'Mayor of Mud Springs' a true Old West character

Bill Bowden remembers going off to Sunday school class each week in the mid-1920s hoping that his regular teacher would be absent. What he and the other boys in the small San Dimas church were hoping for was the appearance of a quiet man in his early 70s as their substitute teacher. Bowden and the rest of the boys knew it didn't take much to draw this teacher away from Bible study and into the Old West. Soon their teacher would be regaling them with colorful tales of Geronimo or Wyatt Earp or Tombstone, Ariz. or even the gold rush in the Yukon. The teacher was San Dimas citrus rancher John P. Clum, who could tell great stories because he had lived through most of them himself. "He had a perpetual twinkle in his eye and a soft voice," said Bowden, a resident of Goldsboro, N.C., when he wrote a recollection for the San Dimas Historical Society. "These were the Sundays we liked. Not because we didn't like David and Goliath, but Mr. Clum told us Indian stories. Stories like you wouldn't believe ..." After years in the mining towns of the West and Klondike, Clum spent some of his latter years in the relative quiet of a West Cienega Street ranch in San Dimas. While there, he was jokingly called the Mayor of Mud Springs, a reference to San Dimas' original name and because he was once mayor - in fact, the first mayor - of Tombstone. He went to Rutgers College as a divinity student but quit to take a job with the War Department. He was among the first employees of the new Meteorological Service, later the National Weather Service. After a long train trip to Colorado, he rode a bumpy stagecoach the remaining 100 miles to Santa Fe, N.M., carrying his fragile barometer in one hand and a derby hat in another, according a story he would tell friends. He made New Mexico's first official weather observation in November 1871...DailyBulletin