Judy McBride and Joe Serreyn presented “Rimrock Ranch: From Dudes to Mobsters” as part of the Sedona Heritage Museum’s Sedona Stories program on Thursday, Jan. 9. McBride, who was a teacher and superintendent for the Beaver Creek School District from 1977 until 2004, and her husband Jim owned the Rimrock Ranch from 1974 until she sold it to Serreyn in 2019. Rimrock Ranch, sometimes known as “the Mafia house” or “the castle,” was built in 1928 by Virginia Finnie, Russell Boardman and Romaine Lowdermilk as a guest ranch.
Lowdermilk was an entertainer and singing cowboy of the early 1900s who founded the Kay El Bar Guest Ranch in Wickenburg when he was 21, eventually developing the working ranch into the first dude ranch in the state. In 1928, he married Finnie, who had been born at Soda Springs Ranch, which was located near Montezuma Well, to Robert Finne and Flora May Weatherford.
“Weatherford is a Flagstaff name,” McBride said. “There’s a hotel in Flagstaff, the Weatherford Hotel. So her mom was highly educated and also had a sense of hospitality. And I think Virginia learned a lot from her mom.”
After the Lowdermilks acquired the Rimrock Ranch, they developed it as a tourist destination and used connections with the Fred Harvey Company tobring in visitors and give them a Western experience.
“Fred Harvey, being Fred Harvey, was always looking for ways to make tours happy,” McBride said. “And somehow he connected with Boardman, because he used Boardman to pick up one or two passengers. Boardman was sort of a key partner, but did not, was not on the property for day-to-day operations. He was picking up guests, either in Phoenix or Flagstaff, and flying them to the ranch.”
Boardman was a wealthy aviation enthusiast who in 1931 set a world record for the longest nonstop flight. Accompanied by copilot John Polando, Boardman navigated a single-engine Bellanca 5,011.8 miles from New York City’s Floyd Bennett Field to Istanbul in 49 hours and 20 minutes, with the aircraft stripped of all extra equipment and carrying 728 gallons of fuel in cans throughout the cabin.
During her talk, McBride screened a film that she produced in 2012 and a silent short titled “Indian Detours” that had been distributed by the Fred Harvey Company. The short documented the company’s tours of American Indian communities, mainly in New Mexico in the early 20th century. McBride’s film also included two minutes of footage showing Boardman landing his plane at the Rimrock Ranch airstrip and guests being taken to the ranch in Harvey cars.
“Fred Harvey was sort of ahead of his time. Herealized that people wanted more than just a bed to sleep in and breakfast the next morning, they wanted to have an experience,” McBride said.
Boardman’s death near Indianapolis in July 1933 brought an end to the trio’s ownership.
“The adventurous career of Russell Boardman, 35,Boston and Springfield, Mass., aviator and sportsman, was terminated today by death,” a July, 4, 1933 AP report stated. “Injuries suffered last Saturday while streaking down the runway of the municipal airport caused his death. He had landed to refuel while racing across country in the New York to Los Angeles air derby. During the takeoff in resumption of his westward flight a crosswind caught his tiny ship and sent it spinning out of control.”
The Lowdermilks divorced in 1941, and Finnie would go on to marry Paul Webb in 1951.
“Rimrock Ranch wassold to the Eatons in the early ’30s, the Schlegals in 1938, a development company in 1958 and the English brothers, with known Mafia affiliation, in 1963,” a Beaver Creek Preservation and Historical Society Facebook post from September 2015 stated.
Charles “Chuckie English” and Sam “Butch” English, who had changed their surnames from Inglese, were soldiers in the Chicago Outfit.
In a Jan. 25, 1964 interview with The Phoenix Gazette, Sam “Butch” English said he didn’t plan to live at Rimrock Ranch and that he saw it as an investment.
“What am I, some kind of monster?” English said. “I have never done a day in jail in my life. What is it with me that the newspapers always picture me as a monster?”
English was mentioned prominently during a U.S. Senate investigation of racketeering in Chicago restaurants in 1953 and 1954.
After English’s departure, the ranch was uninhabited for a number of years and was vandalized. By the time the McBrides purchased it in 1974, only the rock walls of the living room and dining room and two rock houses were standing.
“This place is a young person’s dream but an old person’s nightmare,” was how McBride’s mother described the ranch when she first toured the property in January 1974. Fortunately, McBride described her husband Jim, who died in 2010, as being a man who could fix anything.
The McBrides first met in December 1971 while staying in the same apartment complex in San Jose, Calif.
“The business [Jim] had at the time was called Mobile Clean,” McBride said. “It was a mobile car wash. He would take a oneton truck and outfit it with a Wisconsin engine and a wash tank and a rinse tank and and go and wash cars in [parking] lots.”
“I just couldn’t keep it anymore. But Joe was very aware of the hill, so he would come up to my house,” McBride said of the ranch. “[Serreyn] loves Irish whiskey, so his version is much more dramatic than mine. But I would pour him an Irish whiskey. I would drink ice tea, and like the third or fourth time that we visited around the kitchen table there, he’s signing the papers buying the property.”
Serreyn has been using the property as a short-term rental and as a poultry farm, selling eggs to local restaurants. He also has plans to install aquaponics.
McBride said that she was pleased with how the Rimrock Ranch is being run and that she views its current use as continuing its dude ranch legacy.
“Now the property is about animal husbandry, poultry raising, and learning what you can do and bringing that knowledge back home,” Serreyn subsequently said. “It continues from the old-fashioned cowboy to more of a modern-day homesteader”
