By William "Bill" Peck
The facilities at Hillside were scant to say the least in 1940. The water supply consisted of a drip from a spring claimed by Emmet Coleman and was forbidden to most of us. It accumulated in a 50-gallon drum in front of his store beneath the scraggly cottonwood that served as shade and tether for "whose-ever" horse happened to be secured there.
Our other source was the railroad cistern, supplied more or less gratis free to the community by the Santa Fe railroad that hauled water from Del Rio in tank cars in 12,000-gallon lots. There was supposed to be a small monthly charge for usage, but I don't recall anyone having paid. A hand pump stood on the concrete cistern top and it took us kids a good while to suck up the water by violent pumping when the water level was low and the pump leaked back loosing its prime. I carried many a bucket to our jersey cow that managed to drink it as fast as I could pack it, producing my extreme distaste for milk.
Pop pumped water from the cistern into a fixed, overhead tank with the old hit-and-miss, one lung engine that missed more than it hit. So, we were the only ones who had water piped into the house. The sink discharged into the yard where my ducks made their home.
The Rices, who leased the store and post office, sandwiched between the railroad track and the alley on a flat spot in the railroad right-of-way, didn't have the luxury of running water. But, they had a Delco DC light plant that gave them electric lights, something that elevated them to our level of society. None of us felt snooty, just lucky.
The hobo ten-day miners in the 'jungles' up by the railroad shipping pens, lived about as well as the rest of us with their bedrolls and son-of-a-gun stews. Other than Pop's, this was the nearest thing to a hotel.
I remember the families that crept through town with their wagon pulled by a mule and a pony with goats attached on tethers, dragging behind. Four skinny kids peeked from under the wagon sheet and we were horrified when they pulled up and camped right there, barely outside of our town. The men all rushed home and warned the women not to go outside and fashioned locks for the doors to protect themselves.
Pop's jersey cow was penned in the stockyard and when he went to feed her, he found a man milking the cow who had been dry for some time. He ran him off in a rage then thought of the pitiful story I had told him of a kid sucking the dog and he called him back and gave him half a dollar to buy some milk and bread at the store.
Hillside was a good place to live. In the summer months when the heat got the best of us, the whole town would assemble at the former railroad section-gang's concrete housing. It had six or more two-room flats, all in a line, which the railroad no longer used. They were rented out for $10 a month to various tenants. The building had a nice shaded porch along one side that made it reasonably cool on hot days.
The town's women, the Porters, Van Brunts, Bryans, would save cream and eggs all week and on Saturdays when the lettuce trains were running from the Salt River Valley, Pop would give it a 'red board' and it would stop in front of the depot. The men would climb onto the refrigerator cars and open the vent doors on the ice compartments and pull a three-hundred pound block of ice onto the roof and hand it down with a rope secured to pair of ice tongs. This provided us with enough ice to freeze three freezers of ice cream and enough would be left over to keep cream until the next Saturday party.
There was plenty of cake to go around and about dusk, the mothers would yell at the kids to quit running around in the dark because of the snakes. About this time, the banjos and guitars would appear along with a bottle of 'medicine' that was essential to good music. Bye and bye, the fight would start and the weekend would be a success.
Then, there were the dances at the schoolhouse. These didn't interest us kids much. But there were lots of people about and we could stay up beyond nine o'clock playing as hard as we could. At one dance, Dean Lang and I ganged up on Billy Gordon Porter, better known as 'Squirt.' Although we were playing together, three's a crowd amongst kids . I don't recall the motive and we probably didn't need one, but Dean and I harvested some duck eggs my duck had sat on unsuccessfully for a couple of months. We bopped Squirt with these on his pride and joy, his new hat. Dean's mother, a school teacher, made Dean stand in the middle of the dance floor all night in penance saying he was sorry to every passing dancer for spoiling Billy Gordon's new hat. The hardest part for Dean was to make it sound convincing.
We boys were always in need of a buck and would do anything to obtain one. One source of employment was to shovel the ten-ton load of ore concentrates from one of Bob Bryan's trucks that hauled it from the Bagdad Mine into the gondola cars that took it to the smelter. The copper concentrates were fine and sticky, clinging to the shovels. For a ten-ton load we received a dime split between us.
Old Bob was the finest man in town and was loved by all. Manty Bryan, his faithful and tested wife, was the queen of our town. She was a southern aristocrat who, when needed, could drive one of Bob's K-11 Internationals. She could double-clutch the trucks through the gears, up and down the 16% grade, just as good as anyone else. If someone was sick, Nana, as she was known, would be there tending to their needs.
Tragedy struck the Bryan's one evening when some guests from North Carolina were leaving on a train, a mere hundred-foot walk from the Bryan place. Bob playfully hid their baggage, encouraging them to stay another day, and as the train approached, he stood too near the track and the cylinder head of the engine struck his head. They loaded him onto the train and hauled him to Prescott where he was unconscious for many days with a skull fracture. Nana never left his side and when he did regain consciousness, it broke her heart when he didn't remember who she was. Eventually, he learned to speak again slightly and languished for two years before dying.
William Peck is a long time resident of Hillside. There will be more of his stories coming in the following months.
Enough water is the fundamental key for survival in the desert. The people of Hillside had many ways of making sure that that supply was ample. They also had many characters and knew how to entertain themselves on hot summer evenings before air conditioning.