By William "Bill" Peck

I'm not starting out declaring how good or bad the "good old days" were.  It suffices to state that they are apples and oranges.  It remains for us as individuals to judge whether our present creature comforts come at a price of social loss when compared to the past. 
 

Simplicity of life compensated for material deficiencies.  We were less concerned with the things government provides today and gratified that what we produced was uniquely our creation for which we were unbeholden to anybody else for.  We didn't have a 30-year mortgages or monthly car payments.  We either paid cash or did without.  This freed us up to take more chances and gave us less concern for our financial "security." 
 

The role of history is a yardstick for us to make those comparisons.  Too much cleansing has taken place through movies and television for younger people to accurately gauge what life was actually like in the past.  A stroll through the Sharlot Hall Museum exhibits shows that although primitive, people lived fairly well in the olden days.  What "living well" consisted of depended upon the comparisons made and to whom.  We tended to compare our own successes to people of our own group.  In this measure, we matched up quite well.

I was a country dweller who lived by a much different standard than, say a resident of Prescott.  Let us imagines that I wanted to build a house in Hillside.  I would have gone to the wash, loaded my wheelbarrow with sand and trundled it to my building site.  I wouldn't have a building permit since they didn't exist, so right up front I saved some money.  In my wheelbarrow I would mix some concrete and fill the ditch I had dug outlining my house with cement and rock.  Mostly rock.  This might take 5 sacks of cement.  My foundation was now in place having taken about the forenoon.  A pickup load of 2 x 4's would be ample to frame out my 400 square foot home, about average size.  You see, I wasn't encumbered with a lot of gadgets and this space was ample.  Another load of tin or wide-sawn boards would cover the exterior walls.  Tin was the material of choice for the roof and I topped it off with Cellotex interior walls, a sugarcane-pulp pressboard.  Now all I lacked was the floor of which I had 3 options: If I had spent my entire month's pay, I might leave the floor dirt until I was flush.  Or, I might go back to the wash for some more sand and pour a concrete slab.  If I were married to some toney woman, I would possibly put down a board floor of tongue and groove pine.  Over this would go a covering of linoleum. 
 

There was no wiring or water pipes to install.  There was a wood heater to buy, also a butane cook stove and fridge.  I'd put in a sink to wash dishes where the wastewater would just empty into an underground, perforated barrel surrounded by sand.  Of course, there was also the privy and the chicken pen to build. 
 

Now if all this sounds under-privileged, it wasn't.  I would be quite proud and comfortable in my new house that was entirely mine from the start, just like my neighbors.  You might wonder what kind of a woman would choose such a husband.  Most would have jumped at the chance.  That was the way everybody lived. 
 

That is except Bob Bryan.  Robert A. Bryan started out freighting with mules in Tombstone about 1900.  Bob knew all the qualifying expletives.  Bob married Mantie, a very gracious and refined woman from North Carolina and eventually ended up in Hillside in the early 1930's.  He went to trucking ore from the Bagdad Mine, which was a mere developing prospect, hauling it to Hillside and the railroad.  As a kid, I shoveled many 7-ton loads of the sticky concentrates off of Bob's dumpless truck into railroad gondola cars for a dime. 
 

Bob did well and the mine and his business grew as WWII created a demand for copper.  He wanted a fine house for Mantie and set out during the wartime shortages to build her a mansion in Hillside.  The house was huge! It still stands, all 800 square feet of it, tall in its concrete block walls capped with a red tile roof.  The floors were of polished oak and VARNISHED!  There was even one of those indoor whatchamacallits that you pulled a lever and water ran and all of your leaving went God knows where.  And, a china bath tub that had water heated by gas and you didn't have to pack the water either because Bob drilled the second well in town and pumped it with a windmill that filled his tank all by itself, and gosh was he the envy. 
 

Well they weren't the snooty type and instead he raised the ante for the rest of us scaly old codgers and eventually we had to comply seeing as the women got their heads together, as women will, and they call this progress. 
 

Poor Bob met a tragic end.  Some relatives from Carolina were staying a week in their huge house that had a SPARE bedroom.  The house was just across the tracks from the railroad depot.  Bob wanted them to stay longer for Mantie's sake, since she didn't have too much genteel company.  As the train approached whistling for the board, he hid the guest's baggage whereby a hasty argument ensued.  The guests insisted upon catching the train.  Bob hurried across the track in front of the approaching train, something he did every evening to purchase his evening Republic from the news vendor and thought little of it.  It took some coaxing to get the guests across the track and Bob stood with his back to the track and the passing engine's steam cylinder hit him on the back of the head sending him sprawling.  They loaded him aboard the Pullman car unconscious and hauled him into Prescott to the doctors. 
 

It was weeks before he came to and when he did, he didn't even know Mantie's name.  They brought him home and he couldn't speak or move about.  She nursed him faithfully for months and one day he spoke her name and she cried.  He didn't recover though and in a year or so died. 
 

So, if we are comparing our present lives to life in those days, it is good to be informed that the comparison is impossible.  Life might have been shorter then but we accomplished far more and much more easily.  True, far fewer completed college but it wasn't necessary to have a college education to succeed, so right there you gained at least 4 years.  There was no such thing as TV.  Everybody knew what you had done and what you were capable of.  Banks lent money to individuals based upon their proven abilities and their reputations.  That meant something.  The world was much smaller then and it focused around family and community. 
 

So, you win some and lose a few.  By using history as a gauge, we can assess our mores.  Lose history and you lose the yardstick of civilization. 

William Peck is a long time resident of Hillside.

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (m405pb). Reuse only by permission.
A simple house such as this would be more than sufficient for living in the Hillside area in "the good old days" before we "needed" running water, electricity, cable television, computers, and the Internet.  No permits needed, a foundation ready by noon, no indoor plumbing, no wiring to mess with, maybe a slab floor - a mansion in relative terms!