Hope Springs Eternal for Troubled Town : New Plans Again in Works to Restore Faded Jacumba Spa

Felix Bachmeier recalls climbing out of the rental car that first day inJacumba two years ago and thinking to himself, “Dear God, what have I done?”

The 55-year-old entrepreneur was among a group of Chicago investors who had just paid a million dollars for 235 acres that included the burned-out shell of a famous old hotel, a motel and other property in this tiny backcountry town 70 miles east of San Diego.

The plan was to do a little refurbishing, turn a profit. And Bachmeier had decided to move west to supervise the efforts. A few weeks before his departure, however, Lisa Bachmeier had returned from Jacumba with a grim warning:

“The place is a ghost town,” she told her husband. But Bachmeier had never expected anything like this.

This wasn’t a town, this was an outpost. Other than two general stores, a gas station and cafe, there was little else but a clear blue sky and some ramshackle houses. And the motel needed lots of work.

“I got out of the car and saw the dust and tumbleweeds blowing through town and almost dropped dead from a heart attack,” he said. “It just wasn’t the quaint little place I had envisioned. I wasn’t a happy man that day.”

For a while, he wouldn’t even unpack his suitcase. After all, it was one of his partners who had scouted out the town in the first place as a real estate investment.

“It was a nightmare. I had one foot in and one foot out,” he said in a slight German accent, describing the improvements he has made to the 24-room motel and restaurant. “I never expected to stay long.”

These days, few visitors stay long in Jacumba. After a cup of coffee in one of the town’s two diners, they run like jack rabbits at the after-dark howl of a lonesome coyote.

Once a thriving tourist attraction that a generation ago drew countless visitors to its charming hotel and natural hot springs spa, the town has fallen on hard times.

Just a little bad luck, residents say, at the hands of both man and nature--perhaps a curse from the Indian tribes who once inhabited the expansive Jacumba Valley.

Built in 1927, the Jacumba Hotel and Spa had attracted the likes of Clark

Gable and Marlene Dietrich, along with hundreds of Imperial Valley farmers who drove west along Highway 80 looking to escape the inland heat.

Ten years later, air conditioning came to the valley and many farmers began staying home. Eventually, flash floods and fires swept away most of the statuesque cottonwood trees. Then the railroad closed, one of Jacumba’s last links with the outside world.

In the early 1970s, Interstate 8 was built, retiring the old two-lane Highway 80 but leaving the town without a convenient freeway access.

Once again, Jacumba got left out in the cold. But it still had its famous hotel and hot springs baths. Eight years ago, however, they too burned down.

The Jacumba that Felix Bachmeier found was a place populated by welfare mothers and retirees, most of whom gather each Wednesday for a pot luck lunch at the downtown seniors’ center.

It was a place with a past but no present, a town in search of its future. But, after decades in decline, residents say, Jacumba may finally be on the rebound.

Two San Diego developers have bought dairy rancher Bill Ketchum’s 1,400-acre spread outside town with a dream of building a planned community of more than 1,100 homes that may include a golf course as well as equestrian and other outdoor facilities.

Now there is even talk of opening up the old railroad line to San Diego on a routine basis, and bringing regular air traffic back to Jacumba airport, now a vacant field used only by gliders.

This development business could eventually mean new jobs and a second chance for many of Jacumba’s 500 residents. Even Felix Bachmeier.

Depending on the success of the planned development, Bachmeier and his backers say they might up the ante by rebuilding the old hotel and spa to its former glory.

He’s spent months researching the town and its famous hotel with the idea of developing a new health spa on the old grounds. The goal is to return Jacumba to the status of tourist destination, not just some eye-blink along an old road seldom traveled.

Throughout the valley, people are hoping that city folks discover the fresh air, pristine skies and near perfect year-round temperatures they say Jacumba has to offer.

One 90-year-old motel owner in nearby Boulevard still keeps her aging guest rooms in immaculate shape--even though the business was closed down several years ago--so that, if the developers do ever come, she will be ready, residents say.

But although many residents anxiously await the developer’s backhoe--for the big city to yawn and stretch beyond its limits--others in town have learned to become wary of developers’ promises.

Jacumba has always been a two-owner town, they say. Aside from Ketchum’s ranch, the old hotel and spa has gone through a slew of investors over the years, including a group operated by convicted Ponzi-scheme artist J. David (Jerry) Dominelli.

People are tired of cheap promises. But many older residents have seen Jacumba’s potential as a natural attraction. And, looking to the future, they only want the past to come back again.

“There’s a great deal of apathy in this town,” said Robert Mitchell, former publisher of the Plain Speaker, Jacumba’s monthly newspaper. “The locals have seen too many would-be developers fail because of lack of financing and intentions.

“Many of them really had no plans of developing at all. They did a little start-up work with plans to immediately sell it off to someone else.”

Others worry that a golf course and planned community is not the right kind of development for rural Jacumba, that it will spoil what has become San Diego County’s most unique--and innocent--border crossing.

Just south of town, along a dirt road marked by dust-devils stirred up by the fierce autumn winds, lies the Mexican town of Jacame--an isolated hamlet populated by about 50 families.

Seven miles from the nearest paved road on their side of the border, many Jacame residents walk to Jacumba each day to buy groceries, beer and cigarettes. Several even keep post office boxes there.

At Jacumba, the international border is a wire gate--surrounded by piles of dirt and rocks--that residents on both sides open and close like some well-used cattle guard.

Each morning, they park their trucks in a makeshift parking lot and walk past the deserted Border Patrol station, only to return at the end of the day.

If San Diego is the county’s barricaded front entrance to Third World crossings, then Jacumba is the kitchen door left unlocked to swing wide open, the locals say.

And nobody seems to mind. But, although most residents look the other way at their Mexican visitors, that, too, would change with Jacumba’s development.

“Unless we’ve got some new Border Patrol agent here stirring up trouble, nobody bothers these people,” said one resident, who owns a home within sight of the border. “But, if you bring these city types here with their fancy homes and golf courses, they’re going to want to change that and build some big wall or ditch to keep the Mexicans out.

“Or they’re going to exploit them as cheap labor. Either way, there’s something innocent and simple here that’s going to die.”

Jacumba has another endangered species that many believe will disappear at the first sight of a developer’s bulldozer--backwoodsmen like Norman Blackwood.

They’re alternative types who wear their long hair in ponytails, who have forsaken big city hassles for the placid life in San Diego county’s big sky country.

The son of a railroad man, the 60-year-old Blackwood was born in one of the two dilapidated railroad cars that still sit near the tracks on the north end of town.

Today he owns a house nearby and makes his living as a stone mason, driving the back country roads in his 1965 Chevy Malibu station wagon with his two dogs, Patty and Ginger.

Blackwood relishes his life here, being able to wear a Stetson hat and flannel shirt instead of a coat and tie. He likes having roots in a place, living within a half-mile of the place he was born--even if it is some old railroad car.

“There’s something about these mountains, just breathing the air out here,” he said. “There’s no such thing as smog. You wake up in the morning, take a deep breath and feel good. And things haven’t reached city pandemonium yet. You can still stretch your legs, have a little elbow room.”

But, if he puts his bearded head to the ground, Blackwood can almost hear the sound of approaching development.

“If it changes to the point where I can’t feel comfortable here, I’ll just move,” he said. “Just because I don’t like it, that’s no reason for the town not to prosper.

“I’m not narrow-minded. I remember why this town was built in the first place, as a hot springs tourist attraction. And someday soon, somebody’s going to discover Jacumba all over again.”

Locals say that Jacumba’s battles lines over the coming development are no different from any other community’s. But the town is so small that the two camps are as clearly defined as the sun and the moon on the crisp mountain horizon.

As he sat on a tree stump in front of Anderson’s general store, Roger Hanson spoke the words he said was on many people’s minds.

“This is a one-horse little town that don’t want no development,” said the 58-year-old ex-soldier who spends his days “drinking beer and lying to my friends.”

“But them builders from San Diego are coming east anyway, and there ain’t no stopping them. They can’t go to L.A. because that’s all filled up. They can’t go to Mexico, and the ocean is the other way, so here they come.

“And us, we’re a bunch of grouchy old fogies sitting here like dead ducks without a thing to do about it.”

But Joe Botkin, a partner in the proposed Jacumba Valley Ranch project, said the San Diego developers have won over the hearts and minds of the local community.

“If we want this development to be successful, we have to have the local citizens on our side,” he said. “We’ve gone to them through numerous public forums saying, ‘Here’s our ideas. If you like them, we’ll press forward. If not, we’ll either change them or abandon them.’ ”

Botkin said the developers have already invested more than three years and a sizable amount of money in the project, investigating necessary sewage and flood control plans.

The group would like to have a community plan ready to submit to the county Planning Commission as early as next spring, he said.

Bill Ketchum, who has run a successful dairy operation in Jacumba for more than a generation, said the time has come to sell. His three boys have shown no interest in the ranch, moving off to greener pastures.

And at 70, he’s too old to do it himself. He said he stands to make more than $5 million from the sale, and will stay on as an adviser to the project.

“Let’s face it, we’re going to see a lot of new faces here when this development comes, and a lot of old faces aren’t going to stay,” he said. “That’s the negative part to some people.

“But this town has gone down about as far as it can get. We need this shot in the arm real bad.”

Felix Bachmeier is one of those new faces. A city-type used to skyscrapers and traffic jams, it has taken him a while to get used to Jacumba, where the road runs straight through town without a second thought or even a traffic light to slow anyone down.

And it has taken the town a while to get used to him. “In the beginning, whatever we did seemed to backfire,” he said.

When he planted trees near the motel, neighbors complained about allergies. When he tried to do some other fix-up work, they cried out again.

“No sooner did I put a spade in the ground, I’d have an inspector here saying the neighbors were concerned and upset.”

A nervous man with a quick temper, he sometimes feels he’s like Eddie Albert’s character in the old television show “Green Acres.” Of course, there’s no Fred Ziffel and his television-watching pet pig, Arnold, around.

But, in Jacumba, there’s Norman Blackwood and his two dogs, whom he treats like his children. And there’s a woman known as the Cat Lady, who’s collected all the strays in town.

Despite the town’s peculiarities, there’s money to be made in Jacumba, Bachmeier said. He says there are two rivers running beneath Jacumba--one a cool natural spring, the other a geothermal pool running with hot sulfur water.

He wants to tap those resources to reopen the town’s famous spa, develop a health headquarters that would include massages, beauty parlors and mud baths that he could advertise not only in San Diego and Los Angeles, but as far away as New York and Europe.

So Bachmeier is doing his research on the old hotel. He has brought in a chef from Chicago, as well as architects and other experts to see what can be made of his investment.

“It took me two years to realize what’s here,” he said. “Sure, the town needs some sprucing up. I had an architect come in and he looked at the railroad and airport and the town’s proximity to the border and he was amazed.

“He told me ‘This is a town of destiny. Forget about what’s here now. It has everything to bring people here. Do your homework, and they will come.’ ”

That suits Polly Hollingshead just fine. The president of the Highland Seniors Group first came to Jacumba in 1926, the year after the old hotel opened.

She has seen what Jacumba can be. And she would like to see it happen all over again.

“Our town is so ugly, the buildings are falling down. The trees are gone,” she said. “They might not be able to make it like it was, but just make it pretty again, like it was when I was a girl.”