It’s 1941 in Patagonia and a young mining laborer, here for the summer from California, is hailed, “Hey, Saguaro! Are you going to the baile?” “Sí, you’ll see me there!” he answers as he heads into town for the Saturday night dance at the Patagonia Opera House.
Seventy-five years later, 95-year-old Bill Russell (called “Saguaro” by his fellow miners) looks over past the Gathering Grounds and beyond Red Mountain Foods. He asks, “Where’s the Opera House? It used to be right over there! There were six bars in town, a service station, and a little market. There was no one here except for miners and Circle Z ranch hands. A guy used to come by in a Chevy panel truck with a projector to show movies once a month in the Opera House.”
But, he says, the best thing about the Opera House was the dances with the local girls. He remembers one girl named Lupe Valenzuela. “Her aunt would sit outside with all the other mothers and aunts to watch that youdidn’t sneak outside with any of the girls,” he smiles.
Bill has come on a nostalgic car trip to the village he knew as a twenty-year-old. He was a mining engineering student at the University of California, Berkeley, seeking hands-on experience in the mines. That’s how he landed in the Patagonia Mountains at a copper/lead/zinc mine belonging to American Smelting and Refinery Company (ASARCO). At the time, it was one of the richest strikes ever, surpassing those in California.
“I was a mucker,” he explains. “I wanted to find out what it was like from the ground up, and boy did I find out! Being a mucker underground is not a great job. After a blast, I’d have to clear out the dirt and rock to where the miners could get in and drill holes for the next blast. I had to keep shoveling ore onto the underground ore cars which we would push to the mine shaft. From there the ore would be dumped into a big bucket to be hoisted up to the surface.”
There were two drifts, or tunnels, parallel to each other. At the end of each shift, they would be blasted at the same time to get ready for the next shift to come underground to muck them out. The miners worked around the clock in three shifts. They slept in sheet metal bunkhouses with no circulation or insulation. If you worked night shift you tried to get in as early as possible because it quickly became too hot during the day. Bill remembers, “I sometimes took my sleeping bag outside to sleep in the shade of a cactus, and a cactus doesn’t give much shade!”
At the end of that summer of 1941, Bill returned to college. He recalls that tuition was $26.50 a semester. After graduating, he was sent to Peru to work on a mining project, but the war started. He joined the Navy, and ended up becoming both a World War II and Korean War veteran, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
Russell keeps scanning McKeown Street, from the Patagonia Community Church, down to the block of retail shops where his companion bought him a Patagonia baseball cap. “The town doesn’t look much different than 75 years ago. I thought there’d be a Walmart or Costco by now,” he laughs. I pointed out the new opera house opening soon, across the street. Maybe he can come back to dance in it.