After 50 Years in Amboy, Aging Proprietor Puts His Town Up for Sale

Herman Bazel (Buster) Burris spent 50 years building what he hoped would be a boom town in the barren desert northeast of Palm Springs, but the boom never came. At 80, Burris is set to sell out, walk away and, he says with a Jimmy Stewart crackle, “never look back.”

“I hate to leave,” he said, “but I’m ready any time.”

The price tag on his life’s work, Amboy (pop. 24), is $2.5 million--less than the cafe, motel, tire shop, service station, three homes, mobile home, artist’s studio, post office, airplane hangar and 40 acres plus are worth, Burris said, but he’s not interested in digging for gold at this stage of his life.

“I figure it inventories out at around $6 million, stock and everything--no livestock, just cats and dogs--but it wouldn’t make a difference,” he said, if he got more than the asking price. “At my age, I couldn’t spend it anyway.”

The biggest selling point for the tiny town on old Route 66, Burris said, is that life midway between Barstow and the Arizona border is still quiet, clean and simple.

Burris came to Amboy with his first wife and his in-laws in 1939, and through the years, as they passed on, his burden grew as he took over operation of the cafe, motel, service station and tire shop. He also kept watch on the family’s 53-acre parcel 9 miles away, which he’s selling along with Amboy.

It’s been a hard life but a good one, and for Burris there has been no place like home. He has rarely left town for long, except to buy supplies, and he was happy there.

“The air is clean. We don’t have all the noise and racket, and we don’t have a bunch of gangsters or roughnecks like you do,” Burris said. “It’s good country out here: fresh air, no noise, no traffic. . . . You live 20 years longer here than where you are.”

Burris said the decision to sell the town and the nearby undeveloped acreage, which he owns free and clear, was tough but inevitable.

“Six months ago, I decided I was just getting too old to handle it. I do most of the work myself. The tires are getting big and heavy. My eyesight’s not that good. My wife does all the driving.

“If I was 20 years younger, I wouldn’t sell--under no condition--but I’m not able to do the things that have to be done and I can’t get people to do things. The younger generation doesn’t want to work. They’re not reliable.”

‘Special Type of Person’

Burris first put Amboy on the block 14 years ago, listing it at $350,000 with Joe Lovullo of Anchorage Investments of Dana Point.

Although offers came from a farmer in New Zealand and from California entrepreneurs with imaginative schemes, the amount of deferred maintenance discouraged some, and Burris decided not to do business with anyone he felt uncomfortable about. “Buster felt it had to be a special type of person,” Lovullo said.

To prepare the property for this go-round, Burris has had new roofs put on all his buildings and refurbished the motel with new carpets, new fixtures and new furniture.

Although he would prefer to sell outright, Steve Lyle, manager of Lyle Realty’s commercial division at 4741 E. Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs, which took the listing, thinks a trade “is the best way to go.”

He’s reviewing an offer from the owners of a shut-down pineapple cannery on Maui that Lyle thinks could provide Burris with some income if it were fixed up. He also suggests potential buyers consider the notion of an RV park.

Movie Production

But Burris has his own ideas. Amboy, with a 3-mile-wide inactive volcanic crater a few miles outside of town, would make a terrific movie location, he said, and a convenient and economical site for a permanent production facility.

Portions of “Journey to the Center of the Earth” were filmed at the crater in the late 1950s; a psychological horror movie, “The Hitcher,” was filmed there in 1986, and Ford and Chevrolet shoot their car-in-the-wilderness commercials there every year.

Although business in Amboy has been up and down through the years, traffic through town is growing, Burris said. Laughlin, Nev., and Las Vegas are booming and more and more French, German and Japanese tourists stop to chat while filling their tanks en route north to gamble or on their way south to Palm Springs to relax.

Burris knows that Kim Basinger bought the family-owned town of Braselton, Ga., for $20 million in March, and he won’t be surprised, he said, if some Hollywood type decides to do the same with his town.

Amboy was created by the Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1883 as a stopping-off point for telegraphers and linemen and as a watering hole for steam locomotives. It was followed by Bolo, Cadiz, Danby, Essex, Fenner, Goffs, Homer, Ibis and Java, named alphabetically, railroad officials say, to make it easy for rail workers to remember them. They still stand, intact, and almost entirely undeveloped.

Joined Air Corps

Burris was born in Bandera, Tex., and spent his boyhood dreaming of flight. At 16, he lied about his age and joined the Army Air Corps. Six months later he was found out and put out “in less than 30 minutes,” he recalled. Undaunted, he marched across the field from the military airport to the San Antonio airport and continued to fly as a civilian employee of the Air Corps, from 1925 to 1939.

Burris bought into Amboy with his father-in-law after giving up his work at San Bernardino Air Depot, now Norton Air Force Base, where Burris met his first wife, Betty Crowl.

The family bought “a bunch of property,” Burris recalled, in the San Bernardino Mountains, intending to build a resort, but that plan did not materialize. “Instead, we came to Amboy,” Burris said, and started building on the bone-dry desert sand.

“We built the garage and continued building. We converted the (garage) parts room into a cafe and added a kitchen “to feed the people tied up there” while their tires were changed and their water pumps replaced.

Some of those intending to pass on through had to stay overnight for car repairs, so Burris built a duplex, figuring “that would take care of it,” and when it didn’t, he built more rooms, and by 1952, there were 30 rooms in Roy’s Motel/Cafe, named for his father-in-law.

Bypassed by Interstate

In 1940, industry came to Amboy: a mill was built to process gypsum and salt nearby, and the population grew to an all-time high, 600. By 1980, as mining declined, it slid to 150, and it’s now estimated at about 20.

The construction of Interstate 40, about 10 miles north of Amboy, bypassed Route 66 and put an end to Burris’ dreams of greatness for the town. Most of Amboy’s road traffic these days is Nevada-bound from the Palm Springs area. Drivers heading north on Amboy Road on their way to Laughlin or Las Vegas save about 90 minutes they would have spent backtracking through Barstow.

All freight and passenger trains in and out of California, as many as 40 a day, pass through the center of Amboy on the Santa Fe Railroad’s transcontinental main line.

The easy rail accessibility has spurred interest in several trash-by-rail ventures, the largest proposed by the Santa Fe and its partner, Waste Management of North America Inc. They want to haul 6,000 tons of trash a day to a dump site that would be built outside of Amboy, to take the pressure off rapidly filling dump sites around Los Angeles. Action on the proposals is pending.

Salt is still mined from nearby Bristol Lake by National Chloride Co., and that is just about the extent of the town’s economic base.

Help Became Scarce

Burris’ second wife, Beth, an artist, travels between Amboy and Wonder Valley, where she keeps a studio, and Burris still sleeps in the duplex behind the motel office he shared for years with his in-laws and first wife.

His holdings have provided him with steady if unpredictable income, although he said he stopped providing his most popular service, towing, years ago, when reliable help became hard to find. He still buys groceries and other supplies in bulk once a week in San Bernardino, Riverside or Colton, and stores them in the cafe’s walk-in refrigerator.

Drinking water has always been plentiful for residents of Amboy, although there is no potable natural water supply. A long-standing agreement between the town and the railroad provides for spring water to be shipped by rail tank car from Newberry Springs, 20 miles east of Barstow.

When Burris turns his back on Amboy he’ll leave behind longtime friends like Mary Ann Mason, the cook at Roy’s cafe, who lives across the highway with her husband, George. He commutes to Needles to work for the Santa Fe Railroad.

Burris said Amboy has never been a lonely place. He spends some of each day talking to people passing through. Twin-engine aircraft “land here all the time,” Burris said, although the hangar sits empty and he’s not set up to service aircraft, but a pilot in need of fuel is never turned away.

“We just pull them up to the service station and pump it right in,” Burris said. “It’s unleaded.”

WHAT YOU GET IF YOU BUY AMBOY

Realtor Steve Lyle’s inventory of Burris’ holdings includes: 53 mostly undeveloped acres in Amboy.

40 undeveloped acres about 9 miles east of Amboy.

Gas station.

30-unit motel.

Cafe (open 6:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and serves “anything you want”).

Post office.

Catholic church (now used for storage).

3 single-family homes.

Artist’s studio.

Airplane hangar and use of 3,700-foot runway located on federal land.

Two steel water towers.

152-foot free-standing radio tower.

Commercial well, 9.25 miles east of Amboy, capable of pumping 1,000 gallons a minute of highly mineralized water.

Tow truck and road grader.

1979 sky blue Chevrolet pickup truck.

1983 1-ton diesel Chevrolet truck with 50,000 miles on it.

$30,000-tire room (tires, tire changing equipment).

New gas lines, gas tanks.

Miscellaneous vehicles, tools, restaurant supplies.

Satellite dish.