New BLM Preserve: The San Pedro Riparian Area

SALOME, WHERE SHE DANCED

Two giant saguaros stand sentry over the stone obelisk in Salome that designates the final resting place of Dick Wick Hall: entrepreneur, land developer, prospector, publisher, service station owner, and one of Arizona's best-known humorists. It is fitting that Hall's burial site is here. He created the town. Salome lies about 120 miles west of Phoenix on U.S. Route 60. During his 25-year association with the place, Hall also devised a gold strike, invented a frog that couldn't swim, and described a 20-mile-long golf course. The Iowa native, who died April 26, 1926, spent nearly half of his 50 years facetiously trying to convince the rest of the world that his desert community was akin to Paradise-certainly an understandable effort since he owned most of the town's real estate. (He did manage to interest relatives in following him to Arizona. His brother, Ernest Hall, later became secretary of state: see Arizona Highways, October 1958 and September 1960.) To attract potential customers, Hall wrote and told stories about Salome, very few of which bore any resemblance to the truth. The origin of the town's name is a classic example. Officially, it's Salome, after Mrs. Grace Salome Pratt, wife of Hall's mining partner. But when Hall started The Salome Sun, a mimeographed one-sheet newspaper composed on a broken-down type-

Composed on a brokendown typewriter, the mimeographed Salome Sun kept Hall's gas station customers in stitches. The town, be said, was named after a visiting beauty named Salome (OPPOSITE PAGE) whom he asked to take off her shoes and sit a spell. "When her bare little feet touched the warm Sands of the Arizona Desert, Salome hot-footed ber way to Fame."

version of the story emerged.

Hall claimed a beauty named Salome stopped at his service station one sweltering day, and Hall unthinkingly asked her to take off her shoes and sit a spell. But, alas, he wrote, "When her bare little feet touched the warm Sands of the Arizona Desert, Salome hot-footed her way to Fame."

Thus, according to Hall's paper-selections from which later appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and a hundred newspapers from coast to coast and as far away as India-the "official" official name became Salome, Where She Danced. (A motion picture released in 1945, titled Salome, Where She Danced, starred Yvonne De Carlo and Rod Cameron.) With the syndication of The Salome Sun, much of the nation gained access to such information as the explanation that soil around Salome was excellent for growing potatoes, provided onions were planted with them and the onions were scratched occasionally to make the potatoes' eyes water so they'd irrigate themselves.

The gold strike was a rare case of borderline legitimacy for Hall. He hooked up with a prospector named Shorty Alger, who had found a fist-sized rock laced with the yellow mineral. Hall's version of the event was so convincing that a Phoenix newspaper reporter hailed it as "the richest, most spectacular strike ever made in Arizona." The strike gave Salome instant credibility, but success was short-lived. The mine produced less than $30,000 in gold. So Hall returned to the world of nonreality.

Once, he claimed in his dispatches, a bag of golf clubs fell off a passing car. Uncertain about their use, Hall asked a tourist, who not only explained the game but sketched plans for a golf course. Hall wrote that he seized upon this money-making opportunity and built a course on his ranch, but he mistook "yds." for "rds." So when the course was finally completed, the distance between holes measured in rods, not yards. The whole situation led to some confusion: "One thing that's been puzzling us is these Golf Scores printed in some of the Papers, where it says some made it in 72 or 78 Etc. The Man that made our Map for us was in such a Hurry he forgot to tell us how or what to count and we can't figure whether a score of 72 means that he made it in 72 Hours or 72 days or used up 72 Balls Going Around."

The Salome Frog, Hall's best known character-and still visible in a poster or two around town-was seven years old and unable to swim because he had never seen water. "Three years ago Fourth of July," Hall wrote, "Palo Verde Pete shot off a box of dynamite, and the frog, thinking it was thunder, chased the cloud of smoke two miles down the road, thinking it might be rain."

Dedicated though he was, Hall's dream of a desert metropolis never came true. Salome's population peaked at about 1,500 in the early 1920s, then declined to near 500. Today 800 people call the agricultural community home. In its heyday, Salome's main street was a principal national highway that carried two U.S. Route designations, 60 and 70. But in recent years, construction of Interstate 10 has bypassed Salome, taking its traffic about 13 miles to the south. Still, far from abandoned, U.S. 60 remains the most direct route between southern California and the northern Arizona highlands. Dick Wick Hall: Stories from the Salome Sun, edited by Frances Dorothy Nutt, Northland Press, 1980. Available from Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009; telepbone (602) 258-1000. $9.50 plus $1.00 postage and handling

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