Month: January 2016

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During my assignment at the White Mountain Apache Reservation, the risk of cabin fever sometimes ran high. When opportunity in the form of travel-appropriate weather and four day weekends and a must-see concert or the like came up, both Arizona and New Mexico offered some temporary getaway destinations. The Reservation was about equidistant — around four or five hours each — from Phoenix and Albuquerque, so either was on the radar. (I made several trips to N.M., not only Albuquerque but Santa Fe and Taos as well, and will probably uncover photographic evidence of such travel in my archives.) Phoenix was fairly well known to me, as I had lived there for a few months in the late 60s on other GAO assignments, and of course, I always passed through on my trips to and from Los Angeles from the Reservation. Here are some photos from a couple of days in Phoenix (I once considered making a special photographic study of the quaint motels in that area, among other subjects) and its closely surrounding desert:

Driving east for two hundred or so miles, through the desert and on through national forest, we could finally arrive at my new home-away-from-home in the tiny town of Pinetop:

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Whiteriver (yeah, one word) was the largest community — perhaps three or four thousand people — on the White Mountain Apache Reservation and was its seat of government.  There the Tribal Council gave my crew use of a vacant house for our base of operations.  Here are some pictures taken early on before we were fully staffed.  Depicted are Tom and Dave, two memorable characters indeed*; three or four other staff members would have been out visiting other sites and interviewing officials.

*Tom was probably the most meticulous, detail-aware person I met in my Gov’t career.  His aspiration was to be the Los Angeles office’s head of administrative services and reign over the office’s pool of female clerical support workers.  He was also a semi-professional classical pianist and played a reinforcing role in my acquisition of a piano (initiated by Lynne of the Tucson Troubadours).  When Washington visitors came out to the Rez later on for a few days, Tom used my piano to treat them to a live concert, much to their astonishment.  Dave was an engineer who brought his wife and baby to live in a cabin in the woods for several months, and was an avid skiier and outdoorsman.  He could always be relied upon to provide an utterly quaint, unique perspective to any issue with which we needed to grapple.  And he would douse his snow-and-ice-covered windshield with hot water every winter morning to clear it instantly before driving to Whiteriver.  Not shown in these pics (but I am bound to find some sooner or later) would be other staffers such as my Chinese-American mathematician who was a fanatical CSNY fan; the guitar-playing accountant from the University of Oregon; the doomsayer auditor who was buying gold as quickly as he could and watched the Watergate hearings with me; the Washington, D.C. psychologist whose hobby was sitting in on court proceedings; the ex-Special Forces guy who had had a mission in Cambodia that he couldn’t talk about but was also a pool shark; and some others.   A great, diverse and valuable team (although the LA office declined to send any female personnel).

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