The Road to Mount Lemmon
224 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:11 Jun 2009
ISBN:9780816527816
CA$21.95 Back Order
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The Road to Mount Lemmon

A Father, A Family, and the Making of Summerhaven

The University of Arizona Press
As you wind your way up the Catalina Highway, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a first-time visitor or a native Tucsonan; you know you’re on the way to someplace special.

The Santa Catalina Mountains first captivated Tony Zimmerman on a 1937 hunting trip. Regard for the alpine beauty must have been in his genes—he was the son of Swiss German immigrants—and by 1940 the Tucson schoolteacher had begun taking his family to Mount Lemmon to spend the summer. Back then, the road up the mountain was a rough two-track dirt road from Oracle, and Summerhaven was nothing but a sleepy cluster of summer cabins. But Tony Zimmerman was to help change all of that.

The Road to Mount Lemmon is a beguiling memoir of the Catalina Mountains told by the daughter of one of the pioneers in the life and development of Mount Lemmon’s communities. Mary Ellen Barnes tells how her father Tony resigned from teaching in 1943 to devote his career to the development of this mountain oasis. He not only sold real estate for long time landowner Randolph Jenks, he even bought the village’s tiny two-room store, installing a sawmill to build a larger store, and built the Mount Lemmon Inn. And as she spins Tony’s personal saga, she also gives readers a glimpse of the Catalinas before Tucson became a boom town, recalling idyllic adventures in wild country and the cowboys, rangers, ranchers, and loggers who worked there.

Barnes tells Tony’s story as if sharing it with family, evoking her father’s personality on every page. The Road to Mount Lemmon is an intimate view of a mountain community over the course of nearly sixty years—a view that few people have shared but one all can appreciate.
Written in unusually beautiful language, The Road to Mount Lemon is a short, easy, enjoyable read, looking at a time long ago about a spot not so very far away.'—Journal of Arizona History

'If the 2003 Mount Lemmon fire taught us anything, it is that buildings are ephemeral—but memories endure. In this delightful book, Mary Ellen Barnes, the daughter of Summerhaven pioneer Tony Zimmerman, shares memories of her resourceful father and growing up in a special time and place. Readers will learn how love and hard work transform lives and landscape.'—Bruce J. Dinges, Arizona Historical Society
Mary Ellen Barnes writes with warmth and love about a time and a place she knows so well.’—Marshall Trimble, Official Arizona State Historian
List of Illustrations
Preface
Prologue: Man and Mountain

1 The Road to Mount Lemmon
2 Catalina Lodge
3 Randolph and Julia Jenks
4 The Old Store
5 Snowbound
6 My Mother and the Pine Tree Lodge
7 With Broom and Mop
8 Leeta Westfall
9 Selling Real Estate
10 Mountain Recreation
11 The Zimmerman Sawmill
12 Logging Trucks
13 The New Store
14 Growing Pains
15 General Hitchcock Highway
16 Summer Romances
17 The Meadow
18 Horse Hill
19 Cowboys and Mountain Men
20 Firefighters
21 Farewell
22 The Mount Lemmon Inn
23 Miners, Waitresses, and Sawyers
24 “Feudal Years”
25 Governor Dewey
26 A Ride to San Diego
27 Peppersauce Cave
28 Wrestling with Growth
29 The Fate of the Inn
30 Mountain Church Services
31 Two Christmases
32 Mother
33 Retirement Years
34 Tony, Walt, and Watermelon
35 Teacher
36 The Birthday Party
Epilogue: Mountain Legacy

Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index
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