Zzyzx: The Last Word in the Desert

Welcome to Zzyzx, spelled with a triple Z, a name pronounced ZY-zix and invented so it would fall dead last in the English dictionary and the telephone book. The man who coined it was Curtis Howe Springer, born in Birmingham, Alabama, in eighteen ninety-six, a traveling radio evangelist who called himself the last of the old-time medicine men. In nineteen forty-four, Springer and his wife Helen filed a mining claim on roughly twelve thousand eight hundred acres of federal land here at Soda Springs, and rather than dig for ore, they built a health resort.

Springer recruited homeless men from the Skid Row district of Los Angeles, brought them into the desert, and put them to work pouring concrete. Out of that labor rose a sixty-room hotel he called the Castle, a cross-shaped bathhouse with warm mineral pools, a church, a radio studio, and even a small dirt airstrip he nicknamed Zyport. A palm-lined lane he called the Boulevard of Dreams led guests down to a spring-fed pond.

From this remote oasis, Springer broadcast his sermons and sold his cures over a radio network that at its peak reached more than two hundred stations across the country and around the world. He sold Antediluvian Tea, a tonic called Re-Hib, goat milk, and desert elixirs he claimed could treat almost any ailment. The trouble was that Springer held no medical degree and ran no real mine.

Federal officials concluded that he had done almost everything but mine, and in nineteen sixty-nine the American Medical Association branded him the King of Quacks. On April eleventh, nineteen seventy-four, a federal judge ordered him off the land and gave him just thirty-six hours to leave. The Bureau of Land Management reclaimed the property, and Springer, by then in his late seventies, served time in jail before moving to Las Vegas, where he died in nineteen eighty-five.

Today the buildings still stand, but they belong to the California State University system, which runs a research field station here called the Desert Studies Center. And so the last word in the dictionary became a genuine desert oasis, a place of study, rare fish, and profound quiet.