The Egg Fairy

A couple of months after we moved into Fredonia I was driving up the main street in town jus after dark. I met a car that was driving obviously very erratic. I turned around and followed it a short distance and turned my lights on to stop it. The driver, Jim Pointer, was quite nervous and smelled like beer. He failed a sobriety field test so I took him over to the jail nearby. He spent the night in the jail and I got together with Judge Joe Brooksby the next morning.

Joe said he had known Jim all his life. His family was also one of the "Dust Bowl" famlies that had settled on homestead land the government had offered in 1930's. The area South of Fredonia was good farm land but didn't have much irrigation water from Kanab Creek except on wet years.

Judge Brooksby went real light on Jim because he knew he lived alone in the house his dad had built on the farm, no utilities even. Jim got a pension from being in World War II in Europe. He suffered from "shell shock". Jim had plead guilty to drunk driving because he had been drinking some beer.

Jim had been helping Arlo Hepsworth run a small saw mill just to the North of Fredonia. Arlo had brought out some beer as they were quitting work and I am sure Jim didn't drink more than one or two. It was hard to know how much of Jim's failure to pass the sobriety test was because of his nerves or the beer. No matter, Jim felt he was wrong to be driving.

A few days later as I came out onto my front porch to go to work a carton of one dozen eggs was by the door! The eggs showed up every two or three days until one day I was leaving earlier than usual and there Jim was being the "egg fairy". I said, "why are you bringing me eggs , Jim?"

Jim said, "You probably saved my life by putting me in jail for drunk driving. I kind of had a guilty conscious for locking him up but he eased that guilt a bit. We became real good friends from that day on.

Newspaper Reporter

Living in Fredonia was very different from living Mesa. We had no television and limited radio reception. It was a long way to go to a bigger shopping center in Flagstaff, Cedar City, or Saint George. We had to find things to do with our personal time.

I contacted the Arizona Republic newspaper and became a correspondent reporter. I sent in news stories about every week and got paid for every inch of print. I wrote for the Flagstaff newspaper, also. I even wrote stories for the weekly paper from Kanab, Utah. Some of my Kanab stories got into the Salt Lake papers. I didn’t get rich doing it but I enjoyed it very much.

I learned that the people of the Arizona strip really resented being ignored by the leaders of the Arizona, the Coconio and Mohave County officials. The Fredonia people had been trying for years to get the road paved through Pipe Springs, Cane Beds and Short Creek to Hurricane, Utah and made a state highway. No one in Phoenix paid them any attention. I explained the problem to my editor of the Arizona Republic. His name was Turk Smith and I loved working with him. I’m told him that I thought the road through Short Creek would keep them from being so isolated and possible force them to move on or change their ways. Turk liked this idea so he and I set up news conferences in Fredonia and Short Creek about it.

We’ve met with the leaders in Fredonia and Kanab civic and church one morning. I wrote a neat story about the ideas that people had. Turk brought a photographer along and he took pictures of all the participants.That afternoon Turk, the photographer, and I assembled a group of people in Short Creek for a news conference. I wrote of the ideas that came from this group also. We had some good photos of the people and the homes in Short Creek.

The story was picked up by the Associated Press and came out in papers all over the United States. It was a successful venture because they eventually put in a good State Highway where it had been a dirt road. The terrain was conducive to road building, few hills, mostly sandy soil that was well drained and there were no right of way issues.

My stories were basically uncut in the issues Turk sent me.One of the neatest stories I wrote about was our square dance club in Fredonia. I had learned to square dance in mutual in Pima as a kid and I really liked it. Wanda and I joined a square dance club in Mesa before we went to Fredonia.

With no television and lots of time on our hands I found several people in the church had done some square dancing. Some of the non-mormon couples joined with us and we organized an official square dance club. We were able to use the town hall, a fairly new facility, for our activities.We chose the name of our club “The Arizona Strippers.” I was president of the club at first and I had a treasurer. We paid dues annual to pay for our record player and new records. We danced once a week.We had no one who wanted to call so we used recorded calls. I did some teaching to new dancers but had help from two couples from St Johns that worked for Whiting Brothers Lumber Operation.

I wrote a story about our square dance club and Turk turned the story over to one of the papers cartoonists. He drew a cartoon showing a bunch of old men sitting in the hall and one said “when does the show start”. It was a near cartoon.

I wrote all kinds of special stories about things I ran into and made the people in Southern Arizona aware of lots of things about the Arizona Strip. When the Glen Canyon Dam contract was agreed upon I was able to attend the meetings and wrote a story about Brown and Root getting the contract and all the important information about the dam. The meeting was in Kanab, Utah and again m stories were picked up by Associated Press and went all over the country.