seemed to be about all the youthful community could accommodate comfortably. So he decided to build a hotel.

Lacking the wherewithal, he borrowed $25,000 from the Chicago mercantile wizard, Marshall Field, and raised the remaining capital amongst the better-endowed citizens of Phoenix. Adams, as one member of his family has colorfully expressed it, "was a great guy for blackjacking people into getting things done." His modus operandi in this and many subsequent community promotions was to stage an elaborate banquet, feed the guests into a warm and generous mood and then call for subscriptions.

Occasionally he found it necessary to "plant" the first subscription, which leads one to surmise that, had J. C. Adams not chosen to be a hotel builder and a Western pioneer, he would have done exceedingly well as the proprietor of a medicine show.

The hotel he built, at the corner of Central and Adams, was truly the last word. It was four stories high, with 200 rooms, 66 of them equipped with private baths, each with a genuine porcelain tub as shiny as a set of new false teeth. The structure was distinctly on the rococo side, erected of frame and pressed brick, with brown stone trimmings. It boasted, as a chronicler of the period rhapsodized, "all the appliances for comfort to be found in a big first class hotel in a big city." This was simply a fancy version of the description preferred by folks around Phoenix. The Adams, they liked to say, was the "umptiest hotel in these h'yar parts."

Perhaps its most distinguishing features were the commodious 15-foot verandas built right out over the sidewalks on both the Adams and Central Avenue sides. There may have been a direct connection between these verandas and J. C. Adams' preoccupation with politics. For the story goes that a city ordinance prohibiting this kind of construction was repealed just long enough to let the Adams build its verandas.

It doesn't matter too much whether the story is true. The mere fact of the verandas' existence was something for which many a patron had cause to be thankful. They provided a welcome sanctuary for guests desperate for sleep on stifling summer nights.

It wasn't until considerably later that someone contrived the idea of letting the guests sleep on the roof in mid-summer. The men slept on one side and the ladies on the other, and there was a 12-foot solid board fence between them, bolted on both sides. It was even later than this that the Adams developed what is regarded in some quarters as the first air conditioning system in Arizona. This consisted of seven or eight large pans spaced strategically around the lobby, each containing a 300-pound block of ice, with a large electric fan blowing across it.

In winter the heating was done largely with wood. Each floor had its woodroom and each guest, for 25 cents a day, could be assured that his individual wood box would be kept well-stocked.

A perpetual source of managerial headaches was the wood-filcher a precursor, perhaps, of that light-fingered soul who today persists in making off with the bathtowels and silverware. Interestingly enough, among the most flagrant wood-filchers were the members of a prominent and wealthy Boston Back Bay family.

Adams, who served as mayor and later as postmaster during the course of his political career, wasn't averse to a good, lively scrap when he felt that the interests of his hotel were involved.

He decided one year that his electric bills were too high, so he started a move for municipal ownership of the public utility. The utility, not surprisingly, didn't cotton to the idea.

Adams challenged the president of the utility to a public debate. It was held on the grass around the city hall. The president spoke first. Then Adams, whose voice didn't carry too well, got up to say his piece. But nobody heard him, because just at that moment the power company arranged to have the irrigation water turned in to the grounds so that the audience had to move back.

Adams cried "dirty pool" and challenged the utility president to another debate, this time in a downtown meeting hall. And this time he lead off. When his adversary arose to answer, Adams arranged to have the lights go off. The meeting ended forthwith and the dispute eventually was settled to the mutual satisfaction of both of them.

Adams was a tall man with a stately bearing and fluffy moustaches which he habitually riffled from underneath with the side of one index finger. His office was a nook off the lobby. There the cattlemen dropped in with the latest advices from the range country and legislators came after a day's session to be greeted with, "Well, m'boy, what did you do today?"

Though a steadfast Republican, Adams managed to stay on generally good terms with the Democrats, who, then as now, constituted the prevailing power in Arizona. Once, however, the law-makers took affront at some real or fancied lapse in the hotel's service and passed a bill requiring that all sheets at the Adams be 12 feet long and new carpets be installed in the rooms every other day.

Though J. C. Adams was of the Victorian period, there was nothing Victorian about his outlook on the social mores. When the country club banned the popular if rather intimate dance known as the "Bunny Hug," J. C. announced that it was entirely permissable at his hotel. This made the Adams temporarily anathema to some of Phoenix' stuffier families.

It was in the early 1900's that Adams launched the Arizona State Fair on its way and thus came to be known as "the daddy of the Fair." The customary technique was brought into play elaborate banquets, a "plant" or two, subscriptions, etc.

While considerations of civic betterment undoubtedly motivated him, Adams wasn't being entirely selfless in his efforts toward a State Fair. He saw it as a nice, dependable bonanza for the hotel, with Fair Week bringing in a horde of people from the outlying desert regions and the northern uplands.

Then, too, sporting blood ran deep in J. C. Adams. He was an unflagging devotee of the race track, especially of harness racing, or racing, or, as it was known then, trotting. He visualized Phoenix as a sort of Saratoga of the West, and this indeed is what it became.

The greatest trotting horses and riders of the country converged on Phoenix and the fairgrounds, to compete for handsome purses which Adams helped to make possible. He himself put up the Adams Hotel Stake, and he induced the copper bigwigs to post the Arizona Copper Stake. The record fails to show whether or not this contribution was preceded by a banquet.

There was auto racing, too, bringing to Phoenix such daredevils of the track as Barney Oldfield, driving at fantastic speeds of 50 and 60 miles per hour. An event of each year's fair was the Desert Classic, which was an automobile race from Los Angeles to Phoenix. Between fairs, when times got dull, Adams and some