Tucson's Forgotten Valley of the Moon

In July of 1952, a Tucson newspaper ran an obituary for a rabbit. Readers were told that Jack the Wise had died in his sleep. He was eight years old not bad for a rabbit and God rest his furry soul.

Newspapers don't usually write obits for rabbits, but Jack was a special case. His cleverness had made him a star at the Valley of the Moon, a place everyone in Tucson knew about in 1952, but few know of today, even though it still exists. Jack was part of a rabbit vaudeville show, and the show was at one point the centerpiece of the Valley of the Moon.

An exotic fantasy fairyland covering 2.7 acres, the place was a handmade, homemade, chickenwire-and-concrete manifestation of the images swimming around in the head of a postal clerk named George Phar Legler. Kids all over Tucson knew Jack the Wise. George they knew as the Mountain Gnome, or the Wizard, the names he adopted for himself.

In the beginning, the place was merely Legler's home. As time went by, it became a dreamy network of tunnels and caves leading to dimly lighted towers, miniature castles, an amphitheater with an 80-foot stage, an architectural conundrum that Legler called a cathedral, and an enchanted garden.

Legler started building the Valley of the Moon in 1923 and opened it to the public in 1932. When he was done with the building projects that consumed most of the remaining daylight hours after work, he would go inside, dress himself in a black cape lined with rabbit fur, and work at changing feathers into serpents.

Every Friday night, he gave tours of his fantasyland and astonished children with his magic acts. In the 1940s, after spending many years eating rabbits, he discovered he could train them as performers. He launched what he called The Bunnyland Theater, a vaudeville show in which the performers were rabbits dressed in flowery gowns and dapper suits. He refused to charge any admission fee.

The remnant of a mailman's dream to teach children kindness is making a slow, steady comeback.

"The Valley of the Moon is dedicated to children's happiness," he said. "The minute you charge even 10 cents at the gate, then you're selling children's happiness. Everywhere you go it's 50 cents or 75 cents a head. How can a family afford that?"

Today the volunteers who have been restoring the Valley of the Moon will lead children and adults on arranged tours free of charge. Fund-raising events are held twice a year to raise money for repairs.

Legler was a gentle eccentric who tried to live by a simple principle: happiness, he said, can only be given, not sold or bought, and happiness comes to those who are kind to others.

"I'm convinced that all this world needs is kindness," he said in an interview many years ago. "I believe that if all children were taught kindness, they would grow up practicing it, and, in time, the whole world would be a kindly peaceful place."

His philosophy was simple: "Evil deeds only cause more evil deeds; kindness is the reward of kindness." And yet in his letters to Frank Thibault, a friend with whom he corresponded for 50 years, he described himself as selfish and egotistical. He apparently spent the greater part of his life resisting those tendencies in his character.

While he built the Valley of the Moon, various people came to stay with him and exchanged their labor for his hospitality. Thibault, before he came to spend some time with Legler, apparently offered to pay him rent. Legler would not hear of it. He wrote back: "I would not want you to come here unless you really felt that you were working for a cause, a principle to spread human brotherhood and human health. If you feel that you could live here with that thought uppermost in your mind, I invite and welcome you to live as a brother and comrade pledged to spread the truth of human welfare and unselfish comradeship."

Legler was born in Indiana and lived awhile in Colorado before coming to Tucson in 1910. He worked at several jobs before settling down as a postal clerk. In his younger days, he said he wanted to do something for sick people, and what he did was unique: using small stones and cement, he built miniature landscape scenes and tiny castles outside the windows of bedridden patients to cheer them up.

Everything he did, he said, was influenced by "the touch of three." The three were Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Lewis Carroll. Legler took what he knew of their stories, sprinkled in a bit of Chaucer, and went to work. With a wheelbarrow and mules, he hauled sand from a dry riverbed near his house. He brought rocks and bits of quartz from the surrounding mountains. He bought about 300 bags of cement. "He was a magician and a master of illusion," said Shari Murphy, membership secretary of the volunteers' foundation. "Look at those steps going up to the tower of Zogog [Legler invented names for everything]. They just look like steps, right? Walk up them."

He built hills and caves and miniature gardens where he concealed gnomes and dolls and a variety of fanciful creatures.

Doing so was a strange sensation. Legler had shaped the concrete steps so the risers looked normal at a glance, but, in fact, angles were reversed, so walking up provided the sensation of walking down, and vice versa. "I don't know how he figured out how to do that," Murphy said. Legler's aim was to delight children and to teach them the value of kindness. He wasn't a preacher. He was a mailman with an obsession: he wanted people to be good to one another, and he figured if he got the ball rolling by being kind to one other person, an epidemic could develop. The Valley of the Moon became a symbol for all he believed. He was not a skilled craftsman; everything he built was the work of the common man lost in his enthusiasm. However, Legler was anything but common. In 1952, McCall's Magazine put together a Child's Guide to the United States. For Arizona, the guide listed three places worthy of a child's attention: the Grand Canyon, Montezuma National Monument near Camp Verde, and the Valley of the Moon. When Legler moved to Tucson, the city's population was about 13,000 (today it's around a half-million). He moved to an unpopulated area seven miles east of the center of town. Presumably he wanted space and the opportunity to be closer to the landscape he loved. But the more he worked on his fantasyland of grottoes and tunnels, the more the landscape receded. Eventually his fantasy world literally backed him into a corner. He spent many years living in two dimly lighted

rooms in the depths of his "castle," impervious to any need for creature comforts. By day, Legler concerned himself with the mundane routine of the postal service, but every evening, after work, he returned to his few acres in what is now the heart of the city and immersed himself in the ever-present sacks of cement, rocks, steel cable, and chicken wire. He built cliffs and hills and caves and miniature gardens where he concealed gnomes and dolls and rabbits and a variety of fanciful creatures. He even wedged mirrors into the miniature castles that were above a child's eye level, so that they would be able to see the gnomes and interior walls reflected from below.

He saved anything that might be useful, including cylindrical Quaker Oats containers which he used as forms to make what eventually became a 40-foot-long serpent. He was undoubtedly an irrepressible tinkerer, and it is evident that everything he designed was measured by the eyeball method. Somehow, it all worked.

All of his diversions did not save him from a case of chronic ulcers, however. In 1953, when a reporter for Life magazine went to see him, he was living on warm milk and 13 kinds of pills. In 1969 another publication said that, because of his ulcers, Legler had not eaten any solid food in 20 years. If he were concerned about his maladies, he did not cry out for help. Legler lived to entertain children.

Valley of the Moon

Eventually some of those children came to his aid. In 1964, when he was 79 years old and in failing health, he closed the Valley of the Moon and withdrew to one of its tiny caves.

Seven years later, Kenneth Cummins and Jim Goodridge, teenagers at Catalina High School in Tucson, were talking about dreams. Cummins mentioned that he occasionally had dreams about a weird place where a gnomelike man lived. When he described the scene in more detail, Goodridge reacted. The same scene had popped up in his dreams. They decided that perhaps the place actually existed. They discussed the images with their parents and eventually returned to the Valley of the Moon.

They jumped the chain-link fence that surrounded the place, wandered through a tangle of weeds and scraggly brush, and found the ailing Legler, reclusive and wary of strangers. He was living on vitamins and eight cans of condensed milk a day in a concrete room the size of a walk-in closet. In time they convinced him they wanted to help restore the Valley of the Moon to the place they remembered as small children. Legler's energy was revived, and with the help of the teenagers and their families, the Valley of the Moon celebrated a grand reopening in 1973. Arizona added the Valley of the Moon to the State Register of Historic Places in 1975.

In 1982, when he was 97 years old, Legler died in a nursing home in Tucson. Mary Anne Goodridge, Jim Goodridge's mother, had nursed Legler in his last years. Later she took his ashes to the Valley of the Moon and scattered them under a crooked eucalyptus tree.

Author's Note: The Valley of the Moon, at 2544 E. Allen Road in Tucson, does not maintain regular hours. To inquire about visiting or activities (weddings and parties can be held there; an open house is scheduled in March; special shows take place in spring and at Halloween), tele-phone (602) 323-1331. Admission is free, except for events.

Tucson-based Sam Negri first visited the Valley of the Moon in the early 1980s. He says what impressed him was how one person could bring one unique vision to reality. He also wrote about the bird sanctuary at Holy Trinity Monastery in this issue.

Richard Maack especially enjoys photographing unusual places such as this fantasyland.