All These Recent Deaths...It's Like A Bad Joke. By Jeff Smith OKAY, SO AFTER two weeks of lachrymose tributes to fallen heroes, we ended last week's episode with a plea to the Fates to spare us further loss of comrades-in-arms. The Fates were not listening. John Rawlinson died; and a couple of days later, on the anniversary of the JFK assassination, Mary Lou Harris rolled her truck on the Sonoita Highway and put "--30--" to her curriculum vitae. Damn. Double damn. In the spirit of big things coming in small packages, please accept this abbreviated eulogy to a couple of fine friends and assets to the communities of Tucson, Patagonia and the broader community of humankind. One could easily fill this weekly newshole with obits of deserving departees, but our gimlet-eyed editor would soon get chippy about it. He lacks my sweet sentimentality. In any case, both John, long-time news reporter for both The Arizona Daily Star and Tucson Citizen, and Mary Lou, semi-retired barrister, garlic rancher and apprentice journalist for the Patagonia Press, had the wit and the will to appreciate a short and sardonic salute and farewell. So farewell. See you both on the other side. OH, AND IN case you two are still hovering about awaiting processing to your next port-of-call, here's a little something to share with St. Peter at the pearly gates: You know why God gave blondes one more brain cell than he gave horses? So they wouldn't shit in parades. SPEAKING OF HORSES, mortality, and purgatorial pit-stops this side of the last round-up, many of our local cavvy list their final address as 3928 N. Fairview Ave., the home of Tucson Tallow Co. This has been a Tucson tradition since 1938, but like so many of our hallowed (I did not say "tallowed") customs in this nihilistic era, it has come under fire from newcomers who seem to care not a whit for history. Those six decades into our murky past, when this abattoir was erected, every kid on the street could tell you where horses went when they died: They went to the glue factory. Tucson Tallow Co. was such a glue factory. And soap. And dog food. I suppose you could add candles in there too. Tallow is used to make candles, though a generation of hippie sprout-heads would probably have horrible drug flash-backs to hear of it. And in that more enlightened age, all that surrounded that remote location was a chicken ranch, a fertilizer plant, a slaughterhouse and miles upon miles of open desert. But as Kevin Costner's disembodied seer told him: If you build it, they will come. They built Tucson Tallow Co. and the trailer people came. They came in their onesies and twosies, their 2.3 children-per-family and, as trailer people will, in their litters of 10 and a dozen. They came in their ignorance of the pre-existing existence of a rendering plant in the neighborhood, or in their short-term belief that they could happily co-exist with it. But now there are some one thousand souls living within four blocks of the tallow plant, and they are not all souls at peace with it. They bitch about the smell. A lot. And it does smell. A lot. And they petition their city councilpersons to shut the plant down or force it to move. Which could be done. For a price. What price? A lot. About $2 million, to be precisely approximate. But the city is not willing to pay any of that price. They want this smallish, locally owned operation, which was there first and which is operating legally, and which is not legally bound to do dick, to cough up a hairball of cash big enough to choke a whole herd of horses, to solve a problem created by the people who are doing all the whining and sniveling. Guess whose side I'm on? Jerry Schell, who is a fine mechanic, a very funny guy, a friend of mine (full-disclosure) and husband of major owner of Tucson Tallow--his wife, Glory, is daughter of the late John Haugh, a very well-tailored and well-spoken Republican politician, who was the last guy you'd finger for a horse-renderer--told me the company has saved up about a million bucks to make a move, and that the county has offered to chip in too, and that if the City of Tucson would meet them halfway they'd be happy to comply. "But they (the city) won't even tell us where they want us to go to where they won't screw with us again," said the eloquent Mr. Schell. It all puts me somewhat in mind of the Tucson Rod & Gun Club and its ridiculous and unjust battle with the U.S. Forest Service and the encroaching suburbanites surrounding its Sabino Canyon shooting range. People move in around a known use that they may not in the long run wish to abide with, fully aware that they are the interlopers, and after getting cozy, they want the old-timers to pack up and move. At their own expense, both fiscal and emotional. Actually, it's just another verse of the sad old song about the Indians and the Pilgrims. Doesn't it offend your sense of justice?

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