CHAPTER 13

BENSON AND THE WILD WEST

As I read over the letters after Charles was born in 1945, I remember how seriously Bob considered going into the chaplaincy. His mother expressed the idea that if he didn't go, he would always feel as if he had missed a part of his generation. He went for an interview and was informed that chaplains were very much needed. It looked like a long road ahead in the Pacific theatre even though the war in Europe was over. We spent a lot of time talking about it.

However, as the outcome of the war became more certain, the thought of a two or three year separation for no overwhelming purpose became even more unbearable. And after the atomic bomb was dropped he began to think seriously of getting a church of his own. Cecil Hoffman wrote from Tucson of the opportunities in Arizona. The thought of starting in a new place seemed like high adventure.

The war was over but trains were still crowded with service men and holiday seekers when Bob and I travelled to Benson, Arizona to "candidate" ‑‑ a Presbyterian process of inviting a minister to preach in a church needing a pastor, then to be interviewed and voted upon. Mr. Norman Roberts met the train and took us to his home for dinner and overnight. The Roberts were kind, substantial people. He was an executive in the Apache Powder Company. (After we had lived there we would always remember one of his young employees who told us rather fervently that he had been tempted many times to cheat or steal on the job, but working for such a fine man as Norman Roberts had kept him from it.)

We soon learned that Benson had two reasons for its existence. It was a "powder town" supplying the personnel for the Apache Powder Company, manufacturer of explosives. The other source of employment was the Southern Pacific Railroad. "Powder Row" was where the executives of Apache lived. They supplied the leadership of the church. Their homes were comfortable, not fancy, but they were able to have small yards and fences.

The main street was the East‑West Highway and consisted of an assortment of bars, two grocery stores, a post office, one general store and several motels. People migrated to Arizona in search of warmth and clear air to heal tuberculosis, arthritis, and allergies. The small Presbyterian Church was the only Protestant church in town, but there was a Catholic church, and while we were there the Baptists moved in across the street from us.

Moving in January, 1946 was exciting, but exhausting. I couldn't understand why I was so tired and felt like sleeping a lot. We stopped in Los Angeles with the Don DeWolfs. When Aunt Georgia offered me some baked beans for breakfast, I looked at her blankly. I couldn't tell her that the mere invitation made me nauseated, and what I wanted to say was, "My God I'm pregnant!" Nothing else could have fill me with such total revulsion. It was the first suspicion I had, and even though I nearly miscarried from the incredibly long trip in our 1932 Chevy, my symptoms were unmistakable. I remember flopping down on the mattress that had been delivered to our new home (the bed would come later) and being grateful to just be horizontal. I was bleeding slightly. The next morning, however, I was as good as new and ready to explore our new home and meet our neighbors.

The first Sunday presented Bob's first crisis. He was asked to take over the worst boys' Sunday School class. He soon discovered that the ringleader of the bad boys was Jimmy Schmalzel, son of one of the leading families on "Powder Row". When Jimmy acted up Bob game him a warning, and when he paid no attention Bob told him to get out and go home. Crisis! Alarm! Did Bob know that the Schmalzels were one of the "big givers"? Did he know that Jimmy was the apple of his mother's eye even though everyone admitted he was a holy terror? Would Mrs. Schmalzel ever set foot in our church again? We were warned of all sorts of dire eventualities. It was a great satisfaction when Jimmy came back meekly the following Sunday, and as far as I know he never made any trouble after that. Victory number one.

The center of worship in the simple chapel that served our congregation was a large reproduction of Sallman's Head of Christ. I had been indoctrinated to think that that was the worst kind of sentimental art, but I could see it was cherished by our members as much as the music of "In the Garden" and "Ivory Palaces" (both of which shared the same low category of my opinion). However, I kept my opinions to myself and learned to share in love what taste denied as poor. And it was good.

The drapery behind the worship center and the altar cloth were made of tan monks cloth. When we succeeded in raising money for new maroon choir robes, everyone wished we could afford to have the worship center match, but there was no money. Bob had the idea of dyeing the monks cloth. Although we were dubious about it at first, several of us got together on the project. My recollection was that it was a very big messy job, but the result was a soft wine tone that blended in remarkably well.

Living in a small town was fun. We made close friends. We had wonderful neighbors. We took everything very seriously. We had lots of company, highlighted by memorable visits with my brother Dick (who was in the navy in San Diego), my sister Molly, Maja and Dick DeWolf, and so forth. Bob learned how to run a mimeograph in 100 degree weather and when it was well below freezing. He worked with the youth and the Sunday School. I did my share of having people over, starting a crafts class, sharing with our Women's Society, calling, etc.

I was accepted into the "Executive" crowd and invited to the Women's Club. However, I was furious when they had a bridge party and relegated me to the only "Auction" table when everyone else played "Contract". I came home fuming to Bob, "I suppose they think that just because I'm a minister's wife, I can't play bridge!" I never did like being stereotyped, and I can laugh at my indignation now.

Later I would disprove their original assumption. Mary Lou Hesser, the doctor's wife, was a real card sharp. She had earned their rent by playing bridge while her husband was getting his medical training. One night I was her partner, and I bid a grand slam, doubled and redoubled, in No‑Trump. She left her seat as dummy and came over to stand behind my chair and proceeded to guide me through the play. We made the bid. After she sat down again, I said pleasantly, but evenly, "I appreciate your helping me with the play. I'm not sure I could have made it without your help. However, I would have enjoyed doing it entirely by myself. Winning isn't that important to me." The next day I had several phone calls from women who congratulated me on telling Mary Lou what they would have loved to say.

Mary Lou was too smart. I'll never forget her, partly because she helped deliver Bill. She also helped introduce us to the Peyton Place aspect of Benson.

Her husband was something else. Doc Hesser was the son of a Fundamentalist preacher. He had inherited compassion and warmth from his father, but he had revolted against both the theology and the rules of his strict church. He loved to get roaring drunk, to make outrageous statements and shock people. One night at a bridge party where both the Hessers and Bob and I were guests, Dr. Hesser decided to bait Bob by telling one filthy story after another. Next day several members of our church called to apologize for his behavior, "He shouldn't have talked that way in front of a minister..." I heard Bob say over the phone, "Actually I don't think it was so important whether I'm a minister ‑‑ I would have thought the stories were in poor taste on general principles..."

The thought of going to Dr. Hesser for pre‑natal care and to submit to all his vulgarities filled me with revulsion. So we planned for the baby to be delivered in Bisbee, 50 miles of mountain road away. The baby was overdue by the middle of September. I had several false alarms and was feeling oppressed by the hot weather. On the 15th Bob had to go to a Youth Meeting at the Bisbee Church, so he phoned the Doctor and asked whether he should bring me with him.

"Give her a dose of castor oil and bring her along," was the answer. By the time we reached Tombstone (half‑way to Bisbee), I was having hard labor pains. Bob left me at the hospital to go to his meeting, and by the time he came back to see how I was doing an hour later, he found me in the delivery room along with dear little new Timothy Burrowes DeWolf. I had been completely conscious during the delivery. I remember watching the birth and thinking, "It looks just like Life Magazine..." I was fascinated with the process and feeling very wide awake and conversational. For the first time in several months I was cool! The mountain air and the fall breezes soon made me call for blankets. I kept having strong pains and bleeding after the delivery, and finally a couple of doctors came in and discovered that there was more afterbirth to be removed. After that I recovered rapidly.

Meanwhile Bob had gone back to the Youth Meeting, passed out candy bars to the kids (instead of cigars to adults). And there was general rejoicing and amusement that the whole thing had been executed so efficiently.

Most of the babies in the hospital were Mexican, like small dolls with chubby faces and thick black stand‑on‑end heads of hair. Tim didn't look as picture‑pretty, but the miracle of being able to love a new human personality was just as thrilling as it had been when Charles was born. The girl in the bed next to me wouldn't look at her baby because it was a boy, and she had wanted a girl. I tried to talk to her, but finally I gave up in disgust.

I had to insist again on nursing the baby. The nursing staff gave me a bad time and claimed I was "starving" Tim, even though his weight was bouncing up. I finally appealed to the doctor over their heads, saying that I did not want the feedings supplemented. He agreed with me, but the nurses still gave me a bad time and made me feel heartless. It was comforting to realize when I came back for my six weeks' check‑up that Tim had gained a phenomenal amount and had existed completely on my supply of milk. He was just a very demanding little boy.

Having babies in a small desert town was far from ideal. My next door neighbor, Mrs. Hightower, used to love to point out the potential dangers.

"Now take rattlesnakes," she would say, "they love damp places, like where you have the playpen under the tree..." Or, "You never can tell about scorpions. You know they're the most deadly thing around. It's the little ones that are the worst, and they like to hide between folds of cloth‑‑like the baby's pillowcase there..." She also liked to dwell on tarantulas, black widow spiders, gila monsters, and the fatal effects on pegnant women of breathing turpentine (this of course when she saw me painting the playpen while I was carrying Bill).

Benson had a marvelous variety of migratory birds, and before I got the Roger Tory Peterson Western Guide, I would say excitedly to Mrs. Hightower, "What's THAT bird?"

"Well, that's a red bird..." or "That's a brown bird..." (or black or gray) until I gave up.

She was a good neighbor though, and the night I had to leave the house at midnight for Bill's birth, she came over and stayed in the house until morning with the other two boys.

My first inkling that Bill was on the way was when Bob and I were returning from a conference at Ganada, the Presbyterian Navaho Mission Station in Northern Arizona. Those were the days when I still thought it was fun to look at a map and say to Bob, "There's a route we've never tried, let's go that way..." After several near disasters I learned not to trust maps that much. On this occasion we had chosen to travel on the old Coronado Trail. We thought we were celebrating our 5th Anniversary and would stop in Morenci for dinner. What we didn't realize was that the route was unpaved, rocky, steep, and only wide enough for one car. It skirted the spine of the mountains with deep ravines on both sides. We didn't see a car or a human being for a hundred miles. Darkness fell, and we scarcely averaged 10 or 15 miles an hour.

By the time we reached Morenci, it was nearly midnight and I knew I was pregnant. We were starving hungry, but no place that was open looked fit to have dinner. So we turned the car around to look again. Suddenly we found ourselves caught in the traffic coming down the hill from the midnight shift. We couldn't stop or turn around so we had to wind up more curves until we could finally reverse our direction. By this time we were almost hysterical between pangs of hunger and laughter at the stupidity of thinking that THIS was the ideal way to celebrate. To top it off we finally settled for a greasy‑spoon diner, toyed with our food and went to a hotel where the bathroom was so small that Bob's long knees wouldn't even allow him to close the door if he sat on the john. Those are the sort of memories that seal a marriage for a lifetime ‑‑ that is, if you survive them and manage to be supportive of each other. Bob was always good at saying something that made me laugh at tough times.

Again, I was reluctant to go to Dr. Hesser, but his office was only a block away from our home, and I didn't relish the prospect of going as far as Bisbee again for the birth. Since there was no hospital in Benson, Dr. Hesser had an arrangement with a Mormon lady who lived just East of town so that she could house his maternity patients. And we decided to settle for that. I went to Dr. Hesser when I was about 7 months along. He was always courteous to me, and I felt as if he was like an overgrown boy who wanted desperately to have the approval of people like Bob and me, but simply didn't know how to win it. Mary Lou, his wife, helped out as office nurse. They were frustrated not to have any children themselves, and she was quite friendly to me.

One night about the time that the baby was due, we were invited to Liz Gunter's Ranch for a big party. Liz was someone I was drawn to the first time I met her when we were both doing volunteer work in the primitive library. Later I found out that she was the daughter of the Fultons, who owned a fabulous ranch about 10 miles out of town. One would never see this ranch from the road. One left the road and wound along a private road until one came to the main house which commanded a magnificent view clear to Mexico. To the left was a spacious courtyard flanked by a number of guest cottages that looked like a small but lavish motel, a pool and a two story private archeological museum. The family supported their own private archeologist who helped in their collection of Southwest Indian artifacts.

Liz, as their only daughter, could have lived in the lap of luxury. Instead she had married a hard drinking cowboy. I had been to the Fulton Ranch for parties, but I was dying of curiosity to know how the millionaire's daughter and her cowboy husband lived. However, I knew their ranch was 18 miles off the main highway on rough terrain and I wouldn't dare go, with the baby due any time.

Then Mary Lou Hesser phoned. She informed me that she was dying to go to the party too. But they didn't want to leave town when they knew my condition. Why didn't the four of us go together? Her husband would drive, and if anything happened, he'd be right on the spot.

It seemed like a wonderful idea. I had never driven with them before. Doc had an expensive car, but he drove over the rutted dirt road uphill and round curves as if it were a main highway. I thought surely the baby would arrive on the way. Still it was fun and a very memorable party.

Finally on Sunday evening of May 2nd, 1948, I was overdue. Chris and John Richards (the high school superintendent) had invited us over to play bridge. We ate popcorn all evening in between hands and chatting. Suddenly Bob said, "Oh by the way, did you know that Dr. Hesser smashed his car up last night?" I had been told that Doc was "on the wagon", and I was unnerved to think that perhaps he was drinking again and would be in no condition to deliver the baby. I jumped on Dink, half joking and half serious, for not having told me. And I warned him that he was going to have to see me through the delivery.

It was not a reassuring thought to entertain when my bag of waters broke right after we got home near midnight. We called Mrs. Hightower to come over and sleep on the davenport, and then Bob drove me out to Mrs. Fenn's, the Mormon lying‑in home. When she came to the door to let us in, she greeted us, and then said, "Well, I guess I'll go put some wood on the stove and heat some water..." This seemed to me more like a line out of a novel about frontier life than reality. I never did know why they needed all that hot water.

The pains increased so that Dr. Hesser was called at 2:30 a.m. and he and Mary Lou both arrived. Bob helped all the way through, holding my legs, etc. since there was no delivery table nor professional equipment. As soon as the little blonde headed boy appeared, Mary Lou began teasing me that I didn't need a third boy when she didn't have any. Why couldn't we let her have this one?

This was by far the most fun of any of my childbirth experiences. I was not only conscious throughout, but I had dear little Bill right beside me. I got to give him his first bath. I got to have visits with his older brothers, and Bob could come see me any old time. Mrs. Fenn turned out to be quite a remarkable woman. She was a handsome 50 year old and had 14 living children, 7 boys and 7 girls. She had been born a Catholic and had raised her own 6 younger brothers and sisters after her parents died. A Mormon family had adopted her and all her siblings and taken them to Mexico in the great Mormon flight from persecution. She had become a loyal Mormon, but she loved to talk religion with me. Whenever I went to the bathroom I passed a bedroom that had a large double bed piled nearly to the ceiling with crumpled clothing to be ironed. Mrs. Fenn would come into my room sighing, "My that's a big ironing..." Then she would sit down on the foot of my bed and talk for two hours. She was proud of all her children except for one, the black sheep, but she was obviously most wrapped up in that one.

She believed in natural food and simple living. The pillow cases were made of flour sacks, the menu was vegetarian with an emphasis on wheat germ and whole grains. The one negative thing out of an otherwise wonderful experience was that she wasn't as fastidious as she should have been about sanitary conditions. By the time I got Bill home, he had a bad rash. I showed it to a nurse friend who came to visit me, and she looked sort of horrified as she said, "Why Carol, that's infant impetigo!" Dr. Hesser was impressed when I called him, and freely admitted that as an army doctor he had never seen that condition before. But he gave me some penicillin ointment that cleared it up almost immediately.

I guess one always likes the doctor who delivers the baby. Doc Hesser was never anything but kind to me, and he would never take any money from us. After we moved away, we learned of his later tragedy. He had been summoned to a highway accident, and as usual drove top speed to get there. As he came over the brow of the hill, he saw the accident strewn over the road, and he had the choice of smashing into it or hitting the ditch. He chose the ditch and ended up a paraplegic condemned to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He still practiced medicine, and he still managed to get drunk. Mary Lou divorced him, after having a flagrant affair with Don Turner, to marry her lover.

One morning, while Bob and I were having breakfast and feeding the children, we were startled by a sudden strong vibration and shaking of the house. My initial reaction was that it might be an earthquake. We ran out of the house, but all we could see was a vertical plume of whitish smoke in the east. All of our neighbors were emerging from their back doors into the alley with panic‑filled faces. They knew immediately what it meant ‑‑ the Apache Powder Company, seven miles away, had had an explosion, and men were dead. The plant was laid out in such a way that each unit was isolated. If one blew up, the damage could be contained. However, it was not a unique phenomenon to have an explosion, and it ALWAYS meant that at least 3 or 4 men were dead.

There was an eerie atmosphere in the town as worried wives gathered, not knowing who had been widowed. When the word did come down, there was mingled horror, sadness and relief for those who were spared. Four men were "gone" ‑‑ only a fingertip of one man was found; the rest had disappeared in the smoke. A number of men quit their jobs. This always happened. There was something far scarier apparently about the danger of "disappearing" as opposed to the danger of accident on the railroad, though the casualty rate on the Southern Pacific was far higher at that time. In time most would return to the company and life would go on. Apparently people reverted to the philosophy of "it won't happen to me."

By the spring of 1948 after Billy was born, Bob became restless to get back to California. We realized that we were further from civilization in lots of ways that if we had been missionaries. We had learned a lot from living in a small town. The church had grown, but there were limitations to what else we could accomplish. I remember when the sheriff was shot in the bar one Saturday night, the comment we heard was, "Well Slim always was a quick hand on the trigger..."

We didn't touch much of this segment of the population though we got to know plenty of interesting characters. One woman who came to see me regularly had obviously been pretty when she was younger. She had fine cheekbones, beautiful eyes. But her weatherbeaten skin and gaunt cheeks bespoke a hard life. She was the daughter of a university professor in Southern California, had graduated from college and married a gambler. She lived in incredible poverty up in the wild hills; she was too proud to leave her husband, and she needed someone to confide in. She didn't own an iron so she would come to our house to do her ironing and bring me some raw milk in a mason jar. I didn't see her during the winter when the mountain road was impassible. She told me that the winter before they had lived on beans, nothing but beans all winter long. I became very fond of her ‑‑ she was obviously starved for someone who could talk about books as well as being starved for bread and amenities.

Benson also introduced me to transients that defied one's ability to judge people. We helped a teenager with the face of a choir boy, only to learn that in the next town he came to, he beat up the social worker within an inch of her life. And there was the young woman who made a pair of socks for Billy with elegant multicolored crotcheted tops. The only catch was that they were much too tight for any normal baby. We always called them the "schizophrenic socks" because their creator turned out to be a great deal of trouble to us ‑‑ her mental illness was far beyond our ability to cope.

So we jumped at the chance when Bob was considered for a church in East Oakland. Maja lovingly drove around the manse of the Elmhurst Church and wrote us that she had "cased the joint", and it looked good to her. Bob went up by train to candidate and when he returned he was so elated at the prospect of going back to California that I had to remind him not to act too happy in front of all our parishioners who lived in Arizona because they wanted to. "They LIKE Arizona," I pointed out, "and they don't want to hear how much cooler,better, etc, the Bay Area is..."

Return to Table of Contents