Howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story right here with
Larry Hedrick on mysteries of the superstition mountains you know i met tom Kollinburn in 1975.
he was teaching a class down at the Apache junction high school called prospecting the
superstitions and I found it fascinating I took two two courses in a row and although I had
been here in the late 50s and knew about the legend from Hart Mullins and and other people tom
tom just so interested me in the mountains itself that uh and at the end of the class
all the students rented horses and took a trip from Peralta road all past weaver's needle where
we had lunch and then out first water road and I became friends with tom and over the years
we've if I said we made 30 trips in the mountains that wouldn't be an exaggeration
tom was a Rhodes scholar he also was a teacher at unified Apache Junction Unified District
and he was he was involved in just about everything at Apache Junction you could name
he was on a lot of different boards and stuff like that
and somewhere around 1978 he began to talk about the need for a museum he even showed me where
his dad had talked about the need for a museum and uh one night we were over to his house just
talking away and he brought it up again and i said well Tom why don't we just do it so we decided to
we we had never done anything like that before so what we did is we went and visited three
museums in the Phoenix area and mesa we've the Arizona historical society the fire museum and
mesa museum and we talk to all their CEOs and other people about what they went through to
to acquire a tax status and things of that nature and we borrowed articles of incorporation and we
used their articles incorporation to design ours and we published it in the newspaper three times
like you're supposed to do and we we paid for that kind of stuff out of our own pocket and in 1980 we
finally got our tax expedient status and Tom and I both knew that nobody was going to seriously
help a fledgling organization that didn't have a thing you know no building no nothing just a name
and we for the purposes of incorporating we had to have officers and Tom felt like we shouldn't
be the officers you know we're just putting this together so we named our Wives as officers and
um and then of course after we got our status we we got our first board together and we got Clay
Worst was the first president of the board and Barry Grandell was a educator at Apache junction
and one of my friends uh carol prophet was the this the other one and that was our founding board
and we met at Clay where's office which he was a real estate dealer Greg Davis finally come on
a few other people like that and then we started meeting after we got about 10 people involved in
the board we started meeting at the high school and when we got our taxes status
Carol Prophet was was a an artist and she was well known she she had works in
Scottsdale galleries and she knew a lot of people and one day she called me up and she
says Larry there's a fellow that's going to give a a large donation of Indian artifacts to Brigham
Young University he's done that before and I said well take me out and introduce me to him
and you know we know we knew that as I said people were not going to give things to a
fledgling organization but I sat down at this guy's table for about an hour trying
to convince him that we were worthy of receiving some of this stuff and all i got out of him was
well we'll see well not very long after that he went ahead and made the donation of the best stuff
to Brigham Young but he uh he donated 400 pieces of indian artifacts pottery and stuff like that
most of it was restored but it was well done and we put that in a in in June Woods garage
who was the person that was nominated during the articles incorporation as the person to
of contact and we stored a lot of stuff in her garage because she never parked her car in it
and I just wanted to give an example of how some things came about because since we
knew that people weren't going to help us right off the bat we actively sought donations
we weren't thinking so much about money but we wanted to get things to fill a museum
and carol called me one night and there was a fella over in Paradise Valley that was selling
his home a rather fancy home with a three-car garage and he was moving up towards Sedona
and uh she wanted he was replacing all of the
appliances in his house with all new stuff so that for the sale of the home
and Carol knew that I had a flatbed trailer and it was on a Sunday she
called me up and wanted me to go over and get this stuff that he was going to give to her
so I didn't want to go but I finally gave in we went over and loaded up all the stuff and sitting
in the corner uh off a ways was in this empty three-car garage was a huge cabinet and I was
looking at the back of it and it didn't look like much but I there was a space between the wall and
the front of it and I went around and looked at it and it was an absolutely gorgeous display cabinet
and I walked over to the guy and I said what's the story on that cabinet over there he says well that
was handcrafted in Chicago in 1890 and shipped to Barry Goldwater's father's first store in Prescott
and and I said gosh I said that's amazing I suppose you're taking that with you he says well
I'd like to but I've been thinking about donated to a museum I was back the next day with seven
guys and we picked that thing up and loaded on the trailer and it's still in the museum to this day
it is it is one of the most amazing cabinets you ever saw and and this is how we got started and
another example is carol called me up one day and said this fella over in Scottsdale has a
a complete collection of Arizona highways he'd like to give to us well that's that's good but
you know no hurry we put it off a week or so and we went over and saw the guy and he says well
I gave those away already he says but I do have this fine collection of war cars
and here he had 15 ore cars and stuff and he donated to the museum on the spot and we didn't
have the boom truck at the time so we sent Bob Schoose over and he picked them all up and all
of our stuff ended up at the museum at Goldfield well we've done a lot of media in those days
we were on Good Morning America, West 57th Street, Unsolved Mysteries, all the TV channels in Phoenix
and Tucson and some national headlines because I used the Calvary to promote the museum and
everything that we did and we were in President Reagan's inaugural parade we were in George
Bush's inaugural parade and national television was was focused on this Apache Junction group
associated with the museum and stuff like that and we began to get known through all this media that
we did and we began to get some offers the first offer we had was and I never could pronounce this
quite right with Tovrea Castle so we went down and looked at it and the place was was constructed at
a solid cement and all the electric electrical outlets were already there and there wasn't
anything you could do to add anything as you went up these flights of stairs because each each part
of the castle got a little smaller as you went to the top and we were really interested in that
because of its location and it was well known but then they come up with the clincher says you guys
are responsible for the care and maintenance of the building and the grounds well now the grounds
are huge and they're just covered with cactus and you can imagine what kind of care that would take
to keep the weeds out of this place on on rainy monsoon season and where would we get
the volunteers to do all that but because of several things we decided to pass on it
and then we got an offer from Gold Canyon Harold Chrisst had brought in a building
from out of state a long building it's still out there to church right now but it was on
blocks and and it needed plumbing and wiring and everything we didn't feel like we could swing that
it's a good location but we decided to pass on that
and then Ted Degrazia went down to Tucson and offered his Superstition Mountain facility to us
and we went out and looked at it and most of it was dirt floors and you had to make about 15
turns to get to it it was the hardest place to get to i ever saw and it had very little parking and
we finally decided to pass on that well then a big offer came we got a call from
Valley National Bank and wanted us to come down and talk to their president so we went down went
on the top story and and sat down his office and he says we're building superstition springs
mall and we'd like you boys to consider locating your museum at the mall and um he says you won't
have to pay any rent or it will provide the space and stuff like that and he wanted some ideas we
gave him some ideas about the construction in fact it used to be our idea to go through some canyons
to get to the entrance and they had a model of the Dutchman's burl and and the Dutchman out there in
a cave and all this sort of stuff and he finally ended up saying what would you boys have to have
to do this and tom and I looked at each other and tom was speechless he didn't know what to say
but um knowing me I just blurted it out I said well sir we'd like to have a million dollar trust
fund established at your bank where we don't get any of the principal but we get the interest off
that he says well that's not a problem and we thought we had it made so I they wanted uh some
of our stuff down there in the meantime so in the entrance of the place after they got it finished
i took the uh America's Mounted Military History all the uniforms of all the different wars we were
in and made a big display and on the other side of the thing we had the animals of the superstitions
and things like that and we we really had the feeling that we were going to have a home
without getting into any detail because there are still people alive
something happened to valley national bank it's not here anymore
and that fell through then finally uh we got with Bob Schoose out at Goldfield ghost town
and Bob offered to put us in a shell building and we were to do the electrical and the sheet rock
and the insulation and all that sort of stuff and he needed lumber so we made a deal when we went
after the stamp mill in New Mexico that he got all the lumber and we got the mill and the the
museum at Goldfield was built out of the lumber from the stamp mill in in Bland New Mexico and
we established a museum there and opened it in 1990 we've done an awful lot of work to
the inside I mean it was a two-story building when we had the sheet rock upstairs and the downstairs
had to build all the exhibits and about the only help I had was a guy named Salvador Delgado
he uh he came in and finally I had somebody to hold up the other end of the sheet rock and
between us we we finally got it open i was doing a story for the journal we'd been
doing journals for several years by the way it only took us nine years to get into a museum
and a lot of those museums we talked to in phoenix some of them took 15 or 20 years to get in there
and they had some sugar daddies behind them we didn't have any money coming our way at all
and I was doing a story on week's ranch for our journal which came out once a year
weeks ranch is located just across the street to the west of where the Superstition Mountain Museum
is today the new one and in that research I noticed that it mentioned patented land
and I said well that's private property that whole area out there was all BLM and Forest Service land
there wasn't any private property in the area and so I called clay wurst real estate dealer said
clay how would we find out what the status of this property is and he said well why don't you call
George Marker realty in Phoenix if anybody knows George would know so I called him and he described
the place to and he said oh yeah he says that that was listed with me many years ago he says
it's in receivership with the royal bank of Canada he says would you like me to call him and find out
what the situation is so he calls back he says there's 160 acres of private property there and
you can have any or all of it for 10, 000 an acre well that that seemed a little bit impossible but
he explained that the Royal Bank of Canada was paying taxes on unimproved property that was
killing them off over all these years and they really wanted to get rid of this property and so
they they made us quite a little offer we were able to tie up pieces of it because
it was separated by state route 88 and and a dirt road that went off to the south mountain
view road I think it was called so it was already in three pieces you could only divide
property back then into three pieces but since it was divided by the road in three pieces already
each piece could be divided into three pieces so clay wurst and i uh he he's also a surveyor
and surveyed all of his own properties that he was dealing with so I chained for him and and run the
aiming stakes and we we laid out the whole area and petitioned off the piece that we wanted and
broke all of them down into three separate pieces and and that kind of thing and we put a sign up
on the property across the road with the museum's phone number so when we'd get a call I would close
the doors at the museum and go show property and this is one of the greatest entrepreneurial
associations I was ever involved in we went from a fledgling organization in a rented facility
virtually pennies to a million-dollar corporation in no time at all
what happened was as we first tied up the 57 acres where the museum is now divided into three pieces
and sold off this north peace and the south peace the fellow that bought the north piece uh
we we bought it for we tied it up for 10, 000 an acre we sold it for 15. so the 16 and a half acres
to the north made us 80, 000 and each piece that we sold there after we paid the bank their 10,000
and we got our profit and the final piece was 87.5 acres which amounted to over 600 000 and
when we got through selling all that land the museum had a profit of 991 thousand dollars
almost a million dollars then we spent 220, 000 uh to bring water in a six inch line over
a mile to to this property which served everybody although they didn't pay for it we paid for it all
they had they had to do was pay hookup charges the man that paid 240, 000 for the 16 acres to
the north immediately after water came in sold it for a million and a half so now you can see that
after all this effort we had a paid-for piece of property a building that was bought and paid for
and and then of course we had the other buildings that we brought in and that property today based
upon what the fellow at the north sold his for a million and a half for 16 acres
our 13 acres ought to be worth a considerable sum of money today because it now has water
and that's the way the historical society got started with tom and I as co-founders
and this marvelous wonderful opportunity of finding this property paid for
everything thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains