Desolate Town ‘Is Crying Out for Help’

Not long ago, Susan Cunningham motored around the main drag and back streets of this isolated Mojave desert community, doing her own inventory of a little town in trouble.

Pen and paper in hand, the local Chamber of Commerce vice president counted the vacant homes and abandoned storefronts in her unincorporated burg of 2,100 residents on the wind-blown border of Kern and San Bernardino counties, 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The results astounded her: Half the town’s 52 businesses were closed down. Of 850 single-family homes, 104 were boarded shut. An additional 91 rental homes stood empty.

“It was just alarming to see all these empty places, all these memories of people who used to live here and the shops they used to run,” she said. “This town is crying out for help. But what’s happening to Boron could happen to any little community in America.”

Founded in 1924 to house workers from the nearby Borax Co. mine, the Kern County town has endured a streak of bad luck that has lasted for nearly three decades and now threatens to kill it off for good.

Bypassed when the new four-lane California 58 was built in 1971, the community--named after the mineral extracted from the state’s largest open pit mine--has suffered even more bad news of late. Downsizing by several local employers in the mid-1990s led to a new exodus.

As a result, housing prices have plummeted from already low levels, leaving some homes stranded on the market for years. Recently, one sold for just $8,000.

“Boron, you know, rhymes with moron,” said one resident, who declined to give his name. “Sometimes I think that’s what you have to be to stick around here.”

But Boron’s leaders are talking about a last-ditch comeback.

The community wants to shed its company town image and reinvent itself as a tiny desert oasis that will attract a share of tourists who now whiz past along California 58, bound for Las Vegas and beyond.

Two museums are planned and a new Team Boron is developing ideas on how to win back business. There’s talk of a new federal prison to replace the present one, which will soon close. And Borax says it may do some substantial hiring soon.

Boron’s also got a new slogan, billing itself as the “friendliest little town in California,” one that features 360 days of sunshine a year.

While the plans may seem small, they’re a big step for a town where for years no concerted effort was made to stem the slide.

Boron has also sought the aid of a national nonprofit group that offers technical and economic expertise to help down-and-out communities like Boron get back on their feet.

Doug Loescher, director of that organization, the Washington D.C.-based National Main Street Center, said the town is one of countless communities nationwide edging closer to economic catastrophe.

Some endure military base closings or the opening of a new shopping mall that steals the life-blood from downtown businesses, changing their economic fortunes overnight.

But a dedicated few have returned from the dead, Loescher said. Bonaparte, Iowa, watched its last business close two years ago, leaving its 700 residents with no services at all. Then community leaders went into business for themselves, pooling resources to start a cooperative general food store, hardware and clothing outlet.

Boron officials know they have a lot in common with the Iowa town: Like Bonaparte, Boron is a tiny eye-blink along a winding rural highway, a place so small it rates only a part-time police presence--a county sheriff’s deputy who makes the 30-mile drive from Mojave once a day.

“The goal,” Loescher said, “is to build a community in the greater sense, to experience the feeling of being part of a place, doing whatever need be done to help your town survive.”

Boron knows it needs all the help it can get. “Right now,” Cunningham says, “we really have nothing to offer people. That’s what we’re trying to develop.”

In the 1960s, Boron bustled as old Route 466 ran through downtown. There were seven gas stations and seven restaurants, two of them open 24 hours, to serve the booming Borax plant.

Back then, Ronald Reagan hosted the company-sponsored “Death Valley Days” TV show and hawked Boraxo soap, guiding the firm’s signature 20-mule team into the nation’s living rooms each week. Boron residents bellied up to the Silver Dollar bar to watch the show that put their town on the map.

Then in 1971, the new highway bypassed the town. “I didn’t think it would have any effect,” said Boron veteran F.O. Rowe. “Boy, was I wrong.”

Things went from bad to worse. In the 1990s, area employers downsized. Borax, which had 1,034 employees in the early 1980s, has 727 employees today. A nearby solar heating manufacturer has also reduced its work force. Even the rocket test facility at Edwards Air Force Base has lost workers. Those who remained relocated to places like Lancaster and Barstow.

In January 1995, nine Boron businesses closed. Anita Cone, owner of the Frontier Antique Mall, watched helplessly as the shoe store closed down, followed by the Coffee Mug restaurant, then a gas station, even the Silver Dollar.

Ray Job lost his plumbing business of 24 years. “My customers moved away, some passed away, and I just couldn’t go on,” he said. “I shut off the phone and stopped taking new business. Then I just closed my doors.

“You thought ‘This place is just going to go under. We’re going to become some ghost town.’ ”

Cheap rents attracted welfare recipients from Los Angeles and Bakersfield. Today, 125 families, 30% of Boron’s population, receive welfare--more than twice the rate of more economically healthy Kern County communities, officials say.

Meanwhile, Boron’s unemployment soared. Today, the jobless rate is nearly 15%, higher than the Kern County average of 14% and three times the national rate of 4.4%.

When the nearby federal prison announced it was relocating to Victorville, locals joked that not even the convicts wanted to stick around Boron, where it is freezing in winter and 115 degrees in the summer.

Most frustrating, Cunningham says, was watching 20,000 cars a day pass along California 58 without giving Boron a second thought, despite the two exits leading to town.

So businessmen started yet another attempt to set things straight--founding Project 1,000, an effort to attract that many cars a day to Boron. And they began planning things for them to do once they arrived.

Locals had their downtown history museum, a tidy little space that provides an exhaustive look at the town’s past. And there is a company exhibit at the nearby Borax plant. Now residents are talking about adding rail and aviation museums.

Volunteering on weekends, they’ve spruced up the downtown drag--renamed 20 Mule Team Road--adding parks and roadside displays such as an antique fire engine and an F-4 fighter jet donated by the air base.

Charley Stanley and his wife Siegliende, from Washington state, were two tourists who took the bait. Last week they stood admiring the former Borax mining truck that sat on the roadside.

“We were headed to Las Vegas and saw the signs for Boron and just thought we’d stop and see what it looked like,” he said. “So far, it’s worth the visit. I like little towns like this. I’d hate to see them die out.”

To raise money for their projects, locals held bake sales and dinners. They even invited Reagan to visit Boron to celebrate the town’s conservative values. (He declined.) In the last five years, Rowe says, they’ve raised $100,000 for town refurbishments.

“Hey, we’re just a little town in the farthest corner of the county and so officials haven’t been very interested in us,” he says. “We’ve had to do it ourselves.”

But Borax officials say they’re committed to Boron’s survival and last year donated $175,000, sponsoring schools and community activities.

Recently, Borax helped purchase a smog check machine for high school shop class students so residents wouldn’t have to drive 30 miles to have their cars serviced and youths could learn more about automobiles.

“We’re helping through partnerships, not paternalism,” said Borax spokeswoman Susan Keefe. “We don’t see ourselves as Uncle Borax. Our aim is to teach the man to fish for himself.”

And so Boron casts for a new future. Locals know they’ll have to find ways to repopulate all those vacant houses, not just rely on strangers stopping for a brief museum visit.

And there’s still some in-fighting. Such as whether to allow the new minimum-security federal prison to locate within the town’s limits, which would attract 100 jobs. But residents are confident that the new prison will come. “This is what we need,” said Rowe, “a shot in the arm, some more jobs, some good news for once.”