Monday, May. 18, 1987
In Arizona: Books on a Ranch
By Gregory Jaynes
A lonesome widow runs a bookshop on a ranch in Arizona, one of the warmest bookshops on earth. Her name is Winifred Bundy, and her establishment is called the Singing Wind. You go north out of Benson on the Ocotillo Road, cross the train tracks and proceed 2 1/4 miles across a cattle guard to the shot-up mailbox -- SINGING WIND, it says, a careworn advertisement that is easy to miss -- where you hang a right on dirt, continue a quarter of a mile, open a gate, close it behind you and continue another quarter of a mile past horses, cows and a pair of feuding cats. The trail pays out at the ranch house, where Winifred keeps store behind a mesquite door.
Before entering, it is useful to poke about -- that is if it is in a season when the wind doesn't knock you flat. The wind is nearly always remarkable west of the Mississippi, but each time it forces an occasional visitor into the posture of a boomerang, leaning as far forward as possible in order to gain ground, feels like the end of the world. In any event, the wind doesn't "sing" through the Aleppo pines in these parts so much as it tries to uproot them (the hardest evidence of its vigor is on the barn's tin roof; but for the weight of a slew of dead tires, nature would snatch away that galvanized hat). Violets grow in the yard year-round and tulips in spring. Off in one direction the Whetstone Mountains glower; in another, the Empire Mountains; in another, the Huachucas; in another, the Dragoons, big and little. Birds in the air include meadowlarks, a splash of yellow on their underparts, and vermilion flycatchers, and four or five different hawks, the Cooper's sparrow hawk and the red-tailed being the most prominent. In the cottonwoods down by the San Pedro River there are eagles. And skittering across the sere terrain are deer, weasels and badgers. Beneath the dinner bell by the back door is a sign: SINGING WIND BOOKSHOP. HEADQUARTERS FOR BOOKS ABOUT THE SOUTHWEST. STUFF OF DREAMS MAKE UP BOOKS.
Half the time you won't catch Winifred minding the firm. She could be in the kitchen baking brownies or chocolate-chip cookies. Or she could be in the fiber-glass hothouse picking peas, pulling chard. She might be off on her bicycle feeding cows. She may have gone to town to fetch dry goods. She is a firecracker in a pair of bluchers, a woman the shape of a cigarette, with energy to burn. Winifred runs to get a drink of water. "I have no real hours," she says. "If I'm here, fine. If not, tough luck." Calling ahead doesn't always work either. "I detest telephone-answering machines. I put the phone by the door and leave the door open and hope I hear it, but you never know."
If all this does not sound like careful management practice, there you are; * Winifred never set out to be a careful manager. The daughter of a General Motors vagabond, she attended 22 schools before she reached twelfth grade. In Minnesota, shortly before she got her diploma, she met Robert Bundy, who was working on a master's in electrical engineering. He was nine years older, but "he looked real young." They were married in 1949, and Bob went to work in Los Angeles. "His object was to get to Tucson for me, because it was dry, and I had asthma." When a job opened up in 1952, "we moved like a shot." In 1956 she earned a degree in history and English from the University of Arizona. That was also the year they bought the Singing Wind ranch, about an hour's drive out of Tucson. It is a section, or 640 acres, or a square mile, or not much land by local standards.
Three kids, two boys and a girl, 4-H and Future Farmers of America, calving and irrigating pretty much ate up the next few years. The children grew, the wind blew, the dust flew, and, by 1973, here stood Winifred Bundy wondering what to do. She had flirted with the notion of opening a bookshop, but lacked capital. Then it was that her husband, a soft touch, took in two horrid German shepherds to board while the owners went to Europe. The dogs tormented the horses until a mare reached her limit and kicked out one dog's eye. When the owners returned, Winifred presented them with a $600 bill for feed and the veterinarian. Those funds stocked two shelves of books in her alcove. She was in business.
Word of mouth soon drew a "steady trickle" of readers, some riding high in the saddle, others in pickup trucks. She wrote to publishers, small presses, obscure literati specializing in the Southwest and the American Indian. Gradually she built a collection of more than 10,000 volumes, a repository that scholars, authors, regional libraries and Old West freaks came to rely on. Nowadays the shop has even become a stop on the tour-bus routes out of Tucson. Her customers aren't the sort whose taste runs to Zane Grey -- no, they are more likely looking to flesh out a study of, say, Texas John Slaughter with a document first published when the century was young. Winifred either has it, will find it or will spin out of control trying. Such work kept her pushing on during her toughest trial, the death of her husband four years ago.
The two rooms that serve as the store are full to bursting with books. The logical expansion, the next room, is the bedroom Winifred shared with Bob. She has been sleeping there 31 years, and she cannot bear to give it up. So the business simply overflows all over the house. When there is a herd of browsers afoot in the place, she has been known to cut her deals with sales reps out in the road over the trunks of their cars. When presented with a credit card, she has been known to say, "I'm not going to get involved in that credit-card junk."
"Why, I would buy something if you'd take my Visa," a particularly stiff Ohioan said the other day.
"Well buy it anyway," said Winifred, "and send me the money later."
When presented with cash -- she prefers checks, not wanting much cash on hand -- she will fish around in her jeans and come up with some wadded-up change. "Uh," said a flustered Midwesterner one recent afternoon, "you mind ironing this money?"
All of which is to say it is real relaxed around the Singing Wind, to say nothing of the best part, the part about its being one of the warmest shops on earth. Winifred used to do this when her husband was alive, but she does it even more now: if you are around about sundown, and you and your mates are interesting, bookish but not stodgy, you stand a good chance of being stood to supper. The beef is from her own Charolais, the vegetables from the hothouse. The music might be an old somebody-done-somebody-wrong cowboy song. Also, the same trick works at noonday if you catch her with one or two spare biscuits in the pan. "I don't mind feeding the customers," Winifred says. "I like good conversation at my table."