Title: Book goes deeper than Rancho Mirage's star-studded past Author: Blake Herzog Publisher: Burlington Free Press Date: 6/18/2011 Imagine Bing Crosby as your landlord. If you had lived in Rancho Mirage in the 1950s when the singer and movie star developed an upscale trailer park, Blue Skies Village, onHighway 111, he very well could have been. And if Crosby wasn't around to pester about your plumbing problems, you might have found help with one of his co-investors -- George Burns, Gracie Allen, Barbara Stanwyck, Greer Garson, Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert or Danny Kaye. That's one of the fun tidbits in "Images of America Rancho Mirage," a photo-heavy history book by Leo A. Mallette released in May by Arcadia Publishing. "Before 1920 there was basically nothing here other than a couple of date farms," Mallette said. The first date farm was Everett DaVall's 300-acre Wonder Palms Date Ranch, founded in 1912 near DaVall Road and Wonder Palms Drive, later renamed after one of the city's most famous residents, Frank Sinatra. While compiling the book's 218 pictures from more than 40 sources, he learned there's more to the city's history than the names familiar to Coachella Valley residents since the 1960s -- Sinatra, Bob Hope, Gerald and Betty Ford, and Walter and Leonore Annenberg.

He hadn't realized the area halfway between Palm Springs and Indio was a private aviation hub during post-World War II years, home to the Desert Air Hotel and another airstrip at what is now Morningside Country Club. "There were a lot of people with their own jets who were here in the '40s, '50s and '60s," he said. Eventually, skyrocketing land prices pushed the area into higher-density development, and Desert Air was replaced by the Rancho Las Palmas Resort and Spa and Rancho Las Palmas Country Club. Mallette also touches on the turf war that Bob and Dolores Hope inadvertently touched off when they donated the property that became Eisenhower Medical Center and unincorporated Cathedral City, Palm Desert and Rancho Mirage sought to expand their spheres of influence to include the new medical center. The hospital opened in 1971, and Rancho Mirage was incorporated two years later. Mallette is an aerospace engineer and Pepperdine Universityfaculty member who works and lives in Los Angeles and has spent weekends with his wife at their Rancho Mirage home since 1999. He's written two other books and more than 60 journal articles on such topics as atomic frequency standards, satellite systems and ground stations. "Rancho Mirage" had its genesis a little more than a year ago, when Mallette noticed Palm Springs and Palm Desert were subjects covered by Arcadia's series of hyperlocal, sepia-tinged paperback books.

"I wrote to Arcadia Publishing and asked them if they had one for Rancho Mirage. They wrote back and said, 'No, do you want to write one?' "I said, um, no but the more I thought about it, it sounded like an interesting thing to do." He hasn't heard any sales figures for the book yet, but jokes, "I'm never doing this for the money. I hope it serves as a document of the history of Rancho Mirage at this point in time.".