GREAT WEEKENDS

great weekends Bisbee's Brewery Gulch Daze Serves Up Rattlesnake Chili and Colorful Characters

Don't believe all this hooha about Bisbee being a counter-culture haven. It's really a Norman Rockwell kind of town. No fooling. Take Brewery Gulch Daze, held every Labor Day weekend for 14 years now. This daylong party brings together a mix of locals and outof-towners in a wide-open, shoes-optional small-town street festival.

Visitors can entertain their kids at carnival-style booths, play waterball or something called “human foosball,” dance to live music or enjoy a drink from the open-air balcony of the Stock Exchange bar, while watching a parade of pets dressed in ridiculous outfits. And all the proceeds go to charity. Think of it as pure Americana, the kind of thing Rockwell would put to canvas if he were alive today.

Browse the kiosks along both sides of the street and chat with the merchants about items that have been part of this country's celebrations as far back as anyone can remember — snow cones, ice cream, leather goods, hot dogs.

Or check out another old favorite: the waitress contest. When was the last time you watched waitresses balancing pitchers and water cups on trays and running an obstacle course up and down the street?

Their task involves scurrying between traffic cones and around two tables, which they must serve while an overly energetic fellow with Alice Cooper hair and fatigue shorts makes mad runs at them with an infant's stroller, trying to spook them into jettisoning their trays.

Not passive participants in this contest of wills, the waitresses fight back by occasionally dousing their tormentor with water, then laughing hysterically as they rush toward the finish line.

Spectators lining the sidewalk double over with giggles. As this goes on, the band's lead singer — an ordinary middleclass Bisbee guy with a hoop earring, tattoos up and down both arms, a goatee and a golf hat — is belting out, “All of me. Why not take all of me?” Just when you think it can't get any more normal, along comes John Psomas, one of the Gulch's most distinguished businessmen.

He's wearing a coating of red Marilyn Monroe lipstick, a wig that'd make a fine home for a barn owl and a fetching red dress he borrowed from his daughter. It's cut low in front to make sure nobody, least of all the circus recruiters, misses the tufts of white hair curling off his chest.

Psomas hawks raffle tickets while awaiting the start of the Miz Ole Biz Pageant, for which locals dress up in outrageous costumes.

"I won the pageant in 1997," says Psomas, owner of the Stock Exchange bar and the Brewery Food & Spirits restaurant. "Last year I handed over my crown. This year I like to think of myself as the queen mother."

Psomas makes a big hit with the sidewalk gawkers outside St. Elmo's, founded in 1902 and one of the oldest continuously operating bars in Arizona. As Psomas sashays off, Bisbee resident Diane Benavidez says, "A lot of people with responsible jobs in town just let down their hair today."

Her husband, Babe Benavidez, one of the few miners remaining in a town that grew up on mining, knows all about the Gulch's wild days. He remembers when it was lined with one bar after another.

"After World War II, when I was a kid, me and my friends would come down here and wait across the street for the miners to get rowdy," says the 61-year-old Benavidez. "It was like having a seat at the Saturday night fights."

From its beginnings in the 1890s, the Gulch was considered Bisbee's outlaw neighborhood; home to fast women,

strong whiskey and whatever trouble you wanted.

It also became where the town's immigrants settled, usually in clusters. A group of Serbs would live on one side of the hill, Montenegrins on the other, with a gathering of Mexicans in between.

The Gulch's name comes from the brewery located in the Henry Muheim building. This large brick structure, sitting at the mouth of the Gulch, was completed in 1905, and later housed the Bisbee stock exchange, which operated until 1961.

The old trading board, which displays the names of the company stocks traded, still hangs on the rear wall of Psomas' Stock Exchange bar. It remains the Outside the bar, the area's historic flavor is captured by two men walking the street in period clothing. Donald Smiley, an artist, wears a black suit and veste vest equipped with a crystal watch fob and carries a long pipe in his portrayal of one of the many turn-of-the-19th-century gamblers who plied their trade in the Gulch.

With him is Floyd Lillard, a former stand-up comic, now an antique dealer. He wears a top hat, pinstriped pants and wing tips and carries a walking stick with a Tiffany handle.

His character represents Lemuel Shattuck, who started out as a miner in the earliest days of the Copper Queen Mine, and then went into the adobemaking, lumber and bar businesses. However, he remains best known as the first man to install cold storage for beer. This made him something of a hero among miners who worked 12 hours a day below ground.

"We thought it was important to show some of Bisbee's past, too," says Smiley. "There's more history here than Tombstone ever had."

Modern Bisbee supports the claim and refurbished miners' shacks cling to steep hillsides in a way that does not inspire tremendous confidence about their permanency. But that's part of the attraction of an honest-to-goodness Old West mine town transformed into a semimodern, charming-to-its-toes burg with moderate temperatures, good restaurants and some offbeat bed and breakfasts.

Just up Tombstone Canyon from the Gulch is the Inn at Castle Rock Bed & Breakfast, an 1890s-style miners' boardinghouse, complete with original artwork, an acre of hillside gardens, fishponds and a silver mine shaft stocked with fish. You also might run into Allie, a sweet old greyhound with painted toenails. She likes to snooze near the entryway.

Bisbee offers some good options for dining, too. The food at the Copper Queen hotel dining room tastes good, and Psomas' Brewery restaurant serves delicious steak and pasta dishes.

All-American stuff. Just like Brewery Gulch Daze itself. Town-to-town competition. Donating to charity. Beer. Capitalism. History.

And chili. Several top-notch chili cooks are brewing their recipes beneath makeshift tents. The aroma is intense, like the love these chefs have for their favorite flammable food.

If you don't already know, any one of them will be glad to tell you that real chili does not contain beans.

"There's an old saying," says 67-year-old Pat Linz, a retired aerospace worker from California. "If you know beans about chili, you know that chili ain't got no beans."

Fact is, just about all chili recipes contain the same ingredients. What separates one batch from the next depends on the timing of the chef, as well as his or her showmanship in the preparation. And some chili cooks boast that they sprinkle their concoctions with tarantulas, monkey meat, horseshoes, road tar, even cigar ash.

Just down the way from Linz is 20-year-veteran Doug Thuma, a past Arizona men's chili champion who claims to cook it with a rattlesnake. He's the roly-poly, red-faced fellow with a smoke and a big grin standing behind his beloved chili pot. "It's a pain putting that rattler in there, though," he says with a twinkle in his eyes.

"Why?" you ask.

"It keeps trying to get out." "You mean it's alive?"

"Oh, yeah. I take it out just in time and use it in the next batch. They're an endangered species, you know."

If only Norman Rockwell were here.

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