D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2008
Brick and Mortar Memories
Page: 4Whatever else may be said about Silver City, it has at least always been a colorful place in which to live, and The Limit was one of the most colorful places that anyone in my generation can remember. In the beginning, The Limit wasn't even a bar; it was merely the dream of one as the owner (I have no idea whom he might have been) began constructing a single low wall made from beer bottles held together by mortar. In those days, and there seems to have been data to prove it, Grant County was reputed to have had the highest liquor consumption per capita of any county in the United States. I am not kidding, so readers will see immediately what I mean, I'm sure, when I repeat that Silver City was a colorful place.
Given so much "color," The Limit seemed to go up with amazing speed. The one wall pretty quickly became four walls, and when a roof was added, The Limit went into operation, even as the owner began adding more and longer walls out behind the original, one-room structure in which the bar started. I do not pretend ever to have been inside The Limit; no one that I knew went anywhere near the inside of it. That was because, almost from the start, so much consumption inside so small a space tended to produce varying degrees of tension, the tension in its turn producing varying degrees of animosity . . . quite a lot of it, if one can believe the stories and the newspaper reports. Thereafter, as a general rule, the animosity tended to become physical. What a colorful place to have had at the edge of town! And so, in the Forties and early Fifties, in the absence of Geronimo, Chato, Mangus Colorado, the Wild Bunch, Billy the Kid and Blackjack Ketchum, The Limit fully recalled our link with the Old West. Like the Old West, it too finally died, edged out at last by the Yellow Front Store and, finally, the McDonald's Happy Meal.
In looking back, when The Limit finally went, something akin to a metaphorical school marm, something vaguely resembling a triumph of civilization, seemed to have arrived. Well, as I said in starting, things change. But if the "T" on "T-Mountain" (for State Teachers College) has now changed to a "W," and a few of the fine old buildings have gone the way that old buildings are destined to go, Silver City is still Silver City. As the Prince of Salina says in The Leopard: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D'you understand?" Well, yes, and one stroll down Bullard or up Broadway on any given day should be enough to make any solid citizen understand that the town retains enough flavor, local color and downright individuality to satisfy even the most skeptical old timer who might live amongst us.
To the eye, certainly, much has changed, but deep down, heart and soul, everything has stayed the same.
Phillip "Pep" Parotti grew up in Silver City during the Forties and the Fifties and has recently retired and come home after a long teaching career at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.