On the Back Roads (5 page)

The plaque, the cannon, the catalog store. Everything was dated, refreshingly outdated. Insanity to renovate has not yet destroyed this place. Perhaps it never will.

The door to the nearby senior center was open, so I wandered back across the street. The senior center lay adjacent to the dirt lot where my motor home was parked. At the front desk, a lady with a pencil stuck in her hair finished a phone conversation about bingo. I asked about “the train station.” My first mistake.

“It wasn't a train station. It was a Harvey House.”

I asked if the Harveys still lived in town.

Both of her hands hit the desk. Her voice rose an octave. “My goodness! You don't know what a Harvey House is? It was a big chain of fancy restaurants. They had places all over the country.”

Fortunately, the phone rang. Someone at the truck scales on Interstate 40 had ninety bags of onions for the seniors. She said that the senior center gets a lot of free produce off over-weight trucks.

“The Harvey House has been closed for years now,” she continued. “They want to tear it down, but the city wants to save it. So there it sits. Something to look at, isn't it?”

I got around to the caboose question. She pointed out the office of the Burlington Northern—Santa Fe next to the tracks.

John Myers, a railroad employee, waited for a train to come in from the east. His crew would take it 145 miles across the sweltering Mojave Desert to Barstow, Cali forma. There, another crew would run the train down Cajon Pass to San Bernardino. He would spend the night at the Cool Water Motel in Barstow, as he has hundreds of times. The next day, his crew would bring another freight train back to Needles.

All trains of the Burlington Northern—Santa Fe change crews in Needles. That's the way it has been for decades, twenty-four hours a day, every day.

At John's feet rested a small nylon bag. Not completely zipped shut, work gloves and a walkie-talkie stuck out of the top. He has been a brakeman for twenty-four years, though he looked very young.

He and the others who entered and left the office wore no special outfit that identified them as a train crew. No red neckerchiefs. No black—and—white striped caps. They could easily have passed as electricians or ranchers going about their work here in Needles on any 100-degree day.

We talked about railroading. I asked my caboose question as if it were an after thought. I didn't let on that I had dedicated my whole day to his answer.

“I think the caboose went off the line sometime in 1986. You will still see one now and then, but it's rare. I would say 99 percent of the freight trains have no caboose now,” John said.

“Do you miss the caboose? Wasn't it like a lodge for the royal order of trainmen?” I was searching for something that only a veteran railroad man might feel. Ask an “old salt” about his early days at sea, and his eyes usually glaze over with time-embellished memories.

I was watching John's eyes. He was only looked at his watch.

It was not going to happen. John apparently had no tales of the good ol' caboose days. Maybe there were none. Or maybe they were be fore his time, like back in the 1940s in Iowa.

A five-engine train squeaked to a slow stop. The rest of John's crew, a conduct or and an engineer, came out of the freight office with their bags of clothes. One carried a heavy ice chest, the other a handful of computer printouts.

We walked to the train together.

The other crew was climbing down from the cab one by one, handing bags down to one other. John's crew hopped aboard immediately. There were no hands hakes or greetings normally expected when travelers come home or leave. There was no discussion between engineers, as you might expect,
when the helmsman is relieved. No conversation at all. It was as unceremonious as the changing of shifts in a steel mill.

The first engine began to roar. The train started to move. I felt its thunder my gut. The rest of the engines picked up the throb until they roared in unison.

In less than a minute, the train was gone. All was still. I was standing in the sun. Just me. It was hot.

“Y
ou in there?” She yelled through my screen door. It was the lady from the senior center with the pencil in her hair. I approached to the door. “You looking for me?” I asked. “Sure am. That is, if you want to know about the Harvey House. A couple of people at the center know all about it. Plus I've got some onions for you.”

“I'll be there,” I said, “but how did you find me?”

“This is a small town,” she replied and walked away. Seemingly, that was all the answer I needed, or at least all I would get.

I was about to open a beer and let the remains of the day just play out. Small town or not, since she had made an effort to find me, I would go. Besides, I knew it was cooler there than in my motor home.

Harvey Houses, named for their founder Fred Harvey, who died in 1901, were spaced a meal apart along the route of the Santa Fe Railroad from Kansas City to Los Angeles. Before the days of the dining car, cross-country passengers on the Santa Fe took all their meals in Harvey Houses. Built in 1908, the one here in Needles was named “El Garces” after
Father Francisco Garces, a missionary who came to this area in 1776.

“Indian women, arms covered with strings of beads, were always on the plat form hawking their wares, day and night,” remembers Pete Jewell. Pete has lived here for sixty-five years and has worked for the railroad forty-eight of them. “Near the end, when the trains stopped only for a five-minute crew change, passengers would get off to stretch and buy from the Indians. By the late 1950s, the Indians stopped coming. Couldn't sell much to a freight train.”

Pete remembers El Garces in its prime. “Everyone ate on linen-covered tables with fine china. Fresh flowers were on every table. The ice-cream and soda-fountain room is still there. The walls are all marble. Made it cooler in the summer. Nobody has touched it, except for the pigeons. They have nested in there over the years and have redecorated it a bit. The waitresses, they called them Harvey Girls, all lived there too. They were farm girls, recruited mostly from the Midwest.”

Jo Brochheuser was a Harvey Girl. “My number was seven. We all had numbers like football players. We wore two-piece white uniforms and hair nets. The top had a high neck and long sleeves. I remember, vividly, washing those uniforms in a big washtub and then starching and ironing them. How do you forget that?

“In the summer, when it was really hot, they would bring in a boxcar loaded with ice and blow the cool air into the sleeping rooms with big fans. The coolness reached the whole building.”

By the mid-1940's, passenger trains had dining cars. El Garces became a dormitory for train crews and section workers until it closed in 1950.

With twilight coming on, I walked across the lawn in front of El Garces. I suppose the trees are taller, but everything now is as it was: the benches, the cannon, the soft light, even the air, heavy with heat. It was not hard to imagine this magnificent place three-quarters of a century ago, alive with anticipation and hope. Passengers strolling along the platform, maybe
drinking a soda or eating ice cream, or just sitting here on the cool grass while the train took on what it needed for the last leg of its trip to Los Angeles.

I crossed to my motor home, where neglected grass had been sucked dry by the sun. The grass was stiff and brown. It crunched under my feet like corn flakes, a reminder that this is a desert.

Nearby, six fifty-gallon drums were in their final days of supporting a dilapidated wooden plat form. Its railing already laid on the ground. I imagined it was once decorated with flags on the Fourth of July.

Just like the caboose, El Garces was useful once, even important.

T
he individual was supreme. The gold in his britches often determined just how supreme. They were the ultimate fortune seekers. Whether a gold miner or a merchant on main street, each man was betting on his ingenuity and his skill, or maybe just that his back would hold up. It ws every man for himself. No corporate conglomerates or government agencies were making rules or exacting a piece of the action. No special interest groups shouted demands. In fact, demands of any kind were usually ignored, if anyone was brave enough or silly enough to make any. When an entrepreneur came to town, his competition and his bankroll were the only considerations as to when and where he set up business.

They made the boomtowns of the West, those tent cities that sprung up overnight in Nevada and the gold country of California beginning around 1850. They were the purest form of free enterprise this country has ever known. We have not seen the likes of them for about a hundred years.

Many wild, often lawless boomtowns grew quickly into first-class cities of thousands of people with newspapers, banks, churches, breweries, fancy hotels, and opera houses.
The appetite of their founders for instant riches and adventure was insatiable. They were always on the move. Miners moved to the newest discovery when the one they were working played out, if it ever produced at all. The camp followers were close behind. Some of the towns disappeared, but most are still around in an abbreviated form. Those days are history.

The craze for uranium ore created a few little boomtowns in the West in the 1950s. Oil discoveries made some before that, and some later in Alaska, but they were a different breed. Big money created them, not free spirits. Those towns were laid out on drafting tables, not lined off in the dirt with a stick. They were proper company towns where everybody knew who the boss was. An infrastructure was always in place and expanded as the town grew.

The last boomtown of this century, maybe the last one of all time, is in Nevada. It is probably the only state where it could happen. Laughlin, now the second-largest gambling mecca west of the Mississippi, has a workforce of 14,000 people. Eight thousand people live here. Another 50,000 visit every weekend. In 1984, the population was 95. When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, the town of Laughlin was just a year old.

What is nostalgic, even exciting, about this place is that it has grown with the same mania and madness that characterized its true predecessors. Laughlin has never had a mayor, a police force, or town infrastructure. A county commission that is nearly a hundred miles away still governs it. It still borrows its cops from the poiice department in Las Vegas. There was such a rush to put up casinos and hotels, nobody waited for adequate roads or proper traffic control. Parking space was never a problem in the empty desert. Getting to it was.

For many years, Laughlin had thousands of hotel rooms but not one hospital bed. It had dozens of gift shops and bars, but no library, schools, churches, parks, not even a jail. Today it has some of those things, plus a lot more hotel rooms—11,000 that are occupied 93 percent of the time.

As a boomtown, it's a hybrid. It was built with corporate money, yet its genes is was with a latter-day pioneer named Don Laughlin. By definition, it sprung up “overnight,” but not due to an oil gusher or gold strike. If there was a “discovery” at all, it was that conditions and times constantly change in this country.

Laughlin, located at the bottom tip of Nevada, sits right on the Colorado River across from Bullhead City, Arizona. In the early years, there were two ways to get from Bullhead City to Laughlin: by shuttle boat, operated by the casinos, or by driving up the river and crossing on Davis Dam. Obviously, that drive was an inconvenience for customers, a condition casino operators adore. Gamblers are not gambling when they are driving. The boomtown needed a bridge.

Rather than wait for two state and two county governments to decide where a bridge should be located, casino owner Don Laughlin built one where he wanted it and then gave it to them. It cost him $3.5 million. Generous? Sure, but cleverly so. The 745-foot span is right next to his property—his roulette tables, poker games, and a couple thousand clinking, chiming, chrome-plated slot machines that take everything from nickels to twenty-five dollar tokens. Don Laughlin's Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino gets first crack at the gamblers pouring into town across his bridge.

I left Needles at 8:00 this morning, crossing from California into Arizona and into a later time zone. An hour later, I crossed Don's bridge, leaving Arizona and entering Nevada. Now I am back in the earlier time zone. So I get to pass through the nine o'clock hour twice this morning. It's great how these magical things happen on the road.

I turned into Don Laughlin's 800-site RV park across from his casino complex. It is Sunday and very busy. I have stayed in Laughlin many times, but it grows so fast, each time is a visit to an updated version. I have met Don be fore, but I am going to look him up again.

Don lives in a rooftop penthouse over the twenty-eighth floor of a new wing of his 1,404-room hotel. A lady in his office told me that Don does not show up there until late in the
morning. He usually works after midnight, especially on Saturdays. I arranged to meet him later at the tea dance, a Sunday-afternoon tradition at the Riverside, where Don is a regular.

Don started here in 1964, when he plunked down $35,000 for a small bar and restaurant on six acres of land next to the river. Called the Riverside, it had twelve slot machines and was on a brush-lined, dirt road that led nowhere. “When it rained, the road was one long mud puddle,” recalls Danny Laughlin, who grew up in the town named for his father.

Although Don's contribution is deserving of the town being named after him, he claims that it was not his idea. Relaxing at a table in the ballroom between dances with his girlfriend (he is divorced), Don explained, “A lot of people look at it like, boy, you must be on a big ego kick. You got the town named after you. My answer is jokingly, ‘No, they named it after my mother.'”