with an attached gasoline station and a huge service garage. Across the road, a series of wooden structures were built, including a market (which at one time was the largest Coleman camping equipment dealer in the country), and a post office. He also built several cabins for travelers, and a large "plunge" (swimming pool) next to the café where travelers could escape the desert heat. Ragsdale was a desert eccentric of the first order, and his advertising for Desert Center in publications such as Desert Magazine reflected his personality: "U Need Us – We Need U", "Our Main Street is 100-miles long!", "We lost our keys...we can't close!" (a reference to the fact that the café has been open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year since it opened in 1921), "Free Room and Board Every Day The Sun Doesn't Shine In Desert Center", "If You Don't Believe Me, You Can Go To Hell, or Visit Me in Desert Center in August! Nuf sed, Steve". When Ragsdale needed a teacher for his own children and the few others in the town, the county declined to send one; there weren't enough students to warrant the expense. Ragsdale hastily built a basic structure of stick framing with paper board walls to use as a schoolhouse, and placed an ad in Los Angeles newspapers asking for an auto mechanic with a large family, which he got, and a teacher was indeed provided by the county. Ragsdale frequently retreated to his writing shack near the north tip of the rock formation called "The Alligator" (across I-10 from Desert Center) where he composed poetry—the stanzas are referred to as "Spasm #1", etc.—to be distributed in booklet form to travelers. Ragsdale was a close friend of many classic "desert people" such as Randall Henderson, founder of Desert Magazine; Marshall South, the hermit of Ghost Mountain; desert painter John Hilton; noted biologist Edmund C. Jaeger; and Harry Oliver, with whom Steve co-founded the annual Pegleg Smith Liar's Contest in Anza-Borrego. Oliver often printed items about Desert Steve in his 'newspaper,' the Desert Rat Scrap Book. Within a few years, Ragsdale operated a number of satellite businesses in locations such as Cactus City, Hell, Skyway, Box Canyon, and Shaver's Well. Around 1950, he left Desert Center, living the rest of his days at his log cabin retreat near the summit of Santa Rosa Mountain. His sons, Stanley,