Reporter Henry Brean's Fave Five

While the elephants get all the love, Reid Park's anteaters keep on carrying on

I'm a sucker for a good critter story, and it was fun to get to spotlight some of Tucson's lesser-known but still wildly successful zoo animals.

 ─ Henry Brean

Santiago is not your typical ladies’ man.

He’s got beady eyes, tons of body hair and no teeth.

Also — and there’s really no way to sugarcoat this — Santiago has a really big nose.

But in the world of the tamandua, otherwise known as the lesser anteater, this guy is a real player.

“He has been an excellent breeding male,” said Katie Hutchinson, lead keeper for the Reid Park Zoo’s animal ambassador program. “I think he’s the most well represented male nationwide.”

Though its elephants get most of the publicity, the 54-year-old animal attraction has made a name for itself in zoological circles for its successful anteater care and breeding program.

And none of the zoo’s current crop of anteaters has been as — ahem — successful as Santiago.

He has fathered eight tamandua pups since 2012, and now has grandchildren at zoos in Minnesota and Ohio. His first great-great-grandpup was recently born at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Lety, one of Santiago’s mates, has been almost as productive. Since 2008, she has given birth to seven pups that have gone on to produce two additional generations of lesser anteaters.

“We’ve been wildly successful with tamandua babies,” said Sue Tygielski, Reid Park’s director of zoological operations.

“We are not a baby factory”

As an accredited member of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, Reid Park Zoo participates in what are known as species survival plans designed to maintain healthy, genetically diverse populations at more than 200 animal attractions across the U.S.

The zoo is home to 47 varieties of animals whose breeding schedules and genetic mixing are carefully controlled through the association’s collaborative planning process.

In other words, Tygielski said, “We are not a baby factory. We really look at what species need attention.”

Later this year, for example, zoo officials are hoping to breed more Baird’s tapirs and giant anteaters, among other animals.

And as you may have heard, Semba the African elephant is expecting another baby in March or April, a little brother or sister for the famous Nandi.

Then there are Reid Park’s Andean bears.

Worf is an old man who has spent most of his 26 years in Tucson, where he has been a calm, well-behaved bear with few health issues.

Oja is a youngster, brought in from a zoo in Zurich, Switzerland, in January to give Worf one last chance to father another cub.

As Tygielski put it, when you have a zoo animal like Worf with so many good traits, you don’t want to “lose that genetic opportunity.”

“He definitely would be very interested. She has not decided yet,” Tygielski said. “She’s still a little bit wary of him.”

Writing the manual on tamanduas

It’s no accident that the logo for the Reid Park Zoo features a picture of an anteater. There have been giant anteaters living there since 1968, and the facility is now well known among zookeepers for its work with the burrowing, bug-eating mammals.

Until recently, the zoo was the keeper of the studbook for all giant anteaters at AZA facilities across the country.

“Their reputation is well deserved. They really know what they’re doing,” said Harrison Edell, executive vice president for animal care and conservation at the Dallas Zoo in Texas.

Edell is the species plan coordinator and keeper of the studbook for the roughly 70 tamanduas at AZA zoos nationwide, including the ones at Reid Park.

He said about three-quarters of his job as tamandua coordinator is connecting animal caregivers so they can solve problems and exchange best practices.

When a zookeeper needs expert advice about anteater care, Edell said, Tucson is at the top of the list of places to call.

Through its work, the zoo has helped expand what is known about anteaters, developing through hands-on experience the sort of highly specialized information you can’t easily find on the internet.

“We had to milk a tamandua a little while ago,” Hutchinson said by way of an example. “And we wrote the guide on how to do an ultrasound on a tamandua, so that’s pretty cool.”

Hutchinson and company aren’t just looking after their own anteaters, either. The zoo has also thrown its support behind research and conservation efforts in South America, where biologists are studying the impacts of new roads and farms on the giant anteater and its habitat.

In some areas, anteater advocates have put up road signs and fitted the vulnerable animals with reflective harnesses to keep them from becoming roadkill, Tygielski said.

Reid Park is also helping with efforts in South America — through children’s books and other methods — to educate the public and to dispel negative stereotypes about these unusual but generally harmless creatures of the night.

Not ready for retirement just yet

Tamanduas grow to the size of a small dog and sport four claws on each front foot for climbing and digging. They mainly eat ants and termites with sticky tongues that can extend up to 16 inches, so Santiago has that going for him.

Edell said they are not endangered in their native Central and South America, so there are almost no regulations to protect them from the exotic pet trade. You can buy one from a dealer and have it shipped to the U.S. without much trouble, he said, but they don’t fare well as pets because of their unique dietary and behavioral needs.

According to Edell’s records, Santiago was born in the wild in Guyana and imported into the United States, where he lived at the Fresno Zoo before coming to Tucson in 2011 to serve as one of Reid Park’s animal ambassadors.

Lety’s backstory is a bit more murky. Edell said she came from a dealer who claimed she was born in captivity, but he suspects she too may have been taken from the wild. He said her exact origin is unknown.

Reid Park Zoo currently has three tamanduas, but it does not keep any of them on display in a traditional exhibit.

Instead, the animals live in enclosures behind the scenes and occasionally interact with the public during education programs, special events or daily “keeper chats” at the zoo.

Everyone, that is, except Santiago.

He was relieved of his ambassador duties recently due to his failing eyesight, advancing arthritis and other effects of old age.

But the zoo’s biggest stud hasn’t retired completely. Sometime in the next month or two, zookeepers plan to pair him up one last time with Xochi, another mate with whom he’s had pups before.

Tygielski doubts he will require much convincing.

“Santiago is very elderly,” she said, “but he’s still very interested in breeding.”

Chaser ranges far and wide to photograph monsoon magic

During the 25 years I spent away from Tucson, monsoon season was always when I felt the most homesick, so this was the perfect story for me to do as one of my first for the Star. The storm chaser I found to profile turned out to be really passionate and interesting.

 ─ Henry Brean

A charcoal gray monster with lightning for teeth is about to swallow Three Points, and Lauren Bailey can’t seem to get close enough.

The Rio Rico photographer rumbles down unfamiliar dirt roads, watching the advancing storm as she guns her “soccer mom ride” — a well-traveled Honda Pilot with TSTORM2 license plates and “Arizona pin-striping” down the sides from all the bushes she drives through.

With each flash from the clouds, Bailey exclaims, “Oh, baby.”

She skids to a stop when she finds what she’s looking for: a two-track ranch trail leading south into a small clearing in the cholla and scrub mesquite.

There, she sets up her tripod and tilts her wide-angle lens toward the sky as the first drops of rain begin to fall.

A few minutes later, a long bolt forks down in front of her.

She jumps into the air with a triumphant whoop as the thunder rolls.

She got the shot.

”It doesn’t pay the bills”

This is Bailey’s fourth summer stalking monsoon storms across Southern Arizona.

She is part of a growing army of photographers and weather enthusiasts who fan out across the region when the dark clouds build.

Bailey moderates a Facebook group for Tucson storm chasers that now has more than 400 members. In June, she helped organize a storm chasing event called Monsoon Con at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum that drew about 150 people.

Though a handful of top photographers have managed to make a living out of it, storm chasing remains just a hobby for most.

“It doesn’t pay the bills. You might sell a print or two,” Bailey says. “When you’re chasing, you’ve got to do it for yourself.”

The timing of monsoon season actually works out pretty well for her. She makes her money shooting weddings and family portraits, but business slows down during the hot summer months. The lull allows her to leave her wife and daughter at home and go chase storms up to five times a week, depending on the weather.

Sometimes she goes out with a “chasing buddy.” Often she pursues storms alone or with her dogs, Lilly the Norwegian elkhound and Kara the German shepherd, providing security and company from the backseat.

Bailey also serves as a storm spotter for the National Weather Service in Southern Arizona, relaying ground-level descriptions of what meteorologists in Tucson are tracking on their radar screens.

She says the free training she got through the weather service’s SKYWARN program has helped her to better understand and predict the storms she chases.

Now she’s trying to share what she’s learned — and pay some of her expenses — by hosting occasional weather photography workshops.

She was scheduled to take her first group of aspiring chasers into the field over the weekend.

Chasing storms can be “an adrenaline rush”

Bailey says a good monsoon makes everything else drop away.

“Even if I don’t have my gear with me, if I’m able to just go outside and take a look at that beautiful storm as the sun’s going down and the bolts are lighting up and the sky’s turning all these shades of violet and orange and gold, you just find yourself in amazement and wonder,” she says. “At least for a little while, you forget all your worries and your fears and your troubles, and you finally feel a connection to something that’s greater than yourself.”

Chasing them is also an adrenaline rush — addicting, but “better than using drugs,” she says.

On this Tuesday, her chase begins at about 2 p.m. at the southwestern edge of the valley. The weather report points her toward Madera Canyon, where she sets up to shoot a storm building above the Santa Ritas, only to spot a more promising cell charging up from the south.

A short time later, at a highway exit south of Green Valley, she bumps into David Robinson and John “Flano” Flanagan, two fellow chasers who have stopped to admire the same menacing clouds.

“Look at the green,” she says to the men. “Oh my God, it’s beautiful.”

After a brief strategy session, they climb back into their vehicles and head off in the same general direction, trying to stay in front of the storm as it moves north past Green Valley.

Bailey will meet two other weather photographers she knows, also men, later in the day, but she insists storm chasing is more of a brotherhood than a boy’s club.

“There’s a lot of women doing this now. I’ve seen a lot more women over the past three years really jump into the pool,” she says.

Learning from other expert storm chasers

Bailey has always been fascinated by weather. As a high school student in her native El Paso, Texas, she considered enrolling at Texas Tech University at the southern edge of Tornado Alley just so she could chase storms.

Then “life happened,” Bailey says, and her dreams of becoming a famous weather photographer sat on the shelf for about 20 years.

When she picked it back up in her 40s, she admits she didn’t really know what she was doing. She would hold down the trigger on her old Canon Rebel digital camera and fire away at the clouds in hopes of catching a bolt.

“I was shooting 3,000 photos a day to get five or six with lightning in them,” she says. It was wearing out her camera shutter and draining her patience, especially when she sat down to edit all those wasted frames.

She says she gradually learned the tricks of the trade from other, more experienced chasers, including such accomplished local photographers as Mike Olbinski and “Tucson Greg” McCown.

Today she captures storms using the same high-end cameras she uses for her portrait business, only with special infrared sensors attached that can see lightning through the clouds and trigger the shutter faster than a human can.

As her technique and equipment have improved, so has her success rate. She says she now gets 30-40 “keepers” out of every 300 pictures or so.

Nearby bolts and other close calls

Bailey says she does what she can to keep herself safe, but there is some inherent risk involved in photographing thunderstorms.

“I want to make it home at the end of the day and do it all again,” she says. “But I tell people if you want to be 100% safe, stay indoors and look at other people’s pictures.”

She’s had a few close calls.

Last August, she found herself stranded near Arivaca, when a flash flood cut off her escape route, forcing her to wait about four hours for the water to recede.

And on Monday, a bolt of lightning struck the ground about 100 yards away from where she was set up to photograph a storm in Nogales.

“I had that sick, post-adrenaline feeling for about three hours after that,” she says.

Later that day, though, she captured her favorite photo of the season so far — a bolt of lightning lancing down from pastel-colored clouds at sunset just a few miles from her home in Rio Rico.

Bailey says she can cover up to 500 miles in a single day, so car accidents are probably the biggest hazard she faces. It’s not unusual for her to range from Sasabe to Willcox and into New Mexico in pursuit of the perfect shot. “That’s a day’s chase,” she says.

As she drives, a cellphone and a tablet mounted to her dash flash with up-to-the-minute radar images and other information.

She tracks the volatile weather with an app called RadarScope, which also shows the locations of other chasers who are logged into the program.

Periodically she taps the screen of her phone with a manicured nail as boxy blobs of red and orange flare on the map, marking the development of powerful cells.

Zooming in on one of the blood-red blobs, she says excitedly, “That one is going to go severe warn,” chaser-speak for severe storm warning. “We’re going to toy with this beast.”

Disappointing end at scenic spot

Bailey compares chasing monsoons to a game of “whack-a-mole,” with promising storms flaring and fading in scattered locations across Southern Arizona. She might spend two hours driving to shoot one intense cell, only to have it break apart as new thunderheads explode somewhere else, maybe back where she came from.

Tuesday’s chase ends in disappointment where Marsh Station Road crosses I-10 just east of Vail. With its sweeping views of the Rincons and the surrounding hills, the overpass is a popular spot with weather photographers.

At first, Bailey is excited by the dark shelf of clouds that loom in the sky as she sets up her cameras, but the system blows north away from her and gets snared by the mountains without “dropping bolts” the way she had hoped.

“All you’re going to get is rained on,” she says to another photographer as she packs her gear.

Back in the Pilot, Bailey can only shrug. She has driven almost 190 miles over the course of five hours, and she only came away with a handful of worthwhile shots.

“The disappointing ‘non-soon’ strikes again,” she says.

Then she smiles. She’s already looking at the weather for tomorrow. The forecast calls for storms.

Arizona antique dealer helps Los Angeles library reunite with lost art

I love a good mystery, and this one connecting the small mining town of Bisbee to the Los Angeles' Art Deco palace of a library did not disappoint.

─ Henry Brean

BISBEE — An Arizona antique dealer has discovered a long-overdue item from the Los Angeles Public Library, and it’s way too big to fit through the book-return slot.

A bronze sculpture by a prominent, early-20th-century artist has turned up at Floyd Lillard’s antique shop in Bisbee, 50 years after it went missing from the iconic library in downtown L.A.

Lillard said he plans to return the artwork to the library, just as soon as officials there decide how best to transport the roughly 250-pound curved panel.

“I offered to drive it back myself, if they’ll pay my expenses,” he said. “They haven’t gotten back to me on that.”

For now, the bronze relief sits in a back room of the Miners & Merchants Antique Center on Main Street in Bisbee.

At about 5 feet long, 2 feet tall and more than an inch thick, the panel depicts six ancient scribes from different cultures, symbolizing the history of writing.

It is one of three parts of a larger piece by Lee Lawrie, the famous architectural sculptor best known for his free-standing “Atlas” in front of New York City’s Rockefeller Center.

Lawrie’s “Well of the Scribes” decorated a water feature in the L.A. library’s West Garden from 1926 until 1969, when the garden was paved over and turned into a parking lot six years after the artist’s death. The sculpture was lost after that.

Los Angeles City Librarian John Szabo traveled to Bisbee earlier this month to confirm Lillard’s find.

“Literally I was speechless,” Szabo said by phone on Tuesday. “To see each of the scribes close up was remarkable.”

Lillard said he bought the sculpture about 10 years ago from a woman in Sierra Vista who kept it in her garden.

He thinks the woman was originally from California, but he couldn’t recall her name or any of the details about how she came to have the artwork.

He said she sold it to him for $500 but wouldn’t help him load it into his vehicle. He recalled wrestling it across her yard by himself.

“I wasn’t going to leave it there,” he said.

So what made him so sure it was something valuable?

“Fifty years in the business,” he said. “How does a doctor know when your arm’s broken?”

Lillard said he entertained a few offers for the piece over the years but could never bring himself to part with it.

He finally figured out its backstory about a year and a half ago, when an online search using terms like “bronze,” “Art Deco” and “California” turned up a description of Lawrie’s missing Well. But without a photograph for comparison, he couldn’t be sure.

“I was certain enough not to sell it, put it that way,” Lillard said. “Once I found a picture, I was dead-certain.”

Fittingly, the library mystery was solved with the help of a book.

A few months ago, a San Francisco-based news magazine picked up on a brief mention of the “Well of the Scribes” in “The Library Book,” Susan Orlean’s 2018 bestseller about the 1986 arson fire that nearly destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library.

The Journal of Alta California wound up publishing a “cold case” cover story on the lost artwork, complete with old photos of the library’s West Garden.

As soon as Lillard stumbled across the article online, he contacted the library.

A few weeks later, Szabo flew to Tucson and drove to Bisbee to see the work in person.

He said he had a hard time leaving it behind at the end of the visit. “I started thinking, ‘Would Delta allow me to have this as a carry-on?’”

Szabo said sometime in the coming months the library will probably have the bronze casting crated and shipped back to Los Angeles.

Eventually, he would like to see the piece incorporated back into the building in some way.

As for Lillard, Szabo said the library plans to repay him for his original $500 investment “at the very least,” though the antique dealer hasn’t asked to be compensated for returning the artwork.

“It’s theirs. I don’t call that a donation,” Lillard said. “I want to be there for the party, that’s all. They better invite me.”

Szabo wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We definitely want Floyd here,” he said.

Both men are hoping all this recent publicity will lead to the return of the remaining two pieces of the “Well of the Scribes.”

“That’d be a great conclusion to the story,” Lillard said.

Szabo said he used to think the whole thing had been melted down or buried in some city scrapyard decades ago.

Now he can’t help but wonder if the rest of it might turn up in someone’s yard, maybe in the Hollywood Hills or someplace in Cochise County.

“Where there wasn’t an enormous amount of hope before … now I am hopeful,” Szabo said.

Current residents, previous tenants share hallowed ground in historic Dunbar Neighborhood

It's natural to be a little creeped out by the idea of living in neighborhood built on top of an old cemetery. What I love about this story is the empathy and humanity that residents expressed when I talked to them about the people literally buried beneath their feet.

─ Henry Brean

Editor's note: This story was originally published in September 2019.

Not long after Moses and Kelly Thompson moved into the historic Dunbar Neighborhood, a sinkhole opened up in front of their house on Perry Avenue, north of downtown.

Thompson thought it was a broken sewer line, so he got a shovel and started to dig. He soon struck wood and something underneath.

“I reached in and pulled out a handful of bones,” he said.

That’s how the Thompsons found out they were living on top of one of Tucson’s earliest graveyards.

As many as 9,000 people were buried at the Court Street Cemetery, which opened in 1875 and closed in 1909.

Seven years later, the first homes were built on the graveyard, which covered eight city blocks from Second Street to Speedway and from Main to Stone.

Many of the bodies were never moved.

“Since 1949, about 50 burials have been found,” said Homer Thiel, a research archaeologist from the consulting firm Desert Archaeology.

“In the Catholic half of the cemetery, which is the most crowded half, the average house has somewhere between 80 and a hundred graves on the lot — underneath your house, underneath the sidewalk, in your backyard.

“Probably if you live there, you don’t want to go digging around too much, because you’re going to end up finding somebody.”

Child’s coffin stuffed with clothes

Thiel knows more about the Court Street Cemetery than just about anyone alive. He has dug up or identified 25 old graves in the neighborhood, including the one in front of the Thompsons’ house on Perry Avenue.

He said the bones that Thompson found belonged to a Hispanic child, between the ages of 2 and 4, whose gender could not be determined but whose tiny casket also contained an assortment of buttons.

Directly beneath the child, Thiel and his colleague, Susan Hall, discovered the remains of a Hispanic man in his 30s in a matching, adult-sized coffin, suggesting the two were buried together.

It’s unclear what killed them, but the evidence points to a communicable disease such as smallpox or cholera.

People were rarely buried with their personal effects back then, Thiel said, but the child’s coffin was stuffed with clothing and the man still had a comb, a pocketknife, a change purse and some coins in his pockets, perhaps out of fear of contagion.

Thompson said he took time off from work to watch the archaeologists sift through the grave in his front yard. “It was fascinating,” he said.

A few weeks after the bodies were removed, Thompson marked the spot with a small shrine featuring a statue of St. Francis, the patron saint of families and against dying alone, among other things.

That’s the thing about living on top of an abandoned cemetery, he said: It isn’t spooky; it’s sad.

“These people were somebody’s family. They probably meant the world to somebody,” Thompson said. “It sucks that they were left in the ground do be found with a shovel by someone like me.”

Many bodies were never moved

Thiel expects more skeletons to turn up.

He excavated his first grave in the Dunbar Neighborhood in 2005. Since then, he has been compiling a database with as much information as he can find about anyone who was buried in the old cemetery.

His list so far includes about 5,000 names, mostly combed from death certificates, Catholic burial records, probate court documents and late-19th century obituary notices printed in the Arizona Daily Star.

Court Street was Tucson’s third community burial ground, replacing National Cemetery, which operated until 1881 where the Pima County Courthouse now stands.

National took the place of the original Presidio Cemetery, which operated until the 1850s where the old county courthouse was eventually built.

Thiel said Court Street’s fate was sealed in 1907, when a group of businessmen convinced the city council to start using their new Evergreen cemetery instead.

The owners even offered to move the bodies from the old burial ground for $50 each, “so they were going to make money one way or another,” he said.

Many early Tucson residents couldn’t afford the relocation fee. Those who could may have been cheated out of their money, Thiel said.

“There are rows of tombstones in Evergreen where it’s not clear whether the bodies were actually moved. They might have just done the ‘Poltergeist’ thing and picked up the tombstones and left the bodies behind,” he said.

“As far as I can tell, between 40 and 50% of the bodies were left in place. Either they didn’t know they were there or they just didn’t care.”

Even when they did move a body, they weren’t always careful to collect it all. “They basically reached in and grabbed the big stuff,” Thiel said, leaving behind smaller bones, articles of clothing and, in all but one or two cases, the coffins themselves.

Decorative markers

Dunbar went on to become one of Tucson’s first predominately black neighborhoods. The Dunbar School at Main and Second, just outside the cemetery’s boundaries, was a segregated, all-black school until it was integrated and renamed in 1951.

Two churches, a Salvation Army homeless shelter, a hotel, an apartment complex and more than 80 homes now sit on top of the old burial ground.

The only outward signs of the neighborhood’s hallowed past are the shrine in front of the Thompsons’ house and some decorative markers in the median at First Street and 11th Avenue.

Pastor Jonathan Smith leads the Tucson Sharon Seventh-day Adventist Church, a historically black ministry that opened in 1945 at First and 10th. He’d never heard about the cemetery before, but the news didn’t seem to bother him.

He laughed when he found out the church was built on the Protestant side of the burial ground, not the Catholic side.

Smith said he plans to talk about the cemetery during an upcoming sermon. Tucson Sharon is largely a “commuter church” these days, he said, so he doubts whether his congregants know about the graves beneath their feet.

“It reinforces the fact that where we are is sacred ground,” Smith said.

Living above the dead is not a deal-breaker

Real estate agent Patty Sue Anderson lives in the Dunbar Neighborhood and has sold a number of houses there over the years.

She said she tells all of her buyers and sellers about the old cemetery, though most homeowners already know about it.

Anderson said she has never had anyone back out of buying a property after finding out there might be bodies buried under it, but she has gotten some intense reactions from people during open houses in the neighborhood.

“I don’t get any offers from people who are queasy about it,” she said.

No one told Mike and Donna Erickson about the cemetery when they bought their historic house on Second Street in 1997.

Their first clue came in 2012, when workers were replacing the sewer line beneath the street and Donna spotted them using the kind of tent medical examiners put up when a dead body is found somewhere. “I watch a lot of cop shows,” she explained.

At first, she was disturbed by the thought of all those forgotten graves. She worried that her friends wouldn’t want to come to her house anymore, once they found out what was underneath it.

Now she just thinks of it as an interesting part of living someplace historic — a Southwestern version of the skull-lined Catacombs of Paris.

“The whole world is built on top of everybody else. It’s part of history,” Erickson said, adding with a laugh, “I guess we’ll be ground zero for the zombie apocalypse.”

“You want to treat them with care”

Thiel and company served as the on-site archaeology monitors for the Second Street sewer project in 2012.

Seven burials from the Catholic portion of the cemetery were discovered during the work, including a woman still clutching rosary beads in her hands.

Each time a grave was found, the sewer work would stop so the archaeologists could carefully excavate the site.

“The number one reason is to prevent the human remains and associated artifacts from being damaged further or destroyed. You want to treat them with care and respect,” Thiel said.

Researchers can also use what they find to learn more about life and death in territorial Tucson, from local burial customs to the most common ways people died.

The process generally works like this: Once a grave is excavated, the bones are sent to the University of Arizona for analysis to determine, when possible, the departed’s age, sex and cause of death — all without using DNA sampling or other destructive tests that are prohibited by state laws protecting historical remains.

Experts at Desert Archaeology then process the rest of the grave, identifying clothing and the wood from the coffin.

Thiel sends photos of the casket handles and decorations to a coffin hardware expert in Shreveport, Louisiana, who traces them back to their manufacturers using old funeral-home catalogs.

Once all the examinations are complete, the bones and other items from the grave are turned over to the Arizona State Museum, which has legal jurisdiction over such things.

In most cases, the remains are eventually reburied based on what is known about the person.

Last year, several bodies from the Catholic section of the Court Street Cemetery —including the man and child from the sinkhole on Perry Avenue — were laid to rest once again, this time at Holy Hope Cemetery on North Oracle Road.

Life goes on in the shadow of death

A lot of life has happened to Moses Thompson in the 12 years since he made his grim discovery.

The tiny agave he planted next to the shrine he built has grown to almost envelop St. Francis. A nearby mesquite that shades the old grave site now features a tree house.

Thompson said he used to light candles for the man and the child on All Souls’ Day, but he hasn’t done that for a few years now.

He doesn’t even think about them all that much anymore, he said, and he thinks he knows why: Thompson didn’t have any kids of his own when he found the bodies buried in his front yard.

Now he has a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, “right in the same time frame” as that poor, forgotten child, he said.

“If I thought about it too much, I’d probably cry.”

Not ready to launch: Missile silo for sale is handyman's dream

You never know where this job is going to take you. Sometimes you spend all day at your desk with a phone at your ear, and sometimes you get to climb down a shaky, 40-foot ladder to explore an old nuclear missile silo for a not-so-typical real estate story.

─ Hanry Brean

Southern Arizona’s hot real estate market is about to go nuclear with a new listing near Oracle Junction.

With an asking price of $395,000, this mid-century fixer-upper includes almost 13 acres of open desert and an elaborate, 4,000-square-foot basement built to withstand a nuclear strike. There’s no annoying homeowners association to deal with, though there might be a few restrictions on the property left over from the Cold War.

The decommissioned Titan II missile silo about 35 miles north of Tucson officially hit the market on Friday.

“This is the coolest listing I’ve had to date,” said Realtor Grant Hampton during a visit to the site off Arizona 79 on Friday morning.

The silo’s current owner, Rick Ellis, led Hampton and a pair of professional photographers down into the bunker to get pictures and 3-D images for the listing.

Ellis said he’s selling the property because he’s “bored” and has better things to do with his money, but it’s obvious he still enjoys showing the place off to people.

Being sold as is

After opening the metal doors covering the bunker’s vertical access portal, he led his visitors past a pack-rat nest and down a short flight of concrete stairs to the wobbly 40-foot extension ladder that provides the only way in or out of the facility.

Along the way, he pointed out the spot where he confronted a 5-foot long rattlesnake and demonstrated the sound the 6,000-pound blast door makes when it slams shut at the entrance to the launch control center.

The underground space is dark and dirty, with stagnant water and the remains of dead rodents in several rooms. In a few places, there are openings in the metal floor above 20-foot drops.

Anyone who goes inside is required to sign a liability waiver. Hampton said showings will only be given to serious buyers with proof of financing.

Ellis joked that if they tried to hold an open house for potential buyers, “their surviving relatives might end up owning the place.”

New life for Cold War relic

From the early 1960s until the early 1980s, Tucson was ringed by 18 missile silos, each capable of launching a Titan II missile in as little as 30 minutes and wiping out a target more than 6,000 miles away with a nuclear warhead 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

“They could reach from pretty much anywhere in the U.S. to pretty much anywhere in the Soviet Union,” said Yvonne Morris, who commanded one of Tucson’s nuclear silo crews and now serves as director of the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita.

When the aging Titans were decommissioned in 1984, demolition crews caved in the silos with explosives and back-filled the access shafts for the launch control centers with concrete and other debris, Morris said.

Then the government put the sites up for sale.

“They went for a fairly reasonable price,” Morris said. “People who weren’t interested in what was underground bought them for the land.”

Today, most of the 18 silo sites are privately owned. Morris said there’s one in Catalina with a Methodist Church on top of it and one in Marana that’s now a plant nursery.

That one reportedly sold in 2016 for $1.5 million.

A bomb-proof business plan

Ellis purchased his missile silo in 2002 from the family that bought it from the government 35 years ago. They paid about $20,000. He paid $200,000.

The bunker has a concrete shell at least 4 feet thick. The three-story control center inside is mounted on giant springs designed to absorb the shockwave from a nearby nuclear blast.

It is also shielded against the kinds of electromagnetic pulses that can damage electronics and scramble computer hard drives, which makes it a perfect place to store sensitive computer records, Ellis said.

That’s why he wanted the place. He planned to turn the bunker into a secure data storage center.

First, though, he and his business partner at the time had to dig the place out.

“We rented a big excavator that could only turn left,” Ellis said. “We started digging on (a) Saturday, and we were inside by Sunday afternoon.”

All told, Ellis said, it cost him about $80,000 to clean out the bunker and another $20,000 in legal fees to get the land rezoned for commercial use.

He said he had just lined up his first few customers for Titan Secure Storage when the Great Recession hit and business dried up. The bunker has just been sitting there empty ever since.

At some point, vandals broke in and smashed some fluorescent lights Ellis had installed. They also knocked the ladder out of place, so Ellis had to rappel down the access shaft with a rope to put it back where it belonged.

Bunker buyers beware

Though he’s just now listing it with Hampton, Ellis said he’s been trying to sell the silo for the past two years.

So far, he said, he has rejected inquiries from one buyer that wanted to turn it into an underground greenhouse for medical marijuana and another that planned to use it as some sort of post-apocalyptic porn studio.

“I didn’t want that,” Ellis said.

He thinks his data storage idea is still a “viable business model,” but he said he honestly doesn’t know who might end up buying his silo or when.

Don’t look at Morris.

While she appreciates the “Herculean effort” Ellis went through to reopen the bunker, she said she’s definitely not interested in owning it.

“I have a marvelous view of the mountains from my living room,” she said. “I don’t feel the need to live underground right now.”

Photos: Decommissioned Titan II Missile Complex for sale

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan II MIssle complex for sale

Nov 11, 2019

Titan II MIssle complex for sale

Nov 11, 2019

Titan II MIssle complex for sale

Nov 11, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

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Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan II MIssle complex for sale

Nov 11, 2019

Titan II MIssle complex for sale

Nov 11, 2019

Titan II MIssle complex for sale

Nov 11, 2019

Titan II MIssle complex for sale

Nov 11, 2019

Photos: Decommissioned Titan II Missile complexes around Tucson

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Mar 11, 2022

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Fallout shelters

Updated Oct 3, 2016

Fallout shelters

Updated Oct 3, 2016

Fallout shelters

Updated Oct 3, 2016

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan II Complex 570-9

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan II Complex 570-9

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan II Complex 570-9

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan II Complex 570-9

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan II Complex 570-9

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan II Complex 570-9

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan II Complex 570-9

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Mar 11, 2022

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan Missile sites around Tucson

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Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile sites around Tucson

Updated Nov 8, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019

Titan Missile complex for sale

Updated Nov 14, 2019