Every time I happen to mention in casual company that I once lived in Tombstone, I get the same incredulous look as if I’d said I once lived in Old Tucson. Or even Disneyland.
Yep, we lived on Toughnut Street, right across the street from the old courthouse where they once hung a few of ’em high — and just a couple of blocks away from where the Earps and the Clantons blazed into legend and lore, if not historical accuracy.
Nope, I didn’t have to dodge bullets — make-believe or real — on my way home from school every day on a route that took me down Allen Street, right past the Bird Cage Theatre and the Crystal Palace. As I recall, only a few drinkers were in there on those midafternoons.
I was 11 years old and just starting the sixth grade the year my dad, a union electrician in Tucson, was sent, along with a few of his buddies, to a long-term job in the newly incorporated town of Sierra Vista.
Distances were such that my dad made it home to Tucson only on weekends — a fact neither he nor my mother tolerated well. Somehow they came up with a plan to rent a home in Tombstone where we would all live during the week, then drive back to Tucson for the weekends.
The house on Toughnut Street was a rambling affair, with side porches that had been converted into bedrooms. It also featured a clawfoot tub in the bathroom and an upright piano.
An extra bedroom was soon filled by three of my dad’s electrician friends, who paid room and board to my mother — along with their poker money she seemed to win on a regular basis. Every morning my mother would give my 9-year-old brother and me a quarter from those winnings to buy our lunch at the nearby elementary school.
I don’t know how she did it, but my mother somehow saw to it that I be excused from class once a week to take piano lessons from one of the local ladies. When the upright piano was unceremoniously removed from the house, my mother arranged for me to practice my lessons after school on the piano in the high school auditorium. There, I dutifully tortured Chopin and Strauss while the janitor dust-mopped the floors.
There was no TV reception back then, so we amused ourselves with games and learning new string tricks from Jack, our favorite boarder. For what it’s worth, I still know how to do Jacob’s ladder.
Only once did we attend the movie show in town — on a Wednesday night when the local attraction was “Bad Day at Black Rock.” It turned out to also be a bad night for my youngest brother, then 2, who wailed throughout the show. We left early.
Back then, the only gunfights commemorating the famous Earp-Clanton shootout were held during the week-long Helldorado Days in late October. All the kids in town got the week off from school. I also remember swarms of tourists clomping down the boardwalks, as well as a square dance where my parents actually did a little do-si-do.
And then it was over, with Tombstone reverting to its small-town ways. Too small-town, it turned out, for my mother, who grew weary of the weekly commute between Tombstone and Tucson and trying to keep up two houses. By year’s end, we were back in Tucson for good.
Twenty-five years later, my husband and I motored down to Benson, where he had lived for a time, and then to Tombstone, trying to reconnect. I was amazed to find Tombstone had a visitors’ parking lot by then, filled with cars and motorhomes from out of state.
Ten years ago, I again returned to Tombstone, this time as reporter, where I interviewed long-time Tombstone residents who remembered once upon a time when Allen Street, with its stores and services, was the heart of their town.
Today, Allen Street’s heart beats only for the tourists, there for the fake gunfights, the tacky souvenirs and a glimpse of the wild, wild West that, in many cases, never was.
I can’t even begin to imagine myself as a kid strolling down that street ever again.
