February 1, 2026
Hard to beat a quartet of cowgirls posing near a cryptic cowtown name:
(as in Ten Sleep, Wyoming)
So called because to the Native Americans it was ten sleeps—ten days—from Fort Laramie, Wyoming.
Way back in the nineteen-hundreds, I was a land surveyor and I worked on a variety of Arizona projects that turned into sprawling subdivisions and an infamous interstate highway.
(but the surly attitude is timeless)
Our efforts may not have wrecked our present time, but the end results sure did take a sledge hammer to so many of the things I loved and thought were inviolate.
So, it has been with some effort that I have tried to save as much as I can from those old times.
In Old Arizona
One of the first mafioso to immigrate to Arizona was Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno who landed in Tucson from New York in 1943. He claimed he came to Arizona to retire but he almost immediately invested in land, a parking lot and an Italian bakery.
In the late sixties, when I drove by his modest house in the Catalina Vista neighborhood just off Speedway and Campbell Avenue he held, with his wife, some $329,823 in Pima County real estate. Some estimate he was worth $1 billion. Not a bad retirement plan.
In the late seventies, I went to visit a friend who got busted for drugs and was doing time at a minimum security prison near Safford, Arizona. As I was standing in line to check in, a short woman ahead of me, was asked for her ID and the woman seethed, "You know damn well who I am." Turns out it was Mrs. Joe Bonanno, visiting her son Bill, who, according to my friend who was spending quality time there, ran the place. Small world, no.
"I'm sorry I had to cut your hand off at the wrist, but you reached for your chips."
—Robert Ringer, Winning Through Intimidation
