In Arizona: Taming a Troublesome Town

Roy McNeely is pleased that after a career as a truck driver and a guitar player he has hit on a role that carries some celebrity. Roy remembers Hugh O'Brian playing Wyatt Earp on television, and Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp in the movie. Earp was a deputy marshal in Tombstone, the dust-blown Arizona town best known for a gunfight that gave him his fame, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Today McNeely is Tombstone's marshal. Tourists often ask him for his autograph, and he is flattered.

Flattery, however, does not ease the responsibility of keeping the peace in a town that glorifies its lawless past. Tombstone's bloody history is about the only thing it has in the way of a drawing card, and since tourism is about the only thing it has in the way of a business, there you are. Boothill graveyard holds the remains of scores who did not go gentle into that good night. The main drag, Allen Street, is virtually a shrine to the trigger- happy, to soiled doves and to strong drink. Hiring on as a deputy in April 1984, McNeely thought he spotted some connection between Tombstone's historic character and its contemporary behavior: "I mean, people ran stop signs right in front of me."

Quickly, the new deputy proved himself the fastest ball-point pen around; his pad spit tickets like bullets. "I was the only guy writing tickets," he remembers. "When I'd see somebody fighting, I'd arrest them. It looked to me like there was this look-the-other-way deal going on. The officers would spend a couple of hours in the coffee shops, then a couple of hours with friends, then back to the coffee shops. This place was wide open."

The marshal's job turned over twice before McNeely took his own shot at it. He won the two-year appointment from the mayor and town council in November 1984. At the time he made a commitment to himself to clean up Tombstone and stick there; he was tired of his tumbleweed life.

Born in West Virginia, the 42-year-old lawman drove a tractor trailer for 17 years. He also had a country-music band in which his wife Gayle Lynne played bass. One night he watched a man get shot during a fight in front of the grandstand, and he "stopped raisin' hell" and turned to police work. Gayle Lynne said, "What're you gonna do? Save the world?" And he said, "No. If I can just save one person, it'll be worth it." He also gave up drinking and kicked his cigar habit.

The McNeelys had kin in Tucson, and Roy had always enjoyed Arizona, so he was delighted when a law-enforcement job opened up in nearby Tombstone. Tombstone had been around since 1877, when the discovery of silver deposits rushed it into being. Like so many other by now familiar Western mining towns, it had a brief population explosion, a flirt with naughty notoriety (in 1880 a good-hearted young local attorney made note of the fast life in the dance halls, saloons and casinos, then appended a letter home: "Still there is hope, for I know of two Bibles in town"), and finally fell into desuetude, having little more purpose in the world than grist for the mills of pulp- fiction writers. It clung on, though, a self-proclaimed "town too tough to die," until that moment in this century when the nation realized collectively there was value in old things: if there was gold in them thar Vermont barns, there was money to be made in Boothill.