Item From the Past: Arizona Days

May 17-19, 1997.

Saturday: The big event of the day was going to Boyce Thompson Arboretum [photo below], about an hour’s drive southeast of Phoenix (Ed drove). It was hot as we walked through it, looking at the multitude of desert plants, plus lizards and other small fauna, but there was a fair amount of shade. After we returned to Phoenix, we had a late lunch at an inexpensive steak/Mexican/Southwestern restaurant built on the site of a hacienda and flour mill on the Salt River, which was bone dry.

Sunday: In the early afternoon we picked up Mama at Sky Harbor Airport — I think it’s a funny name — and soon embarked on a drive northward. We took the Interstate to Flagstaff, passing through but not stopping there, and then took Arizona 89 to Cameron, about 25 miles from the eastern entrance of Grand Canyon Nat’l Park and just inside the Navajo Reservation. Along the way we stopped at Montezuma Castle National Monument, a cliff dwelling built and inhabited by the Sinagua Indians around A.D. 1100, and having naught to do with the emperor of the Aztecs. Nothing like a desolate ruin to enlarge your day, as it whispers memento mori in modern man's ear.

We checked into the Cameron Trading Post Lodge, a complex of very comfortable and well-appointed rooms, a lovely garden, an enormous gift shop and a restaurant. The rest of Cameron seemed to be mostly small trailers spread out on the arid landscape. Since we’d arrived late in the evening, we had dinner at the restaurant. Three of us had a thing called a Navajo taco, which was much like a taco except that “Navajo frybread” was used to hold the ingredients. A regular one of these was enormous. The frybread was the best ingredient.

Monday: A day at the Grand Canyon. After breakfast at the motel restaurant (not bad) we headed west to the canyon, stopping first to see it from Desert View [pictured below]. It was the first of many views we stopped at.

Later, after arriving at the park headquarters, Mama and I hooked up with a tour of the town of Grand Canyon’s cemetery, which has a number of pioneers and miscreants of early canyon times within, as well as a memorial to the two airplanes that collided over the canyon in 1956. Yuriko wasn’t feeling so well then, and doesn’t care for cemeteries anyway, so she sat it out. After the tour, we started to look for a place to have a picnic (we’d brought food), and it started to rain while we were at a shopping complex near the headquarters. Yuriko says that that complex didn’t exist when she was there before, in 1990. So we ate at a picnic table facing the parking lot, under an extension of the roof of the stores.

But it was a short rain, and soon we were walking the South Rim trail, taking in some more views. After about a mile of this, we wanted to take a shuttle back from near the Teddy Roosevelt-era hotel whose name I forget, but couldn’t find the stop, so we walked back. But that time we were plenty hungry, and discovered a cafeteria across the parking lot from where we’d had lunch. It was reasonably good and not too expensive — a marked change, Yuriko said, from the last time she was there, when buying food at the canyon meant getting gouged. We didn’t finish dinner that evening till after dark, which meant driving back to Cameron on the narrow and reflector-less park roads. It was a long few miles.

Comic Governors

Yesterday's posting should have been, "auf Wiedershen, Gov. Putz." I didn't think the Illinois Senate would act quite as fast as it did, but something about convicting an impeached governor unanimously says all you need to know about the proceedings.

It made me wonder whatever happened to Evan Mecham, who counts as a footnote character of the 1980s as the governor of Arizona. He too was impeached, convicted and tossed out of office. Turns out he died almost a year ago; I must have missed his obit at the time.

Before Blago, Mecham was the most recent governor to lose his job to traditional impeachment and conviction, and provided the nation with some comic relief. Come to think of it, Blago has provided the same service for us in our troubled times.

Matches & Cards

I come by my habit of collecting matchbooks and cards from restaurants honestly. My mother has, or had, a large collection of restaurant matches. That was simply part of the restaurant experience: get some matches at the end. She never smoked, so smoking had nothing to do with it.

These days you’re more likely to get a business card than a matchbook, but I still collect whatever’s available. Back in April, I was a little disappointed to discover that the Cuban restaurant we visited in Tampa (Carmen’s) had no matches or cards to give away.

This came to mind over the weekend when I assimilated the collection of cards and matches accumulated in my former office into my larger collection at home. At home, I have three former fruit-cake tins nearly full of matches, a business card-holder full of cards (104, I just counted), and probably that many loose cards.

They’re good memory aids, like snapshots. Better in some ways, because rather than looking at a fixed image, they evoke some other kind of memory: the taste of something you ate, a bit of odd décor, someone else at the table with you.

For instance, one beaten up box, emptied of its matches, says Restaurant Metro. 2400 Lübeck-Gr. Burgstrasse 59. Täglich kalte und warme. Speisen von 11 Uhr bis 23 Uhr. See Sunday’s small posting for my arrival in Lübeck—this is where I had lunch with my friend Rich later that day. All I remember is that the service was glacially slow.

Keeping in a German theme, another matchbook I have is from Gerst-House Restaurant. Famous German Style Foods. Draft Beer. Nashville, Tenn. Free Parking. Did that place ever have good pigs’ knuckles. The key was the sauce.

Picked more or less at random, there’s also a reminder of Arthur Bryant’s, a superb barbecue shack in Kansas City, Mo.; the dining room of the remote Kalaloch Lodge on the coast in Washington state; Mama Desta’s Red Sea, on Clark Street in Chicago, where I used to introduce out-of-town guests to the pleasures of Ethiopian food; Gautama, an Indian restaurant in Osaka; Arizona Charlie’s, a second-string casino in Vegas that had huge, terrific breakfasts for about $3 even after the trend for Strip casinos was to make their food service into profit centers, too.

Fine memory aids. Unless, of course, they evoke no memory.

Al’s Steak House. Entertainment Nightly. The Finest in Food & Cocktails. 1990 W. Jefferson St., Joliet, Ill. The matchbook’s a dull red with a fleur-de-lis as the only decoration. I don’t remember spending much time in Joliet, or at any steakhouses there. My best guess would be on one of few business trips I took while working at the Law Bulletin, 1987 to 1990. Probably with Ernie, my boss, who was fond of steakhouses.

There’s also Barney’s Market Club. For Great Steaks. Since 1919. 741 W. Randolph, Chicago, IL 372-6466. With a small drawing of a prosperous fat man, ca. 1940, complete with cigar and caption: Yes sir! Senator. Another steakhouse I don’t remember, and the matchbook shows its age—pre-1990 again, I’m sure—with its missing area code. Every place in metro Chicago was 312 until the late 1980s, and even then we got only two area codes.