In Tucson recently, I had dinner at Hacienda del Sol, a “guest ranch resort” or “luxurious Arizona dude ranch”, depending on who’s talking. The resort has an assortment of rooms, casitas, spas, etc. and has beautiful views of the Catalina Mountains:

The Hacienda has operated off and on as a resort since the 1940’s, and has built out from its original structure, which is the centerpiece and retains the charm of its history. There are lots of B&W pictures on the walls of folks in kerchiefs, flannel shirts and cowboy hats doing the hokey-pokey, and visiting celebrities on horseback (that’s the golfer Sam Snead below – forgive the glare, it’s a photograph of a photo).

However, I have to say I prefer the candid photograph below – perhaps late 50’s or early ‘60’ – that better captures the (lack of) excitement of your daily life at the resort, as well as the lack of any buildings in the background out to the hills (it’s the same view as in the current one earlier).

The next one, similar era, raises the excitement level considerably. It has the staged feel of a shot from a Fellini or Godard film about the decadence of the upper class.

But what is really interesting about the Hacienda del Sol is that it began its life as a “Desert School” for young women. Here is an ad from Fortune in 1930 (again, photo of a photo):

Per the Hacienda’s website, “the prestigious school’s roster boasted names such as Vanderbilt, Pillsbury, Maxwell, Westinghouse, and Campbell, to name a few.”

There were more than a few of these Desert Schools, mostly in Arizona or New Mexico, that were places to send mostly East Coast children to prepare them for college, or whatever that next step might be. Some accounts mention the desert air as being a good thing for kids with asthma (like William S. Burroughs – we’ll get to that) or the regimen of an outdoor lifestyle combined with rigorous tutelage. One might guess that some parents might have liked the idea of getting their children away from the fast life in the city.

Here is a shot of the girls at their studies in the library (it looks exactly the same today – sans students):

Some of the girls’ dorm rooms have been converted into guest rooms at the main building, which perhaps lends a certain frisson to a guest sensitive to adolescent vibrations. The girls did seem to have a good time in the outdoor life:

The Hacienda site has a link to the school’s 1938 yearbook, which is fascinating (http://www.haciendadelsol.com/blog/1938-hacienda-del-sol-girls-school-yearbook/). There were four girls in the senior class, and they seem to have been responsible for the humorous comments on each other and teachers; a playlet; a poem in French, etc. There is one section that has “ten years later” headlines; the one for Tiel Angell (related to the Angell’s of University of Michigan fame) reads thus:

Charming. A cursory search for what happened to the four seniors yielded mostly debutante and travel items in the relevant society pages. However, Shirley Slade shows up a few years later in Life magazine as a bright-eyed WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) in WWII. Here is the Life picture next to her yearbook picture:

Now, when the topic of ranch schools came up, the first thing I thought of was William S. Burroughs (author of Naked Lunch and many other novels), who attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico. This school was along similar lines, but for boys, and was run as an extended Boy Scout Troop. Here’s young William in his outfit:

Shorts were worn year-round and there was a ton of outdoor activity that had the flavor of “toughening a boy up”. Burroughs has said that he had asthma and the desert air was reputed to be a good thing for that, but you do wonder if there was a bit of the “straighten out our . . . troubled . . . son” in all this. Here the boys are in their study, in what looks like a staged shot:

Big Bill’s reminisces of his time there were not pleasant (nor were Gore Vidal’s, who also spent a year there). Here is an excerpt from his novella “The Cat Inside”:

At Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb and couldn’t wait to drop it on the Yellow Peril, the boys are sitting on logs and rocks, eating some sort of food. There is a stream at the end of a slope. The counselor was a Southerner with a politician’s look about him. He told us stories by the campfire, culled from the racist garbage of the insidious Sax Rohmer – East is evil, West is good.

Suddenly, a badger erupts among the boys – don’t know why he did it, just playful, friendly and inexperienced like the Aztec Indians who brought fruit down to the Spanish and got their hands cut off. So the counselor rushes for his saddlebag and gets out his 1911 Colt .45 auto and starts blasting at the badger, missing it with every shot at six feet. Finally he puts his gun three inches from the badger’s side and shoots. This time the badger rolls down the slope into the stream. I can see the stricken animal, the sad shrinking face, rolling down the slope, bleeding, dying.

“You see an animal, you kill it, don’t you? It might have bitten one of the boys.”

The badger just wanted to romp and play, and he gets shot with a .45 government issue. Contact that. Identify with that. Feel that. And ask yourself, whose life is worth more? The badger, or this evil piece of white shit?

Who knows, if they hadn’t jammed the impressionable young Burroughs in a Boy Scout uniform and subjected him to a questionable outdoorsy regimen, we might not have had Naked Lunch.

Note Bill’s mention of the atom bomb. In 1942, Robert Oppenheimer happened upon the school and decided that it would be an ideal remote location for work on the Manhattan project. And so the school was quickly closed and the rest . . .

Credits:

All photographs of the Hacienda del Sol and items from the 1938 Sungod Yearbook are from their website (haciendadelsol.com), except where noted.

The photograph of Shirley Slade as a WASP is taken from http://greatestgeneration.tumblr.com/post/69899150866/what-happened-to-shirley-slade#.WrUrzejwY2x, and is originally from Life magazine.

The photograph of William S. Burroughs at the Los Alamos Ranch School is taken from the article “Los Alamos and the Beat Generation”, Albuquerque Journal, May 7, 2014. (https://www.abqjournal.com/364178/los-alamos-and-the-beat-generation.html)

The photograph of the library at the Los Alamos Ranch School is taken from the article “Exhibit: ‘100 Years of Los Alamos Ranch School – The Boys And Their Books’ Opens At Mesa Library Today”, Los Alamos Daily Post, September 7, 2017. (https://www.ladailypost.com/content/exhibit-%E2%80%98100-years-los-alamos-ranch-school-%E2%80%93-boys-and-their-books%E2%80%99-opens-mesa-library-today)