History Adventuring

As much as I've loved living in Phoenix, I miss human scale architecture. And if you're not sure what I'm talking about, get out of your car. Even in my nice suburban neighborhood here in Glendale, everything is scaled for cars. And that means roads as wide as the length of a football field, blank walls next to sidewalks that are inches from gigantic vehicles rocketing by at freeway speeds, and parking lots that seem to stretch for miles. Compare this to the city I lived in in the mid-1980s, Santa Barbara, California. Sure, there are cars - it's California, after all, but they're separated from the humans. Sidewalks along State Street aren't just afterthoughts. There are parking garages, nicely designed into the backgrounds, that allow people to walk with a few steps down to a human scale world. There are trees, and flowers. OK, let's see a show of hands as to how many people have commuted to work on their bicycles in Phoenix! OK, that's a few,

The first time that I saw a movie that was set in the 1980s, as a period piece, with appropriate costumes, etc., I was amused. Nowadays, I see them all of the time. And as someone who was alive in the 1980s, I can easily see how accurate they are, or aren't. And mostly the movies I've seen that are supposed to be set way back in the 1980s are correct, but the one thing that I see wrong over and over is how men more their jeans. Correct length for modern day, wrong for the 1980s. For the past twenty years, men have worn their bluejeans very long. That is, instead of just a slight break on the instep, like like the photo of the guys from the 1980s at the top of this post, they are worn all bunched up at the bottom, which is correct for the 21st Century. In the 1980s, if you wore jeans that were so obviously the wrong length that they bunched up like crazy at the bottom, you looked ridiculous. Kind'a like wearing your dad's jacket, if it was way too big for you

Even though the old expression, "Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men", meant all of mankind, if you take it literally today, it's a worthy goal. A world where men don't kill each other, or hurt each other, is a good goal for mankind. And of course we must start with our children. When I was a kid, children were taught that it was OK to hurt other children. Games were organized that encouraged pushing other children, and hitting them. Adults put children in uniforms and cheered at the brutality. It made me to ill to think of it then, and it still does. Because in my lifetime nothing has really changed. Sure, bare-knuckled fist-fighting is a thing of the past, and we cringe when we imagine crowds of people standing around and cheering as the opponents got bloodied up and bruised. No, I don't have any children, and they would probably be embarrassed by their old man's wimpy attitude towards violence. And no, I wouldn't go and protest against violen

The city of Phoenix, Arizona, which was founded in 1870, had a trolley car system from 1887 until 1948, and then had nothing until the modern light rail system, which is now in operation, began in 2008. Electric Trolley Car in 1905, 1st Street and Washington, Phoenix, Arizona. That means that for over sixty years, the city of Phoenix had trolley cars that took them all over the valley, and to Mesa and Tempe. Then in 1948 the trolley car system was abandoned, and for the next sixty years, light rail did not exist in Phoenix. The Phoenix that I remember, beginning in the 1980s for me, didn't have light rail. And even most of my expert PhDs (Phoenix History Detectives) aren't old enough to remember the 1940s. And that makes it surprising for people like me to see old photos of the trolleys. The Phoenix that I know just kept widening the roads, building more parking lots, building more freeways. The city of Phoenix lived with light rail for sixty years and then went w

If you've lived in Phoenix since the 1930s, you've probably know about the Heard Museum, which is a Museum of Indian Art, and is on Central between Thomas and McDowell. You may have even gone there, and if you haven't, I recommend it, it's a great place. And it all started with a young couple named Dwight and Maie (Bartlett) Heard, and the Suburban Realty Company of 1897 in Phoenix. Now waitaminute, before you jump to any conclusions about a dramatic story of Real Estate, and wild land deals, hang on. That never happened. It was simply a story of two people who got rich by selling Real Estate in Phoenix. And they did it the old-fashioned way, they earned it. Now, to be fair, Dwight did have the advantage of the Bartlett family, who had a fair amount of money on their own, and invested it with him. He also had the advantage of his wife Maie, who did more than sit around the house looking pretty, she helped run the business. 1913 I have to admit that the fir

As an ASU grad, and someone who is interested in history, I have to admit that the first time I saw the school called “Tempe Normal School”, I thought it was pretty funny. When I went there, it wasn't normal, and I can't imagine that is nowadays. 1911 Anyway, a Normal School is just the old-fashioned name for a school that specialized in teaching teachers, that is, a Teacher's College, which what the name of the school became in 1926, and in 1958 it became Arizona State University. By the way, in case anyone asks you, and I doubt that they will, the original name of the team was the Normals. That's why the football players in the photo at the top of this post have an "N" on their jerseys. Then when the school changed its name to the Tempe State Teacher's College, it was the Bulldogs. Then in 1946, they became the Sun Devils, and the cartoon character that we know now was created by an ex-Disney cartoonist named Berk Antony. Berk Antony

Time travel with me to the near future. Self-driving cars are as unremarkable as cell phones. No one is gasping in amazement at them any more than anyone is gasping in amazement that I am able to make a phone call without a cord on my phone, miles away from my house. It's a complex system of computers, ground positioning satellites (GPS), that sort of thing, but everyone is just taking it for granted. Cell phones and self-driving cars. And it will be the end of parking spots. I've lived in Phoenix and Los Angeles (mostly Phoenix) all of my adult life. And most of the people I've known have driven cars. And one of the most important things in their lives has been a parking spot. It's the first thing that eager eyes look for at a destination. It's the subject of conversation. When my California friends visit me, sometimes they just can't help looking at amazement at a parking spot. Look! Right there! Near the store, or restaurant! In Phoenix in the summer t

Every once in a while someone mentions to me that the water in Phoenix is drying up, and that the city is near a crisis state. Then inevitably they mention the droughts in California, and the Colorado River and the Hoover Dam. And then, at the risk of hurting feelings, I mention that Phoenix has been around since 1870, that the Hoover Dam was built in 1939, and that the water from the Colorado River didn't even reach Phoenix until the 1980s. And that's when people ask me "then where does the water come from?", and I point to the canals. Yes, a small percentage of water for Phoenix comes from the Colorado River, but the vast majority comes from the Salt River. And if you look at a map of Phoenix and look at that big empty thing labelled "The Salt River", just south of the airport, I can understand your concern. There's no water in it (well, maybe a little around Tempe), but the river is still there, in the canals. The canal just north of me, the Ar

OK, to be fair, the Phoenix Mountains, which run east and west from 7th Avenue to 44th Street, aren't really mountains. You know, like the Rocky Mountains. In fact, Omar Turney, who named Squaw Peak, refused to call it a "mountain", so he just called it a peak. Nowadays it's Piestewa Peak, but that's just part of the range of the Phoenix Mountains. The Phoenix Mountains are exactly the kind of places that I've gone to all of my life, right there in the city and seemingly hundreds of miles away. And the best places in the Phoenix Mountains are easy to find - just look where everyone is going, and go somewhere else. When I first moved to Phoenix, in the 1980s, I would park my car in the park and go wander over the southern slopes, in an area where there was a tiny old sidewalk. I called it the "pink sidewalk". Nowadays, of course, there are luxury homes there, so I don't go there anymore. But there are a lot of other places, such as a place

I've lived in Phoenix, Arizona (with the exception of a few years in Los Angeles) since I was a teenager. And since I grew up in Minneapolis, there wasn't much of a “culture shock” for me. Most of the people I've known in Phoenix are from the midwest, such as Iowa, or Minnesota. Or their parents, or grandparents, were. And if their family goes back in Phoenix beyond that, they have been in a city that has been immersed in Midwestern culture for a very long time, so they don't find midwestern behavior, or culture, all that unusual. Of course, if you've never lived anywhere else in your life, you will deny that there is any culture at all. I am a believer that people all live in tribes and just call themselves “the people” and never consider that they have a “culture” or an “etiquette” at all - that's just the way things are done. But if you've lived elsewhere, you know that every place has its own etiquette, and culture. That is, acceptable behavior. A

I love having a car and living in Phoenix. The car I own now is smooth and quiet, and best of all it has some awesome air conditioning! I push a button, my garage door opens, and before I've gone more than a block, no matter how hot it is out there, my little "technology bubble" is keeping me comfortable. And did I mention that it has an awesome sound system, too? With this point of view, I've had a lot of trouble picturing owning a car in territorial Phoenix, right after the turn of the century, say from 1902 to 1912. But I think I'm figuring it out. It was a transitional time from relying on horses to relying on machines, and it must have been kinda crazy. I like technology. I'm an early adopter. My career grew up with computers. I've used them at work and at home, so to me they're kind of like cars. It's hard for me to imagine a world without them, or people who don't like them. But comparing computers to cars helps me to understand.

Like a lot of the roads in Phoenix, like Bell, or Thomas, Osborn Road is named after a farmer. He was John Preston Osborn, and that's his photo at the top of this post. His farm was waaaayyyy north of the Phoenix city limits in the 1800s (the city limits ended at Van Buren, by the way). Of course, not much is left of the Osborn farm except the name. If you stop for a Starbucks at 7th Street and Osborn, you can see where the original Osborn school was, which was right next to Smith's Chapel, which became Bethel Methodist Church. There have actually been four churches there, and the one from the 1940s, which is still there, is the newest. The Osborn family had a lot of influence on Phoenix. John's grandson, Sidney, became Governor of Arizona. Sidney's middle name was the same as his grandpa's, which, as a person who enjoys genealogical research, I like. Just to keep the record straight, Sidney's father was Neri. I've always been fascinated by the n

If you've lived in Phoenix for a while, you've seen the name Del Webb. I'm not gonna try to make a list of all of the places I've seen the name Del Webb stamped into a building, and if you've noticed them, you know why - too many for me to count! But I like to focus on what made him famous, and got him on the cover of Time Magazine in 1962: Sun City. Yes, Del bought up a ghost town called Marinette along Grand Avenue in the 1950s and built a retirement city there. Article about Marinette, Arizona in 1911 Now, waitaminute, Sun City wasn't the first retirement community around there, Youngtown preceeded it by several years (I don't want you Youngtown people throwing chairs at me here!). But Del really went all out. If you look at old photos of Sun City, you will see that he didn't just build some stray houses out there (and it was waaaaayy out there in 1960!), he built hotels, grocery stores, community centers, golf courses, just about everythi

I speak for the trees. I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where there are trees that arch over the neighborhood streets. Even though I've lived in Phoenix since I was a teenager, I still need to walk under tall trees sometimes. I don't know if it comes from being a Midwesterner, but I feel better around trees. I would like to think that everyone does. I collect old photos of Phoenix, and what really catches my eye is the amount of trees that Phoenix used to have. Phoenix is much older than I had ever suspected, going back to 1870. And that's long before the invention of air conditioning, which pretty much made trees unnecessary, I guess. But trees did more than shade the un-air-conditioned buildings of Phoenix. They were planted along the canals to show off that life could now flourish here in the desert. They were wind breaks along the edges of farms. And the palm trees showed that the valley had been made into an oasis. Unfortunately, trees are messy. They are

Nowadays Phoenix and San Francisco don't seem to have much of a connection. The City by the Bay seems so very far away, both physically and culturally. But in territorial Arizona, San Francisco was very important to Phoenix. It was a lifeline. Time travel with me to 1906. San Francisco is ultra-modern. It's a busy city, with a busy port. There's nothing else that compares to it. Los Angeles won't really be much of a city for quite a while, certainly not with a port that rivaled San Francisco. The world connected to the western United States through the port of San Francisco. Now let's go to Phoenix in 1906. And if you're picturing tumbleweeds and a sleepy "old west" town, look again. Phoenix is as up to date as it can be. There is electricity, street cars, modern buildings. There are banks. You can get gourmet meals at the major hotels, including oysters. You can drink champagne, and cold beer. You could buy expensive furniture, and fancy clo

I didn't grow up in Phoenix. I moved there when I was 19 simply because I wanted to get away from the snow and cold of Minneapolis. I had a car, I knew how to read a map, and the rest I knew I could figure out when I got there. When I did get there, I got myself organized, figured out how to pay the rent, attended Phoenix College, and then got my degree at ASU. And I don't recall thinking one way or another about Phoenix. It was just a place to be. I left for Los Angeles a few days after I graduated to go find work in the Big City, which I did for a several years. But when I returned to Phoenix, just for a visit, just to see some old friends, I knew that I was returning home. I never got that feeling in Minneapolis, and I never got it in Southern California. In Phoenix it washed over me in waves. This was my home. Yesterday I was driving around the area of Phoenix that I had returned to, and I could see it the way I saw it back then. California had been so crowded and di

Unless you're a serious history buff, you may be surprised to find out that during the Civil War, Arizona was Confederate. That is, pro-slavery, and in favor of seceding from the Union. Of course, Arizona had no real reason to be Confederate. The economy had never been based on slavery, and after the war, most Arizonans were anxious to remove the stigma of having ever been associated with the Confederacy. They were anxious to embrace the Union of the United States, the Republic. The political party of Abraham Lincoln, which had been in favor of keeping the Union together, and was in favor of a strong Federal policy, were the Republicans. Democrats had been in favor of state's rights over being told what to do by the Federal Government. When the Federal Government started telling the states what to do, they went to war over it. That's the reason for the Civil War. After the civil war, there were still plenty of pro-Confederate people in Arizona. But, like Confederat

OK, I'll admit it, I moved to Phoenix for the weather. I grew up in Minneapolis, which is wonderfully green because it seems like it's always either raining, or snowing. And while I like trees, and green landscaping, I don't like rain, and I don't like snow. I collect old photos of Phoenix, and post them on the web. It's a learning experience, and one of the things I've learned is that not everyone agrees with me about how beautiful the weather is in Phoenix. And that group tends to be the people who grew up in Phoenix, and who experienced the terribly hot summers. I have often wondered how these kids could stand the heat, trying to play outside, etc., but I guess kids do what they have to do. I moved to Phoenix when I was 19, and have spent most of my time in a nice air-conditioned office. In fact, one of the jobs I had was in what I have always considered to be a “space ship” in a tall building downtown, now called Chase Tower. I would drive my air cond