Salome's Dick Wick Hall Days

Salome's

Salome, Arizona, was fathered by a humorist who mostly refused to take himself too seriously. So he'd probably laugh and make a dry joke at the idea of a celebration named after him-even while the showman in him would be pleased with the compliment. Every fall since 1940, Dick Wick Hall Days, a real Western-type shindig, has been held in the town of Salome, on U.S. 60, some fifty-five miles west of Wickenburg, Arizona. Old-fashioned pit barbecue and countrystyle dancing have been the featured attractions. Folks -mostly ranchers-from miles around have come, glad for a chance to get together with neighbors who may live fifty miles or more from them. It gives them a chance to catch up on their visiting, to eat, drink, dance and take part in a home-grown carnival if they wish. These are Dick Hall's kind of people, earthy and down-to-earth, yet far from being bumpkins. Friendly, but with a pride born of independence and achievement gained by hard work-in short, the traditional westerner. Some of themknew Hall. Some have come to the area since. But they all have one characteristic in common with him-a love for the wide, open spaces. This was expressed by the humorist, himself, in a rare moment of seriousness, as a yen for "a place where I can do as I please . . . get acquainted with myself and maybe find the something which every man in his Soul is unconsciously searching for-himself."

DICK WICK HALL DAYS by Gladys Niehuis

Who was this Dick Wick Hall, anyway? What did he do that he should have a celebration in his honor?

The younger, or newer, Arizonans may ask these questions, but others, if they lived in this part of the country back in the 20's, remember, even if it is just "Oh, yes, there was something about a frog who carried a canteen, wasn't there?"

It isn't easy to find out who Dick Hall really was. Most libraries, even in Arizona and California, have little or no material on him; Mrs. Good, of the Arizona State Library and Archives, has the most. But here and there one finds oldtimers such as the two gracious ladies, the former Jones sisters, who still call Salome home, and theysmile as they talk of Dick. Then there are a few foresighted people such as William Sheffler, who owns present-day businesses in Salome and who has preserved copies of Hall's works. Fitted together, these bits and pieces materialize a remarkable man and an unusual story. Before Dick Wick Hall and the frog, there was a restless, handsome young man, born De Forest Hall in Creston, Iowa, in 1877, on "the coldest day in history." A stint at college, a war, a foray collecting rattlesnakes in Florida, a bout with swamp fever-none nor all of these dampened his enthusiasm for life nor scratched his itch for experience. It was at a state fair in Nebraska that young Hall heard more about the Hopi Indians of Arizona, who had long piqued his interest. As an amateur herpetologist he was intrigued by their use of live rattlesnakes in religious dances and other ceremonies. So, in 1898, aged twenty-one, with all of $14.35 in his pocket, Hall landed in Northern Arizona and went on with what he later called a "post-graduate Course of Education not written Down in Books" (the capitals are his; more about that, later). The first "session," he said, was held on

SALOMEOSUN

DEAR FRIENDS SALOME, YUMARESQUE COUNTY, ARIZONA. MUD IS SURE DANCED I Thank You for the Kindly Feeling which Prompted You to write me Such a Nice Letter and I Want to Apologize for not being Able to write You a Farm Personal Letter Right Now, but So Many Folke have been sending me Postal Boquete or eles Fanting to Know How Do I Cos That Way that ons Corner of the Laughing Use Station is All Piled up Pull of Unanswered Mail, and I do Kesp Up. Gor Stenographare and 100 and 300 frem Los Angeles and all the Good (looking) Elso to Do Fork for me on account of the Un Tamed Cow Boya slss they are just Jealous of the Way Salome Danose.

I Don't Know What Elso to Do, so I am grind ing out thie Temporary Impression of Hy Appreciation of Your Writing me, which has good for Both of Us. My Funeral is the Best Bay to Cactus and Lave the Best Way to Eggs and to Get the Flowers Before she Funeral, which is what all the World has been to Wait until After, we are Read to Find Out That Falke thought about Us. So I Thank You for the Verbal and Flowery Writing, including some of the Verbal Boulders which sometimes come along with the Boquets, and Some Llica Years Old of these daye, when I can write you write you a Real Letter maybe this Year or Noxt which is Pratty Soon for this country, where some of the Mountains are Over in Arizona. Watered the Look Just the Same Like they did when I first come here and Planted the Cactus in Arizona.

It Keeps me pretty Busy Watering the Frog and telling Bed Time Stories to my Family of Household Pets, which "Put has made some little Pictures here of for you to peddle Laughing Gas and peddle Laughing Gas and Gum and Bull Durham to Folks Going to or Coming From California by the Death & Shortest Route. All Tourists either Smoke the Bull or else they Peddle it and I Do Both for Over 30 Years and So Long now that I Feel All Undressed if I haven't Got a Sack of Bull Somewhere in my Clothes which is about All you need Clothes for Here in the Summer Time. Even My Frog is Part Bull. I have got Quite Few. I hear a Tourist Hollering Outside where Some of My Pets has made his Climb a Cue which is just Their Way of Having a Little Fun, and I Don't Like to have Strangers Get Rough with My Cactus and Break the Thorns all off. Yours, Until the Frog Learns to Behave real gold and copper dust; in it he made a plea for financial support from the mining interests which he had boosted. His words of appeal are the first available record of Hall's talent for deft and humorous doggerel: "The past ten months serve to remind us Editors don't stand a chance The more we work we find behind us Bigger patches on our pants.

Then let each one show how they like us Send what you can to Dick Wick Hall Or when the fall winds come to strike us We won't have no pants at all."

This, too, is the first time we find his new name in use. De Forest Hall had become, by court order, Dick Wick Hall. A quote from the (then) Arizona Republican of April 27, 1902, explains the change: "Dick Hall came down from Wickenburg yesterday and will be in the city for a few days. He came for the express purpose of changing his name and he is not going to get married to accomplish that purpose either. He says 'Dick' is all right for a name as far as it goes but it doesn't go far enough. He is going to space it out therefore with the alliterative name of 'Wick' so that hereafter he will be known as 'Dick Wick Hall.' This is purely a matter of patriotism with him. He says any man ought to be proud of the town in which he lives; at least he is, and he lives in Wickenburg, or 'Wick' for short."

GOLF COURSE EDITION SALOME, ARIZONA. THE BLUE ROCK IS FANOUS GREASEWOOD GOLF COURSE.

Located in Northwest Yugaresoua County, At and Around SALONE, ARIZ.. Share She panced" the Original Red Bet Mama Bear Foot F Bare Trot the 1 that hade John the Babtist Lose His lisad. The Golf Courss is Little over 23 Miles Around and Fojka tho have Played it say Hobody Never Ene Nothing Like it Howhare Bao NO ARTIFICIAL HAZARDS AIFY THERE OF THE COURSE as there ara Plenty of Natural Ones Folke come from All Over the forld to Bpand the Sesson Playing Around is Just Once and Some Aint Got Around it Yes, Booras zunning Over 1,000 ars Conson, also Birdies of Various Kinds, Eagles, Coyotes & Jack Rabbits but Rabbit, Rodger and Coyota Holes Don' COUNT, Good Guides, Caddye & Horse Canteen hontoya Camping Outfite Leased by the Jotantial Deposis is fade and ALL CADDYS & HORSES LOST OF THE COURSE HUST BE PAID FOR, A Travell ing Barber Shop on the Course Maksa the Rounds Each Month. Tourists

Layout-Greasewood Golf Course

This was also the beginning of the long love affair between Dick and this particular section of Arizonasince the place he was to name Salome was just to the west of Wickenburg.

It was about 1903 or 1904 when Dick, tired of prospecting around the area with his brother, Ernest, began fermenting plans to develop the Salome area. He had become a victim of gold fever when a miner-prospector, one Shorty Alger, set off a dynamite blast which uncovered a fabulously rich pocket of gold-ore running $roo to the pound. In no time at all some two thousand people were milling around the area west of Wickenburg. But although $30,000 worth of the yellow metal was taken out of the 15-foot pit in just a few days, the bonanza proved just a pocket. All the tenderfeet went home, discouraged. Dick was one who stayed.

He decided gold was not only where, where, but in whatever form you found it, so he and Ernest filed on 100,000 acres of the arid land and began sinking a well. This was to be an irrigation project, and was called the Grace (sometimes erroneously "Grass") Valley Development Company. Soon a few buildings were hastily thrown together around the well-site. This spot is about onehalf mile north of the present town of Salome. Hall also began promoting a mine north of the settlement, and he gave this the ever-glamorous name Hall also began promoting a mine north of the settlement, and he gave this the ever-glamorous name of the Glory Hole.

Both ventures, however, took a second place when he decided that the railroad line started from Wickenburg to the west coast offered other possibilities perhaps the real golden opportunity. So, along in 1906, one E. S. Jones, who had run the general store in old Congress and in Wickenburg, came out to Hall's neck of the desert to set up and run a similar store, which would supply physical needs of the railroad builders. Since Dick had developed water, it was on his land, although closer to the railroad line, that the store was erected, and some of the materials for the buildings came from the now not-so-booming Glory Hole.

After several years, Dick's little settlement, which he had named Salome, had grown up around Jones's store and had increased by a boarding house, run by Mrs. Jones and the three vivacious and attractive Jones daughters, Evvy, Dorothy and Lucy, who were friends and neighbors of the Halls, and an integral part of the Salome story. Eventually there was a post office-where Hall was postmaster for a while, and a saloon, which according to Lucy, now Mrs. Proudfoot, later became a schoolhouse. The girls graduated from old Tempe Normal and Miss Evvy, now Mrs. Boyce Watkins, taught here. When the number of pupils in attendance dropped to less than the required eight, she would get word to her sister, married and living in Wickenburg, to "send Margaret down" to fill out the roster.

During this period, Dick spent much of his time commuting to his other interests in Louisiana, Texas, Utah, California and Phoenix, promoting oil, mining, real estate, but always he came back to his own town, Salome, and his family, which came to include a son and a daughter.

With the coming of the state highway, paralleling the railroad from Wickenburg, business picked up. But unfortunately for the little settlement of Salome, which was on the north side of the tracks, this road was on the south side. The town had grown to include a garage, which along with the store and the boarding house, called the Blue Rock Inne, was operated by the Jones family, which by now included sons-in-law. These young fellows, being full of ginger and git-up, thought Mr. Jones ought to move everything over where the cars were going by, but the old gentleman, who, on his daughters' smiling word was "a stubborn Englishman," declined to move a thing. "Let the people come over here-they know where we are" was his ultimatum. This was too much for the young men, so one night while their father-in-law slept, they took the garage apart and moved it, bodily, across the tracks, and set it up by the road! There is no record of what Mr. Jones said, but the garage stayed, and apparently began to stop more traffic. Much of it, tired from the long, bumpy road, stayed to eat, often to spend the night, so the boarding house business also boomed. Of the Inne, Dick wrote:

Quite Often Longer. Meals are Always Extraand sometimes not So Very Extra Much, either.

That last comment was, of course, just out-west kidding, for Dick knew and appreciated the hard work put in by Mrs. Jones and the girls, who roomed and fed people literally night and day. In one place Dick says: "Mrs. Jones is trying to feed them (a large unexpected group from Phoenix) while we print this special edition. She has our sympathy."

They not infrequently had interesting visitors, and upon at least one occasion, an illustrious one. Of him, Dick made these observations: "Mr. Bryan (William Jennings Bryan) came right through Phoenix without knowing it, or at least without noticing it, but he stopped and visited a night and a day at Salome, drank Salome water in preference to grape juice, liked it so well that he forgot to write his Daily Bible Lesson-and Took a Bath in my Bath Tub-the only one within so miles. Now Everyone wants to take a Bath. I'll take Part of that Back. Mrs. Jones has a Bath Tub, too, but Jones is a Republican. I am too, for that matter, but I am not so Particular as all that, because I went to the State University in Lincoln, Nebraska is 1894, when Bryan didn't have any More than I did, excepting a Wonderful Voice and the will and the Brain to back it up with. I used to sleep in the Back of a Law office next to Bryan and I didn't have. Many Bedclothes in Those Days. I don't Think he did either, and after spending Two nights in Salome with the wind Blowing from down toward Yuma, Bryan doesn't think I Need any."

Tent houses were even brought down from the Glory Hole to use as auxiliary accommodations.

The garage was on Hall's land, of course, and he was a partner in the business. It became more than a garage; Hall, ever feeling the pulse of the times, realized that motor travel was here to stay, so he set about luring more west-coast-bound traffic by the door. Calling on his knack for words and his ability to tickle the risibilities, he named his place "The Laffing Gas Station," and began publicizing it by means of a unique, single sheet newspaper, which he called the "Salome Sun," avowedly "Just for Fun-Made with a Laugh on a Mimeograph by a Rough Neck Staff." This was, he admitted modestly, a first-class newspaper-"because it has to be sent out in an envelope with a 24 stamp on it." (That was 'way back when 24 would mail a letter.) And, according to the masthead, the publication's main aim was "to make you smile for half a mile."

And the little sheet did make people smile. Even, eventually, in foreign countries. According to one version of the story, George Horace Lorimer, himself, of the SATURDAY EVENING POST, stopped at the Laffing (Dick wasn't fussy-he sometimes spelled it "Laughing") Gas Station to have emergency work done on his car. Somehow a few copies of the Sun were left in his car, perhaps used to wrap broken, greasy parts; later the famed editor perused the papers and wired Mr. Hall to see if he could get more of the material for the Post. Another story has it that Don Marquis, creator of the deathless "Archy and Mehitabel," and then columnist for the New York SUN, and Thomas Masson, editor of LIFE, then with the SATURDAY EVENING POST, could share honors as discoverers of Hall. It is a fact that Marquis did use quotes from the Salome Sun (which probably came into his hands via some tourist who had picked them up in Arizona and thought them clever enough to deserve reprinting for a larger readership). And one of Marquis's columns said "If we ever get Archy the Cockroach pried loose from Paris. we think of sending him out to Salome to call on Dick Wick Hall's famous Salome frog."

At any rate, the offer came from the Post, and Dick turned it down-several times with the excuse "too darned busy." The amazed editors, whose pages are Valhalla to most writers, countered this unheard-of nonchalance by suggesting that if Hall were so darned busy he could just bundle up the back numbers of the Sun he had on hand and the Post, would pick what they wanted. This, Dick could do.

Soon Dick and his writings were being published and reprinted and quoted in newspapers all over the continent-New York TRIBUNE, Kansas City STAR, Columbus STAR, Montreal STAR, Elbridge CITIZEN, and in a short time drew fan mail from many distant points-even as far away as India. Magazines, too, were gleefully picking up his material... Cosmopolitan, Red Book, Motor News, and many trade magazines. Hall's writing had a flavor as typically American as Mark Twain's, and was not wholly unlike that of the great humorist. Hall has, in fact, beencalled the Mark Twain of the Southwest, but somehow that appellation misses the mark. No man is a little carbon of another unless he is an imitator, and Dick Hall was not that. He had his own wry, yet gentle kind of funpoking wit that still titillates the ear, plus an imagination that delights the mind. Take his relating of how his famed Frog came into being:

The Truth about thar Salome Frog

Salome, Yumaresque County, Arizons“Where She Danced”-was dry long before Volstead was weaned. The Lord initiated the Dry Act here. We are not altogether Dry here, however. It does rain Orice in awhile, but never Twice. We had a Big Rain in February. That was in the Year 1904 or 1905, if I Remember Rightly.

The Frog was not born here. Neither was I found the Egg up in the Owens River Valley, neat Little Lake, California, in a Slough back of Bill Bremlette's place Seven Years Ago. I thought it was a Wild Duck Egg, but on the way Home it hatched ont a Frog. I raised him on a bottle, Shasta and Pluto Water mostly, and that is why he is such a lively and healthy Frog.

The Salome Frog is y years Old and even though he can't swim yer, it isn't his Fault. He never had a chance but he lives in hopes. Three years ago Fourth of July Palo Verde Pete shor off a boz of Dynamite and the Frog, thinking it was Thunder, chased the cloud of Smoke two miles down the road, thinking it might Rain. He is older and wiser now and getting like the rest of the Natives. He just Sits and Thinks. Some times I wonder just what he thinks. He probably thinks he is having a Hell of a Time. MORAL -Even a Frog's Tale can have a Moral. if the World Jooks Blue and Your Luck is Bad and You think You are having a Hell of a Time-why just stop and think of my Frog-Seyen Years Old and He can't swim.

Now, about those haphazard capital letters. Don't try to make them mean anything. Hall didn't capitalize just nouns or adjectives or both; there is no pattern. Here's his bland explanation (you can take it seriously if you like): “The old Typewriter I learned to Write on had lost a Lot of its teeth. It was so old and so Many of the Little Letters gone and I got so used to hitting the Capitals where the Little ones were gone I can't get Out of the Habit. And I think it Looks Better anyway to have a few caps Scattered around it breaks the Mo-notony of so Many Little Letters. I would use all Capital letters if I thought it would make Folks Feel any Better.” And in case you are wondering about the name of the town. Mrs. Proudfoot smiles and says, “Dick had a lot of fun pulling people's legs about that, but the truth is, he named it after Mrs. Grace Salome Pratt, the wife of Pittsburgh promoter Carl Pratt, a mining partner of Dick's, just because it was an unusual name and had humorous possibilities, probably, Grace Valley was also named for Mrs. Pratt maybe to make up to her for the joshing about Salome. Dick loved to joke and it amazed him when people took his windy stories seriously.” Here is Dick's “windy story,” strictly for the tourist trade: SALOME-BY THE MAN THAT MADE HER DANCE (All the Bumps and Curves are Not on the Road) Maybe you have heard of Salome. This is Her, She or It-or whatever else you may want to call Her -after looking stit.

She was a Great Artist. I am Not. The picture I have tried to draw does not start to do Her justice. She was even more so than It. Those who saw Her dance will understand what my limited inartistic inability is endeavoring to convey to the sage brush minds of the unsophisticated dwellers of the Arizona Desert.

It is with unpardonable pride that I lay claim to a soft couch in some warm Hall of Fame as being the Man that made Salome dance. This Great Honor was thrust upon me innocently and unconsciously. I mean I was so innocent that it naturally made me unconscious. When I told Salome to take off her shoes that fateful day I did not realize that the Sand was hot. Neither did She-but when Her bare little toes touched the warm Sands of the Arizona Desert, Salome hot-footed her way to Fame with an Indescribable terpsichorean agitation that has aroused comment all over the known world since then. Many other great Movements of the Day have been started in a similar simple fashion.

Hypnotized by The Symphony of or Sympathy for, Salome, I laid out 1,000 Town Lots on and around the Spot where She Danced, 19 years ago. Since then we have accumulated 18 more Folks and Frog 7 Years Old.” In another slightly abridged version, he ended thus: “That's why Salome danced and made or lost her reputation and left me running this Laffing Gas Station. He once said too, this is "Salome, where she danced and never moved her feet."

As far as can be ascertained, no one has a complete file of the Salome Sun, but it appears to have begun in 1920 and run on a more or less erratic schedule up to almost the time of Hall's truly untimely death in 1926.

Dick Hall did more than just make people smile. He made them forget the bumps in the highway which ran past the gas station-and there were many at that time. He also carried on a running battle with Yuma, the State Highway Commission and other officials of both Yuma and Maricopa counties, in an all-out effort to get better roads, especially up his way, of course. His methods were, to say the least, novel, and sometimes incendiary, for besides his Sun, he once had printed and distributed where they would do the most good, red-lettered handbills worded: "DANGER! Don't go by Yuma. Tourists are warned not to attempt to go to Los Angeles by way of Yuma-100 miles out of the way way and through terrible sand dunes that drift like snow, where planks, brush and boards are used for miles to keep cars from being buried. Go by Blythe, the shortest and best route. " And, of course, at that time, he had some logic on his side. To go by Blythe was shorter, and even his bumpy highway was preferable to the hazardous old board road that ran over those huge dunes-as one who traveled both routes can testify. The battle raged between the Yuma Sun and the Salome Sun, and unpleasantries were exchanged. To a charge that he was an "Ananias," Dick replied that he thought it a pretty good joke when he found out what it meant, as well as good advertising, and he offered a $5.00 reward to anyone on earth who could tell a lie about Yuma. He claimed it was impossible. Further, he said the Mexicans, who had Yuma, sneaked up one night and moved the international boundary line so we got it, and this is what started the trouble between Mexico and the U.S. "I don't blame the U.S. for getting mad," he twitted, "Do you?" He also said once that the territorial prison used to be there-until the prisoners objected and asked to have it moved away! (This fellow could use words like swords!) At one point, however, his crusading became almost an obsession, and he declared he was looking for a lawyer to fight the highway commission and the state for better roads to Los Angeles. Columnist Otheman Stevens of the Los Angeles Examiner, and a great admirer of Hall, deplored this lapse into seriousness: "Mr. Hall has a better weapon than a lawyer in the Salome Sun, for he is probably the next national humorist; it is far easier to laugh an official out of office than it is to put him out by writs and sheriffs," he pointed out. "Please, don't become serious, Mr. Hall, for if you do, the Bromides will surely get you."

He didn't let them get him, but he continued to prod the "Lejestlature" and other officials, maintaining that the Old Indian Trail from Buckeye and Hassayampa to Salome, thence westerly to Blythe was the logical and best way to Los Angeles. One muses what Dick would have to say about the proposed Brenda cutoff.

Some of his little digs and quips, employed to serve his double purpose, still make us chuckle: "Arizona's roads are like Arizona's people-good, bad and worse." He said he knew the bumps and chuckholes made people cross, so he went down the road about twenty-five or thirty miles and began putting up his silly signs. A "city limits" sign some three miles from the tiny cluster of buildings, "Just to Make sure they didn't get through here without Knowing it." And, "Sure, we know the Road is Rough in Spots-SO IS LIFE. There is Bumps in Any Road you Take, no Matter where you go. Did you ever see Salome Shake and Wiggle To and FroMostly Fro? COME AGAIN." "Peace on earth, Good Will to Men. I've got a Frog that was Hatched by a hen." "Stop and See us as You pass and fill your Tank with Laughing Gas. It will Tickle Lizzie's Carburetor and make her smile at the Miles." He used maps frequently in his publication and studded them with his humor: "I don't see why some of you don't stop and stay here at Salome-'Where She Danced-where there is plenty of room to grow up with the country. 19 people here and over 1,000 town Lots-almost like Los Angeles. Note-All the Bumps, Curves and Chuck Holes don't show on this map, but that don't matter. You won't have any trouble finding them without it."

He boosted his home town at every chance.

"We think a paper as large as the Salome Sun should tell the truth. Especially about its own townso we are going to tell the truth about Salome. You will find it out anyway. Salome-'Where She Danced' is not quite as large as Los Angeles, but it is larger than Phoenix used to be-and almost as large as Col. Ed Fletcher thinks San Diego will be Some Day. The city limits of Salome extend from the Harcuvar Mountains on the south, the Granite Wash Mountains on the west and to the head of the valley on the east, including Wendenburg, the little suburb of Salome up the track. When everyone is at home and the section men all get in at night, there are sometimes as many as 17 or 19 people here all at once-not many, but what we lack in numbers we make up for in imagination."

His fictional Greasewood Golf Course (or, Lynx, as he sometimes wrote it) is a classic. It spoofs the game of golf, which had recently become a national craze. It also kids the city folks and their exaggerated fears of the desert. Its fantastic 23-mile course is "laid out" over some of the hottest, roughest acres in Arizona, and Hall mockgravely warns players against the natural "hazards" of poison water holes, bandits, crouching tarantulas and Gila monsters-and even jumping cactus. Of course he adds, as an afterthought, the suggestion that "after spending 2 or 3 Weeks-or Months-Going Around the Greasewood Golf Course," the Inne's accommodations will "Look Like the Big Biltmore Hotel."

In his good friend, Claude G. (Put) Putnam, he had a kindred spirit who knew how to interpret his whimsy, and Put illustrated most of his writing. After Dick's death on April 28, 1926, in Los Angeles (where he had gone, unwillingly, to have dental work done, only to discover a too-far-advanced case of Bright's disease) it was finally Put's sad honor to design the handsome bronze plaque which is on Dick's grave in the yard of the little Hall cabin in Salome.

Many of the stones in the monument on Dick's grave are ore-bearing rocks which were contributed by old mining-day friends-prospectors and hard-rock men, who, like most people Hall knew, were won by his friendly, outgoing personality.

To the reader today, Hall must appear a dual personality; one part of his nature yearning for peace, quiet and the wide-open spaces, the other restless, always seeking new experiences, figuring new ways to improve and develop those same open spaces. A complex and disturbing personality for all his warmth, Dick Hall must have been. But to the people of his home town of Salome, he will continue to be the founding father, and they will doubtless go right on celebrating in his honor every year. And if there is anything to this haunting business, I can imagine a handsome shade in a campaign hat smiling quizzically as it hovers around the annual festivities, enjoying them as much as anyone, because (in his own words) "When people say what a Place to Live, I Feel Sorry for them because I am finding Something for which they are still Seeking. So many say they would rather Die than have to live in a Little Town like Salome, where everybody Knows Everybody Else, because it is so Lonesome Here. They would rather live in Los Angeles or New York or Pittsburgh where they can live 7 years in 1 Place and never know their Neighbors and have to ride y miles on a Street Car to find Someone they Know to say Hello to. Civilization is getting so Complicated Now Days that hardly Nobody raises any Cabbages and Green Onions in their Back Yard no more. I would rather live out Here Lying on the Soft Side of a Big Granite Rock Soaking up Sunshine and Satisfaction Away from the Worries of the Outside World where so Many Folks Work so Hard Getting Nowhere. I can get to the Same Place out here So Much Easier without Working so Hard."

Now, maybe another quote from "Dick W. Hall, Editor and Garage Owner" would be in order right here: "People can Criticize my Writing til they Get Tired, because I make no Pretensions to Being an Author. Would have Starved to Death long Ago if I did. I get a Lot of Satisfaction out of it, which I also Hope is Vice Versus and Pro Bono Publico. Adios Amigos." And that goes for me, too. See you at the celebration?