I have been a member of the group for quite a few years now even since moving from Tucson in 2007 after living there from the mid 1960's as a junior high school student to becoming a ' young' grandmother. We have made several trips visiting family and friends so we have seen the changes in the area in the last few years and the great thing about Vanishing Tucson is being able to read the messages that refer to some building or area in Tucson is being changed or torn down etc . My husband and I will try to place that area in our minds but sometimes we both have a different idea but I am usually right....of course LOL !!
We lived on the far SW side out on Valencia Rd west of Mission most of our years there but our first home was a tiny little 1 bedroom rental on W. Delta Rd between Nogales Hwy and South 6th Ave, we paid $55 mo. rent and our landlord ,an elderly couple had a larger home in front of ours. They treated us like their own family. They had a vegetable garden, fruit trees and a few chickens and were always bringing us things plus she was baking bread, pies, cookies etc nearly everyday and made sure we had enough too, which made my farm raised hubby a happy young man !!! They had a well on the property at the time and I can remember when the Water dept started coming around trying to make them stop using the well and even threatened to take them to court. Some county 'Goons' came to our door trying to get us to say we were getting sick from the well water and that we could sue our landlord for a lot of money and the health dept would back us up. That was the first time I seen my husband threaten to knock the ' heck' out of someone !! And he did quite good and I was real impressed to say the least....they never came back. Our landlord had a lawyer who was able to stop the county with a grandfather clause that until they sold their property or both had died their well could stay. Even after we were able to build our first home further out on Valencia a few years later and the wife had become a widow that well was still there and she still had a little garden but had to give up her chickens, I think she lived to be over 90 yrs old. The house is still there but not our little bungalow and that little water well is old history. We did thru over 40 yrs see a lot of changes on our side of town some good and some very sad, such as Midvale Farm. The rows of crops along Valencia, the Pecan orchard and my favorite old farm houses, painted so white you could see them glisten out there .
