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Well our story today is about a man named Robert E Lee
no not that Robert E Lee. I know I'm old but I'm not that old I knew this guy
Robert was born in Chicago in 1916 in March of 1916. and his father was a chronic invalid and
when his father passed away he had to drop out of high school help support the family
the first job he took was as an usher in a movie theater and I guess he saw a lot of movies because
he had developed a great affection for music and for history and it wasn't long he discovered that
he had a great baritone voice and he could project anywhere without the aid of of artificial means
so he began singing in nightclubs and in fact when he joined the Army Air corps after Pearl
Harbor he was in the Burma theater and he he was often involved in entertaining troops
and he cut a record in the United Kingdom which sold over a million copies and the the name of the
song that he recorded and done so well was long ago and far away now I went online trying to find
his voice I wanted to hear him singing at this with this baritone voice that was so good and it
seems like just about everybody's had sang that song at one time Frank Sinatra, Goulet, Robert
Goulet and a host of female and male singers from even Johnny Ray had his version of it and uh
anyway after the war he was in the the Burma theater of operation and after the war he went
into radio and television he developed several unique programs which Assignment San Antone it
was in Denver and and Texas and San Diego a lot and he formed an outfit called The Knot hole Club
and passport Adventures Liberty International the open road which I think kind of led to the
National open road by Charles Karault and here in Arizona you had Arizona roads with Bill Leverton
and his cameraman Steve Bonet and I've done a lot of things with Bill Leverton
and um he uh he really took off for the longest time and he was kind of a one-man show he uh he
done everything he not only filmed everything he cut and spliced and and wrote the script and
narrated it he he done the whole ball of wax all the editing it's kind of like our producer here
Dave and Jane they do it all too they take the pictures and they do all the editing and
searching for pictures that we can't come up with and what have you and it's quite an operation.
anyway Bob became interested in the lost Dutchman mine and the Superstition Mountains after he heard
about the Adolf Ruth story where Adolf Ruth went in and started searching for Lost Dutchman mine
and and they didn't hear from him and finally went out and found his body and all this sort
of thing and to call Bob a Dutch Hunter would be a stretch because he wasn't really interested
in finding the mine what he wanted to do is he wanted to make a documentary about the subject
and he done quite a bit of research but the research that he did was reading about a dozen
different books that we've talked about uh over the over some of these stories
one of the chief ones he studied was Sims Ely and we had a story on that she could you could go back
and watch and watch the editor the publisher of Sims Ely's book done some drastic cutting and
additions because he was the one that edited the whole thing and in my opinion quite a few mistakes
were made he read books by Barney Bernard and Kurt Gentry the Killer Mountains, Travis Marlow
the one who was involved with the stone maps and all these old books we talk about and he
was heavily influenced by the movie Lust For Gold based upon the book very written by Barry Storm
Mr Storm was quite upset with the film because they took some awful liberties
with the information that was involved in it I've seen that movie several times and it's very
entertaining it's a it's a nice movie to watch but I wouldn't Bank too much on the truth and involved
he started his filming it took quite a while to do this documentary he started these filming in
late 59 and 1960. his second trip in was in 62 then he made two trips in 1972. this was
all doing the filming and interviewing Personnel that lived out in the mountains such as Dawn shade
Don was the person who found Walt Gassler's body and Unsolved Mysteries and him and another fellow
named Al Reser they used to come into the museum when we were up at Goldfield in 1990
and just to look at the collection of maps that we had on the wall up there
and once they'd been there and they kept coming back to study those Maps I always let them in
free and take as much time as they wanted and take pictures of them and whatever they sent a lot of
study on the collection of maps that the museum had and of course Bill and Jerry Crater and they
were Packers who owned a lot of horses and took people on trips into the Superstition Mountains
and uh I was on a week-long trip that was in another story with Tom Kollenborn and
and Bill Crater on one of their expeditions and I was in the audiovisual business audio visual
business at the time and Bill wanted to know if I could make him a a slide presentation to help
with his business so we came to an agreement that if I did that he would give me a horse
so I done the presentation and gave him the tray with all the slides in it and he says
well I guess you I owe you a horse and I said I'll tell you what bill you keep the horse
and you just let me use it anytime I want but you rent it out just like he's yours and that
worked pretty well for me I don't know how it worked out for him but then of course they they
saw Ed Piper out there and interviewed Ed Piper this was Ed was involved with Celeste Jones and
uh in a major Feud out there that got a couple of people killed and the forest service got so upset
with that the sheriff and the forest service went in and disarmed everybody and passed a law that
you couldn't camp in the same spot for more than 14 days at a time and this this broke up all the
the territorial Obsession people had with certain areas because they couldn't stay there any longer
and of course he read the book Killer Mountain about Glenn Mcgill and their expedition in the
mountains which we just did a story on shortly ago that you can watch he interviewed Barney Bernard
and we affectionately called Barney Bernard, bilarni Bernard you know he he put out a book
that wasn't all that bad but uh Barney had something to say about everything
and then of course there was Al moral Morrow I was killed in a cave-in in
in his tunnel in Needle Canyon between blacktop Mesa and Bluff Springs Mountain
and it just so happened that it was Crazy Jake passing through his camp on a number of times
realized that something was wrong Al was always there and I'll come up missing so
Jake reported to the authorities and Sheriff Hawkins, Hawkins went in with a posse and
they found his body in his tunnel where a huge Boulder during a rainstorm had collapsed
in on him and and crushed him to death and Bob interviewed Sheriff Hopkins about that at length
and of course there was a host of other people that names her is not as prominent as some that
we just mentioned that they interviewed and saw and of course that's why it took so long
just doing these filming sessions and then it was a couple of more years before the the documentary
got put together now Tom Kullenborn used to show his documentary after Lost Dutchman Days parade in
Apache Junction every year he would invite people to come to a certain place and and view this video
and you can still find this on the internet and in fact you can still find these uh
his book here on the internet the lost Dutchman mind and the subtitle is the
making of the documentary on the lost Dutchman mine and the only thing I would caution you
about is the printing in this is so fine I have difficulty reading it even with reading glasses
but this book can be found on the internet and I met Bob a couple of times during these
visits that he would come back for Lost Dutchman days and Tom would show his his
documentary this photo is sometime in the late 70s or early 80s I'm not sure exactly who even took
the photo but there's Tom and I and and Bob and Ray Johnson everybody in the picture is gone now
but um I invite you if you're interested to to look up this video and and book and if you're
interested why get you a copy so there you have it folks some of the most popular names of the
Dutch hunters and the Superstition Mountains he interviewed a lot of them and all these
people put together have spent over a hundred years looking for the Lost Dutch from mine
and uh they haven't found it yet because that's just another mystery of the Superstition Mountains
thank you for watching this episode of mysteries of the Superstition
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