Yuma's Soul

INSIDE A CITY RICH IN HISTORIC TREASURES LIES A HEART

I'M ON THE UPPER DECK of a paddlewheeler heading west on the Colorado River near Yuma. The early February temperature hovers in the high 70s, and the afternoon sun feels like a warm flannel blanket on my shoulders and face. A couple of hours earlier, I heard the national weather news. The Northeast is suffering an ice storm and people are freezing; in California, torrential rain slams the coast from San Francisco to San Diego. I say a silent prayer on behalf of the frozen, sopping populations on the East and West coasts, then lean back toward the warm glow of the sun and count my blessings.

Ron Embrey, owner and captain of this paddlewheeler, the Colorado King I, microphone in hand, regales the passengers with stories. He talks about the landscape, the golden eagle sitting on a ridge to our right, the boats that once plied this river on a regular basis, the great blue heron that just crossed the bow. This is the 200th cruise of the Colorado King, Embrey says. It's going to take us three hours roundtrip to cover 18 river-miles between Martinez Lake and Imperial Dam.

This man offers so much information, I say to myself, You should be taking notes. Instead, I sip my Dr. Pepper and lean back in a patio chair to soak up more rays. After years of experience, I've learned that Benjamin Franklin was correct when he observed, "It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright."

This has happened before. In fact, during each trip to Yuma - I've been making these visits for 28 years there's always an interlude like this one that reminds me why I like the place so much. That I like it at all shocks most of my friends. Yuma has two reputations, which I call out-of-state and in-state: Among the thousands of out-of-state visitors who flock here every winter, Yuma means a warm paradise where they can escape the snow and freezing temperatures of Canada, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio -take your pick from the glut of out-ofstate license plates that crowd the streets from Thanksgiving through Easter. Arizona residents, on the other hand, regard the place as the crucible they must endure on their way west to a summertime vacation at San Diego's beaches.

Unquestionably, Yuma sees very high temperatures during the summer months, but I'm inclined to agree with Mayor Marilyn Young, who observed, "If you think Yuma is much hotter than Phoenix, then you're one taco short of a combo plate."

In effect, travelers who make a quick stop in Yuma on their way to the Coast pass through the city's center and miss its heart. Yuma's soul remains in its old downtown, known locally as the North End, the part of the city that grew up along the banks of the Colorado River in the mid-1800s. The charm of that neighborhood has always seemed palpable and intriguing.

The feeling registers strongest when I'm near the Sanguinetti house, two blocks south of the river. E.F. Sanguinetti, the son of Italian immigrants, settled in Yuma in 1887 and eventually owned several businesses. His home now serves as the historical society's Century House Museum. Sanguinetti had the soul of a poet, but he lived in a place where summer temperatures (before air-conditioning) seemed unbearable, where the river (not yet dammed) flooded almost every year and where people avoided being eaten alive by burning manure to ward off mosquitoes. Sanguinetti retreated to his back yard and turned it into the garden of an Italian villa. His gardeners planted bushes of purple bougainvillea, groves of willowy bamboo, orange trees, a giant guaymuchil tree and languorous palms, and then he built aviaries for his cockatiels and doves.

The day after my cruise on the river, I visit this garden, later transformed by Sanguinetti's descendants into the Garden Cafe, and then let my imagination drift. I want briefly to be a character in an oldblack-and-white movie filmed at an oasis along the Nile. In the early part of the 20th century, one of Yuma's promoters re-ferred to the river as [OPPOSITE PAGE] In the heart of Yuma's character-rich North End district, the Spanish Renaissancestyle Hotel del Sol and Nite Club awaits salvation through restoration.

[RIGHT] Guests enjoy lunching alfresco at the Garden Cafe.

REVEALED TO THOSE WHO SEEK IT

the Arizona Nile. Perfect, I think. Give me a white suit, a Panama hat and a pencil-line mustache. Maybe I can pass for a bored dilettante from a Paul Bowles novel. What brought that on? I wonder. Is it nostalgia or the late afternoon glow that lies just beyond this flowering oasis? More likely it's the overall ambience of old Yuma the narrow streets, the rickety porches, the whitewashed cottages with Mexican tile roofs, the dignified brick buildings such as the old Gandolfo Theater and other landmarks along the riverfront like the Hotel San Carlos, where actors Charles Boyer, Errol Flynn, Marlene Dietrich and Boris Karloff stayed while working on films shot at the nearby dunes. Even President Herbert Hoover spent the night there, attracted, no doubt, by such state-of-the-art features as drinking water purified by Yuma's unique zeolite process, and a cooling system that used well water to reduce the air temperature to 68 degrees, then piped it into the rooms.

Most of the structures in the North End date from around 1916, when a devastating flood destroyed almost all of the buildings on Main Street. This area will change in the coming years with a major hotel and convention center, a multiplex cinema and a brew pub, but right now it still looks like a remnant from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row transplanted to Yuma.

There's a mix of nostalgia and pride in the city's history along the streets near the river. In the morning, I wander over to Yuma Crossing State Historic Park, a block north of the Coronado Motel, where I'm staying. The adobe structures and exhibits at the park evoke Yuma's past as a port and major crossroads. Prospectors heading for the California goldfields in 1849 crossed the river at this point, following the route Spanish soldiers and missionaries traversed nearly a hundred years earlier. Called the Yuma Crossing, the area became part of the United States in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase.

From 1852 until 1877, shallow-draft steamboats operated from the Sea of Cortes to the Yuma Crossing, carrying the supplies used in the development of Arizona and New Mexico territories. Materials would be loaded onto boats in San Francisco, and in 12 days they covered 2,100 miles to Port Isabel, where the Colorado River joined the Sea of Cortes. Equipment was then transferred to the shallow-draft steamboats and transported upriver to Yuma.

The arrival of the railroad in 1877 ended steamboat trade south of Yuma. However, riverboat business north of Yuma continued until the Laguna Dam, built 15 miles upriver in 1909, prohibited boating traffic. It may be just as well because dams built in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, eventually dried up the portion of the Colorado River between Yuma and Port Isabel.

From Yuma Crossing State Historic Park, I return to the Best Western Coronado Motel (among the oldest Best Westerns in the U.S.) for a tour of one of the city's most unusual museums. The motel, built in 1938, is itself a historic institution. John Peach, whose parents built and managed the Coronado before he took it over, also owns the Yuma Landing Restaurant, also built by his parents. In both places, you can see another fold in Yuma's past: Peach and his wife, Yvonne, converted a cottage that served as the office for the original motel into a quaint museum filled with "artifacts" of the decades from the '20s to the '50s. The motel's original switchboard, where Peach's mother used to eavesdrop on her guests' conversations ("They all did it," Yvonne says), is there, along with some things I'd never seen before. Coin-operated radios, for example. "They took nickels and dimes," she explains. "For 10 cents, you could listen for an hour. When Peach's mother stopped charging for the radio during World War II, it ranked as a big event. The local newspaper even carried a story about it with a headline, 'Free Radio at the Coronado!'"

At the Yuma Landing Restaurant, directly north of the motel, I could spend an entire morning looking at the fascinating black-and-white photos, most of them shot by Emil Eager, that line the walls. The photos document nearly everything that's occurred in Yuma over the last 50 or 60 years, including cowboy movie star Tom Mix's wedding.

Two restaurants that have been part of Yuma for many generations also reflect this love affair with the past. Lutes Casino on Main Street not a casino but a beer and burger joint with pool tables was "decorated" by brothers Bob and Bill Lutes with posters of deceased movie stars and writers, old boots and stuffed animals and an operating room lamp rescued from the county hospital illuminating one of the pool tables.

A less zany but equally evocative ambience can be found at Chretin's Mexican Foods on South 15th Avenue. The place started in the 1930s as an outdoor dance hall owned by Jose Maria and Engracia Chretin. Maria enclosed the dance hall with adobe walls. Later, a stage was added, and Chretin began selling tacos and sodas at the dances. Eventually, the dancing ended but the restaurant business thrived, in part because the enterprising Maria used to provide shuttle service for soldiers and marines stationed at Yuma's military facilities. World War II-era patriotic posters cover the walls, along with plaques for individuals who distinguished themselves by consuming record-breaking numbers of nachos.

One afternoon I spent an hour at the remains of the Yuma Territorial Prison, now a state park on Prison Hill facing the Colorado River. Between 1876 and 1909, 3,069 prisoners lived within its adobe walls. (The first seven helped build the place.) From 1910 to 1914, it was used as a high school, which may explain why it remains a source of pride for Yuma High School. Yuma High's football team, the Criminals, always receives a police escort onto the playing field. Not only that: Go to one of the school's wrestling matches and you'll see the athletes, also known as the Criminals, wearing black-and-white striped warm-up suits. One proud mother got up at a school board meeting recently and announced that her mother had been a Criminal, she had been a Criminal and now all of her children were Criminals!

After four days of exploring Yuma by foot and boat, I decide to rent a bike in the North End and cruise the bike path that meanders from Prison Hill down to Yuma Crossing Park and westward, a flat ribbon running parallel to the river. A tourist train follows the same route, but nothing rumbles this afternoon and I cruise among reedy banks and small cor-rals. Are people actually freezing in other parts of the country? I'm roasting.

Later, after having my fill of physical exercise, I take my car and head east of town about 10 miles on 16th Street to a unique chapel I'd seen a few days earlier. Smaller than a child's treehouse, the chapel sits at the edge of a broccoli field and was built by farmer Loren Pratt, who happens to be there watering some flow-ers when I stop by. He tells me he saw a similar chapel in Washington state. "It just touched my heart and I thought, Well, my wife is still here even if she is in a nursing home, and this is something I want to build for her." Sadly, he says, she was so ill by the time the chapel was done, he wasn't sure it had given her the spiri-tual pleasure he'd intended. Nevertheless, he says, the tiny chapel provides a source of comfort to strangers who visit from around the world.

I sit in one of its miniature pews and say a word for Mrs. Pratt. Then I drive back to the river and think about the chapel as one more unique landmark in a town filled with hidden treasures. If only I had another week, I could see them all. AH

YUMA IS A TOWN FILLED WITH HIDDEN TREASURES. IF ONLY I HAD ANOTHER WEEK, I COULD SEE THEM ALL.