A Little Light Reading

Today's AZ Republic has a brief article about a coffee-table book that is a pictorial account of Gilbert's history:

Dale Hallock, a former mayor of Gilbert, has written a pictorial book on the town.

A Pictorial History of Gilbert, Arizona, sponsored by Mercy Gilbert Medical Center, is Hallock's first book and is believed to be the first pictorial history book for the town.

The 144-page coffee table book will be published by The Donning Company Publishers of Virginia Beach, Va., and will contain 200 black-and-white photographs of old Gilbert. Orders begin this month for the $39.95 book that be available in the fall through the Gilbert Historical Museum, the hospital and other locations.

Hallock, a retired escrow officer who was mayor from 1971-76, has several boxes of archived material on the town after researching for nearly 20 years when the opportunity arose. He said he plans to write a comprehensive history of the town as well.

"When this opportunity came, he was the natural because he has done all the research," said Kayla Kolar, executive director of Gilbert Historical Museum.

Mercy Gilbert will donate a portion of the sales to the museum.

"It was absolutely wonderful. I learned many things about pioneers to Gilbert," said Hallock, whose wife hails from the John Anderson family, cattle farmers who homesteaded here in 1886.

The chapters are arranged chronologically by subject and begin with cowboys and homesteading families such as the Gilberts, Coopers and Barkleys.

It's has chapters on the railroad, farming, schools, development of downtown, the Great Depression and World War II, infrastructure, growth from 1970-90 and growth since the 1990s. The last chapter is about the Mercy Gilbert Medical Center.

Hallock was 16 months old when his family came to Gilbert from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma in 1936. He lives in Mesa now, but plans to move back to his hometown soon.

"I go back to my school every Tuesday and Thursday," said Hallock, 72, who volunteers as board secretary of the Gilbert Historical Society, which he helped create in 1973. The society is in what was once Gilbert High School.

After digging through the thousands of pages of tiny print in our current Internal Revenue Code over the last couple of weeks, a picture book sounds downright refreshing.