Big Red Rocks, Little Red Devils: A Moab Story

By Emmett R. Dixon

Blaze a trail through the town of Moab, Utah and the youth of one slightly crazed, sunburned kid. He has asthma, he’s scrawny; he plays rock music on his Vox Jaguar organ. He has attitude and he’s in your face. Part memoir, part history and part philosophy, Big Red Rocks, Little Red Devils will reveal the keys to life, liberty and the pursuit of girls, all from the driver’s seat of a ‘69 Pontiac Firebird. Enjoy the ride!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483440583

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Big Red Rocks,

Little Red Devils

A Moab Story

Emmett R. Dixon

Copyright © 2015 Emmett R. Dixon.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4059-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4058-3 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 11/17/2015

Contents

Introduction

Author’s Notes

Moab, Utah

Cliff Dixon

Moab in the 1960’s

Westside Elementary School

Our House

The Cataclysmic Event or: The Evil Overlord Arrives

The Fabulous Firestone

The City Pool, or Where I Spent Summer

The New Neighborhood

Adventures In and Around Moab

Left Hand

The Sand Flats, Lion’s Back, Lemon Squeeze

The Chicken Ranch Road

The Dawn of Music

Junior High School

East and West become One Class

The Mystery Dance

Get Yourself a Job

Where the Girls Are

Grandma Stover

Arches National Monument

Relationships

It’s Only Rock and Roll But I Like It

New Adventures in the Canyons

The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park

Uranium, or Come Glow with Me

All I Really Wanna Do, Is Baby Be Friends with You

Band of Brothers

Me and The Rest

Where’s The Money?

Sashay through Deep Powder

The Moab Times

Photography at Big Rock High School

The Firebird

What Is A Jeep Safari?

The Friendship Cruise

Let’s go to the Beach

Hikes near The River

High School Daze

The Fiery Furnace

The Westerner Grill

Cars and Girls

A Trip to Salt Lake City

Interact

Horseshoe Canyon

Dance, Dance, Dance

Moab circa 1969

Devil’s Perspective

A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life Part 2: The Afternoon

The Firebird Needs a Tune-Up

Talking About My Generation

The Big Hits of 1969 (With a bullet!)

Devil’s Garden

Homecoming

Frantic Days

Winter in Canyon Country

Spring Has Sprung

This Is the End, Beautiful Friend

About the Author

Introduction

Moab was the perfect place to spend my childhood. In those days it was a small town of about 4,000 people, quite undiscovered by the rest of the world. It is situated in a valley on the edge of the Colorado River, in the southeastern corner of Utah. It remains for me a place of constant wonder. The close proximity of the river, the La Sal Mountains, Arches National Monument and the rest of the canyon country make Moab a special place.

People who grow up in small towns often speak fondly of their youth. I will tell you a story about my home town, and why I consider myself lucky to have spent my formative years in such a place. The story is told in chronological order, more or less, with as much accuracy as I can muster. We can’t say for certain which of our memories are accurate and which have been, over the years, embellished or truncated. I think it’s important to remember as accurately as possible. Sometimes memories can be painful and we tend to change things around a bit. This is probably a good thing. We all cherish our mental health. In recalling the days of my youth I have attempted to be truthful about what happened why it happened the way it did.

Writing a story about what happened a long time ago is a way of sharing our history with one another. It’s a way of sharing our humanity, of preserving it for those whom we won’t be around to tell the story in person. Verbal history, handed down from generation to generation has been replaced by written language. It is still important to share our history with one another, whether through words, photos, videos, or other media you may choose. It is human nature to love a story. It’s why we have bookstores, blogs, movies, videos and all of the social media that we embrace these days.

Why would anyone decide to write a memoir? I think it’s because some event triggers a need to discover how we became the creatures we are in the present moment. We are on a voyage of self-discovery. In that process we often feel compelled to share our stories with one another. I hope you find my story illuminating and maybe entertaining.

You make take umbrage with some of my remarks. If so, I apologize in advance. I did not set out to upset anyone. As my generation always used to say, I didn’t mean to slip the meat to your sensitive personality.

Author’s Notes

As the story developed I found myself including ideas and opinions about certain topics. Though not part of the story per se, they do inform the reader regarding my philosophy and mindset. Feel free to take short side trips with me as we go along or skip them altogether.

I was in a quandary regarding what to call the sections where I go off on a tangent or blather on about something vaguely related to the actual story. I believe this is referred to as a rant, in the vernacular of the day. Should they be labeled as such? Perhaps a more literary title would be appropriate. How about perspective or viewpoint? A simple aside might do. In the end I decided to notate extra commentary by using this format: R&R: topic where R&R denotes rant and rave and topic is the subject under discussion. This way you can easily spot the material that may not be material!

One final note about people and institutions: I have changed the names herein to protect the innocent. Forthwith the following disclaimer:

Any resemblance to persons living or dead should be obvious if they are still alive and can see well enough to read. If they are dead there can be no libel. This does not however cover certain cases when a person or persons may be only brain dead, their corporeal substances still drawing the occasional breath. In such cases they won’t be reading this book anyway. All events described herein actually happened, more or less. The author may have truncated, expanded or omitted certain events for dramatic purpose or because he felt like doing so. The institutions and businesses mentioned herein are all figments of the author’s imagination and no resemblance to any actual business, institution or thing is intended or should be implied.

Moab, Utah

Moab, Utah. There are tires, shoes, socks, all manner of events and even photographic paper named after it. You can read about it in magazines that cater to jeepers, bikers, hikers, river rafters, runners, old car collectors, rock bands, rock climbers and naturalists. Many people have heard about Moab and many have visited the area to indulge in their outdoor fantasies. It seems like every week there is some sort of event designed to lure people to the area. It’s what my dad always referred to as a tourist trap. The main street is jammed with shops and stores that sell jewelry and baskets and t-shirts. There are motels and fast food joints everywhere, along with Jeep rentals, bike rentals, raft rentals, gold panning equipment and tour guides. It is a different place in 2014 than it was in 1959. Moab has become a tourist mecca, attracting folks from around the world. If you’ve been to Moab recently, you know what I’m talking about. One thing has not changed: the beauty of the red rock country that is only moments away from the noise and congestion of Main Street. There is timelessness about the canyons that no amount of tourism will ever change.

The Moab of 1959, the year we moved there, was a far cry from the gear-head mecca of today. There was no tourist industry at all, if you can imagine that. I suppose there were a few people who wandered into the area to drive through Arches (then a national monument). Moab was ignored by the world except for one thing: uranium. The uranium industry was in full swing. The prospecting, mining, hauling and refining of uranium was the economic force driving that little corner of the world. It seemed as though the town existed only to provide support for people who were involved with uranium. There was a refinery on the edge of town where all of the uranium ore was trucked for processing. This required trucking companies, mechanics, petroleum distributors and tire companies. There were suppliers that specialized in mining equipment, explosives, surveying equipment, drilling equipment and so on. It seemed like everything was tied to the discovery, mining and refining of uranium. The sleepy Mormon outpost that Moab was originally had become an industrial madhouse. There were still ranchers and orchards, but agriculture was no longer the focus of the denizens of Moab.

So you are thinking that my family probably moved to Moab because my dad was somehow involved in the uranium mining industry? Wrong, gentle reader, it was because of me. I was about to enter the second grade upon our arrival in Moab sometime in the spring of 1959. No, it wasn’t because Utah had the best grammar schools in the nation and my folks wanted me to have the best education available. It was because I was a sick little kid and because of my condition, needed a dry climate.

We moved to Moab because I had asthma. That was the thinking in those days regarding severe asthma. There were limited treatments available for those suffering from asthma in the 50’s. The regimen went like this. They would stick you in the hospital, shoot you full of adrenaline and put you on oxygen. That was all they could do. Medical specialists told my parents that I wasn’t going to make it in the environment that we lived in at the time. This was Santa Cruz, California, where I have fond memories of the mountains and of school. I was in the hospital much of the first five years of my life, drowning in my own fluids as my lungs were constantly fighting for air. There were no drugs to treat asthma in those days like there are now. I remember struggling to get a breath, concentrating on getting a tiny bit of air in and out of my body. It went on and on, seemingly forever. I was allergic to just about everything, and any item on a long list could and did trigger a terrible attack that would find me back in the hospital. I think my parents were worried about me, and I assume they had some desire to help me. That’s what parents are supposed to do, right?

The story that I was told, over and over, for years and years, was that we moved to Moab for the climate. It was thought that a dry climate would alleviate some of my suffering. Parents do things for their children that the children don’t understand or appreciate. The move created a great deal of tension between my parents. I overheard my mother berating my father, many times, for moving to this godforsaken hellhole. There were also issues that lingered from previous marriages. They never talked about their previous marriages, but this one was number two for both of them. No regrets from the first go around, so no siblings hidden in the closet to be discovered by strange obsessions with genealogy. What we do know is that for my health, in addition to some more nebulous reasons, we made the move to Moab in the spring of 1959.

To my eyes, southeastern Utah was an alien landscape. We came from a coastal range in California, green and lush. Driving to Moab was a trip through barren lands foreign to my experience and my imagination. When you are a child everything seems big and the country in which we found ourselves seemed big indeed. There were sheer rock walls in every shade of red with black streaks on them. They looked as though some giant madman had decided to randomly dump huge buckets of stain from the tops of cliffs. It was hot and dry; so dry your skin felt like it would just shrivel up and fall right off your bones. The wind blew all the time and was filled with giant clouds of red sand that seeped into every pore; your eyes, ears and nose felt gritty all the time. Your hair was just a dirt bag on top of your head. This was supposed to be the land of health and well-being?

For me it was exactly that. My health started improving soon after we arrived. I was able to run around all day without stopping to catch my breath every two minutes. I still had terrible allergies and still had severe asthma, but it became manageable. I felt invincible compared to my former self. The dry climate made a big difference in my health and in my life. By the time I reached high school I could actually run around the track a few times without feeling like I would die at any moment.

Upon seeing the red cliffs surrounding Moab, I got the impression that we had just arrived on the set of an old western movie. I couldn’t believe the place. It didn’t seem quite real. I quickly became attached to it. It was wide open. You could be alone in what seemed like the middle of nowhere in minutes from wherever you happened to be at the moment. In those days, little kids lived outside.

Being in a classroom was like going to the dentist, you hated it, but you had to do it because it was for your own good. School was always easy for me. I spent little time studying because it wasn’t necessary. I paid attention in class and usually had my homework done before I left school. That left more time to be out in it, exploring the strange new world in which I found myself. I did enjoy reading and read voraciously from an early age. I was reading novels by the 4th grade and in the 5th grade I discovered science fiction. Storm Over Warlock by Andre Norton was the book that opened up a whole new world of interest for me. From then on I became a big fan of space stories and speculative fiction in general. But that was for after dark, when they (THEY) made you come inside. If it was still light out, you wanted to be outside and most parents in Moab expected you to be out of the house. They didn’t have to say it because kids lived outside. The only rule we had was to be back in time for dinner.

Life was defined by geographic boundaries. As I grew older they expanded rapidly from our backyard to the street I lived on, then to the rest of the neighborhood. It was only four blocks to the city park and the SWIMMING POOL!! It was three minutes to the elementary school on the west end of town. By the time I entered junior high the entire town was my playground. Then there was Mill Creek, the Slough (the marsh and wetlands caused by the Colorado River), the canyons up the chicken ranch road, and even the Power Dam. You could do all of that by yourself on your bicycle in mere minutes. You mom didn’t drive you anywhere. You were expected to walk or ride your bike.

You learned independence early in the game and you came to relish and embrace it. The world was at your feet, always waiting to welcome you to the next adventure. All you had to do was show up. The dryness and the heat didn’t seem to bother me or any of my friends. We lived outside and spent our days as naked as we could get away with, all becoming little brown babies within the first few weeks of spring. It was hell going back inside because it was usually too cold. The grownups always had the old swamp coolers cranked up to max.

You know what a swamp cooler is? You’re going to love this. Imagine a sheet-metal box about 2 to 3 feet on a side. They had removable grates that you stuffed with a sort of batting. I never knew what it was, but it looked like wood shavings encased in a sort of plastic mesh that more or less held it together in a thick pad like a furniture blanket. Every spring you took out the old ones from the previous summer and put in new ones. You had to do this because the water was hard and built up nasty white mineral deposits as it ran down through the wood shavings. Here’s how it worked. In the bottom of a sheet metal box was a little water valve, like you would have in your toilet tank. And guess what was attached to the water valve? It was a toilet bowl float, exactly the same thing as in your good old American Standard in the bathroom. So the bottom of the box became a water tank, regulated by the toilet bowl float, attached to the water valve. Also in the bottom of the box was the key device, the heart of the matter, the sump pump! It sat in there and pumped water up to little troughs at the top of each side panel. There was a little hose that fed each panel from the sump pump. The water was supposed to trickle down through the wood chips and eventually return to the sump, if it didn’t evaporate on the way down. Then all you needed was a squirrel cage fan and another motor to run it! The exhausted air was cooled by the water trickling down through the wood chips, plus it was obviously humidified, which was a good thing, given the dry climate. If you had money, you had a huge one of these things up on the roof or even several. Otherwise you had one stuck in an open window somewhere in the house. They leaked most of the time and smelled like wet sawdust. After running for a couple of weeks non-stop they started growing weird sludge in the water at the bottom and the pads started clogging up with mineral deposits. I guess you figured out why everybody called them swamp coolers!

Cliff Dixon

My dad was known as a telephone man, but he was much more than that. He got a job in Moab with a regional phone service provider. The name of the outfit was Midway Telephone, and it was owned by G.W. Cooper, one of the big shots in town. Like many businesses in small towns it was a family affair. The ‘old man’ didn’t run the company, his son Charlie did. Anyway, my dad was a radio man, and had been for many years. He was hired to maintain radio equipment, install two-way radios in vehicles as well as construction sites, mines, or wherever they might be needed. He was also a microwave engineer and operated the system that brought television to Moab from Salt Lake City. Communications in rural areas was quite an adventure in those days. To understand how it all worked you need to know a bit about the general area.

Moab sits in a little valley in southeastern Utah, about 250 miles from Salt Lake City, the state capitol. It is about 100 miles from Grand Junction, Colorado, which is to the east. The north end of the valley is crossed by the mighty, muddy Colorado River. The river traverses east to west and then turns south as it passes through the portal to continue its way down marvelous canyons to the confluence with the Green River. In those days, the town was about one mile from the river, an easy bike ride if you wanted to go down on the river for a swim or go cat fishing. The city proper is contained by sandstone cliffs on the east and west. The valley continues south to become Spanish Valley before the whole thing runs into the base of the La Sal Mountains. South of there you have almost all of the uranium and later copper mining plus the oil field in Lisbon and Dry valleys.

The next town south is Monticello which sits at the base of the Blue Mountains. Mt. Abajo is the high point in this small range. It’s where the primary communication took place for all of the radio telephones in the whole area. Radio communications were relayed to and from equipment installed on Abajo Peak to customers stuck out in the boonies throughout this part of the state. When you wanted to call another radio telephone or place a phone call to a land line, you picked up your microphone and pushed the transmit button.

There was a protocol that you followed when making a call. You pushed the button and said: This is mobile telephone KXQ26 (or whatever your assigned call sign was) calling Monticello Operator, come in please. Then you waited for a few seconds and if you were in a spot where you could hit the repeater (big antenna) on Abajo Peak, the Monticello Operator would respond, Radio (or mobile telephone) KXQ26 this is Monticello, go ahead please. Then you would ask the operator to connect you with the number you were calling. If your installation was in a vehicle, service depended on your location and it varied widely. If your radio telephone was a stationary location, such as mine, drilling rig, or construction site, the antenna was mounted as high up as possible for that location. In those circumstances, you had a pretty good chance of making a successful call.

The only people that had radio telephones in those days were people whose business required them. They were big, expensive and required constant maintenance. It was a unique service that didn’t exist in most parts of the country. The equipment was manufactured by Motorola exclusively. A radio telephone consisted of two big boxes, one for the transmitter and one for the receiver. Each box was a foot wide, a foot deep, two feet long and weighed 40-50 lbs. A cable went from wherever these boxes were installed to a head unit that consisted of a speaker and a microphone. The antenna was mounted on the roof of your vehicle, or a tower on whatever building you were in if it was a stationary installation. Then there was another cable that ran from your battery back to the boxes to power the whole thing. They required so much juice that your truck had to be running to provide enough power to make it work. Most people installed auxiliary batteries in the engine compartment to provide additional power. Another cable went from the receiver to your vehicle’s horn which would honk when you were receiving a call. If you were actually in the vehicle when the operator was trying to call you, you would hear something like, This is radio KPQ62 (Monticello Operator’s call sign) calling mobile radio KXQ26, come in please. Then you would respond with your call sign and be connected by the operator to the calling party. Now you have an idea what it took to make a phone call back in those days. My dad installed radio telephones and maintained all of the equipment required to make the system work. This meant a lot of trips to the Abajo Peak to keep things working. He drove giant snow cats like they were Grand Prix race cars. Nothing could stop him.

In addition to this line of work, he was also a genius at microwave installations. He designed and installed the longest microwave link in existence and made it work while he was at Midway Telephone Co. That is another story which we might get to a little later. In my eyes, my dad was the smartest man on earth. There seemed to be no limit to his knowledge. He could repair almost anything electronic or mechanical. I don’t remember a repairman of any kind calling at our house. If something broke he fixed it. Plumbing, heating, electrical, appliances, it didn’t matter. If it quit working he would fix it. He remodeled our house and built on a beautiful family room with a fireplace on one wall.

He was always reading technical manuals and studying. He studied more than I ever did. I learned how to think, reason, investigate, deduce and make conclusions based on the information at hand from my dad. When I was little and wasn’t in school, I used to go along on wild trips to the middle of nowhere with him. We’d leave before dawn and get back late. There was always a radio that needed repair or a new installation to be made. There were many trips to the tops of various mountains to repair faulty equipment. Abajo Peak, Bald Mesa and Beaver Point were my playgrounds. Any time of year, day or night, off we went.

Moab in the 1960’s

Moab was redneck central in the early days of the ‘60’s. You were either a redneck yourself or you catered to rednecks. Over the years, the term has taken on a derogatory connotation, something I couldn’t understand. The people I knew and grew up around were hard working people who seemed generous and warm-hearted. Moab was a modest town populated by people of modest means. The wealthy folks were the merchants and those that inherited or married money. Our family fell somewhere in the middle of the range. I always thought that we had everything we wanted or needed.

My sister and I received new clothes every year for school. This was an end of summer ritual that required a trip to Grand Junction for the dreaded back-to-school shopping day. Universally hated with a passion by all kids, it was required by well-meaning moms. If left to their own devices, kids in those days would wear the same clothes relentlessly until they became so threadbare they would simply cease to exist. Eventually someone would notice and mention that you were running around in your skivvies. The moms would never let that happen. You might not own a closet full of clothes, but you always started the school year with a new pair of pants and two new shirts. We always had the school supplies we needed and never thought about where they came from. I didn’t think we had more or less than anyone else. It seemed we all existed in a well-balanced, equitable state. I’m sure that’s not how it really was, but that’s how I remember it.

To my dad, the outward expression of being well-off was a new car every two years. He always said that when the ashtrays were full, it was time to get a new one. He loved new cars as much as my mother hated them. He drove a company truck or some sort of rugged 4WD (with his own radio telephone- how cool is that?) so we were in effect a two car family, when that was not the norm. My mom always wanted new furniture, which I thought was a complete waste of time. She did get a new suite of furniture once that I can remember. It was right after we had added on the monstrous, glorious family room with a flagstone fireplace and sliding glass doors out onto the new patio. There really wasn’t any way around it because we had absolutely nothing to put in there. We would have ended up sitting on the floor (fine with me). She soon became the proud owner of not one, but two lazy-boy recliners, a huge hide-a-bed sofa (done up in a marvelous textured orange vinyl), a coffee table, end tables, lamps, rugs, and most important, the entertainment center. She couldn’t have cared less about that, but to my dad and me it was the only thing worth having in the entire room. The entertainment center was a monstrous cabinet that set off to one side of the fireplace. It was large enough to land a small plane on and weighed several tons. It housed the all-important color TV, record player, radio, and big built in speakers on either end. We always had the largest, newest TV available which my dad kept tuned to perfection. In those days, you had to align the color guns once a week or your picture developed color fringed ghosts. We never had that problem. He had a signal generator that would send color bars to the CRT. Then he adjusted the aim of each color gun for a perfectly aligned picture. Being tubes, they required frequent adjustment. He taught me how to do the alignment. I used to go over to friends’ houses and adjust their TV sets for them. That usually amazed the dads!

When I would visit my friends’ houses, they seemed to have about the same stuff as we did and their houses seemed about the same size. There were exceptions at both ends of the scale but it was irrelevant to us kids. We would adapt to the situation instantly, happily moving into and out of the great variety as it came along. Equality is a myth, but in the eyes of a child