In Arizona: Taming a Troublesome Town

By Gregory Jaynes

Roy McNeely is pleased that after a career as a truck driver and a guitar player he has hit on a role that carries some celebrity. Roy remembers Hugh O'Brian playing Wyatt Earp on television, and Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp in the movie. Earp was a deputy marshal in Tombstone, the dust-blown Arizona town best known for a gunfight that gave him his fame, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Today McNeely is Tombstone's marshal. Tourists often ask him for his autograph, and he is flattered.

Flattery, however, does not ease the responsibility of keeping the peace in a town that glorifies its lawless past. Tombstone's bloody history is about the only thing it has in the way of a drawing card, and since tourism is about the only thing it has in the way of a business, there you are. Boothill graveyard holds the remains of scores who did not go gentle into that good night. The main drag, Allen Street, is virtually a shrine to the trigger- happy, to soiled doves and to strong drink. Hiring on as a deputy in April 1984, McNeely thought he spotted some connection between Tombstone's historic character and its contemporary behavior: "I mean, people ran stop signs right in front of me."

Quickly, the new deputy proved himself the fastest ball-point pen around; his pad spit tickets like bullets. "I was the only guy writing tickets," he remembers. "When I'd see somebody fighting, I'd arrest them. It looked to me like there was this look-the-other-way deal going on. The officers would spend a couple of hours in the coffee shops, then a couple of hours with friends, then back to the coffee shops. This place was wide open."

The marshal's job turned over twice before McNeely took his own shot at it. He won the two-year appointment from the mayor and town council in November 1984. At the time he made a commitment to himself to clean up Tombstone and stick there; he was tired of his tumbleweed life.

Born in West Virginia, the 42-year-old lawman drove a tractor trailer for 17 years. He also had a country-music band in which his wife Gayle Lynne played bass. One night he watched a man get shot during a fight in front of the grandstand, and he "stopped raisin' hell" and turned to police work. Gayle Lynne said, "What're you gonna do? Save the world?" And he said, "No. If I can just save one person, it'll be worth it." He also gave up drinking and kicked his cigar habit.

The McNeelys had kin in Tucson, and Roy had always enjoyed Arizona, so he was delighted when a law-enforcement job opened up in nearby Tombstone. Tombstone had been around since 1877, when the discovery of silver deposits rushed it into being. Like so many other by now familiar Western mining towns, it had a brief population explosion, a flirt with naughty notoriety (in 1880 a good-hearted young local attorney made note of the fast life in the dance halls, saloons and casinos, then appended a letter home: "Still there is hope, for I know of two Bibles in town"), and finally fell into desuetude, having little more purpose in the world than grist for the mills of pulp- fiction writers. It clung on, though, a self-proclaimed "town too tough to die," until that moment in this century when the nation realized collectively there was value in old things: if there was gold in them thar Vermont barns, there was money to be made in Boothill.

Tombstone had the climate, a desert that bursts alive in spring, the San Pedro Valley, Dragoon Mountains to the north, Huachucas to the south, and sunsets that turned the land lavender. With fresh paint, new lumber and much of America out on the open road in the modern prairie schooner, the motor home, Tombstone was back in business, a going concern. The town hummed along selling tours of the cemetery and the O.K. Corral, silver and turquoise jewelry, antique mining implements, as well as the regrettable curios of the day: plastic scorpions, John Wayne on velvet, Elvis dinner plates.

A town making do, that is what it was, unaware of its loose ways until Roy McNeely rolled up in a 1973 Winnebago, for which he had traded a motorcycle, a sidecar and $1,200. Nowadays, even the townsfolk who back the new marshal say that his zealotry riles 50% of their lot. City Councilman Martin Devere, a businessman whose charges include Boothill cemetery, and a McNeely supporter, says that "anyone good in that job is bound to ruffle feathers." A local innkeeper says flatly, "I think he's an egomaniac. We had a little fender bender out front here, and you'd of thought it was Murder One. I mean, I know in a little town like this--we only have 1,700 people--he doesn't have much to do, but you should have seen it!"

Roy McNeely, tearing down a dirt road after two kids on unregistered, unlicensed, uninsured motorcycles, conceded there was some resistance to his policies at first. "Some people called me a little dictator, a little Hitler," he said. "I was fighting tooth and nail to clean up the department, and it seemed like everything I did got blowed out of proportion. It was all over hell." The marshal expertly maneuvered his squad car into a position to cut off the young bikers. Both got off with warnings, and the admonition that failure to correct their legal obligations would amount to $700 in fines next time.

For the last month of 1985, McNeely's office collected $1,820.65 in fines, double or triple the amount his predecessors usually brought in. Wearing a leather vest, a .357 in a holster and silver conches on his belt, the marshal was going over his ledgers when an elderly woman stuck her head in the door. "This is a $10 fine," she said. "I just don't think this is fair to the tourist. I was only there a little while."

"The Dodge in the red zone?" McNeely inquired.

"Yes, but $10--is that fair?"

"Yes it is. Within 20 ft. of a crosswalk, it is."

Returning to his paperwork, the marshal pulled out the fruits of his labor thus far, and in the doing made the point that he inherited a bureaucratic mess. The files are tidy now, and thorough, as is personnel. McNeely replaced the old crew with six new deputies. "Look here," he said, going back to the early entries in one journal. "Now look here," he said, flipping to recent jottings covering a like period of time. "Four pages of tickets rather than that one little dinky one. We had officers start doing their jobs. That's what happened."

| From a file drawer he fetched evidence from criminal cases his office has dealt with. The point was, it seemed, simple citations can lead to bigger things. One example: a bicycle obscured an auto license plate. The car was stopped, and it yielded eleven bags of a "brown mushroom substance I can't pronounce (psilocybin), although I know it's a dangerous drug," some marijuana and pills. Large cases or little, the marshal said, you have to be on your toes. Mothers used to come down to the saloons and leave their children outside on the benches until all hours. McNeely now enforces a 10 p.m. curfew for everyone under 18.

A woman shopkeeper in Tombstone said one afternoon, "I wouldn't mind the marshal if he weren't so damned Goody Two-Shoes."

McNeely is proud he lives clean. So what if he won't go to movies in which they take the Lord's name in vain? So what if Sunset Carson is his hero? So what if he drinks sarsaparilla at the Crystal Palace? "The people are beginning to realize they're either gonna have law enforcement," the marshal said,"or they're gonna let the riffraff take over the town." For his part, no matter whether he is reappointed for two more years this fall, the man is stuck on Tombstone. The other day, he traded his Winnebago and a 1948 diamond- studded, flat-top Gibson guitar for a 65-ft. mobile home. "I ain't leaving," he said, removing the wheels.