Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 3

EINAL A10 The Arizona Republic Sunday, October 14, 1984, Lifeblood flows sh pace I I 1 iv IT I Yt I I i wHiOimntiimi hi -nr-T" -r li i' Eighty-two-year-old Mildred Buckley runs the post office in Hackberry, a town cut off since 1934 by U.S. 66. Then, 45 years later, Route 66 was bypassed by 1-40. "We're just hanging said. "I by a thread, that's all," Buckley just hold my breath every day." Hackberry was a major cattle-shipping point.

The railroad doesn't, stop here anymore. The school, painted red, white and green, and shaded by cedars, is in great shape. It's still the best schoolhouse Route 66. If enrollment dips under eight, however, it'll be closed, Mildred Buckley said. In some ways, Mildred and Roy Buckley are Hackberry.

"We're at that stage of life when we're on the road going downhill," she 6aid. "We went uphill for a sluggi along By WARD HARKAVY Arizona Republic Staff HACKBERRY Roosters and geese outnumber residents in this century-old village on Route 66. Hackberry, named for a tree near its long-abandoned silver mine, is located on a 90-mile stretch of U.S. 66, the Main Street of America from Chicago to Los Angeles until freeways came of age. Reduced to a secondary highway in the late 1970s, when Interstate 40 opened between Kingman and Seligman, this gentle road now is the only lengthy stretch of Route 66 left in Arizona and one of the few left in the country.

Its two paved lanes curve through grasslands and granite dells. Like many other Arizona toads, it cuts through sweeping valleys and rocky canyons. The highway, however, is no longer the major transcontinental route through Arizona. Just as the railroad tracks alongside no longer carry the great Santa Fe trains Super Chief and Chief as they did during the '50s and '60s. What happens to the hamlets and villages along such a road when highway builders jilt them? Near Kingman, restaurants and motels, such as the Kozy Korner, are trying to make comebacks.

In Peach Springs, which lies halfway along Route 66 between Seligman and Kingman, the destitute Hualapai Indians vow to regain their tourist trade by trying to develop lakes and motels in and around the Grand Canyon. In Hackberry, abandoned by miners and twice bypassed by road 2 II Doyle SandersRepublic Bobby Troup, who composed Route 66 while traveling the highway in 1946, speaks at ceremonies in Williams marking the opening of Interstate 40 in the area. Members of American Legion Post 13 form honor guard. Review Continued from Al 1 "Winters are dead anyway." During those five days, gas stations on Route 66 through Williams suffered, several businessmen said. "This last week was really terrible," said Kelly Brockett, a 29-year-old native of Williams who works at a Union 76 station on the western end of town.

"We lost way over 50 percent of our business." Brockett's wife, Linda, who owns Foster's curio shop on Bill Williams Avenue, said she has mixed feelings, adding that her business hasn't suffered yet. She and other downtown merchants the only kind in Williams are afraid that new businesses will be built near the freeway. Business was terrible Saturday morning for Gary Killinsworth, but he was smiling. Killinsworth, a 25-year-old business school graduate of Arizona State University, operates a Chevron station next to the freeway, a mile from the rest of the town's businesses. Last week was "real good out here," he said, disclosing that some merchants told him he was doing a "disservice" to the town by opening Spray Continued from Al residential areas throughout Arizona receive special protection under permanent regulation." The spraying may not have violated any laws but did breach a "gentlemen's agreement" not to use highly toxic pesticides near Scotts-dale homes and schools, said Richard Sweet, administrator of the pesticide board.

A team of DHS medical investigators was sent to Scottsdaie on Thursday and reported that the Id rtry builders, a handful of people are trying to keep their post office and school going. That's about all that's left. It was 50 years ago that Hackberry was bypassed. Tired of seeing Route 66, then a dirt road in Arizona, washed out by almost every rain, a highway was built a half-mile to the north. The old silver-mining town, 21 miles northeast of Kingman, is dead as a town but retains life.

Hidden under elderberry branches is a sign that reads, "Buckley's Retreat: Hunters, fishermen, rockhounds welcome." It stands in front of a majestic blue frame house built in 1910. Few visit here anymore. It was cut off once by new Route 66 in 1934. Then, 45 years later, Route 66 was bypassed by 1-40. "We're just hanging by a thread, that's all," said Mildred Buckley, 82-year-old postmaster of Hackberry.

"I just hold my breath everyday." She and her husband, Roy, moved here 20 years ago after her brother-in-law, Henry Bacon, died. Bacon had built the big house. The post office, a tin building between the big house and the Buckleys' trailer home, is one of two landmarks in Hackberry. The other is a 67-year-old school, in which nine pupils still are taught. "There's just enough excitement here," Mildred Buckley said: "watching the kids playing; once in a while, cattle get out, and we have to chase them.

That's about the excitement." a station next to the freeway. His family still has one downtown, too. Killinsworth disagreed. "It will hurt some of them," he said, "but we've still got the Grand Canyon I haven't heard of any plans to move it." On Saturday, he and almost 1,000 others heard Mayor James Hoffman say, "Route 66, goodbye! Welcome, 1-40." It was 1926 when a series of dirt roads from Chicago to Los Angeles was given the name U.S. 66 or, more commonly, Route 66.

Starting in the late 1950s, interstate highways began bypassing small towns on the route. Williams was the last. Ironically, many townspeople of whom more than half depend on tourism for a living are eagerly awaiting the return of passenger trains, which abandoned Williams' when Amtrak took over in the 1960s. A steam-powered train to the Grand Canyon, 60 miles away, is scheduled to start service in July. Economic survival, not sentimentality about Route 66, dominates conversations.

Such is the case for Bobby Troup, who composed the everlasting song Route 66 while traveling the highway in 1946. Troup, who will be 66 next Thursday, played and sang the song for the crowd victims' symptoms were consistent with pesticide-related illness. In immediate response to Babbitt, pesticide regulators Friday placed a 24-hour ban on use of the pesticides by non-Indians on the reservation. Officials also drafted a 90-day rule to restrict pesticide use statewide and called board members to Phoenix on Saturday to vote on the measure. The Arizona Farm Bureau Federation announced immediate opposition to Babbitt's proposals, and federation President Cecil Miller said Thursday that his members will "work individually" with members of the pesticide board to a It's a beautiful spot about 14 miles from Kingman.

Whitton, 55, was a trucker for 41 years. He traveled this stretch of Route 66 countless times. Like thousands of other Mid-westerners, Whitton escaped to California on this road. His journey was from Ohio in 1956. Now, he and his wife, Norma, have escaped from southern California and are trying to revive a Route 66 restaurant.

The Ranchero Restaurant, originally built in the early 1960s, is now the Kozy Korner Cafe. "Truckers use this road because it's less of a climb," Whitton said. "You save fuel and save time, even though it's 13 miles farther. "There are four hills on 1-40. There's only one here." In 1979, Interstate 40 between Kingman and Seligman opened.

It's 25 miles south of old Route 66, and it's straighter and wider. But it's also steeper. Old Route 66, which gently curves north of the interstate, was built along the tracks the Santa Fe built in the 1880s. The Santa Fe, in turn, had followed the path, originally surveyed by soldiers on camels, carved by Western trailblazers earlier in the 19th century. The pioneers and railroad builders tried hard to avoid the mountains between Kingman and Seligman.

There are faint signs of economic revival in this western quarter of the old route. Whitton said a couple of gold mines have opened. There's a subdivision. There are signs for a 52-mile dirt road that connects Route 66 with Lake Mead, north of here on the Colorado River. A month or so ago, Whitton said, a West German film crew stopped at the Kozy Korner.

Driving a Cadillac convertible with a camera mounted on the trunk, the crew filmed commercials and a documentary. Modern history is bypassing Route 66, but historians aren't. Edgar A. Walema, chairman of the Hualapai Indian Tribe, doesn't have time to savor the past of Route 66. The present is too difficult.

"Since the bypass, we've been hurting," he said. Two of every three able-bodied Hualapais are unemployed. Peach Springs, the tribe's headquarters, is on the apex of the Route 66 curve, about 50 miles northeast of Kingman and 40 miles northwest of Seligman. The town sprawls along hills 20 miles south of the Grand Canyon. The town is at rock bottom economically.

"Route 66 was the main life-stream for the tribe," said Walema, a burly, 47-year-old retired Army sergeant who moved back to the reservation a few years ago. "When Route 66 was open," he said, clamping his big fists together on the desk in his tiny office, "we had a supermarket, we had a dry-goods store, we had curio shops, All five industry representatives voted to limit emergency action to the Scottsdaie area, while four health or citizen representatives favored restrictions for the entire state. The industry members were joined by one citizen representative, Carmen Dolny, a lawyer in the Tucson public defender's office. Board chairman Bill Embree, a Yuma farmer who drafted the proposed state restrictions, did not vote because under board chairman votes only to break ties. At the end of the hearing, which attracted about 60 spectators, the board extended the Scottsdaie ban until Nov.

8 and modified it to we had a cafe. There were service stations. There was a drive-in." There also was a doll factory, to supply the curio shops. "Now, we don't have anything open," Walema said. "There's one cash-and-carry store.

There are no more gas stations. Everything we depend on food, commodities, gas, everything we have to go 50 miles to Kingman." Fewer than 800 Hualapais live in Peach Springs. About 400 others live off the reservation, he said. Some Hualapais work at the Genstar lime plant in Nelson, off the reservation about five miles away. Practically the only source of income for the tribe is handouts from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

It does have a small river-running business. The economic problems also have created what Walema calls an "unstable tribal government." "We have high turnover in government here," he said. "There's no consistency in planning." The Hualapais, who were Cavalry scouts in the 1800s, live on almost 1 million acres of beautiful land adjoining Grand Canyon National Park. Most of it is difficult for outsiders to get to. The Hualapais are dreaming of a dam in the Grand Canyon to create a lake in their side canyon.

"We have a canyon into the Colorado River," Walema said. The tribe's Peach Springs Canyon goes to the river along with a terrible road. A small dam, he said, would back up enough water to create a recreational area nearby. Walking over to maps on his office wall, Walema points to sites on the bluffs over the canyon's Lower Granite Gorge that could be developed. "We're thinking about resorts, motels, maybe even a KOA campground," he said, marking a spot on the Shivwits Plateau overlooking the Colorado River.

"It was a dream," he said of the dam. "We've had a proposal in Congress for the last 20 to 30 years. But the Sierra Club fought it. I guess they want to protect the wilderness. "The Arizona power people were interested, but now, after the Central Arizona Project, no one wants to support the thing." Walema acknowledges that even some Hualapais don't want the canyon developed.

"Our people are slow to come around," he said. "We have a lot of sacred areas down there." Another dream of the Hualapais probably would encounter far less opposition: Wiliha Road, a paved highway from Grand Canyon Village to the Havasupai hilltop, which overlooks Supai Village. Now, only a dirt road leads to the hilltop. By a painfully circuitous route, such a road would pass through the Hualapai Reservation and would bring back some tourists. allow exemptions and to address objections by tribal officials.

Salt River tribal officials have said the ban, which technically applies only to pest-control advisers, applicators, growers and sellers licensed by the board, is discriminatory and invalid because it pre-empts Indians' authority over their own land. The ban, as adopted, covers a one-mile buffer zone around Scottsdaie city limits and the college, which sits on land leased from the tribe. Most non-Indian land around Scottsdaie is covered with urban development. while. Now, we're going down." Tom Whitton adjusted his crutches so he could face the picture windows.

"Every time you look out in that valley, you see something different," he said. "It's beautiful here." Whitton, injured in a fall off a ladder, was gazing north toward Hualapai Valley. Beyond the spacious, grassy valley are the Music Mountains. Across Route 66 to the south are the Peacock Mountains. Republic Troup wrote the song in the Then, seven days after he arrived in Los Angeles, he met Nat King Cole, who, Troup said, loved it and recorded it.

Fred Nimz, whose television picture now will stop fluttering, helped survey the freeway near Williams in the 1960s. Nimz, a 77-year-old former American Legion commander in Sunnyslope, lives in Phoenix most of the time, but he's going to retire to Williams. "Some of these people think their town is going to die," he said. "It's not going to die. They just have to' promote it a bit.

Look around: It's beautiful here." tional news, and the media has played to this audience and frightened a small group of people." But county resident Terry Wil-lingham disagrees. "It's been said that people who are around pesticides and farming all the time don't complain because they understand pesticides," said Willingham, who lives in a farming area south of Avondale. "It is because people think there is nothing they can do about it." Voting on the issue split the board between representatives of the public and state health agencies and the majority, which represents agricultural industries. Chicago 1 ngelejsj- ROj S7" Seligman Saturday. He cut the ribbon opening the freeway.

He left the crowd with these words: "I really hope you tear this interstate highway down and go back to Route 66." Troup later explained that he merely wants all the states to agree to call the new interstate highway Route 66. He said he hasn't driven Route 66 since he wrote the song. Asked if there was something special about Route 66 that prompted him to write a song, he replied, "My first wife suggested it. She said, 'Get your kicks on' Route I was on my way to Los Angeles from Pennsylvania to be a song-, writer." express their concerns. Board members declined to adopt the statewide rule Saturday after listening for five hours as farmers, crop-dusters, agribusiness lobbyists urged them not to "overreact" with restrictions that could limpair the harvest of crops.

The board also heard from people who said pesticides are a health problem throughout the state. "I'm worried about the emergency nature that this situation has been placed in," said Robert Edgar, a member of the Arizona Agricultural Chemicals Association. "People who are not knowledgeable about pesticides respond to sensa.