The once-booming town of Silver Bell peals no more

From Dec. 21, 2009:

While looking through my stamp collection, I came across a 1965 five-cent Christmas postage stamp. It was first issued from Silver Bell, Ariz. I can’t seem to locate this town.

Are you sure it was from 1965? I thought the post office would have been closed by then. The U.S. Postal Service has a Silverbell branch in Tucson. Could that have anything to do with it?

Silver Bell was — is — located in the Silver Bell Mountains in Pima County, about 35 miles northwest of Tucson.

It was once a booming copper mining town with a population at one time of about 1,000.

According to one account, it was a lawless “hellhole.” By 1905, the town had a railroad station, a Wells Fargo office, a company store, a school, two saloons, a Chinese bakery, a barber, a doctor, a justice of the peace and a deputy sheriff.

The mineral content of the water was so high that it wasn’t potable. It couldn’t even be used on gardens. Water was hauled in by wagons and later the railroad and was dispensed from two taps twice a day for two hours.

The town rose and fell with copper prices and faded away by the 1930s.

Everyone uses the term “hunker down” when talking about bad weather. What is the origin of that phrase?

Everyone? If everyone used the phrase “ding dang razzenfusen,” would you, too?

Personally, when bad weather is approaching, I use the phrase, “Get in a supply of pickled herring and put on my jams and winter bathrobe and sit on the couch all day under a quilt until it’s time to go to bed.”

Nobody seems to know the exact origin of “hunker,” though it could be a Scottish word from the Old Norse word huka, meaning “to squat,” and that word is related to similar sounding words meaning the same thing in Dutch and German.

So to hunker down would be to make yourself a smaller target for the stormy winter blasts.