Hotel El Rancho as it looked when it opened in 1936.
Hotel El Rancho in Gallup, New Mexico, is as much a draw for tourists as it was when it opened in 1937 and one of the first things anyone is told about the hotel is that it was owned by the brother of the most famous film director of the early 20th century, David Wark ‘DW’ Griffith. Given its history as home to the stars, commemorated today by named rooms and copious photographs through the hotel, it’s easy to see why the idea that RE Griffith was related to such a movie legend has been repeated over and over again, by everyone from the National Parks Service to Wikipedia.
There’s one problem; it isn’t true.
There has always been something that has troubled me about the Griffith connection; I have a degree in film and have researched DW Griffith and I knew that, of his siblings, not one had a name beginning with R. So down the rabbit hole I went.
Rupert Earl Griffith, movie theatre mogul but no relation to DW.
Rupert Earl Griffith was born in 1893 in Hallettville, Texas, the second son of Henry and Minnie Griffith. He had two brothers neither of which were David Wark and his only relationship with DW was that they shared a surname. In 1920, putting a spell as a grocery salesman and one marriage behind him, RE Griffith – as he would be known for most of his life – found a job working as a commercial salesman in the motion picture industry selling film. He then opened his own theatre before moving to Oklahoma in 1931. From there he began the Griffith Amusement Company with his brothers Louis Clyde and Henry Jefferson, known in the family tradition as ‘LC’ and ‘HJ’.
David Wark Griffith, legendary movie director, but no relation to RE…
Despite the Great Depression, the movie industry – and the Griffith brothers – prospered. By the early 1940s they were the operators of the largest independent chain of theatres in America, owning some 290 picture houses. In 1936 RE had come to Gallup to build the Chief and Navaho theatres; New Mexico was, at that time, very popular with Hollywood filmmakers and Griffith, who adored all things Old West, decided what Gallup needed was a top-notch hotel.
He was right. Hotel El Rancho opened in 1936 and, over the next two or three decades would play host to countless stars. Did DW Griffith ever stay there? It’s quite likely he didn’t, for he had made his last film, the unsuccessful ‘The Struggle’, in 1932, five years before the hotel opened.
RE Griffith also went on to open The Last Frontier hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada (it would be renamed the New Frontier in 1955 and was where Elvis Presley made his Las Vegas debut the following year) which was designed by his nephew William J Moore who owned the El Cortez and Showboat hotels in Vegas. Incidentally, The Last Frontier had originally been planned to be built in Deming, New Mexico, but on a buying trip for the new venture, Griffith and Moore stopped in Las Vegas and realised the potential of the growing city.
The interior of Hotel El Rancho in the 1940s, still instantly recognisable today.
The Last Frontier, Vegas’ first themed hotel, opened its doors in 1942, but RE Griffith would have only months to enjoy its success. On November 24, he died of a second heart attack, days after he had suffered the first at the Beverly Hills Hotel while on a business trip to California. It was just five miles from where DW Griffith would also die of a coronary at the Knickerbocker Hotel in 1948. And the myth continues to persist that they were brothers.
Some time ago i wrote a piece on the rapid decline of the Minnetonka Trading Post on Route 66 in Arizona. It’s not often I get to add a positive update, but I have been delighted to see that, under new ownership, the Minnetonka is being beautifully regenerated. Only some of the petrified wood wall could be saved (too many people helping themselves to it) but it looks grand!
It was the perfect news story. A husband shot dead by his wife at the exclusive Casa Del Mar club as the last minutes of 1936 ticked away, but, no doubt to the joy of news reporters, this story proved to be so much more.
Just a story’s throw away from the modern end of Route 66 at Santa Monica Pier, the Casa Del Mar opened in 1926, the same year as the Mother Road, as one of the most exclusive beach clubs in California. It was the place to be seen and, on December 31, 1936, Harry Addison Love chose it for his last meal of the year. The problem was the lady with whom he was dining was not his wife, but his 66-year-old mother, Cora Adkins Love, a lady with whom Harry lived and who was unaware that her only son was married.
This had, as you might expect, been something of a bone of contention for Helen Wills Love, the 31-year-old woman who regarded herself as the wife of Harry Love. Despite an apparent marriage in Ensenada, Mexico, in May of 1936, Harry had neither moved in with his bride nor publicly announced the nuptials. In fact, he appears to have been at pains to keep the marriage secret, particularly from his mother and family. While he and Helen had an apartment at 3613½ 4th Street (a convenient five miles north of his mother’s home on South Harvard Boulevard), he rarely spent the night there.
Helen and Harry took an apartment here after their wedding. Helen was allowed to clear the place out in January 1937 after she was evicted while in custody.
After lunching together on that New Year’s Eve, Love and Helen drove to the Elks Club where Harry told her to wait in the car. She did indeed wait in the garage for several hours before discovering that he had left the premises by taxi in order to avoid returning for his car. It was a mistake on Harry’s part, but an even bigger error was to leave his gun in the car. Tucking the pistol into her coat pocket, Helen called a cab and directed driver Max Daniels to take her to the Del Mar club where she had expected to dine with her husband.
Although described variously as an attractive or statuesque brunette, this unfortunate photo was one of the first released to the press of Helen Wills Love.
At the club, she strode up to the table where Cora was sitting and a row ensued. Cora was clearly aware of who Helen was and there seems to be little love lost between them. She declared that, as his mother she had a right to all his holidays (something which, unsurprisingly, didn’t sit well with Helen) and then told her to leave. At this point Harry appeared and grabbed by Helen by the arm, propelling her into the lobby and, after paying Daniels her cab fare, telling the driver to wait for her. According to Helen’s testimony at her trial, Harry told her, “You’re no more married to me than anyone else in the world. You get this cab and I didn’t give a damn where you go!” He then struck her and struggled for the gun after which she remembered nothing.
That story might have had some credence had Max Daniels not been waiting for his fare. He watched with interest as Harry Love came running back out of the Casa Del Mar shouting, “Someone stop her, she is shooting me”. A second or so later, Helen Wills Love ran after her husband and fired at him. Daniels bravely disarmed her, and, as he waited for the police, she cradled her husband’s head as he died on a settee in the entrance to the club.
Max Daniels’ lively testimony painted a picture of the shooting.
And that might have been it, a rather sad crime of passion, but there was much more to come. Once in custody, Helen told an officer that it was only because she had loved Harry so much that she had shot him, while her justification varied between it being because he had chosen his mother over her or that she believe he was about to throw her over for another woman. Both reasons are quite likely, but interestingly, the centre figure of this story, remains a complete enigma.
Harry Addison Love was born in Trinidad, Colorado in 1890, the only son of Charles and Cora Love. He was called up for military service in 1917 and this may have been – as Helen later ascertained – the only time he did not live with his mother. His father had died suddenly of a heart attack in 1923; Charles Love had been a successful lumber merchant who had retired in this forties and this inheritance appears to be the main source of Harry’s income, although there is evidence that he may have run a short-lived company dealing in agricultural implements. While newspapers at the time of the murder claimed the 46-year-old to be a ‘retired wealthy broker’, there is little to confirm this career – indeed, just a year after his father’s death, he was at liberty to take a three month holiday in Hawaii with his mother – and it may be that he was reliant upon his mother’s money, in which case he wouldn’t want to cut off his supply of funds by admitting he had married.
Cora Adkins Love, the mother of Harry Addison Love. She would later prove her son was not married.
The Loves appear to have been a close-knit family; when a daughter, Esther, three years Harry’s junior, married in 1918, it was quite a society event in Los Angeles, but she and her husband Howard Spencer moved in with her parents and brother, a situation which continued with the addition of two granddaughters. After Esther’s death from pneumonia in 1929, her husband and children remained in the Love family home and one granddaughter was still living with Cora when the older woman died in 1950. But Harry remains a shadowy figure and the only photographs that appear to exist of him are, as we will see, less than complementary.
We know equally little of Helen’s background. Newspaper reports of the day described her variously as a women’s wear buyer, a dress designer and a secretary. Nor do we know how she met Harry Love or how long they had been courting before Harry whisked her away on a mysterious trip to Mexico in May 1936 where they were married. It may be that Helen had refused to engage in anything more than a little canoodling until that point, which inspired Harry to arrange the so-called wedding trip in order to persuade her into his bed. But if Helen thought that things would change, she was very much mistaken. Back in California he refused to announce the marriage or tell his mother and when she threatened to show Cora the marriage certificate, he took it away from her and told her he had locked it in a safety deposit box.
Taken into custody after the shooting, Helen immediately made an attempt to hang herself in her cell with what some newspapers termed a silken scarf and others, more lasciviously, her undergarments. For the next few days it was reported she was on a fast, taking only liquids, but of course that might simply have been due to the bruising of her throat following the suicide attempt.
A calm Helen, still in the clothes she was wearing on the night of the shooting.
She was charged with murder on January 5, 1937, and pleaded insanity. The following day she was allowed to visit Harry’s body, laid out in an open coffin in a Venice Boulevard mortuary, where news cameras captured her kissing her dead beau and muttering, “You don’t blame me do you darling? You’re happier than I am.” She made the undertaker promise to bury Harry with a tiny wreath of red rosebuds over his hearts before leaving; whether this happened is unlikely – one can imagine that Harry’s family would have quashed such a maudlin idea.
For the Love family refuted any notion that Harry had ever been married to this woman. Howard Spencer would state in court that his brother-in-law was a single man, while his mother tearfully testified that “My son was a single man. He always had lived with me and never lived anywhere else.”
Howard Spencer, the dead man’s brother-in-law, who was adamant Harry was a single man.
Even Helen, in the cold light of day, must have had qualms about the relationship. When they took the flat on 4th Street, Harry only moved in a few changes of clothing and, when in July 1936 Helen told her husband she was pregnant, Harry’s reaction was fury. She claimed; “Harry told me that if I didn’t get rid of the child I’d be found dead on some beach like lots of other girls were.” Interestingly, this episode was mentioned only briefly in the trial and Helen certainly wasn’t with child as she waited to go to trial.
Helen being comforted by her mother, Mrs Claudia Wills.
The trial began in March 1937 and was clear cut from the start. Several witnesses had seen Helen shoot Harry, she had admitted killing him and the only question was her sanity. Three psychiatrists found her to be sane and in full comprehension of what she had done. The jury retired but, an hour and a half later, the foreman asked to see Judge Frank M Smith. It was presumed the request was to render a verdict, but no. The jury was complaining that one of their number was drunk and foreman Harry Joannes quite rightly said that this was entirely inappropriate, particularly given that the prosecution was asking for the death penalty. Dr Benjamin Black, county physician, administered a sobriety test to Mrs Mary Plettner and found that she was indeed inebriated – a pint bottle of grain alcohol was found in the ladies’ washroom with a fair amount of it gone. She was replaced by an alternate juror and deliberations continued.
The newspapers delighted in this photo of Mrs Mary Plettner, the jurist dismissed for drunkeness.
There seems to have been a certain amount of sympathy towards Helen from the eight-woman, four-man jury, whether it was because of the way Harry had treated her or for her own gullibility, for they returned a verdict of second degree murder. This was despite the fact that Helen had gone to the Casa Del Mar with a pistol in her pocket which might be said to indicate some degree of premeditation.
Mary Plettner (left) was sentenced to five days in custody for contempt of court which she served in the cell next to Helen (seen her on the right). Her husband, Walter, was at pains to point out she had been drinking gin, not raw grain alcohol as reported…
Before the sentence could be pronounced there was yet another twist in this story. Returning to her cell, Helen told a jail matron that she could “kill myself by strength of will power”. Laying down on the bed she appeared to lapse into a coma which defied half a dozen psychiatrists. They stuck pins in her, slapped her face and tickled her ears but she remained inert for seven days, being fed by a sugar drip, until she was awakened by Dr Samuel Marcus (unfortunately there appears to be no record of how he achieved what half a dozen of his colleagues could not). Once recovered she was sentenced to seven years to life and, although she had requested a second trial due to the episode of the drunken juror, this was denied and she was taken to the women’s correction facility at Tehachapi in California to begin her sentence.
Helen Wills Love heading for the California Institution for Women in Tehachapi.
There is no record of when she was paroled, but given that she is listed at the prison in the 1940 census and not in 1950, it seems logical to assume that she served closer to seven years than to life. In 1951 she married Edward B Gloeckner and, when that marriage failed, George McCullough in 1967. Neither husband suffered the fact of her first so-called bridegroom but then one supposes they were sensible enough to keep their mothers at arm’s length.
I say ‘so-called’ because, in December 1937, Cora Love succeeded in obtaining an injunction permanently bar Helen from using the name Love or representing herself as Harry’s widow. Her attorneys had searched the records in Mexico and could find no proof of the 1936 ‘marriage’ of Harry and Helen; thus she was ruled to have never been married to him and had no claim upon his estate. Everything went to his mother.
Harry C Smith, the man who chained himself to his car.
On a hot summer’s day in 1929, a young man drove into Detroit accompanied by a motorcycle escort to be greeted at his journey’s end by a large crowd. He was not a movie star, although the reception might have seemed otherwise. Harry C Smith was a chap who had just driven his Plymouth roadster from Los Angeles which, while adventurous on pre-interstate roads, was hardly noteworthy. However, not many drivers – in fact, probably no others at all – undertook such a trip while chained to the steering column of their car…
Harry was a car salesman of some years’ standing, working first for Norman Inc, and then in April 1929 being recruited by the Robert Atherton dealership in Los Angeles, an agency for the new line of Plymouth automobiles, a brand which had been launched the previous year. It seems that Harry lasted just a handful of weeks in that job for, on May 24, 1929, it was announced that he had been appointed as manager of E Allen Test, Inc, in Stockton, California.
The impressive showrooms of E Allen Test in Stockton, California.
Test had started a Dodge dealership in 1915 after moving from Pennsylvania with his brothers and by this time occupied an impressive facility on El Dorado Street in the city. Harry had worked for Test previously and when E Allen Test decided to embark on a lengthy tour of Europe, he chose Smith to replace his previous sales manager who had left for Los Angeles. Test had, in addition to the Dodge dealership, just acquired the Plymouth franchise for the local area and so young Harry Smith decided to go to Detroit to see the Plymouth plant for himself.
Locked in his leg irons, Harry hands over the key to the Detroit-bound pilot.
However, he also took the opportunity to plan a publicity coup to raise the profile of the fledgling car brand. He attached himself to the steering column of his roadster with leg irons, which Captain AW Gifford of the Los Angeles traffic squad locked. The key was then sent by air mail to Detroit while the captive Harry followed on behind. From contemporary pictures, he had enough chain to perform basic functions along the road like refuelling – it seems that he used Richfield stations although it’s unknown whether he had any sponsorship from the oil company – and this came in handy when he suffered two punctures along the route, not to mention running off the road at one point.
So Harry set off, his route taking him via Salt Lake City, Cheyenne and Omaha and onto Detroit, a total distance of 2735 miles. He arrived some 86 hours and 7 minutes later, a quite remarkable achievement considering the primitive roads and that his roadster averaging 38mph (laudable for the day, but perhaps laughable almost a century on). He was welcomed by A Van der Zee, the general sales manager of the Plymouth Motor Corporation, while an even more welcome face was that of Inspector William Doyle of the Detroit police who had collected the key from the airplane and could now liberate Harry.
Harry is greeted by Plymouth sales manager, Mr Van der Zee.
A tour of the factory (then the largest single floor structure in the country) followed with Harry exclaiming to the factory managers, “Now that I’ve gotten a better idea of the marvellous new production methods which you employ, the care and precision in manufacturing, I can understand how you produce such a high quality car at so low a price.” While he was extolling the virtues of Plymouth, the factory’s engineers had torn down his roadster to see what effect the long journey had had on the auto. They found it had withstood the trip with no sign of trouble which was just as well as Harry Smith then turned around and drove it all the way back to Los Angeles, saying “I won’t be chained on the trip west, and I won’t drive as fast. The car can stand the grind much better than I can!”
There has never been much to Bard, New Mexico, but, for decades it had a single store which was the centre of the tiny community. In his 1946 Guide, Jack Rittenhouse wrote that Bard ‘consists of a single building, but it includes a post office.’ At the time that Rittenhouse passed through on Route 66, the postmaster was Harry Elton Heckendorn, a native of Missouri who, with his wife Geneva, had moved to New Mexico. It appears that he started the Bard Trading Post just after the Great War and he was confirmed as the Postmaster in 1920.
In 1948, the Heckendorns sold the flourishing business to Harry and Vivian Whatley but they maintained their ties with Bard. Two of their children would die young; Helen who succumbed to a long illness in 1937 aged just 25 and John Melvin who died in 1953 of pancreatic cancer at 40, and they, along with their parents, are buried in the Bard cemetery. Bad luck would continue to dog the Heckendorns. After the death of their daughter, they brought up their grandson Raymond, just four when his mother died, but he was electrocuted while working in the Texas oilfields in 1972. He was 39.
The Whatleys built a new store a little way north to take advantage of traffic and ran it for ten years before selling to Clyde (seen here) and Mamie Dovie Robbins in 1959. Just as Harry Whateley had been before her, Dovie took over as Postmaster. For years they were the heart of Bard, even though Route 66 had been realigned, leaving the store isolated. But they made a living selling gas, groceries, notions, drugs, hardware and vetinerary supplies, and, when Clyde passed away in 1974, Dovie continued to run the place for a few more years with the help of her sons Carroll and Lester.
Empty since the 1980s, the Bard Store still had its shelving inside and it was possible to see what a decent-sized shop this had been. Until a few weeks ago when, like so many redundant and forgotten places, it was razed, leaving only memories.
Leorena’s entry in the 1916 ‘Wolsniwanozira’, the Yearbook for Winslow High School.
Winslow is perhaps best known for its connection with show business – most people know the little Arizona town for its mention in The Eagles’ song ‘Take It Easy’. But almost a hundred years ago, Winslow had its own rising star in Leorena Shipley, a young actress who seemed destined for great things until one fateful day on a trip to the Petrified Forest.
Leorena was born in Iowa on 28 September, 1897, but her family moved to the West Coast when she was a teenager. Her father, Leo, was Chief Despatcher and Tram Master in Needles, California, before moving his family to Winslow in 1912 to take up a similar position for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Leorena, along with her older sister M’Dell and her much younger sibling Constance, settled in the Arizona town where Leorena was a popular student at Winslow High. In the ‘Impossibilities’ page of the 1915 Yearbook was an affectionate entry which read ‘For Leorena S to keep out of trouble’. That year she took part in several plays, one of which the reviewer claimed was ‘the best amateur production ever seen in Winslow’.
Winslow High School where Leorena was both a pupil and teacher.
Upon graduation, Leorena – thanks to a Navajo Country Scholarshop – went to the University of Arizona where she starred in stage productions and gained her teaching certificate. With the Great War raging and her father serving in France, she returned home to Winslow and taught at the High School for two years. Then, she left to follow her dreams rather against her parents’ wishes (although, until her marriage to Leo, Della Shipley had, with her sisters Lulu and Nella, been part of the Smale Sisters Concert Company who performed all over Iowa and the Mid-West).
Leorena changed her name to Norma Deane and moved to Los Angeles, where she trained at the Martha Oatman School of Theater in Los Angeles and was its first student to become a professional actor, In 1923 she joined the Ralph Cloninger Players at the Wilkes Theatre in Salt Lake City where she was quickly promoted to second leading lady . She played vamps, comely wenches, charming lasses, drug users and, in October 1924, got her big chance when the company’s leading lady, Edythe Elliott, was taken ill and Leorena had to step into her roles at a moment’s notice.
One of Norma Deane’s earliest publicity shots.
After more than two years with the Utah repertory company, Leorena moved to the Belmont Players where she was appointed leading lady and she spent several months performing in Calgary, Canada. But, by September 1926, she was back in Winslow and preparing to sign a contract which would see her as the leading lady of the Grand Theatre in Phoenix. Her parents were proud of her success despite their initial reservations and welcomed her home, where she spent several days socialising.
A publicity photo for an actress many described as ‘an auburn-haired, blue-eyed beauty’.
On 11 September 1926, Leorena, her mother, her good friends May Ingledew (who had thrown a bridge party in Leorena’s honour just a few days previously) and Tug Wilson, made a trip to the Petrified Forest. At the end of the day they returned along a gravel road that would, just two months later, be named Route 66.
Striking a winsome pose.
There had been a heavy rainstorm that afternoon and a concerned Leo and Vance Wilson, Tug’s brother, drove out to see if they could find them. To their relief, they met up with Leorena and her party just after the Cottonwood Wash Bridge at about 10pm and both cars turned for Winslow, with Vance Wilson in the lead. He crossed the bridge safely but, to his horror, when Vance looked back he saw his brother’s car fall backwards into the water. The road had been washed away leaving just a crust of paved surface which had given way beneath the second car.
The car was on its side in the water, almost totally submerged. Tug managed to struggle his way out and then, with the help of Leo, extricated Mrs Ingledew and Mrs Shipley. But there was no sign of Leorena. Vance Wilson was lowered on a rope into the water but couldn’t find her. Finally it was decided to take the two women back to town and raise the alarm. Despite being soaked, bruised and cold, Tug Wilson stayed at the scene – preventing another car from plunging into the wash – until help arrived.
Scores of people were quick to turn out, some working around the clock to try and find Leorena. By now, with the car buried in 15 feet of water and quicksand, it was clear that they would not find her alive. Eventually, at 4pm the following day, they discovered her on the floor of the car; it was thought she had been knocked unconscious and then became wedged behind the steering column. It took another five hours to recover the body. Leorena Shipley was just 28 years old.
The Cottonwood Wash and bridge today.
Her funeral was held on 15 September in the Washington School auditorium to accommodate all the mourners. Many Winslow businesses closed and Leorena’s coffin was carried by six young men she had taught at Winslow High School. She was laid to rest in the Desert View Cemetery, her coffin covered by American Beauty roses.
After her death, all of Leorena’s clothes, including many of her stage costumes, were packed away and remained unseen for decades. In 1970, when Leorena’s last surviving sister M’Dell died, they passed to M’Dell’s son Leo Dan ‘LD’ Welsh. LD had lived with his grandparents since he was a baby and grew up idolising his aunt Leorena. As a 14-year-old he had even taken part in the rescue efforts, diving into the water at the end of a rope. He and his wife Verna didn’t want the precious gowns to leave Winslow, so they eventually donated them to the Navajo County Historical Society and the clothes now form part of the collection of the Old Trails Museum where they are a beautiful if poignant glimpse of what might have been.
This photo, with her beautiful smile, seems to most sum up Leorena Shipley.
Just this week I had a reminder of how quickly history can disappear on Route 66. On the western side of Truxton, Arizona, once a small but lively town until the interstate opened in 1978, on the opposite side of the road to the old Orlando Motel, was a boarded-up building. Few, if any, people took any notice of it and if they did it was to smile at the misspelled ‘NO TREAPASSING’ sprayed on the side. But this was once someone’s livelihood and the scene, one might argue, of a miscarriage of justice.
For sixteen years Wesley and Alice Bryant had run the grocery store in Truxton but in 1976 they had been robbed and the beating they suffered during the course of that crime put them in the hospital. They asked their grandson Guy Mefford to come from California and run the store for him, although that hadn’t been what Guy had been planning for his life. An Army vet who had served in Vietnam, he wanted to train as an auto mechanic and he was just doing just that when the call came from Truxton. The Bryants were by now in their seventies and so Guy and his wife Esther ended up staying and taking over the store.
After the interstate opened, trade fell away although Guy liked the fact it gave him time to sit with his feet up and read a book. The store didn’t make much but, as he said, they didn’t need much. Esther, on the other hand, wasn’t keen on the isolation. If Guy was on a run into town, she would lock the door if she didn’t like the look of a potential customer.
Guy and Esther in the store in 1979. [Photo by The Arizona Republic]
But over time the Meffords found what little they had was being stolen from them. By 1990, the store had been burgled some 50 times over the previous six years. The police could be of little use – the nearest officer was in Kingman, 45 minutes away, and on one occasion when Esther detained a shoplifter it took almost three hours for law enforcement to turn up. By the summer of 1990, Guy was fed up. So one night he hid in his store and waited. He didn’t have to wait too long; 34-year-old Victor Randall dropped through a hole in the roof and instantly made for the beer cooler. Guy shouted at him to stop, and when he didn’t, he shot Randall in the buttocks.
One might think this was appropriate if rough justice. Randall pleaded guilty to burglary and was sentenced to 180 days in jail, 200 hours of community service and four years of probation. That might have been the end of it, and made future burglars think twice about robbing the store. But in June 1991 Guy Mefford found himself in court, charged with aggravated assault … and convicted. The judge was harsh; not only did he sentence Guy to four years’ probation but he ordered him to pay $10,000 into a Hualapai youth programme. And then there was a final blow. Judge James Chavez ordered that Guy Mefford sell his store by 1st January 1992.
Guy had little option. The store was closed and sold. As far as I know, it never reopened. Esther, who was eleven years his senior, died in Los Angeles two years later. When Guy died in Mesa in 2008, the funeral home didn’t even know his date of birth and had to appeal for information.
All that remains is the concrete pad. The store was demolished last year.
For years the store has remained on the side of Route 66, overlooked by tourists, a little snapshot of a domestic tragedy. And then last year it was gone, demolished by the county.
The Joshua Motel, now gone although the palms survive.
And so more vestiges of Route 66 quietly disappear, abandoned so long that when they are finally no longer there barely anyone notices.
The Joshua Motel office.
Just south of the well-known MOTEL sign in Yucca, Arizona (all that remains of the Whiting Brothers motel which once stood there) was the Joshua Motel and Sandy’s Café. The Joshua was a small place, just eight rooms, but it had the advantage of being right on Route 66 – at least until Interstate 40 slashed through the middle of Yucca. It was probably built shortly after Route 66 first came through Yucca back in 1952.
The Joshua Motel office to the left and its first two rooms.
Next to the Joshua was Sandy’s Café which seated 38 people. It seems that life was a constant struggle for Sandy’s, its lease seemed to be constantly up for sale. In the 1960s it was modified to also serve as a drive-thru and to drum up trade. But when I-40 opened in the early 1970s it was the end of the road for the Joshua Motel and Sandy’s Café. Traffic rolled onto Kingman or Needles to find a bed or a meal. The motel staggered on for a while; in 1977 it was being marketed with a desperate air and a knock down price as a potential nursing home. When I first saw it, old petrol pumps were being stored in the office.
Sandy’s Cafe. The sign once boasted neon lighting but that was gone long ago.
A little way south, on the other side of Guthrie’s Service Center, stands Yucca’s most famous landmark (although it’s a toss up between that and the Dinesphere), the truck on a stick. It used to have buildings around it, a large roofless block building and an older wooden workshop, not to mention a house with various derelict cars and buses around it.
Ran when parked?
In the spring of 2022 the Joshua Motel and Sandy’s Café were demolished. The neighbouring land around the truck on a pole has been cleared and scraped, leaving the Peterbilt in not so splendid isolation and the entire acreage up for sale. It is, according to the realtor, ‘a great location for RV park, boat shop, restaurant, off road rental, and so much more’. But, although it’s only been on the market for two months, the price has already been dropped by $40,000. And so another little piece of Route 66 history disappears.
Very many thanks go to out to Lara Hartley Roberts for spotting that the motel and café had gone. (See Lara’s wonderful photography at www.flickr.com/photos/redshoesgirl/)
Considering the place had been abandoned for 30 years, the bathrooms had held up quite well.
This garage stood in front of the truck on a pole.
The interior of Sandy’s Cafe.
This garage stood in front of the truck on a pole.
The Joshua was always small, only ever eight units.
18 December 1947 was a cold winter’s morning like any other in Tucumcari. Bertha Eugene Wagnon Kappel had got up at 4.45am to prepare for her shift at the Home Café in the Vorenberg Hotel. (The Vorenberg was a grand hotel in downtown Tucumcari which boasted suites with private baths, a large lobby, dining room and barber shop as well as the Home Café. After the First World War it was owned by Floyd B Redman who built quite a property portfolio over the years. In the 1950s he bought another motel which was managed by a lady called Lillian Leigon; romance blossomed and he presented the motel to her as an engagement present. The motel was the famous Blue Swallow.)
The Vorenberg Hotel. The Home Cafe where Bertha Kappel was employed can be seen at the right.
Bertha had only been working at the Home Café for a couple of months while her husband Gus Adolph did various odd jobs. They had been married in Oklahoma in 1938 but several of the family – Bertha was one of 13 children – had moved to Tucumcari where Adolph also had links. They and their daughter were staying with Bertha’s brother, Roy, and his wife Catalina, in Roy’s home on North 1st Street, although the Kappels had purchased a lot nearby on which they intended to build a rudimentary house. To this end, Bertha had bought some lumber and, after finishing work on 17 December, she visited the lot to inspect progress. She found that the lumber was missing and this set into inexorable motion the events of the next few hours.
Bertha returned to her brother’s house and accused Adolph of selling the materials. He denied it but she discovered that he had, in fact, sold the lumber to a neighbour and, even worse, he hadn’t been paid for it. Bertha told him to get the lumber back within three days or “she would turn him in”. Now, the lumber may have been from a dubious source and Kappel did have a prior conviction for theft, so it might have been a well-aimed threat on her part. The quarrel continued into the evening although Adolph would later claim that the couple had been made up by the time they went to bed.
Even before the lumber incident it doesn’t appear to have been a happy marriage. Bertha had moved to Tucumcari some eight months before while her husband tried to find work in Oregon. When he returned to New Mexico she had sworn out a warrant on him for non-support of their 12-year-old daughter, Mary Frances.
Unsurprisingly next morning, the arguing flared up again when Adolph was slow to accompany Bertha on her walk to work. She left the house without him and when he called out to her to wait, she replied; “You dirty son-of-a-bitch, if you are going with me, come on.” It was an unfortunate choice of words and Bertha probably knew that it was a term that particularly offended her husband.
At around 6am, near an overpass, the body of Bertha Kappel was discovered just three blocks from her brother’s house. She lay in a pool of blood, her head cracked open by three blows from an axe and her left ear almost severed. When she was found, Kappel was taking a nap, having returned home, vomited and then taken two aspirins for a headache and then slept for an hour. When he woke up, he had a hearty breakfast and then went to the Home Café to say that his wife wouldn’t be coming to work that day. He was then arrested close to where Bertha’s body lay.
Adolph Kappel had a limited mental capacity but he knew enough to get rid of the axe, tossing it onto the roof of a neighbour’s house where it was later found. He signed a confession, saying that he had no recollection of killing his wife but remembered “I was standing over her and I struck a match and seen what I had done.” At his trial, he was charged with first degree murder and the jury took less than an hour to find him guilty. He was sentenced to be executed in New Mexico’s electric chair.
Kappel appealed and was granted a second trial on the grounds that the jury had not been given the option of convicting him of second degree murder. This jury decided that the murder had been conducted in the heat of the moment and was not planned or deliberate. He was once again found guilty but this time the sentence was 90-99 years rather than death. Kappel proved to be a model prisoner – for at least a year…
Gus Adolph Kappel
Assigned to a prison work gang at the penitentiary’s clay pits, on the last day of October 1950, Adolph Kappel made his escape aboard a black mule called Pete (one newspaper reported the beast was called Pegasus which seems a little fanciful). For five days he managed to stay ahead of police and prison guards in freezing cold weather until he was finally captured 35 miles south east of Las Vegas, New Mexico. He gave various reasons for his escape, saying that he had wanted to find out why he hadn’t heard from his daughter and believed that his brother was preventing her from writing to him. He also said he wanted to see his sister-in-law who had been involved in a road accident and then intended on going to Oklahoma to visit his mother and other relatives. But he also told reporters that “I am not the man who killed my wife” and that had he been able to get to Tucumcari he “could have cleaned up the whole mess”. Given that he had signed a confession which formed the basis of his first trial and pleaded guilty to second degree murder at the second trial it’s difficult to see how anyone else might have killed Bertha.
In 1953, Governor Edwin Mechem commuted Kappel’s sentence to a flat 70 years while the Warden commented, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that Kappel was “now a plumber. He does not have access to a mule”.
Governor Erwin L Mechem who commuted Adolph Kappel’s 90-99 sentence to 70 years.
Adolph Kappel applied for parole at every chance and was denied for many years. When was he released? The short answer; I don’t know. He died in 1978 at the age of 63 and is buried in the Santa Fe National Cemetery. However, he was also incarcerated in the Penitentiary of New Mexico which is just 15 miles from Santa Fe but I found that he had won a newspaper competition in 1976 when living in Ojo Caliente near Taos so it appeared he stayed in the area after his release. Perhaps he just had nowhere else to go.
John Frederick Kappel whose bound body was found in a Sayre lake in an unsolved homicide.
It is perhaps a little ironic that, with one brother behind bars for homicide, another brother should also meet his end by murder. In September 1963, the youngest Kappel son, John Frederick, was found floating in a pond in Sayre, Oklahoma. This was no natural drowning; John’s hands and feet were tied and he had also suffered a blow on the head before being thrown into the lake to drown. He had previously been working as a union picket for the International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers Union protesting at the construction site for a grocery store in Elk City. Police stated that his job had nothing to do with his death, although they were bemused at the lack of signs of a struggle as John was a large man – 6’4” and 240lbs as well as being a karate expert – and throwing him in the pond had required lifting him over a barbed wire fence. The case was never solved.
The lower walls are all that remains of the Vorenberg Hotel after a fire in the 1970s. The house where Bertha and Adolph were living with her brother is also long gone.
Ed’s Camp looks very much as it did when he passed away well over 40 years ago. That’s because it is clearly out of bounds, please respect that.
Ed’s Camp, east of Oatman, Arizona, at the foot of the Sitgreaves Pass, is fascinating for the man who was the only owner; Lowell ‘Ed’ Edgerton, a man of both enigma and mystery who has left behind him one final puzzle.
Edgerton was born in Michigan in 1894 and headed west as a young man on the advice of his doctor. Edgerton had suffered from tuberculosis which, at the turn of the 20th century, was the leading cause of death in the United States – he claimed exemption from the draft in World War I as a consumptive. Initially moving to southern California, he found the climate of Arizona more to his liking and he would spend the next sixty years of his life in Mohave County.
Little is known about Edgerton’s early years in the West and many of the stories he told throughout the years should probably be taken with a healthy dose of salt. Later he would claim that he had begun to train as a doctor (he did study for a short time at the University of Michigan although that was in engineering) and had, while working for a mining company in Mexico, amputated a man’s leg during the Mexico revolution of 1910-1920. He told stories of how he had owned a mansion in Los Angeles but had lost it in a property deal that went bad. He also claimed that, while tracking a mountain lion, he followed the beast into Nevada and became so engrossed in the hunt that he forgot about his wife and five children and figured there was no point in going back. There’s actually no record of Edgerton ever having been married, let alone having a brood of five children!
When he moved to the Oatman area, he was able to pick up the lease on the tailings dump of the Oatman works, tailings being the by-product of the mineral recovery process, the material left over after the valuable ore has been separated from the uneconomic material. Within months, his operation was making more money than the whole mine and he was then hired by the Tom Reed Mine as foreman of recovery. Around 1919, Edgerton bought a parcel of land at Little Meadows in the foothills of the Black Mountains in north west Arizona. The site had been known to Europeans since 1776 when Father Francisco Garcés, a Spanish missionary and explorer, paused here on his expedition across the south west of America, while it became a staging posting for future treks, including that of Lieutenant Beale. The attraction of Little Meadows was that it had that commodity which could be worth as much as gold: water.
The Kactus Kafe was the first building that Ed put up on the site.
Initially, like so many who rushed to the area at this time, Edgerton’s intention was to make his fortune through a gold strike. With his older brother, Tibor, he took on a number of mining jobs until he realised that he could make a steady (and easier) living catering to travellers and miners than digging into the mountains. His trading post was little more than an open space with a tin roof – he later said that, with the inauguration of Route 66 in 1926, traffic became so busy so quickly that he never had time to add walls! As Tibor returned to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to open a tea rooms, Edgerton added the Kactus Kafe (this time a proper building) and a gas station and called the place ‘Ed’s Camp’.
At first Ed’s Camp had no tourist cabins or rooms. Instead, travellers could pitch a tent or sleep in their cars. For those who wanted a little luxury and had a little more cash, there was a screened porch where they might sleep on a cot. Just as NR Dunton did at Cool Springs, Ed charged for water on a per bucket basis although that fee was waived if people paid to stay. As the place grew, a grocery store and souvenir shop were added and Ed’s Camp became a stop for Pickwick Stage Lines, a coach company that would become part of the Greyhound bus empire.
One of the surviving cabins.
But Ed Edgerton was far more than just a store and gas station attendant. Over the years, he studied the rocks of Arizona and became an expert geologist who could identify any Mohave County rock and say, to within a few miles, from where it had come. He proudly told people how he had met Marie Curie, the French-Polish physicist – a claim which is quite possible as Curie toured the United States in both 1921 and 1929.
Edgerton owned and mined a rare earth mine from which he extracted ore that was shipped to a variety of companies, providing some thirty different minerals that were used in alloy steels, electronic components, ceramics, plastics, atomic devices and even cosmetics. He even, if only briefly, had a mineral named after him, although Edgertonite, an oxide of oxide of iron, yttrium uranium, calcium, columbium, tantalum, zirconium, tin, and other minerals was quickly renamed Yttrotantalite when it was realised it had already been discovered in Sweden in 1802. It is, however, quite likely that Edgerton was the first man to find Yttrotantalite in the United States and he would say that he had provided the material for the first atomic bomb. Truth or fiction? We shall probably never know.
Edgerton credited Yttrotantalite with saving his life. According to him, on 17th April 1957, doctors told him he had cancer. They gave him thirty days to live unless he had major surgery. Edgerton declined the operation and returned to Ed’s Camp where he decided he would treat himself. The story changed in some details on each retelling, but this is probably the most comprehensive description to survive: “I put on two suits of heavy woollen underclothes and put these swatches [of Yttrotantalite] in between, all around, and then I put three big electric pads around that. I cooked myself for about seventy-two hours at one hundred and thirty degrees. I didn’t eat anything, I drank warm water. At the end of seventy hours stuff began to loosen inside me … Rotten goddamn stuff, it couldn’t take the heat. I commenced to bleed internally and for up to ninety hours I bled inside – rotten blood first and then fresh blood – and then that quit.”
After that, Ed Edgerton nursed himself back to health on a diet of goat’s milk, raw eggs and avocadoes. Two months later, his doctor declared there was no sign of cancer in his body and it was a miracle. Although it’s tempting to believe that it would be difficult for anyone to survive such extremes of temperature for so long, not to mention four days of internal bleeding, Edgerton believed that he had cured a cancer and instead of having just a month left on this planet, he lived for another thirty years. He claimed that he was studied intensively by the Veterans Administration Hospital in Fort Whipple, near Prescott, although there are no records of Edgerton having been a patient until he died there in 1978. He also told people he had worked with one of the foremost cancer experts in the world – although he declined to name the scientist – as well as claiming that he could predict where in a person’s body a cancer might be just by the colour of their hair.
It would be tempting to dismiss Ed Edgerton as a crazy old desert rat, telling tall tales in the best tradition of a hermit. But Edgerton was far from that. While some of his stories may have been embellished – and others, quite frankly, tongue-in-cheek fabrications created to entertain visitors – he was much respected in the fields of geology and mineralogy, despite his lack of formal training. He took on consultancy work for companies, taught in the local college and wrote and presented papers on minerals. Edgerton was certainly not a hermit although much about his life remained a mystery. In 1948 he ran for the office of state senator in Mohave County on a Republican ticket (although he was beaten by the Democratic candidate, C Clyde Bollinger) and he trained to be a census enumerator for the 1960 US Census, a job his father had also done in Michigan sixty years earlier.
Thanks in part to the natural springs and in part of the improvements that Edgerton made over the years to the water flow, Ed’s Camp truly became an oasis in the desert. Late into his seventies, Edgerton kept Kingman supplied with pears, as well as growing apricots, tomatoes, quinces, strawberries, peppers, corn and grapevines. His pomegranates were so good that they won four ribbons at the Arizona State Fair! He even managed to keep alive a huge saguaro cactus which stood for years just by the gas pumps. It eventually attained an impressive height and several arms before dying around thirty years ago.
On 7th September 1978 Ed Edgerton died at the age of 83, not as he would have surely wished at the place he had called home for most of his life, but in the VA Hospital in Fort Whipple. His obituary mentioned only that he was a ‘retired miner’ but Lowell Edgerton was so much more than that. Today Ed’s Camp is gently decaying although the rigid enforcement of those NO TRESPASSING signs mean that he would still recognise the place. The gas pumps and cactus are long gone but the makeshift trading post and the café remain, while you can catch a glimpse from Route 66 of the basic tourist cabins he built. Squint hard at the hillside opposite and you might just make out the few remaining white stones that once spelled out Ed’s Camp. Now it seems a bleak spot in the desert but for much of the last century it was paradise for Ed Edgerton.
But Lowell Leighton Edgerton leaves behind one last mystery. Just where is his final resting place?
The Findagrave web site has him listed being buried in the Mountain View cemetery in Kingman, which would seem logical. So just a few weeks ago I took a walk around to see if I could find his grave. When I had no luck, I wondered whether it was unmarked, so I sought the assistance of the cemetery staff. They were very helpful and hauled out large leatherbound ledgers which list all of Mountain View’s ‘residents’. Finally they looked up and said, “He’s not here.”
As Ed died in a VA hospital I considered whether he would been buried by the Veterans Administration in Prescott. But, after combing through VA records for all of its Arizona cemeteries and burials, I drew a blank. I widened it to a nationwide search (although it seemed supremely unlikely he had been taken back to his home state of Michigan) and the end result? He wasn’t there.
Wherever Lowell Edgerton was laid to rest, he’s keeping it to himself – and I think he would rather have liked that.
These cabins were the height of luxury at Ed’s Camp!In front of Ed’s Camp once stood the gas pumps and a saguaro cactus.
So Harry set off, his route taking him via Salt Lake City, Cheyenne and Omaha and onto Detroit, a total distance of 2735 miles. He arrived some 86 hours and 7 minutes later, a quite remarkable achievement considering the primitive roads and that his roadster averaging 38mph (laudable for the day, but perhaps laughable almost a century on). He was welcomed by A Van der Zee, the general sales manager of the Plymouth Motor Corporation, while an even more welcome face was that of Inspector William Doyle of the Detroit police who had collected the key from the airplane and could now liberate Harry.
NEVER QUITE LOST 