By Mona Lange McCroskey 

In January, Prescott lost one of its grand dames with the passing of ninety-year-old Alice Mackin. She was the eighth child of Irish immigrant Peter Mackin and Alvina Bennett, who herself was born in what is now "the smack dab middle" of Goldwater Lake. Peter went riding by Alvina's home, saw her shoeing a horse and took a fancy to her because she was able to do such things; they married in 1902. Alice was born in 1916 and lived at Groom Creek in a house that was also a bar and stage stop (the house is still in the family).

Her father was killed in a freighting accident when she was only eighteen months old, leaving her mother to raise the family of eight children. 

Alice's childhood memories are delightful! Fortunately, she shared some of them in an oral history interview. One of her first recollections was of a Chinese cook named Sing, with a long queue, who worked in the bar at Groom Creek and made great, huge oatmeal cookies for the Mackin children. Alvina closed the bar after Peter's death and took in boarders who worked in mines in the nearby Bradshaw Mountains. Alice observed her mother butcher a steer, skin it and quarter it just like a man, because she had to. When she was five they moved into their "winter house" on North Montezuma Street, where BPA Associates is today. From there, Alice and some of her siblings walked to school at St. Joseph's Academy. They crossed Granite Creek, hopping from one rock to another because there wasn't any bridge, and climbed the long flight of stairs up the hill from McCormick Street to the Academy. Alice didn't like school, and a friend coaxed her to read by bringing her licorice from Andres Cigar Store. As the youngest of eight, she was probably a spoiled brat, but "that's just the way it was." 

Alice much preferred the summers spent at "Mackin Acres" along Groom Creek, where she helped her mother plant a garden. She used a corn planter that dropped pieces of corn into the ground, and she carried a saltshaker to season the radishes the children pulled up from the garden and wiped on their Levis. They had horses and cattle, which her mother rounded up and branded. The Lange boys drove their P Bar cattle through their property, across the creek, and into town for shipping; in 1994 she could still hear them "hootin' and hollerin' the way cowboys do to keep the cattle moving." 

It was great fun for the Mackin children to visit their (not very close) neighbors, the Otto Lange family. Alice described how, in preparation for the trip, they would take the wagon wheels off the wagon and soak them in the creek to make the spokes tight. "We'd load up the wagon, and away we'd go with all of us, and we'd go visit them on a Sunday afternoon." After dinner they left about three o'clock in order to get home before dark. Once in a while, the whole Groom Creek community would have a cookout across the road from Mackin Acres, where they played music and sold box lunches. 

Alvin Bennett and Alice's Uncle Grant built the dance hall in Groom Creek with a big stone fireplace, where locals provided the music on piano, violin, banjo, and whatever else was available. They danced until the wee, small hours of the morning, pausing at midnight to make coffee in a five-gallon coffee pot and share sandwiches and cakes and pies. Alice and her brothers and sisters were not permitted to go to the dances; they had to clean up the dance hall the next morning. This "was great fun, because then we got to eat any leftover sandwiches and cakes and pies and stuff." 

Her mother remarried when Alice was a young girl and opened a restaurant called 'The Coffee Cup Café' on Montezuma Street. Alice received a liberal social education in downtown Prescott as a little girl and later, as a bartender. The restaurant was next to Bozarth's Butcher Shop, and above it was "a house of ill repute, like many of 'em in Prescott," called the Annex Rooms. Alice tarried on the plaza and listened to the broadcasts of the World Series, and she never took her lunch to school because she could eat whatever she wanted at her mother's restaurant. She thought she was "a really hot stuff little girl" when she went in to the elegant new Hassayampa Hotel and got her hair cut in a Dutch bob. (Somebody in the family always had their foot in the door at the Hassayampa: in the 1970s, Alice tended bar; one of her husbands was a bellhop there for years; her brother Les was working there when he met his wife; and her sister-in-law was an operator in the beauty shop.) 

Alice didn't remember the depression as causing the Mackins a great deal of hardship; they had the restaurant and paid six hundred dollars cash for a Model "A" Ford in 1930. Her mother often spent half the night sewing on a treadle machine by kerosene lamp, "cutting down this one's clothes to fit the other one," but that was not just during the depression. They were never without a warm coat and the necessities of life. After the repeal of prohibition, Alice and her friends frequented Bruno's, a drive-in on the "island" at the intersection of Miller Valley and Fair Street, which served a mug of beer and big bag of popcorn. Later she went to work bartending. She was employed at J.C. Penney's for 43 1/2 cents an hour, and after filling in at 'The Nite Cap' on Christmas Eve and making forty-five dollars in tips, it was "Goodbye, J.C. Penney." 

Alice lived in California for thirty years in the middle of her life before returning to her beloved Prescott. When she went out, she always stood out from the crowd with her beautiful white hair and her colorful, chic clothing, often coordinated with one holiday or another. Alice had five husbands and she led an adventurous life, but she was always the lady. Her death marks the end of a generation of Prescott pioneers; those who survive are grateful for her presence and her pride in her family. We are honored to have been there when 'Auntie Alice' was feted at the Mining Company in March 2007, on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday. 


Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(Alice Mackin) Reuse only by permission.
Alice Mackin, 1916-2007, pictured here on May 6, 2002.