Wacky Wingdings

WING DANOS

For 364 days each year, Gordon Thornhill is a mild-mannered, self-effacing machine shop owner. But in the predawn blackness of July Fourth at Taylor, Arizona, he becomes Captain of the Artillery and carries forward a ninety-year-old tradition of lighting the gunpowder that fires an anvil high into the chilly mountain air.

Normally lady-like Arizonans Peggy Isard and Kathy Hutchings of Tempe go temporarily insane on an August afternoon at Pinetop, towing a scantilly-clad couple in the World Championship Bathtub Races before a frenzied cheering throng of curious visitors.

Dr. Mark Ivey forsakes his bedside manner at the annual Payson Sawdust Festival, hops aboard a floating log in front of a packed grandstand, and challenges any man in the house to beat him one-onone in the birling contest.

There's a lot of this contagious madness going around Arizona, particularly during the heat of summer and almost entirely in the state's smaller communities, from the Mexican border to Page and from Lake Havasu City to Willcox.

These are the exuberant expressions of the Arizona spirit, a modern rebirth of a pioneer ability to make one's fun from the materials at hand. These are the festivals that build community pride, bring in Visitors from all over the nation, and prove once more that the American talent for comic innovation still lives.

These are Arizona's Wingdings. We're not speaking here of the state's traditional community celebrations. Those time-honored rodeos, parades, Indian dances, and pioneer days play an invaluable role in preserving the special charm that is Arizona. But they're just not deranged enough to qualify as Wingdings. To do that, an event must be more than a Little

WANG DANGS

improbable-even delightfully ab-surd. It's often said that you needn't be crazy to dream up one of these events, but it certainly helps. Some Wingdings have their roots deep in Arizona history. Prescott's annual Hose Cart Race was first run in 1885, when that Yavapai County city served as capital of Arizona Territory. Morris Goldwater, the favorite uncle of Senator Barry Goldwater, helped organize that first competition between volunteer firemen's companies. The Gold-Panning Championship at Wickenburg originated at the famed Vulture Mine, which surrendered millions of dollars in gold dust in the 1860s. The Taylor anvil firing was started in the early 1890s by Mormon pioneers who had no cannon but wanted to celebrate the Glorious Fourth in bang-up style. Other Wingdings celebrate the voca-tions of just a local area. Payson, long a logging and sawmill center, attracts lum-berjacks from many parts of the United States to compete in its annual Sawdust Festival. Miami glories in its mining heri-tage by staging the Mucking and Drilling Competition, right in the middle of town. And Salt River Valley cocktail waitresses display their skills in hilarious obstacle races at the Waitress Olympics in Tempe. But these are the more serious com-munity highjinks. Most of them are held strictly for fun. Well, almost. If an occasional tourist should wander by in curiosity and spend a couple of bills in the local motels and restaurants, so much the better. But that hint of material-ism isn't really enough to ruin an event's amateur standing. A shining example of pure, unadulter-ated Arizona Wingding spirit is that exhib-ited in the World Championship Burro Biscuit Toss, held each Labor Day at Oat-man, a picturesque northwest Arizona mining camp. Burro biscuits, in case you are a bit hazy about them, are the local equivalent of cow chips, and they have similar aero-dynamic properties. "We choose the biscuits carefully, so they'll be uniform in size," explains Mau-rine Nixon, impressario of the big event. "Then we spray-paint them gold." The main street is marked off to show the distances in feet, and each contestant gets three tosses. Despite the difficulty of sailing a burro biscuit for appreciable dis-tances, a woman once heaved one 125 feet to set a record that still stands. Winners in each category receive mer-chandise prizes-and a small basket of gold burro biscuits to take home. Mud volleyball, the squishy but popu-lar attraction at Fort Verde Days, is inter-spersed with milder activities such as a greased pig chase and a horseshoe tour-nament. John McReynolds, Camp Verde shopkeeper and program chairman, ad-mits finding contestants for the game is a sticky situation. People are reluctant to play, "but it draws the crowds to watch," he says. Up in Pinetop, in the cool White Moun-tain Country, they have brought utter silli-ness to new heights with the Annual (OPPOSITE PAGE) As American as watermelon on the Fourth of July, Arizona Wingdings reflect the pioneer spirit of small town homemade entertainment. Payson, home of a number of festivals and events each summer, hosts the annual Sawdust Festival where competitors from all over the nation prove their prowess in logging skills. In birling (one of the favorite contests), the loser gets dunked fully clothed. (BELOW) One of Willcox's wilder competitions is the Invitational Turtle Race, an international event that's part of the town's Rex Allen Days each October. Mexican competitor Pedro Tortuga won last year's event.

World Championship Bathtub Races. Ari-zona desert dwellers have started forsak-ing the early August heat and humidity in record numbers to be a part of the fun in the land of tall pines. First there's a gala parade of wheeled bathtubs down Pinetop's main street. The hilarious and highly imaginative decor of the racing tubs is a sight to make the trip particularly worthwhile. Highjinks amongst the outlandishly attired compet-itors adds still more flavor to the event.

Then the competition gets fierce. Each tub must weigh at least fifty pounds, must have at least eight inches of water in it, and must contain two adults. Six men pull the careening tub and screaming pas-sengers the first seventy-five yards, passPulling the tow ropes at that point to six eager women who tug their craft the final sixty yards. Sloshing water soon makes the racing course slippery, and adds to the fun. More than a few contestants have been forced to explain on Monday morn-ing at the office how they happened to be run down by a speeding bathtub. Jim Pettinotti, managing director of the Pinetop-Lakeside Chamber of Commerce, sees nothing but mounting national recog-nition for his town's improbable but al-ready famous competition. Lake Havasu City first staged its now-classic Anything Goes Pancake Race in 1971 as part of the dedication festivities for the transplanted London Bridge. Legend says the British staged the first pancake race long ago in honor of a house-wife who heard the church bells ring while she was cooking breakfast. In her haste to reach the church on time, she raced breathless to her pew before she noticed she still had a skillet full of pan-cakes in one hand. Now the Pancake Race is an eagerly-awaited October event in the Colorado River Community. In this curiously complex competition, a spirited young maiden runs the first lap, flipping a pancake in her skillet three times as she crosses London Bridge. She and a boy then paddle a boat back across the channel, still grasping skillet and pancake. Before the ritual is finished, a boy tosses water-filled balloons to a teenaged girl, an adult male and female drive a golf cart blindfolded, and in the final lap all team members put their feet into shoes attached to water skis and walk like giant caterpillars to the finish linewith the leader still valiantly carrying the skillet and, yes, the pancake, too.

WINGDINGS

There must be simpler ways to enjoy a sunny fall day on the Colorado River, but the London Bridge Days festival crowd finds the event a barrel of laughs.

Comedy and craziness are key ingredi ents in most of Arizona's Wingdings. But competition-fierce and heartfelt-is the magnet that attracts the throngs.

Perhaps the most elaborate and competitive of them all is the Sawdust Festival, which fills the Payson Rodeo Grounds for two days in late July. Aficionados of the woodsman's skills flock into town from all over the West and points beyond to enjoy the show.

If you've never watched a lumberjack bring down a large pine tree in half a minute-and make it fall within inchesof his target-you've missed a rare kind of thrill. While you track a summer shower on its way down from the towering Mogollon Rim, you can cheer the nimble birlers, who try to maneuver each other off a spinning log to an early bath in the birling pool.

You can applaud the axe-throwers as they split the bulls-eye from way out, or marvel at the artistry of the geniuses who create wood sculptures with a chain saw.

Provided you stay up-wind from them, you may get a charge out of the gentlemen who spit tobacco juice for distance.

The Sawdust Festival has been packing them in since 1976, when it was launched as a tribute to Payson civic leader Reed Smith. Since 1978, Elaine and Walt Dror-baugh have been its prime movers. Moreover, both their son Dan and their daughter Alice have been crowned all-around champions of the event in recent years.

Not all the Arizona Wingdings are staged in Pine Country for fugitives from the desert summer.

The annual Waitress Olympics elimina-tions are held in late April, with the championship event coming about in Tempe's Diablo Stadium in early May. For sheer innovative madness this classic is hard to top.

If you can picture teams of four winsome waitresses, each burying her face in a bowl of whipped cream to find a hid den olive-or racing in tandem, legs tied together, to deliver glasses of water on a tray without spilling-you begin to get the idea.

The warped mind of a young radio promotion executive, Jack Preda, conceived the Waitress Olympics. All entrants must be bona fide working waitresses representing an Arizona bar, hotel, or restaurant. More than a hundred establishments enter deadly-serious teams with equally serious coaches.

Because the winners get a week's vacation in Hawaii-and the second and third prizes are not too shabby, eitherthe ladies practice intently for weeks. A crowd of some 5000 comes to cheer their favorites in the finals and to contribute their dollars to the Arizona Recreation Center for the Handicapped in Phoenix.

WING DINGS

One of their favorites is the Kamikazee Karousel. Each contestant gulps down a mixed drink and then circles six times around an erect baseball bat, touching her head to the end of the bat throughout each circuit. Those dizzy damsels who can still stay on their feet then race back to the starting line-usually with about a fifteen-degree list to port. It's great fun-except for the time in the 1981 competition when one waitress lost her balance and careened into the bleachers, breaking a leg.

A wingding need not be elaborate to be a winner. Willcox folk work up a frantic lather over their Invitational Turtle Race, which attracts entrants from several states during the annual Rex Allen Days in October. A competitor from Mexico Pedro Tortuga, by name-recently added an internationalal touch to the show. Wickenburg for years has been attracting eager visitors to its Gold Panning Contest, which recalls the days when miners became wealthy overnight. On a February weekend, for a modest fee, a visitor can pan for real gold (salted in the sand the day before) on the banks of the Hassayampa River, keep any of it he finds, and compete for the cash prizes awarded to the winners.

(BELOW) Perhaps the oddest and oldest of Arizona Wingdings is the ftring of the anvil each Independence Day in the bamlet of Taylor. Dawn on the Glorious Fourth doesn't break, it explodes, as "Gordon Thornbill and his belpers set an anvil in the middle of the street, place a metal cylinder filled with gunpowder on top of it, and then set another anvil on top of that. Then as everyone holds ears and breath, Thornbill ignites a powder trail that detonates the charge with a mighty roar and sends the anvil soaring up above the beads of the cheering crowd."

You don't really expect to come home from Wickenburg any richer, but the fun and excitement make it all worthwhile. That's certainly the case at Prescott.

Back in 1885, when disastrous fires were laying waste to downtown Prescott with terrifying regularity, the community-minded of Arizona Territory's capital city banded together to form volunteer fire companies. Two of them hold a special place in Arizona history: the Toughs, who boasted many of the bartenders and gamblers on Whiskey Row, and the Dudes, whose membership tended more toward white collar types.

WING DANOS

Because both units prided themselves on their speed in rolling a fire cart down a street, unreeling the balky hose, and getting the first water onto a blaze, it was inevitable that a challenge should be issued for head-to-head competition.

The Dudes, Morris Goldwater's outfit, won the first race along the Courthouse Square and carried home the coveted prize-a silver fire trumpet. They're still at it, almost a century later, in the Mile High City.

Eight men's and four women's teams competed in the 1983 renewal of the Prescott Hose Cart Race. Captain Tom Campbell of the Prescott Fire Department was in charge of the competition, which attracted entrants from both Maricopa and Yavapai counties. Teams build their own hose carts, exactly like those of 1885, and practice diligently for the big day.

They don't have much need for practice to do their own thing at Taylor, just south of Snowflake, on the Fourth of July.

Exactly at 4:00 A.M., a truck bearing the anvil-firing crew pulls up in front of the Latter-Day Saints church, followed closely by the band, local police cars, and a throng of Taylor citizens who would rather carry on tradition than sleep.

Gordon Thornhill and his helpers set an anvil in the middle of the street, place a metal cylinder filled with gunpowder on top of it, and then balance a second anvil on top of that. Then, as everyone holds his ears and breath, Thornhill ignites a powder trail that explodes the charge with a mighty roar and sends the heavy anvil soaring up above the heads of the cheering crowd.Police sirens add to the din, the band strikes up a noisy march, and the lengthening parade moves on down the street to repeat the ritual until every Taylorite is roused from sleep and headed toward the town's big Independence Day program of patriotic speeches and entertainment.

Arizona's Wingdings are gossamer, fleeting, ever-changing phenomena. Many a community "tradition" has been launched in wild enthusiasm, only to die and be forgotten after a too short and undistinguished span of life.

But Arizona's small-town innovators are an ingenious lot. They continue to come up with ever new Wingdings, all candidates for immortality. And, occasionally, one of these ideas catches on.

When a fledgling Wingding does achieve acceptance and permanency, it can be worth its weight in gold dust. For then it becomes much more than another event to list on the Arizona Office of Tourism calendar, or one more glittery trap to lure the free-spending visitor.

It brings neighbors closer together, planning and working for months in advance to achieve a common goal. It helps put a town on the map, gives the home folks a sense of community, and enhances the quality of life for everyone.

Arizona's Wingdings-bless 'em-are here to stay.

Former newspaper reporter and public relations director Dean Smith currently is the executive vice president of the Arizona Historical Foundation.

Cartoonist, satirist, artist, Bob Boze Bell weekly lampoons life in Arizona for Phoenix's New Times. His book Low Blows is a collection of his work.

WANG DANGS

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Pinetop's World Championship Bathtub Race lures desert dwellers to the cool country each August. The races achieved national attention a few years ago on television's Real People. (ABOVE) No matter what the event, Arizonans enthusiastically support their local Wingdings, promoting community pride, good fun, and not a little insanity.