“You better be sure there’s enough undeveloped land around here to make it worth your while.”
“Shoot, there’s twenty miles of desert past the edge of Proper,” he said. “Nobody’s going to develop that. Not when they can keep putting money into Primm and Las Vegas.”
Kirby was right. Our small town was the last that had benefited from a developer’s imagination, and, despite the money he’d poured into it, the population growth remained constant. For every family that moved in, another moved out. We were the even steven of real estate.
Proper City was named after Pete Proper. Legend had it that Pete vowed to give up all of his vices if only he’d strike gold. Sure enough, he did. Overnight, he swore off drinking, women, and gambling—a big deal in a state where most of it was legal. He built a house in the desert in the late 1800s and encouraged like-minded folks to join his new community. And thus, Proper City was born.
After his death in 1930, the town fell into decline. Its one feature—location, location, location—worked to its disadvantage. Proper City was close enough to the California state line to attract vagrants and scofflaws looking to escape California jurisdiction. Soon enough, the only people looking to develop in Proper were the very bootleggers and gamblers Pete Proper had renounced. Families left and Proper City all but imploded.
In the ’50s, the Clark County Council announced plans to reinvent Proper City as a census-designed town. Small, square, pastel-colored tract houses popped up along street names picked out of children’s books. The town was approved for a library and post office, and retailers were offered tax incentives to move in. These days you can still see the remnants of the early layout of Proper City in the same small houses and the old movie theater downtown. New restaurants came and went and a few old ones stuck around.
I’d been away from Proper for seven years except for holidays when I came home, and it seemed each time I returned, a fresh crop of coffee shops and cupcake stores had moved in along with a batch of theme restaurants that played with the fairy-tale aspects of town. But drive to the town’s edge and you’d be met with miles upon miles of desert, bisected only by a narrow two-lane road. Prairie dogs and rattlesnakes were the residents out that way.
“Have you chosen a college yet?” I asked Kirby.
“Nope. If I don’t get a swimming scholarship, I’m going to the Proper City Community College. In my spare time, I’ll have to work to make the money for tuition.”
I could tell from the look on Kirby’s face that he knew college was more important than the dune buggy he’d been saving for. I wasn’t in a position to offer him anything more than the limited part-time hours my dad already had him working, and twenty hours a week in a costume shop wasn’t going to buy much in the way of higher education.
*
FOR the next two hours, Kirby and I sorted through bins of costume accessories that had been amassed into a large pile in the back corner of the shop. We were two months away from Halloween, which was to us what tax season was to accountants, but our shop didn’t exist by Halloween alone.
Going hand in hand with Proper being census designed was the fact that, aside from what Pete Proper—or Proper Pete as he’d been nicknamed after giving up all of his vices—had established back in 1892, there was no history of important battles being fought here or of celebrities having once dined here—although Clark Gable had been waiting for Carole Lombard at a bar in nearby Goodsprings when her plane went down—so what we were left with was a void. We weren’t known for gambling or shopping or drinking or prospecting. We were a town without an identity.
Nobody really knew who to credit with the costume party craze, but the oldest of the photos that were now featured on the Proper City website were from the early ’60s. Once the parties started, the identity stuck. Backyard barbecues, sweet sixteen parties, promotions, and holidays all became an opportunity to pick a theme and dress accordingly. The Proper City Chamber of Commerce accepted photos from anybody who submitted them, and our quirky love of costume parties became what we were known for in our small corner of the state. Newcomers to our town must have wondered about our sanity.