For those of you not familiar with Arizona, there is a little town in Yavapai County named Bagdad. It ain't big, but I've actually been there. 35 years or so ago my aunt and uncle ran a drive-in movie theater there, and they also published a weekly paper. They were undoubtedly members of Bagdad's Chamber of Commerce, too. I spent a summer in Phoenix once while attending the U of A, and I spent a fair bit of time picking up the paper from the printer, inserting ad pages and rolling and banding it for delivery. Every Thursday morning either my aunt or uncle would drive the 97 miles northwest to the little town and spend the weekend there.
I went with them once, and I gotta say it was a pretty dull place, coming from Phoenix or Tucson as a 20-year-old college student. The town was founded in the 1860s to serve the needs of miners working a copper mine; even in 1990 it had only 1900 inhabitants. I saw the same movie three nights in a row at the theater, helped clean up the snack bar, and was generally bored to distraction. That has to be the smallest town I've ever been in for any length of time; even Kwajalein had more people and more ways to occupy me. Staying with relatives who were forty years older had a dampening effect, ya think?
Posted by Linkmeister at March 31, 2003 03:02 PM