Desert Rose

Desert Rose was the name of a Salsa that started in Tucson, Arizona about 1978.  The owner sold salsa in non descript glass containers out of the trunk of his car at the Tanque Verdi swap meet. The swap meet was held in area of northeast Tucson located in vacant land by the Tanque Verdi wash and Tucson river (both dry most of the time except after a down pour from a thunderstorm.  The swap is long gone, moved to a location in south central Tucson not far off the Interstate 10 highway.

I was not a salsa user until I tried Desert Rose salsa and I became a real fan.  I could not get enough of that stuff. 

We had long and old friends located in Tucson and still have them to this day.  They are the ones that introduced me to the product.

Later I would have them get me supplies of the salsa which in time had risen from be sold in the back of car to being marketed in high end department stores in Tucson.  We even went so far as to make telephone contact with the folks that made the salsa and had it shipped to us at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

From Dayton I was reassigned to Germany and it became prohibitive to ship it to Germany.  So we suffered through the tour without having it available to us.  There was Mexican restaurant in Bitburg, not far from us at Spangdahlem Air Base.  But we found the food had hybridized to sort of German influenced product and not so good to our liking.

We returned to the states and were assigned to Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California.  That was striking distance to Tucson.  By then we had a son living in Tucson and so we were able to pick some Desert Rose locally.  We also found some later in local grocery stores.  And we reestablished our telephone contact with the purveyors of the product.  So we were again being supplied with the salsa we liked.

I had retired from the Air Force and was working for Rockwell in San Bernardino and we had salsa and chips every Friday.  I introduced the group to Desert Rose and it became the number one product at our Friday shindigs.  This simply attested that Desert Rose was the very best commercial product of its sort.

We moved on the Ruidoso, New Mexico where I worked out on White Sands Missile range.  We kept getting the stuff via mail from their home offices.  By now it had moved to southern California. 
That did not matter we still could get the product.

That job petered out and I ended up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area working for Texas Instruments.  We resided in small community of Argyle, Texas.  And sure enough we continued to get supplied via parcel post.

Texas Instruments Defense Segment was sold to Raytheon and we were transferred to Tucson, Arizona.  No longer the home town of Desert Rose but you could get it off the shelf in the Whole Foods chain  of grocery stores.  No more parcel post for the time being, just drop by the store and pick it up.  Mind you it was not always available but reliable enough for us.

Then all of a sudden it disappeared.  I searched the Internet to no avail.  Yes, I found reference to Desert Rose Salsa but it was no longer be prepared.  The business had folded, the product line was gone.

To bad, we miss the product.  We constantly check local stores for their salsa shelf and find many brands and types of salsa but nothing to approach Desert Rose.