KINGMAN

KINGMAN COUNTY SEAT OF MOHAVE COUNTY

More than eighty years ago he trudged across the great western plains and mountains, locating the route for a ribbon of steel rails that would one day bear the proud name Archison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Lewis Kingman left his name on two towns along the way-one on the flat plains of Kansas, and the other in the Arizona desert near plentiful springs of fresh, pure water. We shall direct a friendly "Howdy" towards Kingınan, Kansas, a green and pleasant city in the wheat lands, but our story will tell of Kingman, Arizona, at the hub of Mohave County. This is a story of my home town, a story which to me is always most fascinating.

The springs that Lewis Kingman saw in the northwestern Arizona desert already bore a name that of Edward Fitzgerald Beale, Lieutenant, United States Navy. Not only was Lt. Beale a long way from salt water when he first saw this spot in 1857, but he was traveling by a very un-nautical method of transportation-camel train. This name of Beale is an important one in my home town, carried as it is by the broad avenue that runs the length of the city from east to west, and also by the hotel that was almost a second home during my boyhood. The story of the Beale Hotel really tells the story of Kingman as a great stopping place for travelers that number into the hundreds of thousands each year, a flood of visitors that increases with each passing year and with Each expansion and improvement in the network of modern highways that converges on this spot. Here the highways from Hoover Dam and Las Vegas pass through to Phoenix and beyond. Here, too, the traffic from Los Angeles flows past on U.S. 66 to Albuquerque and Chicago and points east. Like few other places in these United States, Kingman is a town devoted to the care, feeding, and rest of the Great American Traveling Public. The Beale Hotel saw a great deal of me in my early days for a good and sufficient reason. My grandmother, Mrs. Lulu R. Hall, owned and managed the Beale, and it had a very elegant soda fountain. Add to this a wellstocked newsstand, replete with WINGS, ACES, DOC SAVAGE, THE SHADOW, and DIME MYSTERY (still published under the same good, old title, but now costing a nifty zsc per copy), and I was in clover. When not guzzling an ice cream soda or cringing from the thunder of The Shadow's twin .45s blazing in the gloom, I could have plenty of fun just watching the passing parade. Weary travelers decamped from the train at the Harvey House across North Front Street, or uncoiled from their dusty automobiles, and marched up to the desk of the hotel in search of a room for the night. The townspeople lounging in the lobby would promptly follow to the desk as soon as the visitors had departed in the care of one of the Chinese bellboys, Chang or Billy, and the large register sheet would be carefully examined to find out who Kingman's new guests might be. Something beautiful and fine went by the boards with introduction of the individual hotel registration card. The street from which the traveler entered the Beale Hotel recently acquired a new name which also has much to do with the hotel. When Ralph Edwards announced, "This is your life, Andy Devine," the program was concluded by the notice that North Front Street would from that time be known as Andy Devine Avenue. Andy not only shared my experience of growing up in the town of Kingman, but also spent a great deal of his time at the Beale Hotel, for it was owned by his parents, from whom my grandmother purchased the property. Today, the Beale Hotel is joined by a dazzling array of motels and motor hotels (something like thirty-eight of them at last count) that provide a bed for the night for Mr. Tourist and family. These extensive accommodations are supplemented by a full complement of restau rants, shops and all the other facilities needed by the family on the go. One item worth visiting, even if not hungry at the moment, is a rather remarkable tapestry in Charlie Lum's Jade Cafe. At first glance this appears to be a large, panoramic photograph of the Hong Kong skyline, with fine detail associated with a photographic image. Close inspection, however, discloses that the picture is made up of extremely fine needlework-some of the ladies will be able to more skillfully describe the type -but it impresses me with each inspection with the infinite patience and skill that must have gone into such a work, revealing, as it does, the classic Chinese handcraft.

As indicated elsewhere in these pages, the overnight guest in Kingman is being rapidly supplemented by the visitor who stays for several days or longer to enjoy the new recreational areas that are now opening up in Mohave County. Kingman's location at the convenient center of roads leading to the lakes and mountains has caused this interesting shift in pattern of visitors to the region, a trend that promises to grow in importance. During many months of the year, it is easy to schedule a day calling for water skiing, fishing, or sunbathing in the morning at Lake Mohave, snowball fights in the Hualapai Mountains during the afternoon, and then back to Kingman for dinner and the night. Total travel-less than one hundred miles.

A favorite attraction for visitors is a museum located in the Chamber of Commerce building on the west side of town near the high school and hospital. Here are found many rusty items of equipment used during early prospecting and mining days in Mohave County, together with ore samples, old photographs, and a lot of history. Nearby is a handsome monument to Lt. Beale, complete with metal camels, while just across the street a huge freight locomotive gives the younger generation a rare opportunity to climb into the cab and relive the days when these brutes puffed through Kingman on the Santa Fe main line. A nearby shady green park provides a welcome spot for a rest or a picnic.

But my home town does more than give visitors a handy operating base for vacation trips. Kingman also serves as an important commerical and business center for a large portion of northern Arizona, besides being a good place to just settle down and live. The 3,500-foot altitude, pure air and good water seem to spell the right combination for a rapidly growing tide of retired people who are discovering the pleasures of life on the high desert. While the former standbys of the economy, mining and cattle raising, have now been overshadowed by the tourist industry, they still exist in significant amounts. Kingman is still the place to go "to town," where mercantile institutions such as the Central Commercial Company, billed as "America's most amazing country store," stand ready to supply everthing from soup to nuts (and bolts).

During World War II Kingman bulged at the seams as thousands of Army Air Corps personnel manned an aerial gunnery school east of town. At war's end the desert around the air field was crowded with some 8,000 military aircraft flown to Kingman for their last trip on the road to being melted down into the pots and pans of the future. Many a combat crewman traveling along U.S. 66 near the parked planes spotted a familiar group or squadron tail insignia and turned in for a final nostalgic visit with his own plane. The air base now serves as a commercial airport for Bonanza Airline's daily prop-jet service to Phoenix and Las Vegas. The airfield has also been recently utilized as the site of a major new manufacturing industry for Kingman as the Vagabond Trailer Company of Michigan started assembling its luxury house trailers here for distribution to the western market.

While people usually are home town boosters by natural inclination, there are several things about KingKingman that have always seemed to set it apart from other cities of similar size, in my estimation. I have often visited cities of 10,000 or more and found them less well supplied with shops and service facilities than Kingman, a fact doubtlessly due to the transient population that daily swells the town's normal count of 4,000 or so. Of course, the wide streets, so wisely laid out long before the gas buggy came along, are a welcome change from the scene found in most places.

Kingman impresses most people as a town of good homes, of schools, and of churches. It is also a town of good people, who enjoy the pleasures of small town living, but who somehow seem more in tune with the times nationally and internationally than might be expected of a community of this size and location. The reason for this cosmopolitan interest and awareness, of course, must lie in the tremendous number of contacts made by the people of Kingman with visitors from every state and nation who stream through the city. Yes, Kingman is a town very much in tune with the world of the Sizzling Sixties.

Much credit here must also lie with Kingman's communications media, the weekly newspaper and radio station. The MOHAVE COUNTY MINER has served as an excellent reporter of the passing scene for more than enough years to warrant a regular column reprinting items from the pages of Fifty Years Ago. The editorial pen is now in the capable hands of a native son of Mohave County, Dick Waters, and he has created a product that is first class in every respect. Of course, the native code requires that the weekly appearance of the MINER be greeted by expressions to the effect that there is no news, again, but the pages are scrutinized with great care and diligence. Such is the MOHAVE COUNTY MINER, a weekly window on Arizona's northwestern corner that is treasured and appreciated most by the subscriber who must receive his copy in some spot far removed from the Mohave County scene.

So, too, it is with KAAA, the radio voice of Mohave County, which serves as a welcome visitor in home or automobile from first morning news until signoff time. The friendly interest and good programming taste of Wally Stone have done much to add to the cohesiveness of civic effort in Kingman during the years since radio arrived in the area.

While the desert lakes and pine-covered mountains are so close to Kingman they might be considered citylimit recreational facilities in a far-flung metropolitan center such as Los Angeles, there are other playtime areas even closer at hand. There is a fine municipal swimming pool that keeps the youngsters happy all summer, and a unique golf course that keeps their elders baffled the year around. The golf course is of the desert variety, with bulldozed fairways and oiled sand "greens." The rough is really rough, and balls lost down rattlesnake holes are generally given up with a penalty of one stroke, it being considered a bit unsporting to excavate even a snake's home and castle, although they are always fair game out in the open.I feel strongly, too, about our old adobe home, with its thick walls and graceful high windows, that has seen well over seventy winters come and go on the Kingman scene. It may not be chrome-plated, split-level, and supercharged, but the warmth and color of the Navajo rugs on the floors, the green of the shrubs and trees in the yard, all spell out a charm of living that is somehow lost in Suburbia. It spells out the pleasure of life in Kingman, a good place for one to visit, and also a good place to live.