(Kingman) A Lesson That Took A Long Time To Learn ... or did we get it at all?

Our latest trip through here showed us you can really depend on a place to be boring, and remain boring, no matter Chamber of Commerce manipulations.  Our first time here we wrote up an object lesson to other chambers of horror that there is a danger in using room tax revenues to try and buy wealthy tourists. We were to find that for all the places “Get your kicks, on Route 66” was used in tourist marketing, there also was a wide difference of opinion by the townspeople of Kingman of exactly what those “kicks” were, and what class of visitor needed.

As Bobby and I both have a lot of experience in tourism marketing, Kingman was to us was a blatant example of what we call the Castle Rock Syndrome (a Mt. St. Helens gateway)— local businesses so intent on snagging some of the dollars traveling down the road, or so worried that they will go to a neighbor, that they forget what the attraction happens to be.

We founded this publication in March of 2001 and after our initial Kingman article decided not to contribute to the hubbub of sidewalk huckster preying on innocents that came along. Now, we are attempting to do this right for our reader’s.

Perhaps we are totally mistaken in our first judgment. It is a curious thing to me how lasting impressions of a place can be dictated by a series of such trivial things. It is almost the same as a random access political poll, with a small percentile speaking for the mass.

Now we only stop for things of interest to a cultural tourist. As the railroad —equally a national treasure as the highway— and the Harvey House girls, waitresses brought from back East to work at train lunch counters, who became the grandmothers of Arizona.

However, on this visit — we were told with a sniff— we were a day ahead of a biker run through Kingman, which apparently are “one rung lower,” than motorhome travelers. Not wanting to be rounded up with the usual suspects, we exited, that-a-way, fast!

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