Tombstone

“Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” was on Turner Classic Movies again last week. A classic Western, I have seen it several times and always enjoy watching Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas playing Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.

Do not ask me when most movies first came out. I know a bunch of great movies aired first in 1939, “the golden year of motion pictures,” including “The Wizard of Oz”, “Stagecoach”, and “Gone with the Wind.” Other than that I can’t place most movies within a decade of their release, not since the 1950's, 1960's, and so on up to the 2010. For the past 60 years I have been too busy to think about such trivia.

However, I can tell you the exact date and place that I first saw “Gunfight at the O.K. Coral”. It was August 14, 1957, and Wally’s mother babysat with two-year-old Karl while Wally and I went to the Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge, Illinois. (That’s Hillary Clinton’s home town.)

After the movie, we picked up Karl and went home to 5931½ Northwest Highway in the far northwest corner of Chicago. That ½ always amused me; we lived at the center entrance to a big, “U” shaped apartment building. An hour later I went into labor, and our daughter Martha was born at 3:04 a.m. on August 15. A date a mother should remember.

As the children grew up, we moved from Illinois to Michigan to Texas to Pennsylvania and back to Illinois, where Martha graduated from high school. She went as an exchange student to Norway, to college in Minnesota, with the Peace Corps to Thailand, and came back to Illinois. She now lives in Naperville, Illinois, with her tall husband and three big (all over 6 feet) sons.

We lived in Michigan when my parents invited me and the children to go with them to a convention in San Diego, coupled with an extended vacation going and coming. Martha was seven years old.

On the trip west we spent a hot summer afternoon in Tombstone. We climbed boot hill, where all the wooden grave markers had been repainted a dazzling white with fresh black letters; the place looked like a set for a B movie. I loved the little Episcopal Church, incongruous in this Western town, gift of a wealthy Eastern family. My Dad loved the saloon with its long, elaborate oak bar. That was another thing that struck me as incongruous, as my parents were tee-totalers. The five of us, old folks, me, and the two small children, sat in the bar drinking lemonade.

In Tombstone we also saw the “real” O.K. Corral. It proved to be what a corral should be: a big, dusty pen for cattle waiting to be taken to market. The afternoon sun was blazing hot. The sand burned our feet right through the bottom of our shoes. Karl, 9, said, “Why did we pay money to see this? There is nothing to see here.”

It took a lot of imagination to realize that 100 years ago men pulled out their guns and killed each other in this miserable place.