(upbeat music) - For over the past 60 years, Arizona PBS has told incredible stories of Arizona's distinctive people, beautiful landscapes and treasured history.

Now relive those memories we've pulled from the vault.

Hello, I'm a Alberto Rios.

Discover the success and rivalry between two competing Arizona softball teams, while following the story of a pioneering family.

From The Vault presents another edition of, Arizona stories.

(crowd cheering) (jaunty music) - [Pat] In the 1940s, amateur women's softball was nearly as popular as the Phoenix Suns are today.

- It was good, clean fun.

And it was one, it was the biggest sporting event in Phoenix at that time.

So, gosh, what else do you do, but go to see a good softball game?

If we had a choice between seeing a good, girl softball game and a men's game, we'd always go to the girls game.

Sure, it was more action.

It was a fast game, real fast.

- [Pat] Phoenix had several good women's teams but the Queens and Ramblers were the best.

Their games often took place at the Phoenix Softball Park which was located at 17th Avenue and Roosevelt.

It was a terrific place to see an exciting style of play at a very reasonable price.

- I think it only cost them a quarter.

So a whole family could go for a dollar.

- It was a place that people brought their families.

Mother and dad and the kids and everybody came.

- [Pat] A game between the Ramblers and Queens was always quite a battle and the fans loved it.

- You either were a Rambler fan or you were a Queen fan, and there was no in between.

I mean, they sat on their side and ours sat on our side, but it was as intense with the fans as it was with the players.

- We chose sides and we rooted for our teams.

It's just like the Brooklyn Dodgers.

If you're a Brooklyn Dodger fan, you're a Brooklyn Dodger fan.

And we were just as loyal to the A-1 Queens as the Brooklyn Dodgers are to their team.

(bright music) - [Pat] The fans all had their favorite players.

One of them was a young woman named Rose who would later become Arizona's governor.

- I came down here in '39 and played for the Arizona Cantaloupe Queens.

And the reason we were called that, we were sponsored by the cantaloupe growers.

and at that time, Phoenix was big into cantaloupe.

- [Pat] Mofford was with the team for a year and had her own ideas about what made the women so powerful.

(crowd cheering) - To see these girls perform, not maybe to an equal, but almost an equal to a man that can hurl a ball as fast and also they're colorful on the field.

There's some awfully pretty ball players.

- [Pat] Dressed in bright satin uniforms and short silky skirts, it's no secret that the women brought a certain amount of sex appeal to the game.

And at tournament time promoters took full advantage of it.

Touting the Queens as America's most beautiful athletes.

- I think that Queens had, I don't wanna say it and be prejudice, but, they had younger, better looking women, I think maybe that was one of the reasons, I don't know, man.

They had good looking women playing.

- Yeah, they had cute outfits.

Sure.

But we didn't go out there just to see the outfits.

We went out there to see a good ball game.

- [Pat] And that's exactly what they got.

The Queens and Ramblers had some of the best athletes in the world.

They ran fast, they threw hard and they always played to win.

- The Queens and Ramblers probably had the biggest rivalry of any two teams in the world that I know of.

- You came to play.

I mean, they gave you everything you wanted.

I mean, it was dog eat dog, especially Dotty.

- Their coach used to tell everybody, don't slide into Wilkinson, just come in and knock her down, because she's not gonna let you have the plate.

Which I didn't.

- Well, he said, don't go around.

- And, go over.

That's what he told you.

Go over me.

So anyway, there, six people had come in and knocked me down that night and Flossy was the seventh.

She came in and knocked me down and I got up and knocked her down.

You remember that?

- Yes, I remember that.

- [Pat] In 1940, that kind of aggressiveness paid off big.

The Ramblers won their first national championship.

- That was the first national title of any kind that Phoenix ever had in 1940.

So naturally, we got a lot of publicity from the governor and everything.

We had parades downtown and, like they do for Barkley and the basketball now.

Well, they did that for us.

- [Pat] The Ramblers became local celebrities but the Queens weren't far behind.

Together, they put Phoenix on the sporting map, winning a combined total of eight national titles.

And this town's passion for sports can arguably be traced to these women's softball players who loved the game.

And their fans who loved it right along with them.

(energetic music) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) - [Narrator] Tempe, Arizona today is a thriving vital community.

It's hard to believe that it sprang from this humble Adobe structure on the bank of the Salt River, east of Phoenix.

La Casa Vieja, The Old House.

It all started with the arrival of Charles Trumbull Hayden just after the Civil War.

- And in 1866, Charles Trumbull had a contract to ship a bunch of stuff to the army up north of here.

And he had been trading with the Salt River tribes, and so he consulted them to as to where there was a good place to cross the river.

And they told him that right in this vicinity there was a wide area in the river where it was shallow with a rocky bottom that you could ride across with a team of mules.

- [Narrator] When Hayden reached the river the water was too high to cross.

Legend has it, he climbed Tempe Butte, viewed the land and was struck with some ideas.

- Well, he felt that if he were to place some sort of cable across the river and tether a ferry boat to it, people would pay to use that ferry boat instead of having to camp out as he did.

Another opportunity that presented itself would be to divert some water from the river and use it to turn a water wheel on a flour mill.

- [Narrator] Hayden did build the ferry large enough to carry a stage coach and horses across the river.

He employed local workers to construct the flour mill and ran it with water from the river, and he built this hacienda as his home using Adobe bricks, rough cut timber and a Pueblo style roof.

- Hayden used those materials because anything manufactured or milled would've had to have been brought up from as far away as Tucson, and so he had to use what was on hand here and he used the ancient techniques of Adobe and latilla ceiling, the large, rough hewn logs that they brought probably from Payson or Prescott, maybe still green because they're bowed and sticks laid across those and then reeds from the river.

And then on top of that, over our heads right now there's still about a foot to a foot and a half of packed earth that they used to seal that roof.

- [Narrator] The street became known as Mill Avenue, the town, as Hayden's Ferry and the area began to prosper.

At the age of 50, Hayden married Sally Davis.

Together they ran a blacksmith shop, post office and other businesses.

Their home became a safe harbor for weary travelers.

- [Michael] The Haydens had, because of the nature of their businesses, the ferry crossing and the flour mill, almost immediately the need to feed people and give them a place to sleep.

So as early as the 1890s, you have stationary that says Hotel Hayden.

- [Narrator] The Haydens had a son, Carl, who eventually became a United States Congressman and served 57 years in the U.S. House and Senate.

They also had two daughters, Sally and Mary.

Mary had two sons.

One of them is Hayden C. Hayden.

- Yeah, my uncle and my aunt and my mother were all born in the Casa Vieja and they lived there and my grandfather had built the mill across the street to make flour from the Mormons that made it, and then he'd sell that flour to the armies.

- [Narrator] By 1890, the family had moved into a new home and this became known as, The Old House, La Casa Vieja.

Over the next quarter century, more structures were built including a boarding house.

The site went through many changes and eventually fell into disrepair.

In 1924, the Hayden daughters restored the home, the first historic renovation in the state, and ran a tea house.

The courtyard was open then, and in it, a soothing fountain, which still stands.

- A little shady retreat from the dusty streets outside and a little bubble of civilization they could create in the middle of the bustling hacienda.

- [Narrator] The great depression of the 1930s forced the Haydens to sell La Casa Vieja.

Over the next decade or so, the building housed several owners and various businesses until 1954, when Leonard Monti purchased the landmark and established the steakhouse still operating today.

Monti preserved much of the history like the Adobe walls and the river rock floor.

Today, his son, Michael runs the restaurant and has done extensive renovations to the building he grew up in.

- [Michael] When I was a kid, it was still not uncommon to see people riding around horses in this area.

And it just occurred to me that there's an opportunity to gather and record as much of this information as possible, because I find that a lot of the young people who come to work for us here, and so many of the customers, are very interested in knowing what life was like here before.

- As far as La Casa Vieja's concerned, Hayden built it and then Leonard Monti started and made it a lot bigger, and so that legacy is there.

- [Narrator] Hayden C. Hayden continued operating the family's flour mill until it closed in 1997.

La Casa Vieja is the oldest continuously occupied structure in the entire Phoenix Metro area.

The building is on the national, state and city historic registers.

It is a slice of the past in the heart of Tempe, Arizona.

And even as a restaurant, La Casa Vieja continues to house history for future generations to enjoy.

(cheerful music) - [Pat] On a lonely stretch of highway 79, between Florence and Tucson, stands a monument to Tom Mix.

Mix was one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the silent era.

Turning out hundreds of westerns alongside his sidekick, Tony, the wonder horse.

On the night of October 12th, 1940, Mix was driving from Tucson to Phoenix.

Unknown to him, a bridge ahead had been washed away by floodwaters.

Mix slammed into the sandy banks and was killed at what is now called Tom Mix Wash. Tom Mix's popularity may have waned over the decades but this Arizona milestone will make certain, he is never forgotten.

- [Narrator] Water is the lifeblood of the valley of the sun.

It flows from rivers, such as the Salt and Verde into a labyrinth of 131 miles of canals that feed the valley's homes, businesses, farms and archers.

The canals we depend on today, were first designed to irrigate existing farms and encourage future agricultural development.

William J. Murphy was a pioneer in this regard.

In 1883, the railroad excavator and entrepreneur and his men braved raw desert, flash floods and funding mishaps to construct the canals.

- He was doing excavation along land that hadn't been developed at all.

Hadn't been any type of farm and they just had to go through whatever they came across.

- [Narrator] One thing they came across was a solid shelf of rock at what is now 56th street and Indian School.

- There was a big fall in the land, but even as early as 1883, 1884, when the Arizona canal was being built, people saw the potential for hydropower, so they left the fall in there.

- [Narrator] Where some saw a future source of electricity, others saw beauty.

Murphy, who acquired land around the area, planted trees and grasses around the falls.

- [Shelly] There was nothing out there before.

It would've been cactus and dried brush, and here we have a great canal going across the Northern part of the Salt River valley and a spectacular fall.

And people ended up going out and having picnics.

- [Narrator] But the falls had potential for more than a picnic spot.

- Around 1900, 1901, they petitioned the federal government to build power plants on the Arizona canal.

They built one at Arizona Falls.

In 1902, the first hydropower plant electricity was delivered to the city of Phoenix.

(thunder crashing) - [Narrator] Just three years later, flood waters rushed through the canal, destroying the power plant.

The federal government empowered what is now Salt River Project to rebuild.

- In 1910, the Salt River valley water users association, which is now part of Salt River Project saw the potential in the valley and signed a contract with the federal government to construct three hydropower plants in the valley along three different canals, and one of them was the Arizona Falls.

- [Narrator] The new power plant was finished by 1913, providing electricity to farmers around the area, but the falls were now covered up.

- [Shelly] It became a great, massive concrete structure.

- [Narrator] And it stayed that way until about 1950 when it was no longer a cost effective power source.

The plant was shut down, but the structure remained for the next 50 years.

Most valley residents had no idea what was under it.

- We moved in about 1986 and I used to walk the dogs up and down the road and it just was ugly.

It wasn't pretty.

I didn't even know there were falls here.

- [Narrator] At the turn of this century, new renewable energy technology and some forward thinking allowed the SRP, the city of Phoenix, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Phoenix Arts Commission to bring Arizona Falls back to life.

- [Shelly] We've recreated the feeling of the falls and yet have retained and are producing green and renewable energy.

So, it's a marvelous blending of technology and a learning environment.

- [Narrator] Once again, Arizona Falls is a place of beauty, power and picnics.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (uplifting music) - [Mike] The Ford Apache Indian reservation is absolutely a beautiful, marvelous place.

The mountains are 10,400 feet.

It's sort of untamed and I really love this place.

It's the center of the earth for me.

- [Narrator 2] Mike Cooley's family and their way of life have been centered in these mountains for six generations.

- My great grandfather, my father and my wife's side, all of her family and all her relatives are from here.

You've got to feel a bond to this land.

- [Narrator 2] If there's magnetism in these mountains, Mike's great-grandfather was the first Cooley to feel that pull.

Corydon Eliphalet Cooley came here about 1870, hired by the army to help build an outpost that became Fort Apache.

Cooley spent the rest of his life in the White Mountains, opening the area to settlers, but he also was a teacher and friend of the Apaches.

When Corydon Cooley came to this area he found the White Mountain Apaches living along the White River as neighbors of the fort.

(Native American chanting) - People live here and they farm here.

- [Narrator 2] Edgar Perry works to preserve the history of his Apache people and their way of life.

- [Edgar] And they built from leaves, bare grass and the willows.

- [Narrator 2] The implements of life back then, which are artifacts or vanishing arts today.

Corydon Cooley came to know the Apaches as very few white men had.

- I think he loved the Apache people primarily because they had such a joy for life.

And their sense of humor was incredible, which it is still today.

- [Narrator 2] Odette Cooley Fuller is Mike Cooley's sister.

She's director of the Fort Apache Historical Park, where archives give us a window on Apache life a century ago.

- When you married into that group, you married the whole group, and perhaps that was what most meaningful to him.

- [Narrator 2] Meaningful, because Cooley married into the tribe, twice.

In Apache tradition, Cooley married two daughters of Chief Pedro.

One later died in childbirth, but Molly survived and gave later generations of Cooley's their Apache birthright.

There's another chapter of Cooley's life that almost seems torn from a different book.

This white man who loved Apaches and learned their language also hunted them down.

The army hired Cooley to lead Apache Scouts in the running battle with hostile Apaches.

In later years, he enjoyed the nickname, Colonel, though he won his army fame as a paid civilian.

- He was an adventurer.

He was an opportunist.

He was looking for that edge and I think he found it.

He also found a real home.

(cows mooing) - [Narrator 2] Between adventures with the army, the Colonel settled into ranching.

- The Colonel himself was not a person to go out and punch cows.

- [Narrator 2] Everett Cooley says his grandfather got into cattle for the money.

(cow mooing) But ranching is one of the ways Everett and the Cooley family have kept close ties with the Apaches.

This land has been a key to survival for the White Mountain Apaches, but a century ago they were in danger of losing it.

As white settlers pushed into the area, there was growing political pressure to take more Indian land.

Colonel Cooley stood up for the Apaches.

- It was a shooting offense in those period of time if you were on the wrong political side, as it were, and the wrong political side was absolutely being with the Indians.

- [Narrator 2] Much of Colonel Cooley's ranch land now belongs to the Apache tribe.

But back in 1876, when he and a partner split up they agreed a card game would decide who kept the ranch.

After several rounds with no winner, the partner said, show low and take the ranch.

Legend has it Cooley laid down the deuce of clubs and won.

That's how the town that grew up on part of the ranch got it's name, Show Low.

The homes that Corydon Cooley built on his ranches were well known rest stops for travelers, but today it's hard to tell just how grand the biggest house really was.

- Oh, my Lord.

Looks like an explosion happened here.

- [Narrator 2] Mike Cooley's mother, Clementine, remembers the splendor of the house that was built here in the 1880s.

- I loved that fireplace.

So big, so beautiful.

And then the veranda, oh, that was lovely.

Sitting out there in the sunshine and breeze.

The officers wives and the officers used to come up here and dance.

- [Narrator 2] The old house was still standing in the 1960s until the night of the fire.

- When I pulled up and parked across the road and saw the old ranch burning, I cried I'll admit it.

It was gone forever.

- [Narrator 2] Corydon Cooley's grand old house is gone, but his family remains.

Great grandson Mike, built his home right here on the reservation.

- Is this the Colonel right here?

Whoa.

You wanna talk.

You wanna talk about a wild bunch of characters?

This is it.

- [Narrator 2] And like his great grandfather, Mike married an Apache woman.

Mike's son, Bruce married a woman of Apache and Navajo blood.

Now a sixth generation of Cooley family is growing up here in the White Mountains.

- [Mike] We're a mixture and it's two cultures coming together.

Yeah, history does repeat itself, doesn't it?

- [Narrator 2] Corydon Eliphalet Cooley lived out his last 30 years in the big ranch house he loved.

When he died in 1917, the man they called the Colonel was buried at Fort Apache, with full military honors.

Now if the Colonel could return to see this land again, the Apache people and his descendants, what would he think of it all?

- [Mike] I think he'd be quite proud of us and I'm quite pleased with the legacy that I'm going to leave to my family.

- [Narrator 2] A legacy of two worlds, two cultures and they came together in an amazing place loved by both.

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