Arizona, 1957. A small town called Cornville, 40 miles south of Flagstaff. The Sisters of the Holy Cross have run a children’s home on the edge of town since 1931. 26 years, 31 children. On a Tuesday morning in October, a county official drives out from the courthouse with a padlock and an unpaid tax notice for $1,240.
The sisters do not have $1,240. They have 31 children and a kitchen garden and a faith that something will happen before the door closes. Here is the story. The Holy Cross Children’s Home in Cornville occupied a two-story adobe building on the south edge of town, set back from the road behind a low stone wall and a row of cottonwood trees that the sisters had planted in 1933 and that were tall enough by 1957 to give shade to the yard where the children played in the afternoons.
The building had been a school before it was a home. The Sisters of the Holy Cross had converted it in 1931, the second year of the Depression, when the number of children in Yavapai County whose parents could not keep them had become a number that the county itself could not manage alone.
Sister Margaret Claire had arrived at Cornville in 1938 as a young sister of 24 and had been running the home since 1944, when the sister who preceded her had been reassigned to Phoenix. She was 43 years old in October of 1957, a small woman with steady hands and the particular kind of calm that comes not from the absence of worry, but from having worried about everything already and found that worrying changed nothing and action changed some things and prayer changed the rest.
She had the handwriting of a woman who had been writing important things down for a long time and knew the difference between what needed to be recorded and what needed only to be remembered. She kept a ledger of every child who had passed through the home since she had taken over, name and date of arrival and date of departure, and where they had gone.
There were 141 names in the ledger by October of 1957. 31 of them were still in the building. The 31 children ranged in age from 4 to 14, and they came from circumstances that varied in their specifics, but rhymed in their essentials, which was that something had broken in the adult world around them, and they had arrived at the home on the south edge of Cornville as a consequence.
They had come from Prescott and Flagstaff and Cottonwood, and two from as far as Tucson, brought by the county welfare office or by relatives who could not manage, and by one mother who had walked 17 miles on a January morning in 1954 with her two daughters and handed them to Sister Margaret at the door without explanation, and walked back the way she had come.
Sister Margaret had written the mother’s name in the ledger beside the daughters’ names without comment, and had given the two girls the room with the south window because it caught the afternoon sun. The home was funded by three sources. The Diocese of Phoenix contributed a quarterly stipend that covered approximately a third of operating costs in good years and less in bad ones.
The County of Yavapai paid a per child rate that had been set in 1948 and reduced by 11% in 1955 when the county budget contracted. Private donations from Cornville and the surrounding towns made up the difference in some months and did not in others. The property tax on the building was $413 a year, assessed by Yavapai County and due in November.
Sister Margaret had paid it every year from 1944 through 1953 without missing once. In 1954, the boiler failed and the repair cost $890. In 1955, the roof over the east wing leaked through the winter and the repair cost $1,140. In 1956, the county reduced the per child rate and the diocese reduced the quarterly stipend in the same quarter and Sister Margaret paid the operating costs and the children’s medical bills and the food and the heating oil and did not pay the property tax because something had to wait and the property tax was the thing that could wait. It waited 3 years. The accumulated amount with the county’s delinquency penalty applied at the statutory rate was $1,240. The notice had come in September. The county assessor’s office had been patient or had appeared to be or had simply been slow, which produced the
same result for 3 years. The letter in September said the patience was finished. It said that if the outstanding amount was not paid in full within 30 days, the county would proceed to take possession of the property. Sister Margaret had read the letter in the kitchen after the children were in bed and had sat with it for a long time and then had put it in the drawer with the home’s other documents and written three letters, one to the diocese in Phoenix, one to the county welfare office in Prescott and one to a private donor in Flagstaff who had given money before and might give again. The diocese wrote back saying the quarterly stipend could not be increased at this time. The county welfare office wrote back saying it had no discretionary fund for property tax obligations of private facilities. The donor in Flagstaff did not write back. On a Tuesday morning in October, a county official named Mr. Holt drove out from the Prescott courthouse in a county
car with a padlock on the passenger seat and the possession order in a folder. He was a man of 50 who had served the county for 22 years and who did not enjoy this kind of work and had told the assessor’s office so on more than one occasion without result. He parked on the road in front of the stone wall and took the padlock in the folder and walked to the front door.
Sister Margaret was in the kitchen when she heard the car. She came to the door before he knocked. She looked at the padlock. She knew what it meant and what he was there to do. She thanked him for coming personally. She asked him if he would like coffee before he put the padlock on. He said no. She asked if she could have the morning to explain the situation to the children.
Mr. Holt said he was required to complete the possession by noon. She thanked him again and went to find the children. John Wayne had been in Flagstaff the previous night for a dinner connected to a fundraising event for a land conservation group. He left Flagstaff at 7:00 in the morning heading south toward Phoenix where he had a meeting in the afternoon.
He took the road that the man at the hotel desk had described but he had written the junction down wrong in his notebook and took the wrong fork south of town and was 12 miles down a two-lane road through open country before he understood that this was not the road to Phoenix. He slowed when he saw the building and the county car and the man in the dark suit standing at the front door with a padlock.
He pulled over. He had not planned to stop. He was already 40 minutes behind the route he had intended to take and the Phoenix meeting was fixed. He sat in the truck for a moment looking at the scene, the building, the stone wall, the cottonwoods, the county car, the man with the padlock at the door and the nun in the gray habit standing in the doorway and behind her, visible through the gap, the faces of children pressed together trying to see what was happening.
He got out of the truck. He walked to the gate in the stone wall. Mr. Holt turned when he heard the gate. He looked at Wayne and placed the face and blinked once and looked away and then looked back. Wayne asked what was happening. Mr. Holt told him. He told him plainly, the way a man tells a thing he is not proud of but is required to do.
The tax debt, the amount, the possession order, the noon deadline. Wayne looked at Sister Margaret in the doorway. She was looking at him with the expression of a woman who has asked for something many times and has not received it and has stopped expecting to receive it and is therefore not performing hope. She was simply looking at him.
He asked her how many children were in the building. “31.” She said. “The youngest is four.” He looked at the yard behind the stone wall, the cottonwood trees, the kitchen garden with the last of the autumn squash still on the vine. He asked Mr. Holt how the payment needed to be made. Mr.
Holt said, “Cash or certified check payable to the Yavapai County tax assessor with the property address noted on the instrument.” Wayne did not have a certified check. He looked at the wall. He looked at the children in the doorway behind Sister Margaret, one of them a boy of about 10 with a torn collar who was watching with the focused expression of a child old enough to understand that something important was happening and young enough to not yet know that important things often go wrong.
He took the long brown leather wallet from his jacket. He counted $1,240 in bills onto the top of the stone wall in the October light, flat and deliberate the way he always counted. He stacked them and set a small stone from the wall on top. Mr. Holt looked at the money. He looked at Wayne. He said, “Sir, I need to write you a receipt.
” Wayne said, “Write it to the Holy Cross Children’s Home, Cornville, Arizona. Paid in full.” Mr. Holt opened his folder on the hood of the county car. He took out a receipt pad. He wrote the date and the amount and the property address and the notation paid in full and signed it and tore it from the pad. He held it out.
Wayne took it and walked to the door and gave it to Sister Margaret. She looked at the receipt. She read it. She read it a second time. She looked at Wayne. Her face did not change immediately. The change came slowly, the way a face changes when it is receiving something it had stopped believing was possible. She said, “I don’t know who you are.
” He told her his name. She looked at him. She said, “I know your name.” She said, “The children will know your name. Some of them have seen your pictures.” She said it the way a woman says a thing that is meant as information, not as gratitude. He said, “I would ask you not to tell them.” She looked at him.
She said, “Why?” He said, “Because a thing done in secret stays done. A thing announced starts to be about the announcement.” He said, “Keep it between us. Teach the children that a stranger helped. That is enough. Where are you watching from?” Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches.
Mr. Holt collected the money from the stone wall, counted it, put it in the county envelope, and drove back to Prescott. He wrote it in his logbook that afternoon as a paid possession order, no further action required. He did not write the name of the person who had paid. Sister Margaret went back inside.
She gathered the children in the main room and told them that someone had helped today and that the home was staying open. She did not tell them who. The 4-year-old, a girl named Penny, who had arrived 6 months earlier and who had not spoken more than 20 words since, asked if the man with the hat was an angel.
Sister Margaret said she did not think so. She said she thought he was just a man who had taken the wrong road. Wayne drove back to the Flagstaff Junction and found the right fork to Phoenix and made his afternoon meeting. He called his business manager the following week and asked about the home’s annual tax liability.
The manager made inquiries. The annual tax was $413. Wayne instructed him to pay it anonymously from a production company account each November for the following 10 years. The first payment arrived at the Yavapai County Tax Assessor’s office in November of 1957 in a plain envelope with no return address accompanied by a bank check for $413 drawn on an account called Batjac Productions.
The county clerk recorded it and filed the receipt and did not know whose account it was. The payments arrived every November for 10 years through 1967 in the same plain envelope with the same Batjac Productions check inside. The county clerk processed each one without comment. Sister Margaret received the annual receipt and filed it beside the ledger and did not know whose production company account it came from and did not ask.
The home never missed a tax payment in that decade. Sister Margaret left Cornville in 1971 when the diocese reassigned her to a school in Tucson. She was 57 years old. The ledger of children went with her. By the time she left it had 231 names in it. She kept the tax receipt from October of 1957 in the cover of the ledger tucked into the inside fold for the rest of her life.
She died in 1994 in Tucson at the age of 80. The ledger and the receipt were found together in her desk. The Holy Cross Children’s Home in Cornville operated until 1983 when changes in Arizona’s foster care system made the large residential model obsolete. The building was purchased by the town of Cornville and converted into a community center.
The cottonwood trees planted in 1933 are still in the yard. They are very large now. In 1995, a woman named Patricia Oaks, who had lived at the home from 1952 to 1959, and had become an elementary school principal in Sedona, organized a small reunion of former residents. 11 people came. They were between the ages of 43 and 65.
They sat in the room that had been the main room of the home and talked about what they remembered. Patricia donated two items to the Cornville Community Center the following year. The first was a copy of the ledger page showing her own entry, photocopied from Sister Margaret’s original, with her name and dates, and a note in Sister Margaret’s hand that read, “Patricia arrived knowing how to read.
We gave her harder books.” The second was the county tax receipt from October of 1957, paid in full. She had found it in the cover of the ledger when the diocese had sent it to her after Sister Margaret’s death, because Patricia was the only former resident anyone at the diocese had thought to contact.
The receipt is framed on the wall of the main room of the Cornville Community Center beside the door. The cottonwood trees are visible through the window beside it. The placard underneath reads, “On a Tuesday in October 1957, a man took the wrong road out of Flagstaff. He stopped here. He did not stay long.
He asked that his name not be remembered. We are remembering it anyway. The name on the placard is John Wayne. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. There are more stories coming, and unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.”
