Friday, July 18, 2008

Grandma Hazelton is Famous

For those of you who don't the legend of my Grandma Hazelton, the local newspaper of Cottonwood, AZ has been helpful enough to introduce her to a wider audience.

Short version: my amazing, sage and childlike Grandma is a bit of a local celebrity in the small AZ town where she lives in an apartment a mile from my parents. She walks everywhere, to the point that she gets about 7 offers a day to give her a ride because she's looks like a little lost lady or maybe a homeless person, and people want to help her. People have stopped and wanted to take her home to their house for Thanksgiving, not knowing that she has family. Everyone from Walgreen's to Denny's to Dairy Queen knows about the little, hunched over old lady who walks around Cottonwood. There's even a man who was so touched by his interaction with her (she's a little bit of a prophet/nun) that he pre-pays for her coffee at Starbucks every week. She just walks in and they give it to her.

I think that's the story that caught the reporter's attention, but nevertheless, here's a cute little local profile of my Grandma Hazelton, part of the "local color" of smaller town Arizona, that happens to be related to me. On a side note, though this article doesn't really reveal any of the AMAZING things about Grandma Hazelton, my brother and I seriously, seriously want to make a documentary about her, and I have about 12 hours of recordings I did with her in 2006 about everything from her childhood to her opinions about possible life on other planets. Golden!

Here's a link which hopefully works
I have jpeg's of the article which I might try to put up here if it's not too wonky.

5 comments:

lacie said...

i didn't know you have family in cottonwood!! i have cousins who live and ranch there. that's wild. i bet they know your grandma. :)

JustAnotherDramaQueen said...

oh my goodness. adorable!

Anonymous said...

this is so awesome!

too bad i didn't get to know here when she lived in sd... i guess in high school we were too cool for that... or something.

Kj said...

Update: I just talked to Grandma Hazelton yesterday, and not only has everyone in Cottonwood told her "Ooh, I saw you article!' but she's mostly dumbfounded by the fact that she is on the Internet. "Oh Katie, someone said the article even made it to the Internet? Oh my goodness!"

Liz said...

Yeah for the incredible shrinking grandma!!!