It's been here since the Wilson administration. Long before regular ice delivery. When they had real cowboys and real Indians and it was an accomplishment merely to make it out here and make it back home.

Its age and the name 'Wigwam' suggested (to me) a property like the El Tovar, a venerable lodge with maybe a trout stream flowing through the lobby, or labyrinthine nature walks, maybe networked exposed beams and deeply shadowed rooms lit by mesquite torches, where everybody gets their own burro ride to their casitas, I don't know what exactly. But something Colteresque. Something mysterious and tested by time.

Afraid not. Not anymore.

The blimp looks funny. Blimp and building look opposite to each other. It's the Goodyear blimp.

The Wigwam is only here because the Goodyear corporation needed long-staple cotton they couldn't get from Egypt, there was a war on. They acquired thousands of acres and the main building, the ranch house, the Organization House, was built in 1919. It slept six.

Cotton prices soon bottomed out but the Goodyear executives had sussed out that Arizona was more pleasant than Akron in the winter, so it stayed open. The town of Litchfield Park developed around the resort, named for Goodyear executive Paul Litchfield, who treated the blimp like a company car or company sky-yacht and floated out here every year. (People could tell he was in town by looking up.) (What's the right verb for traveling by blimp? Floating? Gassing? Outgassing?)

Imagine yourself as the 10-year-old kid in Akron Ohio whose Dad works at Goodyear and three weeks before Christmas day you're told to help the maid pack up your big brown trunk, you're going to Arizona for Christmas on the Pilgrim, moving soundlessly over the checkerboarded countryside in empty airspace, watching your own bulbous shadow vault and slip over every ground obstacle, and when you land in Arizona, you'll go horseback riding and see real live cowboys and Indians. It's enough to make you blurp up your Ovaltine with anticipation.

Jack Stewart was hired on in 1933 and put the resort on a profitable basis even in the Depression. From the book We Met at Camelback:

Jack began his promotions by getting Litchfield to spend over $7,000 advertising the guest ranch in 100 newspapers. In these he emphasized an extensive social program which included breakfast rides, moonlight steak fries, pack trips, bridge and putting tournaments, bingo games, tea dances and a variety of similar activities now practices in most resorts. He brought in Spanish serenaders, square dancers, lecturers and movies. Cowboys were imported from both Arizona and out-state to put on rodeos. A little used stretch of paving of Highway 80 was promoted for bicycling.

Jack Stewart left after three years because he was moonlighting, building the Camelback Inn, and taking some of his favorite paying guests with him.

There may have been some historical substance here at one point, but it's all been steamed and pressed out in a renovation that looks like it was done in, oh, 1985. Today the Wigwam has no feel at all. The main building has the style, proportions and spatial logic of a small airport. Those big meeting rooms and hallways go on forever.

Put this all together mentally. . .and it's pretty clear that one fine day the Wiggy management made a business decision and went for the big corporate convention and meeting business. From a reservationist's eye this must be an obvious move: corporate business means more dollars with fewer transactions, comes in big room-blocks with cancellation penalties, eases scheduling, is predictable. Some poor sap of an interior designer must have taken this to mean that the Wigwam should also LOOK like an office. Because, today, it do.