Page A2 / The Joan De Arc Crusader / Saturday, December 24, 2016

Front Page A1 / Entertainment A3 / Nostalgia A4 / Crossword A5

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire

Letter from the Editor

Farewell to my friend Louis
by J. Bueker

      Sometime back around 2001, just for fun, I created a web page on AOL and started populating it with images from my modest collection of Legend City photos and artifacts. This whimsical little lark would ultimately lead to a rather astounding sequence of events.
     I didn’t remember the park all that well, really. Legend City had been gone almost 20 years by this time and was a rather fuzzy memory for me. Only the old mine ride was still fairly clear in my recollection. Yet something about this fading chapter of Phoenix history deeply intrigued me, and so I slowly began to gather more memorabilia and information on the park, gradually reconstructing the place in my memory and on my website. When AOL discontinued its personal web space, I purchased Microsoft FrontPage and rebuilt my growing site elsewhere in cyberspace.
     After a couple years, some interesting things started happening. People were taking notice of the site, and I was welcomed into the local underground nostalgia scene, becoming a minor celebrity on Wallace and Ladmo club websites and the like. There I met kindred spirits and formed lasting friendships. Other folks started contributing content to the Legend City site, and its development began steadily to accelerate.
     Then in the spring of 2003, quite out of the blue, it happened. The man himself contacted me.
     Louis Eugene Crandall. Legend City’s creator.
     Louis had been surfing the Internet with his family on Easter Sunday that year when someone suggested a Google search for Legend City, just to see if there was anything about the park on the Internet. Lo and behold my site appeared, and Louis was nothing less than perfectly thrilled. It’s hard to believe now, but the poor guy actually thought that Legend City had been completely forgotten by the world and only he and his family even remembered the place at all.
     I must confess that when I first started my Legend City hobby, I wasn’t even familiar with the name Louis Crandall. I had only the vaguest notion that there was this man who had built the park and then withdrawn in disgrace. I kept encountering a rumor that he had absconded with all the stockholders’ money and retired to Utah a wealthy man. I had no idea he was actually still alive and now I was talking to him on the phone.
     So when Louis invited me up to Provo for a visit that summer, I hardly knew what to expect. Was he really a crook? What would I find when I got there?
     What I observed during that visit was a humble, kind, sweet, gracious and brilliant man, full of energy and enterprise, and a man deeply grateful to me for attempting to perpetuate the memory of his beloved amusement park. It also soon became quite clear that this was a man of the highest integrity, and suddenly all those rumors of his criminal ways started to seem quite laughable. From this point forward, we became the closest of friends.
     I’m so happy that Louis lived long enough to witness the renaissance of interest and appreciation for Legend City that has emerged in recent years. He was able to explore the website, attend the 50^th anniversary celebration, delight in the publication of the Legend City book, and then tour the museum exhibit in Tempe this last year. He had the opportunity to see for himself just how dearly and lovingly his old amusement park is remembered by so many. I think this provided him with a sense of closure and a great deal of joy in his final years. He so richly deserved this.
     “People just loved Legend City,” Louis was fond of saying, and this is a very true statement.
     But people loved Louis Crandall even more.

We welcome your letters at jdacrusader@aol.com. 

The ever-changing focus of Christmas

     We happen to live in the Sonoran desert of south central Arizona, and have now for quite a long time.  Christmas in the desert is not like any of the great wintery Christmases from the movies or in poetry. Typical holiday conditions here range somewhere between “Christmas by the pool” to standard sweater weather, and there is zero opportunity for a picturesque thick mantle of snow, or frost-covered windows or any of the other traditional winter scenic enhancements. Sure, there are a few folks in Arizona wishing for a white Christmas, but unfortunately I don’t think they’re talking about the snow. At any rate, this year it looks like we’re only going to have lots of rain, which makes holiday travelling particularly miserable.
     The official kick-off for our family’s Yuletide events in the '60’s and '70’s was Christmas Eve at my grandparent’s house. The main event for us kids would always be the following morning, but the first opportunity to score some Santa swag lay nestled in boxes beneath the tree that my grandmother painstakingly draped every year with about fifty pounds of “angel hair.” Imagine a family of asbestos-fiber pooping spiders trapped on a Douglas fir for about 100 years, and that’s the festive bonus you get from angel hair. My grandma loved that stuff.
     Between the prerequisite dinner and the drive back home that always included a tour of their well-decorated neighborhood, there was plenty of epic gift-giving and receiving at Lois and Howard’s place. The youngest kids were generally pressed into service as “Santas,” distributing the piles of gifts to their intended recipients, while the lazy adults weighed down all of the comfortable furniture.We didn’t care, we were drunk on crass materialism and the possibility of getting that one stupid toy that was going to get us through the sleepless night ahead. That Flintstones Give-a-Show Projector was destined to have totally dead batteries by daybreak, no matter what.
    Eventually we all grow up (sort of) and the focus of Christmas becomes much different. The joy of receiving is overtaken by the greater joy of giving, if only because we still remember the heady excitement of Christmas and want every child to have that same feeling. And so, the socialist circle of wealth transfer is complete. Takers become givers, givers become takers, and we all give each other a bunch of stuff because (and only because) we just want to. It’s sort of weird if you think about it, so don’t. Just try to remember that what you may consider the holiest day of the year is really all about being generous, and hang on to that thought as we enter the challenges of a new year.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________JDA 

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