Bonnie Henry: Family's lodge near Wilmot was 8 miles from Tucson

It had to get better. And it did.

Six years after Marion, her husband, Glen, and their kids arrived in Tucson in 1942, they were opening up the Barra Nada Ranch Lodge, described as "eight miles east of the city."

Today, a church occupies the site, surrounded by businesses and apartments on East Pima Street, just west of North Wilmot Road.

Try riding a horse around these parts today. Then again, horseback riding was something of an afterthought at the Barra Nada, too.

"We were a one-horse outfit," says Marion, 90. "If guests wanted to ride, we'd borrow horses from the Triple H" - a guest ranch where El Dorado Hospital would later rise.

Raised in Buffalo, N.Y., Marion moved when she was 15 to San Diego, where aircraft jobs beckoned her father and brothers.

In 1940, she married Glen Hotchkiss, 17 years her senior and the father of three. On the last day of November 1942, the family arrived in Tucson, where a supervisor's job for Glen, now deceased, was waiting at Consolidated Vultee.

The family had arranged to rent a house near Broadway and Wilmot, then known as the middle of nowhere. "There's a Hometown Buffet there today," says Marion.

But when they arrived, the house was vacant. Not sure they should enter, the family members camped out their first night. "We broke off some greasewood branches and made a fire, and I heated the bottle for our 8-month-old baby," says Marion.

After the war ended, the couple plunked down $300 for an acre at 6180 E. Pima St., with the idea of building a single-family home.

"Then a man came along from the Triple H ranch and said, 'Why not build a dude ranch?' " says Marion.

Why not, indeed.

"So we bought nine more acres at $300 an acre," says Marion. It was raw land, no water, and the power lines were just starting to inch up along Pima. "We hauled water for a year from Ernie Molina's gas station at Speedway and Wilmot."

Glen, Marion and Glen's two boys all helped build the place, which included four duplexes, a lodge with a dining room and rec room, a swimming pool and a home for the family.

"We could afford to buy the material but not the labor," says Marion. Every weekend they went to Mount Lemmon, hauling logs for ceiling beams and stones for the fireplace.

Three years later, the job was done. "But we had no money to furnish it," says Marion. "So a friend loaned us $5,000 interest-free, and I bought all the furniture from Sears Roebuck."

Glen also built a cupboard and a large dining table, where Marion set down the meals three times a day.

"After I cooked all day, the guests wanted to play cards all night," says Marion, who remembers having to oust at least one card shark. "He took everyone's money."

He wasn't the only guest evicted. "Joe Bonanno would come for breakfast. His bodyguard stayed with us awhile. They would have meetings out by the pool, all these men in business suits," says Marion.

But after she got a phone call threatening to dynamite the place if they didn't "get the Mafia out of there," they had to tell the bodyguard to leave. "He was very nice," says Marion. "He said, 'Every place I go I'm asked to leave.' "

Less notorious guests included actress Zasu Pitts, William Randolph Hearst Jr. and TV star Garry Moore. "They put on their jeans as soon as they got here," says Marion.

When spring training ended every year, they also hosted a dinner for the Cleveland Indians. But until cooling was added sometime in the mid-1950s, Barra Nada - loosely translated as "Bar None" - entertained few guests come summertime.

To make ends meet, dimes were extracted from the lodge's Coke machine. Marion let the neighborhood kids swim in the pool, 50 cents a kid. She also hosted dinners. "One June I gave 23 dinner parties, 100 people for each one. I did all the cooking, fried chicken every night," says Marion. "I still do not like to cook chicken."

After the '70-71 season, Glen and Marion sold the whole place, right down to the furniture and dishes, to what is now Grace to the Nations church for $235,000. Glen died in 1993.

"We never made much money, but we had wonderful people coming back year after year," says Marion.

Reach Bonnie Henry at 573-4179 or at bhenry@azstarnet.com, or write to 4850 S. Park Ave. Tucson, AZ 85714.