WAs your vehicle inches along the Malecón during the one o’clock rush hour, progressing at a snail’s pace, it’s hard to imagine what this town was like in the early 1960s, when Gene and Virginia George first came here to live. Gene, a WWII navy pilot who was freshly retired from his post as a lieutenant in the LAPD, brought his wife & family here to help out his uncle Ulysses George, developer and operator of the Hotel Playa Mazatlan. They had visited Mazatlán on various occasions since the hotel opened in the late ’50s, so they had an idea of what they were getting into when they packed up and moved to the sleepy little town of 40,000 people. Driving south from the U.S. border, says Gene, “you had to be ferried across two rivers” and to get here by air, adds Virginia, “took seven and a half hours from Tijuana, with a stop in Hermosillo on the way.” Gene recalls that there were only five American or half-and-half families in all of Mazatlán. Of course, living at the hotel, the Georges always had people from north of the border to socialize with, but they did try to maintain contact with the others.  “There was no Halloween or Thanksgiving,” Virginia recalls, “so we’d get together with the other families for those holidays, especially Halloween for the kids.” But the family of a Baptist missionary here never joined in with the Americans; they wanted to be friendly only with Mexicans. The Georges have a photo album with very few recognizable landmarks. Avenida Playa Gaviotas, the street that runs past their hotel in the Golden Zone, was a dirt road in those days, and across the street where the hotel parking lot is now was an estuary. There, a couple of fishermen in pangas (small rowboats) harvested an endless supply of shrimp. Beyond that, there was just one lonely little farmhouse in the distance all the way eastward to the mountains. “There were no phones out here,” says Gene, “and for that matter there was no electricity or water service. The hotel had to build its own facilities to supply all that.” Where the El Cid golf course and development stands now, nothing but a swamp land existed. “There was nothing out here,” says Gene of the Golden Zone, “except a broken down trailer park just north of the hotel with accommodations for maybe three or four people. You didn’t drive down here, you flew.” At least, the airport was close by. In those days it was located in the near suburbs, on the strip of

land where the University of Sinaloa and the baseball stadium stand today. “Just a 15-minute drive from the hotel,” says Virginia, “You turned left at Camaron Point (today Valentino’s) and drove a little ways on another dirt road, then turned right to the airport.”  Looking north from the front of the Hotel Playa, you couldn’t go past where the Balboa Club is now, recalls Gene, it was complete jungle. Going south, a dirt road meandered along the coast and around Icebox Hill to Olas Altas. Just beyond it, heading uphill, was the Colegio Pacifico where Jeff and Jeannie George went to grammar school. “There was just one building on Icebox Hill,” says Gene, “and that was a whorehouse.” Virginia had to drive the children every day along the unpaved coast road, bring them home for lunch, then drive them back for afternoon classes and pick them up when school was over. It got so tiresome to make that trip four times a day, the Georges finally moved downtown, to a house on Belisario Dominguez. When the children reached high school age, Virginia had to move to Guadalajara for four years, commuting back and forth, because there was no suitable option for them in Mazatlán at the time. In the ’60s, the town pretty much ended around Gutierrez Najera (the street that runs inland from the Fisherman’s Monument), and most food was purchased at the mercado. Virginia remembers that there was no refrigeration at the market “so you got there early. Or you could buy just-caught fish right from the pangas when they came ashore at North Beach. Kelly, the original Kelly, had a dairy farm where the Lala plant is now, so that’s where our milk came from.” Finally”, she says, “something like a supermarket opened on Zaragoza.” Entertainment? “There was a movie theater,” says Virginia, “the Cine Diana, but there was absolutely no television of any kind in all of Mazatlán.” She recalls that a small Fabricas de Francia occupied the same downtown location it has today. It was only one story with a parking lot on top. In those days there was a full-fledged American Consulate here in Mazatlán, and every Fourth of July the handful of Americans living in Mazatlán received invitations to the official party. It was truly a small-town life for the few gringos living in Mazatlán some 40-odd years ago. And the Georges have had the amazing experience of watching everything you see in Mazatlán today grow up, little by little, around them.