Vernon Bauldry has a neighbor problem. The same goes for Alan Goff. When they eye each other from across the street, they see the enemy.
The two men have complained to the police about each other, hired lawyers and battled in court. Bauldry, a retired carpenter and heart patient, stands at his bedroom window and monitors Goff's every move. Goff, a telephone-company employee and drag-racing enthusiast, fears Bauldry so deeply that he won't walk from his house to his car without a pistol in his hand.
This has been going on for more than a decade, in a seemingly placid residential neighborhood near the intersection of 16th Street and Bethany Home Road.
Except for the for-sale sign in the front yard, which has been in place on and off since the mid-1980s, the Bauldry property is the picture of perfection. Vernon and his wife, Leona, keep the lawn and bushes green and trim, and the house paint is like new. The family Buick is kept behind the garage door, which is decorated with a large silhouette of an antique car. Across the street, several vehicles mark the Goff property, including a large, black trailer slumping in the driveway, a four-door pickup truck and two large, American muscle cars in various states of repair parked at the curb. A half-dozen or more "No Trespassing" signs are displayed around the front of the house. Except for weeds and crabgrass, the yard is dead. Bauldry feuds with Goff because of the condition of Goff's house. Goff won't clean up his act, because he feels he's being harassed by Bauldry.
This feud--how it got started, where it's been and how it might someday conclude--has been a topic of discussion on this block for years. Neighbors of the feuding neighbors don't know when it will end, but fear that it will end badly. "Sooner or later, Vern's going to take Alan so far that he's going to go off his rocker," says one neighbor.
"I'm afraid there will be a tragedy if something isn't straightened out," says a former neighbor, who fled the neighborhood years ago because of all the malice in the air. "They both, I think, are going berserk."
@rule:
@body:Chicago-area natives, the Bauldrys had been living in their home for several years when the Goff family moved in. Alan Goff was married then, with children. The Bauldrys had children, too, and the two families started off on friendly terms, the Bauldrys say. "Alan and his wife took good care of the house," remembers Leona Bauldry. Vernon says he would regularly accept daytime deliveries of car parts for his mechanically minded neighbor when Goff was at work.
Things started to go downhill when Goff and another neighbor, a dentist who lives next door to the Bauldrys, got into a dispute over a delivery of concrete. Goff and the dentist, who wouldn't be interviewed for this story, poured driveways at the same time, with Vernon Bauldry lending a hand. But there was a dispute over the bill for the mixer truck. The Bauldrys aren't sure why, but the tiff between Goff and the dentist quickly spread to them. "That seems when the trouble started," says Leona Bauldry. "Goff was friendly then, and then all of a sudden he just went berserk for some reason."
The Goffs were eventually divorced, and Alan kept the house, which began to deteriorate.
Since then, the Bauldrys have kept a list of grievances against Goff. His many cars are loud, so loud that Leona's pictures are sometimes shaken off the walls in the front room. Goff keeps beat-up, primer-painted cars and dragsters on blocks in his front yard. Goff has let his yard go to tall weeds. Railroad ties have been kept in a pile at the curb. At night, Goff has placed garish strobe lights in his windows. He decorates his vehicles with profane signs and sayings.
The Bauldrys have complained to the City of Phoenix about Goff's yard before, and the city has cracked down. Goff, threatened with fines under a property maintenance code adopted in the late 1980s, was forced to bring his house and yard into compliance. Goff's maintenance-code file is not currently active, meaning that all of the cars on his property are now licensed, his roof has been repaired, trash and debris have been cleaned up and yard vegetation adequately tamed.
Still, Goff's yard does not meet the standards set by yards like the Bauldrys'. Vernon and Leona--both in their 60s, now free of their children and anxious to move to a smaller place--say they've had their house on the market for two years. They say they've talked to upward of 50 potential buyers, but the scene across the street is scaring away prospects. "The last one we had in says, 'What the hell is that over there, a used-car lot?'" says Leona. @rule:
@body:"We were never friends with the Bauldrys," says Alan Goff. "From the minute we moved in, we knew something was wrong. He would constantly be spying on us, or watching us with binoculars or in some way harassing us.
