Big-Top Pee Wees
A few photos that didn’t get into my article on “Bombastic Birthdays” for Times Publications. Photo credits: Amanda Marie, Christine Johnson and Sergio.
Fast Times at Legend City
Fast Times at Legend City
Published July 2013 by Times Publications
By Jimmy Magahern
Toward the end, Legend City was more of a sprawling teen hangout than a family amusement park. Although it had originally been designed as Arizona’s scaled-down, westernized version of Disneyland—complete with a railroad, a riverboat, a frontier village and underground mine ride, in addition to the standard carousel, spinning teacups and roller coaster—by the late ’70s, many of its old attractions had either stopped operating or had simply stopped amusing. Teens back for their millionth visit to the place (admission, after all, was still affordable, and in Phoenix, there was still no better place for young people to congregate) had to pretty much make their own good times.
“They weren’t opening new attractions,” says Richard Marsh, who worked at Phoenix’s fabled theme park for its first two years, 1963 to ‘65, and then came back to work a season after college. “And you could see people looking around, saying, ‘What rides haven’t we been on?’ Young people would come back at night, and occasionally they would have some bands there. But they weren’t spending any money. You paid your admission, you came here and that was it.”
Fortunately, with packs of high schoolers let loose on a winding playground of carnival rides, snack bars, a tree-lined lagoon and western movie-set storefronts, it was fairly easy to find something to do at Legend City. And the “Twilight Zone” vibe of wandering a dilapidated western theme park frozen in time provided the perfect backdrop for more edgy adolescent adventures.
“There was so much sameness to it,” Marsh says. “But for us, that was the fun of it! Everybody knew every square inch of the place. We’d go to the Red Garter Saloon and they’d play Dixieland music, and it was kind of fun. It was just a cool throw-back feeling, even back then.”
If a ride was out of order, or simply too familiar to sit through one more time, Legend City’s aging kids took to engineering their own adventures. “On the river ride, people found out that you could jump out of the boat—in some places, you could jump right out of the boat and onto the shore!” Marsh says, with a laugh. “At that point it was all pretty unsupervised. The rule was basically just have fun!”
Employees were having the most. “One of the great secrets of Legend City was the life at night after the park closed,” Marsh reveals. “I remember when they brought in the Ferris wheel. That was the biggest after-hours ride in the park. That’s when we’d let our friends in and we’d just ride it forever. You didn’t turn the lights on, because that would make it too visible, but you’d have couples riding the carts up to the top and then making out in the darkness. Just goofy kids, having fun.”
Growing Pains
While it didn’t exactly age gracefully over its 20 years, Legend City matured perfectly in sync with the original generation of Phoenix Baby Boomers who began going to the park as kids. As they all got a little older, and the boys’ attention went from cowboys to girls, the park itself seemed to lose interest in maintaining its own “Bonanza”-era theme attractions in favor of wilder (and, inevitably, more dangerous) thrill rides. As the girls grew closer in age to the can-can dancers kicking up their heels at the Golden Palace, the park sprouted a teen dance hall and booked local Top 40 bands on the Lagoon Stage.
By the time Legend City reached 18 (then Arizona’s legal drinking age), the corner of the park that once held the Gay ’90s miniature golf course had given way to a full-fledged concert amphitheater, Compton Terrace, with a portion of the old Main Street buildings re-purposed into an “Encore Plaza,” retaining the ice cream parlor and snack bar while adding a beer garden and concert T-shirts concession area.
“The idea was that you’d go to a concert and then hang out in the park for a while,” says John Bueker, who runs a tribute website to the park, http://www.Legend-City.com, and is writing a book on its history. And, for a while, it worked: the same kids who had played putt-putt golf on its southeast grounds in the ’60s were rocking out to the Go-Go’s, Pat Benatar, Jackson Browne and Def Leppard on the same plot of land in the ’80s.
Inevitably, as many in that generation were finding jobs, settling down and, against their earlier ideologies, “selling out” to corporate America, Legend City itself was sold to Salt River Project in 1982, which closed the park permanently the following year and leveled it to make room for its corporate offices.
Bueker says the final years of Legend City were hard on those who’d remembered the park at its prime. At times, seeing the peeling paint and broken parts on the once magical animated figures were enough to make an angst-y adolescent mourn his own loss of innocence. Bueker remembers riding the Lost Dutchman Mine—the last of the original theme rides still running until the end—in the summer of 1980, after having been away for a few years.
“I was 22 at the time, and it was a really sad experience, because everything was run down,” he recalls. “We went on the mine ride, which to me was always the greatest ride at Legend City, and none of the animated figures worked anymore. They hadn’t been able to keep them up.”
Part of that may have been due to the animatronics’ inventive do-it-yourself construction, says Dick Kraus, who designed many of the park’s original moving figures and effects out of whatever machinery he could find. “After I left they brought in some engineering students from ASU,” he says. “Trouble is, they probably couldn’t find half of the motors I made, ‘cause I buried them around the attractions!”
Working parts or not, nobody ever expected Legend City to fall victim to the wrecking ball. Behind the scenes, the park had been struggling to stay open since its second year of business, temporarily closing from 1965 to 1969 after a bankruptcy judge placed the park in receivership and undergoing three ownership changes (and a few extended off seasons) before its last owners, the Capell Brothers’ carnival operation, finally took SRP’s $21.5 million offer for the land and auctioned off the rides and buildings.
Until that point, Legend City had always miraculously come back from a closed season. To the generation that grew up in the place, from the Iron Horse train ride to Fleetwood Mac at Compton Terrace, it seemed almost a state-preserved playground, an old rickety treehouse the city’s parents couldn’t bear to take down.
“It was like a museum of our childhood,” says Bueker—adding, with a laugh, “a run-down, dusty museum! But it was ours. And we never imagined that some day it would just disappear.”
Teen Town
“How many of us can share great stories about the experiences we had at Legend City?” asks longtime Valley magician and comedian Brad Zinn, working the stage at the Arizona Historical Museum’s auditorium. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I had my first kiss at Legend City.’ ‘I had my first job at Legend City.’”
Zinn, one of many local entertainers who got their start at Legend City, is here emceeing a 50th anniversary reunion of the park’s founders, employees, entertainers and former visitors, organized in large part by Bueker, and the auditorium is filled to capacity. A few of the luminaries who take the stage, from Legend City’s visionary founder Louis Crandall to the beloved Bill “Wallace” Thompson of the long-running local kids’ program “The Wallace and Ladmo Show” (who, along with Pat McMahon and the late Ladimir “Ladmo” Kwiatkowski, performed at the park’s Lagoon Stage nearly every weekend for most of its run), appear worrisomely frail—although Wallace, when he can be heard, still manages to crack the audience up with his ever-sharp, mischievous wit.
But the audience members who stand up when Zinn asks for a show of former park employees look surprisingly youthful for having worked at a place that’s been closed for 30 years. That’s because most in attendance were pretty young when they worked at Legend City, surely the city’s single biggest employer of teens at the time. Even in its final years, the park was employing between 200 to 300 young people, average age 20, each season. In the summer of ‘69, after U-Haul founder Sam Shoen bought the park, even the administrative staff hired to oversee the 125 high school and college kids working the rides and sno-cone machines was made up entirely of young men and women under 25.
Bonnie Gallagher Osborn was just 15 when she was hired to work at the Candy Store at Legend City in 1973. She had used a fake ID to get the job.
“I was only 15 years old with a fake ID when I was hired,” says Bonnie Gallagher Osborn, sporting the same nametag she wore back when she worked at the Candy Store. “I got started there because my older brother worked in the arcade, fixing pinball machines.” Her first summer there, in 1973, she was given the title of midway sweeper, which entailed carrying a broom and dustpan around the park sweeping up trash, cigarette butts and whatever splashed up around the Krazy Kups. It wasn’t the most glamorous job, and Osborn only cleared $27.01 on her first paycheck for a weekend’s work. Nevertheless, she loved it.
“The fun part about that job is I got to meet, like, everybody the first weekend I worked there,” she says. “Most of the people who worked there were teenaged boys, running the rides and the games. And I got to meet them all right away. But I was my brother’s little sister, so they all knew I was off bounds!”
Bonnie’s brother Joe was only 20 himself, but already a supervisor of the arcade. Most of the other managers were little older than that, and a certain permissiveness prevailed.
“We were all young,” she says. “One of the best parts of when I worked in the Candy Store was, if the park wasn’t too busy, my supervisor would come around and say, ‘One of you can clock out.’ And all three of us girls who worked there always volunteered for that, because then you got to play in the park all night!”
Osborn, too, remembers the after-hours parties. “We’d have fun in the park after it closed, and then we always went to the V.I.—Village Inn Pizza—where there was always a little underage drinking. The managers were old enough to drink, but some of us weren’t.”
Jonathan Abel, one of the guides on the Cochise’s Stronghold river ride in the mid-‘70s, recalls the after-hours parties at the park, too, but says they really were mild compared to things kids do today.
“The times were different, you know. And a ‘wild time’ then really wasn’t that wild,” he says, with a laugh. “Mostly, we were tired! We worked our butts off for eight or 10 hours each day, and it was hot. So maybe 30 kids would hang around after closing, and we would just sit and talk, and maybe have a drink or two until dawn. But that was about as wild as it got!”
Lou’s Playground
With his four daughters and one son taking the stage along with him at the Arizona Historical Museum, Louis Crandall is introduced by his eldest daughter, Janie, and the crowd erupts in cheers, everyone in the house rising to deliver a standing ovation to the man who created Legend City.
It’s a long-overdue “thank you” to the founder who left Phoenix broke and defeated after his dream of building a Disneyland in the desert failed to make enough money to stay open beyond its first three years. After Legend City closed down in September 1966, Crandall, in debt and without a home, moved his family to Provo, Utah, where he built a second business and never returned to Phoenix—except, once Legend City reopened, to take his children back to visit what remained of the theme park he had originally built for them.
Legend City was hardly recognizable by the time it closed its doors in 1983, as illustrated by the very different billboards from when it opened and when it closed.
Before the reunion event, Louis Crandall says that he still carries regrets over losing Legend City. “It breaks my heart to see that park, that was destined to be the greatest park in America, not make it because we didn’t have just a little more money to carry it on properly,” he says. And certainly, Legend City became a harsher place as its quaint western buildings faded under the shadows of the big iron carnival rides, brought in by the Japanese ride manufacturer that became its third owner. The costumed bandits who once held up the train in re-enacted robberies were replaced by the occasional real gangs on the midway, according to Mike Marryat, the park’s general manager from 1976 to ‘78. In the summer of 1977, a 12-year-old girl, Esther Urbalijo, was killed when the door on the Zipper ride flung open, throwing her and her 15-year-old sister 60 feet to the ground (the family was eventually awarded $1.3 million in a lawsuit).
Marryat says Legend City never felt quite the same after that tragedy, at least for him. “Something I saw that night changed me,” he says. “After we called the fire department, I closed the ride, and I had people screaming at me to open that ride back up. And they had been there and had watched what had happened. I couldn’t believe it.” After suspected arson burned down some of Crandall’s original western-themed buildings, Marryat left. “It was a different world,” he says.
It’s Louis Crandall’s kinder and gentler Legend City, however, that’s celebrated at the 50th anniversary reunion today. For all its changes, the park retained at least a little of Crandall’s quirky flavor (most of the buildings were still standing, however vacant and faded, until the end), and the generation that grew up letting their imaginations—and sometimes, themselves—go wild on its sprawling acres did it all against the defining backdrop Crandall gifted the city, back when Phoenix was a smaller, simpler place.
“My dad always wanted to make everyone happy at Legend City,” says first daughter Janie Crandall Hjorth. “And he inspired us that way. We five actually go on trip together once a year,” she says, motioning to her siblings. “It’s all due to the love that he and my mother, who’s been gone 15 years, showed us.”
Sharing in Crandall’s grandiose dream to give Arizona its own dusty Disneyland, Hjorth says, his own kids were inspired “to love each other and be happy people.”
Weren’t we all.
IT Geeks, Guns and Money
IT Geeks, Guns and Money
Published in Scottsdale Airpark News, June 2013
North Scottsdale’s National Firearms Dealer Network aims to become the Amazon of guns—by bringing Southwest creatives over to the “other side”
By Jimmy Magahern
At the head of the long conference table in what’s dubbed the NFDN Strategy Room, surrounded by elegantly lit display cases of rare handguns and assorted weaponry, National Firearms Dealer Network president Larry Davis pulls up his company’s website on a laptop and displays the home page on a widescreen monitor on the opposite wall.
“Let’s pretend that you’re walking into a mall,” he begins, focusing on the arresting splash page image his graphic artists have created. The photo-realistic illustration depicts the sprawling interior of a two-level shopping mall—almost definitely late-1980s Metro Center, circa Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure—only all the store signs look like logos from the pages of an NRA magazine.
“But your anchor store, instead of being Dillard’s, is Smith & Wesson,” Davis continues. “Next to that is the Colt Store,” he says, clicking on the storefront on the top floor that most definitely would have been Kay Jewelers in ’80s Metro Center.
“These [virtual] stores are actually owned by Colt, by Smith & Wesson,” Davis says. “We design and build it for them, but they actually own the stores. So as you go through the mall now, what it does is it gives you a complete shopping experience. You can go into the stores of all these manufacturers, and it’s like walking into Dillard’s.”
Except it’s Glock Perfection and Savage Arms whose signs have replaced the Hot Dog on a Stick, and Lotions and Potions. And Winchester and Browning appear in place of Goldwater’s and Dillard’s.
Davis, a long-time Scottsdale Airpark pilot who flew for some of the business icons who were instrumental in constructing the Airpark, just sits back and smiles at the richly interactive virtual mall his tight team of 15 employees has created for him. Built to facilitate the quick online transfer of inventory from major firearms dealers to mom-and-pop gun stores around the country, the National Firearms Dealer Network bills itself as “The Largest Firearms Mall in the World.”
“Pretty neat, huh?” Davis asks, with a smile.
Creative Design
Depending on which side you take in the national gun debate, Davis’ brought-to-life vision of a shopping mall made up entirely of gun stores can strike you as either an apocalyptic scenario or a dream sequence from the ultimate “Rambo” movie.
For Davis, an intriguing mix of former Walmart V.P. and card-carrying NRA supporter—a man who quotes Patrick Henry and Sam Walton, often in the same breath—his NFDmall.com is clearly the culmination of a dream to bring his years of experience as a Walmart executive (among his early achievements, he managed the chain’s first Superstore, in Texas) in service to his love of American weaponry.
But what about the rest of the staff at NFDN, like the hip-dressed young woman toiling over a splash page for Mossberg autoloading rifles? How did Davis manage to corral some of North Scottsdale’s best creatives into producing top-flight web architecture and graphic design for a product not traditionally in tune with the liberal arts?
“You don’t have to be a gun supporter to work here,” Davis insists. “They can hate guns. Some of them, all they like is computers!”
“There are people who work here who don’t even own a firearm,” adds sales and marketing vice president Chad Seaverns, who’s taken over control of the laptop. “At the heart of it, we’re really a marketing e-commerce company and we’re working with computers, helping small businesses succeed.”
Davis is quick to credit his staff of graphic artists, IT team and call center operators, who have brought this slick web operation to life in a under a year, expanding into an office space connected to Davis’ brick-and-mortar store, US Autoweapons, on Northsight Boulevard, between the Scottsdale Gun Club and the Habanero’s Mexican Grill.
“I don’t want this story to be about me,” he cautions. “We’ve got a very talented programming department, we’ve got a very talented graphics department. And then,” he says, patting Seaverns’ back, “we’ve got Chad, our Internet guru.”
Davis leads a quick tour down the hall, past the room of call center operators eying a bank of monitors that show the locations of NFDN’s 500-plus dealers, all linked into the company’s online inventory of more than $300 million of in-stock firearms and accessories, past John in sales (“He takes care of all of our Facebook and Twitter”), to creative services, where art director Shane Wagoner is busy setting up a shot of a new Browning rifle that’s just come into the shop.
Wagoner, who’s worked for close to 30 years in the graphic design field, admits it hasn’t been easy recruiting traditionally liberal creative types to design web pages for semi-automatic weapons manufacturers.
“It is difficult, yeah, because of the nature of it,” he says. But there’s also something artistically alluring about gun imagery—and enough well-heeled financial backers behind the industry—that has drawn some of today’s best graphic artists to the field. However ugly one may view our country’s obsession with guns, the websites for Colt and Leupold riflescopes would look beautiful in any creative’s portfolio.
“What Shane does is, he’ll sit down with his people here and they’ll try and get the culture in their mind before they do their design work,” Davis says. “And that seems to work.”
Whatever their motivations, Davis is just happy to have a crack team busy making his ambitious vision come alive.
“We used to have a saying over at Walmart,” he says, leading the tour back around to the front door, which is kept tightly locked during business hours. “‘Dream it, do it and fix it.’ I dreamed it, they’re doing it, and we’re all fixing it!”
Cul-de-sacs
What makes living in these suburban lollipops so special — and where in the Valley can we still find them?
Beware the bump-out.
That’s what subdivision developers call those little semi-circle arches of asphalt that bump out like swollen elbows on curved residential streets, shoehorning four or five homes into the space of three while giving the illusion of a half-Knots Landing.
The bump-out may feel a little like a cul-de-sac — the way the PT Cruiser tries to feel like the 1930’s Chrysler Airflow, say, or the Harkins’ chain of Cine Capri-style theaters goes for replicating the air of original Cine Capri. But it’s just not the real deal.
“It’s really not a cul-de-sac,” said Ken Peterson, vice president of sales and marketing for Shea Homes. “Where I’ve seen that the most is in higher-density neighborhoods, where they can fit more homes in using that format.” Today, the traditional “lollipop” cul-de-sac street pattern, where a short residential street dead-ends in a radius around which each home sits on a pie-shaped lot graced with a bigger-than-average back yard, is something of a luxury.
“I see cul-de-sacs used more in private communities, higher-end communities,” said Jim Funk, executive director of the Gainey Ranch Community Association, where he estimates there are about 30 cul-de-sacs — many with landscaped center islands. “Only because it’s usually more economical to just put the streets in a grid and line the homes straight up and down the street.”
“Whenever we have a cul-de-sac home, we normally charge a heavier premium, because of several things,” explained Sandra Wilken, a Valley real estate broker who, in her 37 years in the business, has represented properties at Gainey Ranch, The Phoenician and throughout the Biltmore area. “It’s at the end of a street, it’s always more private, more quiet, fewer cars, and a usually the lots are a little bit larger.”
Wilken said cul-de-sac lots are often “high on the wish list” of most homebuyers she deals with — particularly those from the east coast, where the American cul-de-sac, first spotted in Radburn, New Jersey in 1928, had its origins.
Lately, however, faced with growing criticism from “smart growth” advocates and anti-sprawl activists who see the cul-de-sac as endemic of the isolated, disconnected state of today’s suburbs, the lollipop has been getting a licking. In 2009, Virginia became the first state to severely limit cul-de-sacs in future developments, refusing road services to subdivisions that fail to comply. Since then, cities such as Portland, Charlotte and Austin have proposed similar restrictions. Even the cul-de-sac’s greatest asset — the safety it provides kids at play from outside traffic — has been challenged: new studies show cul-de-sacs’ spoke-wheel driveways are prime spots for “backovers,” which actually account for over a third of all non-traffic vehicular fatalities among children under 15.
Fortunately for fans of the round street square, which proponents tout as a center of neighborhood social interaction, there are still plenty of old-school cul-de-sacs in the Valley. Ahwatukee is sometimes referred to as the “world’s largest cul-de-sac,” as the whole town is somewhat geographically isolated from the rest of the metropolis. And fittingly, there are dozens of cul-de-sacs along the streets in Ahwatukee that back up to South Mountain. But there are also still plenty of lollipop-shaped streets in the older neighborhoods off north Central Ave., throughout the Arcadia district and all around Paradise Valley.
In newer developments, though, looking for cul-de-sacs may have you driving in circles. “Communities today are more designed with a minor arterial street that feeds into the neighborhood and then a looped road that runs through it,” said Peterson. “But on the turns of that loop, you’re still getting these pie-shaped home lots.”
It may not be Knots Landing, but at least, for cul-de-sac fans, it’s not the end of the road.
Arizona Pickers – What’s Hot
“It kind of goes in cycles,” says professional antique appraiser Anastacia Siembieda. “A few years ago, rosewood pottery was the hot item. Now it’s Fiestaware from the 50’s. You’ve got to keep up!” Some other hot collectibles today, according to Siembieda:
• Vintage jewelry, purses and compacts. “Don’t be afraid to ask at a yard sale, ‘Do you have any old jewelry?’ Sometimes the best stuff doesn’t get put out.”
• Designer clothes from the 70’s, or from now-defunct local department stores like Goldwater’s. “You can make a lot of money selling that stuff online now.”
• Perennial classic toys like Lionel trains and Barbie dolls. “But they don’t even have to be that old. Cabbage Patch dolls have pretty good value today.”
• Signed pieces of costume jewelry. “Like the old Sarah Coventry necklaces your mother used to wear. Eisenberg is good, too, but harder to find.”
• Vintage shoes. “Shoes are very overlooked. But you can get a good price on ’em.”
• Books, especially history and sci-fi. “With book stores disappearing, old books are hot again.”
• Religious items, especially rosaries, statues and prayer books. “If I get hold of old rosaries, they’re gone in a second. Catholics, especially, are reclaiming these things.”
• Any old postcards having to do with cowboys, westerns, Halloween and Christmas. “But especially Halloween now. I found a lot of German Halloween cards in Prescott, and was able to sell them for $100 each.”
• Hummels. “They’re back! They were dead for years, because the older people got rid of them. But now there’s a new generation that are liking them again.”
• Clothing from the 70’s. “All that stuff I couldn’t stand from the 70’s, the college kids are getting into now. Hey, as long as they think that’s antique, I’ve still got my Calvin Klein jeans in the closet!”
11-5-12: Election Eve post
Sprained my wrist today pushing a guy’s car to get it started. Been smartin’ all day, but it’s a good kind of pain: an injury sustained in an act of helping someone out.
To me, that’s what these times are about. We’re all smartin’ a little. But when it comes from giving each other a push, it doesn’t hurt so bad.
Forward! And pop the clutch!
More ‘O the Mountain
Bill O’Brien is a hard guy to edit. He talks your ear off, and has so many fantastic stories to tell about his 86 years. It was a chore trimming his colorful life story down to 1,300 words. Kudos to Adam Klaawon over at Phoenix Magazine for getting it down to a choice 1,200 – still a generous amount of ink over the 1,000 that was originally assigned.
In any event, here’s the longer draft. We both wished there would have been room for the coda here, about the corned beef and cabbage. All those words, and Bill O’Brien’s just getting started.
Top O’ the Mountain
How do you get to the top of Camelback Mountain? For Bill O’Brien, it took ingenuity, hard work — and a bit of the luck of the Irish
By Jimmy Magahern
Not long ago, Bill O’Brien was asked to speak at his grandson’s wedding ceremony, a class affair held outside on a rolling hillside by a San Francisco country club. Fresh out of college and diving head first into marriage, young Steve O’Brien was looking to his worldly grandfather for, as Bill recalls, “advice that he could carry through life.”
O’Brien laughs, taking a sip from his third short Harp at the Dubliner, a traditional Irish pub in northeast Phoenix owned by one of his old friends. “Now, that’s a hell of a question!”
Nonplused, O’Brien took the mic, stood up in front of the sea of rented tuxedos, polished patent leather shoes and church-going Irish Catholics and delivered a bit of wisdom gleaned from his own college days, back when he was a member of the short-lived University of Arizona Polo Team.
“I said, ‘Keep your head down, your ass up, and charge!’”
You could spend a month of Sundays with Bill O’Brien and probably not get another motto out of him that better sums up the colorful life of the iconic Paradise Valley businessman. A book full of stories, sure. But not another life lesson quite as concise.
At a spry 86, O’Brien is not a big man — 5-foot-six, when not wearing his trusty cowboy hat. But he’s a giant in the Phoenix Irish community, as signaled in the affectionate shoulder slaps he gets from every grey-haired, red-nosed gent in tweed who passes through the Dubliner’s door. It was O’Brien’s influence with city leaders and businessmen that helped bring the community not only the Irish Cultural Center at Margaret T. Hance Park, but also the Rula Bula Irish Pub on Mill. “The Irish community here was in a lot of separate fractions,” says Patricia Prior, the center’s Ireland-born president. “You know how headstrong some of us can be! But Bill brought us all together.”
O’Brien’s even a hero with the Hispanic community, having founded a small society called the Los San Patricios de Arizona that celebrates, once a year, the little-known band of Irish immigrants who fought on the side of Mexico during the Mexican-American War. “We always liked those guys anyway,” says O’Brien, who learned to speak perfect Spanish. “The Irish and the Mexicans have always liked the same things: family, work, singing . . . drinking!”
He’s also a legend in Paradise Valley, where O’Brien is famous for having not only owned the most valuable piece of real estate in Arizona — 56 acres on Camelback Mountain, including its summit — but also for having done the right thing with it. In 1967, upon hearing that developers were planning to build a restaurant atop the Valley’s most renowned peaks — complete with a tram that would have picked up passengers near the front gate of O’Brien’s own 2.5 acre ranch at its base — O’Brien formed a partnership with his friend Russell Jackson and bought the land, giving the top 26 acres over to the city as a preserve, forever banning construction above the 1,800-foot level.
Ask him how he got to that summit, however, and you’ll get a series of wonderfully digressive stories that, together, extol the virtues of that same heads-down, hind-up determination he imparted to his grandson. The lesson becomes apparent, after another round or two: There is no easy lesson to be learned from one man’s riches; only the interlocking layers of experience formed by a life richly lived.
“My last semester in high school, I told my school pal, ‘I’m gonna leave, there’s nothing for me here,’” says O’Brien, by way of beginning to answer the question of how he got to the top of Camelback Mountain. “I practiced running alongside railroad cars. I was on the gym team, so I knew how to jump up, look to see if there were any hobos in the car, and catch the next one if there were.”
His epic life journey is as capricious as Forrest Gump’s, including the brushes with dignitaries (a lifelong cowboy wanna-be, he once rode horses with Ronald Reagan and mistook Henry Kissinger, enflight aboard the Concord, for an old rancher he’d known) and stint in the military (he served as a Navy captain during World War II after joining the ROTC to play polo in the U of A cavalry).
His first job out of college found him sweeping up wool at a Boston warehouse, but O’Brien, who’d made extra money through high school trapping coyotes around his west L.A. home and shipping their hides to Hudson’s Bay fur traders in Chicago, quickly moved up to wool grader. “I’d say, ‘That’s an Angus wool, West Highlands wool, carpet wool,’” O’Brien recalls. “They were impressed!” Before long, his Boston bosses were shipping O’Brien and his new bride, Sada, off to South Africa, where he became an international wool trader.
It was there, in Capetown, that O’Brien’s polo experience surprisingly came in handy. With the Boer Wars over, the British and Dutch continued to battle each other in friendly polo matches at South African barbeques (“boy, could they eat!”), and O’Brien soon found himself a substitute player for both teams. One day, a stout Brit alerted O’Brien to the news that the pound sterling had dropped to 23% on the dollar, and O’Brien — who’d majored in Agricultural Economics at U of A — instantly saw the opportunity.
“The next morning, I started going to auctions from Port Elizabeth to East London, buying wool like crazy,” he says. He spent close to a million dollars of his employer’s money in two days, without any orders — a stunt that drew stacks of furious telegrams from his boss — but his instincts were right. The company was in the black before the following Monday.
Upon returning to Arizona, O’Brien focused those keen instincts on buying and reselling land. “I could see how Arizona was growing,” he says. “So I started buying and selling land like it was wool.”
He financed the preserve atop Camelback Mountain by selling the 30 acres below it to John Gardiner, a Hollywood high roller he’d met through his sister, the 1930s film star Jane Bryan. “As I understand it,” recalls long-time friend Bob Glenn, “he went up to Carmel, California and talked to Gardiner, who had a successful tennis ranch up there.” So certain was O’Brien of Camelback Mountain’s ability to sell itself, he had walked into Gardiner’s office carrying two airline tickets to Phoenix. Somehow, he persuaded Gardiner to catch a plane that very day, and by the next morning, the John Gardiner Tennis Ranch (now Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain) was born. The 26-acre “hands-off” zone was part of the deal.
“He loves interacting with people, and he’s always got these great ideas,” says Glenn. “He gets these ideas of how to do things, and he’s not scared of doing ’em!”
Glenn and his wife Nancy have known Bill and Sada for 40 years now, and he affectionately calls O’Brien “the most energetic little Irishman I’ve ever seen. Even now, if someone asks him, ‘Do you wanna go on a wild boar hunt in Uruguay?’ He’s like, ‘What time are we leaving!’ He loves adventure.”
And gab — clearly a fundamental of Irish culture that O’Brien, blessed with friends too numerous to tally, still craves.
“It’s still early yet,” O’Brien says, taking a break about midway through his life story to crack open the Dubliner’s lunch menu. “How’s the corned beef and cabbage?”
— 30 —
Pitchmen
No, celebrity deaths aren’t increasing, we’re just noticing them more – and rushing to be the first to tweet ’em. Twitter’s “Trending Topics” gives us all that creepy window on who everyone’s talking about. And being on top of this list is not always good.
“GangbangGirl” tweets “Hurry and comment on Karl Malden!” – presumably in a race to get her comment on the top trending thread of the day. Others rush to “RT” the day’s best one-liner: “Fred Travelena does a great Michael Jackson impression,” goes to @ChipChantry, listed as a comedian in his bio.
Bad news travels fast in the Twittersphere, and crafting 140-character tributes to the latest departed celeb has replaced the daily crossword puzzle.
But sometimes Twitter also brings us into the lives of those actually effected by a celebrity death. People who were all ready to post their clever “Kaboom!” jokes about Billy Mays’ passing were derailed by the bracingly personal tweets from one YoungBillyMays, the 24-year-old son of the world famous pitchman. Following Billy Mays III on the day of his dad’s death took us along on a rollercoaster of emotions, from the creepy (his first: “My dad didn’t wake up this morning. I’m sure you’ll all hear about it. It hasn’ t yet hit me but it’s about to”), to the touching (“Man, I miss him”), to, around three days later, the just plain lame (re-tweeting a fan who wrote, “Today on my way to work in the rainclouds I saw a cloud that literally looked like a ‘thumbs up'”).
Along the way, the young Mays fielded thousands of tweets from fans of his dad, sharing one-liners (“Heaven just got a lot cleaner”), charicatures and Photoshop tributes to the bearded, bombastic TV presence they all grew to love. The hastily assembled “twitfam” urged all to wear blue the next day in honor of Mays’ familiar workshirt-and-khakis uniform, and Billy III shared links to photos of the many who did.
By the third day, Mays was appearing on news programs, hocking his home-made album on MySpace and plotting a Billy Mays Memorial Foundation . . . and followers began to level off, some probably searching for the grandson of Karl Malden. But while it lasted, the passing of a pitchman became personal, through our mass access to the online diary of his loving son and a sudden means of immediate connection with a real person behind the familiar face.
Laid Off, Inc.
Related Article:
Don’t call them unemployed. A new class of “nontraditionally employed” corporate castaways are finding creative ways to survive – and in the process, quietly creating a new economy.
In a half-vacant business park in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, sits Gangplank, a 5,000 square foot office space that’s something of an anomaly in this dire economy: it’s actually filled with people, working. On this typical Wednesday morning, about 35 mostly young computer jockeys are spread out on 24 utilitarian IKEA tables, busily tapping away on their laptops, while down the hallway, five open-door offices are occupied by pairs of entrepreneurs leaning over each other’s desks, ardently swapping ideas.
Except most of the people buzzing about the bullpen today are not employed by Gangplank itself. Half, in fact, are not working for anybody.
Gangplank is the Phoenix area’s first “coworking” space, a twist on the old “free Wi-Fi” coffee shop environment that’s more about building a collaborative community out of the growing population of like-minded, skilled free-agents left office-less by the unemployment wreckage than selling them overpriced java and scones.
Three things have happened while the unemployed population has waited for the economy to rebound and new jobs to emerge. For starters, many of us have decided we don’t want ‘em — at least not the old style of jobs, top-down managed and rigorously controlled. We like our freedom, and the rewards for towing the company line have vanished. Secondly, we’ve finally discovered a use for all our social media links: our Twitter and Facebook pages are now our employment agents, marketing our skills and, surprisingly, paying the bills through referrals and leads to contract work. Lastly, thanks to the new frugality and the erosion of corporate benefits, we’ve discovered doing our own things may be enough. The paycheck we make may be equal to the quality of life we take.
Now enter coworking, a movement which physically gathers the new LinkedIn generation of self-employed freelancers and consultants into a whole new model of the workplace — the office as reinvented by those cast off by the old. In this office space, there’s no bullying supervisor roaming between the cubicles asking for mind-numbing TPS reports, and no downsizing efficiency experts nosing around to see who’s playing Tetris on company time. It’s the office as LAN party: young creative types toting their own rigs to link up and interact with others – only in this case for work, not play.
In “Laid Off, Inc.,” I take a look at this emerging movement, beginning with Gangplank, an experiment started by a group of Web developers who took advantage of the downturn to move into a space double the size of their old office for roughly the same rent, and then opened up the environment (complete with pool and foosball tables, a full Rock Band set for the Wii) to other free-agents in their field. It’s already paying off: five start-up companies have emerged from the collaborations since the space opened last October, netting the cooperative $3 million in business already, according to one of the principals.
“We’ve created gravity here,” he says. “A lot of smart people who’ve been tossed off by their employers are being pulled toward us now. And it’s working. We’re working!”
wordwork 
