Tag Archives: Arizona History

The Laughing Desert

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Dick Wick Hall

The Laughing Desert, a new book about Jane Hall’s father, humorist Dick Wick Hall, and his nationally syndicated newspaper feature that made the town of Salome, Arizona, famous in the 1920s, has been released just in time for the  celebration of Dick Wick Hall days on October 6. The book includes a complete replica of the 1925-1926 Salome Sun and previously unpublished material about Dick and his family. An introduction places the Sun in its historical context, and an epilogue reviews Dick’s legacy. I’ve added several new photos of Salome and the Hall family, love poems from Dick to his wife, Daysie Sutton Hall, plus images of Arizona’s McMullen Valley in the 1920s. Arizona’s Official State Historian and a prolific author, Marshall Trimble, wrote the Foreword. He’s a sought-after entertainer and ingenious storyteller. (I’ve heard him sing on two CDs and they are great fun. What a voice!)

The fourth issue of the syndicated Salome Sun. December 13, 1925.

Between November 22, 1925, and June 27, 1926, the 8 x  11 inch four-column Sun was released as a humorous feature for the Sunday editions of papers across the country.* It is full of Dick’s stories, poems, tongue-in-cheek news reports, and homegrown philosophy. Just as his daughter, Jane Hall, would do ten years later, Dick poked fun at all forms of pretension. He also came up with delightful anecdotes about small-town journalism, golf and golfers, and desert life. Claude “Put” Putnam’s engaging illustrations of Arizona Outback critters and characters such as Chloride Kate, the Reptyle Kid, Cactus Callie, Gila Monster Jake, and cub reporter Archie Bald Doveface, make The Laughing Desert a great book for readers of all ages.

Over the past several months, I’ve been deeply touched by the citizen-historians of Arizona’s McMullen Valley who want to keep the memory of Dick Wick Hall alive. Several organizations joined forces to raise the funds for a new fence around Dick’s grave and create a plaque in his honor. Other activities are planned as part of this Founder’s Square Renovation Project— an Arizona Centennial Legacy Project (details in the book).

These efforts inspired me to create a digital copy of The Salome Sun from a master copy I bought many years ago.  With the help of print-on-demand technology, it’s been possible to produce the first edition of this book** as part of the Founder’s Square Project. In fact, books are now being printed for each of the 139 students at Salome High School, the “Home of the Fighting Frogs,” and they should arrive in Salome before October 1.

Anyone who loves the history, literature, humor, romance and colorful landscape unique to the American West will find treasures in The Laughing Desert. As an early ad for the paper put it, if you enjoy the great outdoors and laugh at the West of Mark Twain, Owen Wister and Charlie Chaplin, “you will be hilarious over the Salome Sun.”

My research for this book made me realize why Dick had such a great influence on his daughter Jane Hall. Her diaries reveal that his lively imagination, forceful personality, and untimely death shaped her own search for fame as a writer as well as the choices she made as a young woman. (She must have known that Dick would have enjoyed lampooning New York’s cafe society and her debutante antics.)  After Jane arrived in Hollywood at the end of 1937, she wrote to a friend that her fellow writers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer all “remember Daddy.” In the next post, we’ll return to the experiences that gave Jane the material for the stories and screenplays she wrote after 1934.

*The original mimeographed edition of the Sun was an informal handout at the Salome Service Station. Only a few copies exist (1921-1924) in the Arizona State Library in Phoenix, and the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson.

**In 1998 and 2004, I put together a photocopied booklet about the paper for the Dick Wick Hall Days Celebrations in Salome that is mentioned in search engines, but those books were never intended for wide distribution.

 FOR ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS PLEASE USE THE CONTACT TAB. For an article about the book that appeared in the Yuma Sun check out : http://www.yumasun.com/articles/salome-83109-hall-cutler.html

Christmas in Salome, Arizona 1925

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Happy Holidays to all!

This illustration of ”Our Christmas Tree“ (unsigned but possibly by Claude G. Putnam)* appeared in The Salome Sun in 1925. No one imagined it would be Dick Wick Hall’s last Christmas (see prior post).  Dick added the following thoughts using  the sporadic upper case letters that became his signature and some deliberately questionable grammar:  ”Christmas comes pretty near getting by here without noticing us much Much and Vice Versa and Nobody remembered it was Christmas Day until December 25, which happened to be Christmas day – even if we didn’t think of it . . .Archie Bald Doveface reminded us of it.… He also said Folks out here ought to Respect Christmas because Christ come from the desert – but Scar Face Scroggs says if he did he sure had Sense Enough to Leave it; all of which I don’t pretend to Argue About. . . . You can’t very well have a Tree out here where there ain’t nothing much but greasewood and sagebrush, so we compromised by using the Big Cactus near our Office and everybody had a Good Time excepting Happy Jack Aagaard, who volunteered to act as Santa Claus and had to climb up to Light the Candles and Get the Presents while the Reptyle Kid played A Hot Time on the Harmonica . . . The Frog got more Presents than anybody, including a Canteen of Water and a Bath Tub.”

If Dick Wick Hall were alive today you can be sure he would have fun writing posts about ways to improve life in what is now La Paz County (and used to be Yuma County), about the challenges of Golf in the Desert, the adventures of his Frog, the trouble with Easterners and promoting his latest business venture; many posts would poke fun at Society Ladies. And, as Dick was buried near this very same Saguaro, we will end the year on December 31 with a few observations about his ghost and his legacy–with some more insights from Tom Masson who thought Dick never really died. And he has a point about that.

Next month we will follow the Hall family to Los Angeles and Manhattan Beach, California where Jane kept on writing and made quite a success of it . So let’s give Dick the last word and see what he had to say about California: “Folks who have Never Been to California, or those who have Been There Once and can’t get back again, they all Dream of it – a good deal like Women who have Never Had any Pink Silk Undies, or those who Have Had Them and can’t get any more. California, in many ways, Is a good deal like Pink Silk Undies. It Takes Money to live in or Explore the Wonders and Beauties of California –and that is what a Lot of us are Working for –the Money to get either into California  or Pink Silk Undies – and Dreaming of the Good Times we will have When We Get There.”*

*From The Salome Sun. Putnam was the illustrator for the syndicated version of the Sun and for some of Dick’s stories.

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“A Genius Passed Away”

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Encouraged by her father’s success with his now syndicated Salome Sun, and his stories in the The Saturday Evening Post, “little Jane” kept on scribbling. During the fall and winter of 1925–1926, more of her poems were published, and her biography of a little colt– told from his point of view– came out in the Los Angeles Times on December 3, 1925. Jane had high standards for herself and those around her. In a new red leather diary for 1926, she gave herself marching orders for the year:” 1. Don’t be so saucy to Daddy; 2. Be more conciderate. [sic]; 3. Don’t primp so much. 4. Help mother more.”

Within a few months, Jane’s efforts attracted notice outside Salome. On a fortuitous Friday in late March—the 26th to be exact– the Yuma Morning Sun proclaimed in a small headline on its front page: “ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SALOME GIRL IS WRITER OF FAIRYTALE WITH MOST IMPRESSIVE MORAL; SHOWS GENIUS.” “Up in Salome—made famous by Dick Wick Hall–,” the editorial comment began, “where the desert is just a little bit more desert than anywhere else in Arizona, there seems to be something in the air that produces a peculiar type of genius.” Jane’s composition followed. “How My Wish Was Granted” is a first-person tale of a melancholy little girl who has gone swimming in a small cove. Suddenly, the voice of a mermaid barely three inches high, interrupts her thoughts. The mermaid grants her one wish, and a mere twelve seconds to decide what it will be. The girl does not ask for anything extravagant but for a wreath of coral just like the one the mermaid has in her “dark lustrous hair.” The mermaid is so pleased at this modest request that she adds the gift of perfect happiness to the wreath. The little girl admits, ” . . .the heavy sense of depression that I had for the last few days left me, suddenly, and I felt perfectly happy.”

But the mood in the Hall household had changed by the beginning of April. Dick Wick Hall had gone to Los Angeles for some tooth extractions and run up against severe complications. On April 13, he typed a note to his wife from the Hotel Hayward. He was desperately homesick; his eyes brimmed with tears when he found a rose that Daysie had left in his bag and a sweet note from Jane in his typewriter. The next day, Dick’s doctors discovered that he had acute kidney disease. Jane, her mother, her thirteen-year-old brother, Dickie, as well as her uncle, Ernie,* were at his bedside at the small Angeles Hospital when Dick Wick Hall died on Wednesday, April 28, at about one in the afternoon.

There was no question about where Dick would be buried. On Sunday, May 2, eight leather-skinned pallbearers carried his casket to a modest garden near the office in Salome where Dick and his daughter had worked so diligently for much of her childhood. And there he would lie for generations to come next to a tall Saguaro. In the coming months, friends erected a small obelisk out of quartz and other local stone for a man whose quirky characters, sage advice and wry humor had given them a reason to smile. The town of Salome still celebrates “Dick Wick Hall Days” every autumn. And Jane Hall – whose journey had just begun – paid homage to the most important man in her life in the way she knew best.

To Daddy

When the blossom graced the cactus
And the fields were sweet with hay,
When the birds were singing in the trees,
A genius passed away.

In the joyous month of April
Just two days from merry May,
A man who made the whole world laugh,
My father, passed away.

Of all the mortals in this world,
Our Lord has picked the best,
For on the 28th of April
My Daddy went to Rest.

 

*Ernest Hall, Dick’s younger brother, was Arizona’s third Secretary of State and occasional acting governor between 1921 and 1923.

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How Did Salome Become Famous?

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Thomas Lansing Masson (1866-1934)  Mentor to the Hall Family

In this age of social networking and instant access to information, it’s hard to imagine life 90 years ago when it took a lot of patience and more than a little luck to put a tiny town like Salome, Arizona, on the national map. That’s what happened when “The Salome Sun” came across the desk of editor, author and humorist Tom Masson. Born in Connecticut, he lived in New Jersey and worked in New York for most of his life. That didn’t discourage him from helping out a maverick in Arizona who poked fun of all forms of pretension in his desert newssheet. Masson’s enthusiasm gave everyone in Dick Wick Hall’s family hope – including little Jane – at a time when their chips were down. And what nobody knew until now – I certainly didn’t until I found some letters he wrote to Dick’s wife Daysie – was that Tom Masson became a spiritual mentor to the Halls even after Dick was no longer on this Earth in the material sense (as Masson would put it).

Dick’s lucky break came at some point in 1922 when a literary-minded traveler, Karl Harriman, stopped in Salome and picked up some copies of the mimeographed “Sun.” He mentioned Dick Wick Hall to Masson who had just become the editor of the “Short Turns and Encores” humor pages in The Saturday Evening Post. Masson came to The Post after twenty-nine years as Literary Editor and then Managing Editor of Life –the general interest magazine that Charles Dana Gibson took over when Masson went to The Post– not the photo journalism magazine Henry Luce launched in 1936. By then, Masson had written several stories, articles and books; he was something of a sage. In Tom Masson’s Book of Wit and Humor (1927) he recounts how he “got the Salome Sun man” for his column.

Harriman, then editor of The Red Book, told Masson about his recent trip to Arizona one night over dinner in New York City. He said, “There’s a fellow out there who has a frog that has never had a drink, although he seven years old.’” (Actually, the frog had never had a swim and could not have survived in Salome without a drink.) Masson was as intrigued as Harriman had been by the tales of Dick Wick Hall and his quirky little hamlet. He wrote to Dick, who before too long, (and after more than one request according to Dick), sent him a pile of his work.

“As soon as his humor was featured in the Short Turns page,” Masson wrote, “he was approached by a lot of magazines and is now – well, almost a national character.” Dick’s first contribution to the “Short Turns” page came out on August 12, 1922. That fall, excerpts of varying length from “The Salome Sun” appeared every week but, because Dick was preoccupied with his mines, only two appeared in 1923. Fourteen excerpts turned up in 1924 and three in 1925. Dick often signed these nuggets of desert humor and philosophy “Dick Wick Hall, Editor and Garage Owner.” According to Dick, The Post paid him $.25 a word “to copy and run” the segments from “The Salome Sun.”

Pretty soon Dick’s luck got even better. In the Twenties, readers everywhere clamored for good fiction and for a mere five cents they could have a lot of it — on slick coated high-quality pages. By 1925, under long time editor George H. Lorimer, The Saturday Evening Post was one of the top mass-circulation magazines in the United States with more than two and three-quarter million readers. The welcome publicity for Salome increased once The Post also accepted Dick’s short stories. The first of these, “Salome – Where the Green Grass Grew,” came out on January 3, 1925. He was paid well and in good company with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, and William Faulkner, to name a few. (Who knew that one day his daughter Jane would write in the office next to Fitzgerald at Metro.)

Masson also gave himself credit for energizing Dick’s and Daysie’s marriage: “One of the funniest things he [Dick] ever wrote was a private letter to me in which he said that his wife somehow never seemed to have much respect for him, but the day his stuff came out in The Post [sic] she said that after all she guessed he did have brains. I know that Dick won’t mind my telling this, because I happen to know that they’re both crazy about each other.”

More to come on Masson and the Halls. But first we’ll take another look soon on Jane’s progress and the loss of her father.

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From Tomboy to Glamour Girl

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Cosmopolitan Oct 1939

Jane Hall and Kate as pictured in “Beauties” by Bradshaw Crandell. Cosmopolitan Magazine, October 1939 (Copr. Hearst Publications)

WATCH FOR “NANCY GOES TO RIO” ON TCM . The film is a remake of ”It’s A Date” which Jane worked on in 1939. She kept her story and screen credit.

Here’s a bit of background for the posts and images in the  Salome to Hollywood Blog and Gallery. (Posts began on 11/16/2011.)  So who was Jane Hall and why is her journey of interest today?

“I was a candle on the President’s birthday cake!” On January 30, 1934, Jane Hall was exuberant as she whirled around the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria at a pageant in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fifty-second birthday. For nineteen-year-old Jane, this ball and other glamorous evenings like it were not just fun, they were research. Jane’s roots in Arizona and California had not prepared her for this world of eastern glitter. Just four years earlier she had been an orphan who knew what it meant to be heartbroken and hard up. But once she arrived in the nation’s cultural capital to live with her aunt and uncle, her life was transformed.

Like an undercover agent, she brought keen eyes and ears from the wide-open West into what appeared to be (but of course was not) a dream world. In his definitive history of Depression – era culture, Morris Dickstein refers to the “split personality” of the 1930s as Americans confronted disaster and sought to “create art and entertainment to distract people from their trouble. . .”* Jane Hall did just that in her stories, essays and screenplays as she came to terms with the tragedies in her life.

Named a “literary prodigy” by at least two papers by the time she was fifteen, Jane’s work frequently appeared in print between 1925 and 1942. Her sharp wit and superb ear for authentic dialogue soon caught the notice of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In October 1937 Metro offered her a contract as a scenarist, and over the next five years she worked on several films. In August 1939,  “These Glamour Girls,” which had already been published as a novel in Cosmopolitan, opened in New York City. It was “the best social comedy of the year” according to the New York Times. And the film gave Lana Turner her first starring role. That same month, Jane’s feature-length article about her visit to the set of “The Wizard of Oz,” received high praise from the editor of Good Housekeeping. It seemed she was on her way.

Jane’s journey from a desert hamlet in Arizona to Manhattan’s Café Society and then to Hollywood is a story of resilience that is often exhilarating and always captivating. Her father, Dick Wick Hall, Arizona’s best-loved humorist in the mid 1920s, was the dominant influence on her until an unexpected illness cut his life short in April 1926. By then, “Little Jane” had already decided she would be a writer; her work first appeared in the Los Angeles Times when she was ten.

As she reached twenty, literary magazines such as Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post, and especially Cosmopolitan began buying her stories on a regular basis. In the middle of the Depression, Jane  wrote fiction with a twist of satire about the romantic predicaments of her socialite contemporaries. As editors soon learned, she was as much fun as the characters in her stories. But she had agonizing choices to make and kept a unique record of her professional and emotional journey. Drawing on her diaries, sketches, photographs, telegrams, and hundreds of letters, we will travel across America with this articulate young woman, who was also my mother, as her small-town values were tested, and she made decisions that would affect her for the rest of her life.

Return Address– A Letter from MGM

A critical turning point for Jane came between 1938 and 1940 when she “belonged only to Louis B. Mayer.” She worked long hours, often six days a week, in the Writers Building at Metro – for much of the time in an office next to F Scott Fitzgerald’s – (see Gallery) and still managed to dance with the stars at night. Her voice from Culver City is candid, refreshing and, at times, disturbing as she describes her adventures and the creative process at MGM during its Golden Age. (She also did some contract work for Universal Pictures and RKO. )

In weekly posts (that began on November 16, 2011), we will follow this self-conscious, sturdy tomboy as she matured into a sophisticated, glamorous young woman and in October 1939* became one of Cosmopolitan’s iconic cover girls.  Her complexion is flawless, the features perfect, but the expression in Jane’s green eyes is wistful.  Always unsure of her looks as a young girl, by 1939 her sense of who she should be had been redefined by Hollywood and by cover artist Bradshaw Crandell. The image is symbolic; the world of glamour was seductive but it came at a cost.  Her aunt and uncle — her guardians–had been hard-hit by the Depression and felt enormous relief when Jane became engaged to Robert Frye Cutler, a handsome businessman and theatrical producer, who could provide some assurance of financial security. Though unforeseen complications that followed her marriage distracted her from writing, Jane left a priceless record of the years between 1925 and 1942, when she helped create and assess the vibrant culture of a tumultuous era.

These posts are just an introduction to Jane’s story. A forthcoming book will tell the full story – much of it in Jane’s own voice. For photos check out the  Salome to Hollywood gallery and the individual posts.

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