Home Sweet Jerome: Death and Rebirth of Arizona's Richest Copper Mining City is the first modern history of Jerome. It's the history of how the town came back to life after mining abandoned it in 1953. It's the story of how uncommon people -- hippies, old timers, businesspeople, outlaws, artists -- overcame antipathy for each other to create a new future from the shards of the past.For thirty-two years, Diane Sward Rapaport was immersed in Jerome?s social and political life. "I became privy to the fortunes and misfortunes, dreams and ambitions of a quirky patchwork of rebels, heroes, scoundrels, and artists. I heard preposterous stories: the ten-dollar sale of Main Street in the 1950s; the ghost that lived in a gun; the theft of a large amount of money from the Catholic Church; and several 500-plant pot gardens growing in the mountains." A drug bust in October of 1985 made The New York Times with the headline?Ghost Town That Was Restored to Life is Now in Uproar Over Raid for Drugs.? Among those arrested were two members of Jerome's Town Council and its Chief of Police.