History Adventuring

Time-travel with me, and let's be the happiest baby ever, in Phoenix, Arizona in 1938. The photo at the top of this post is of my neighbor and fellow history adventurer,  +Carole Lowe Beath  . As you can see, she was the happiest baby ever. It's 1938, the United States is still digging itself out of the Great Depression, and there's a major World War just around the corner. But we're a happy baby, and that doesn't matter. What matters is that we're in Phoenix, and the future looks bright. Phoenix, Arizona in 1938 Dad works for Union Oil (look carefully - there's a "76" sticker in the back window of the car). The house, by the way, is at 339 N. 20th Drive, which is near 20th Avenue and Van Buren. A nice neighborhood! Phoenix will grow so fast after the 1940s it will be almost unrecognizable. That's what Phoenix does, it grows, and it's still growing. The "happiest baby ever" house is still there, by the way. The n

Let's time-travel back to the 1950s in Phoenix. We're heading north on Central at Van Buren. It's a one-way now, but it wasn't then. Let's look at the buildings. I did this with one of my very best PhDs (Phoenix History Detectives) on Sunday. As we drove along, my tour guide, who saw all of this when it was new, pointed out interesting buildings, and I saw them. Of course they're not all there! Most of them are gone. And so when you find ones that you recognize, like the 1st National Bank Building there (which is now an ASU Building), it's a lot of fun. The grey building on the left with the radio tower is the Westward Ho, and in front of it is the old Post Office building, which like a lot of buildings in downtown Phoenix, are being repurposed by ASU. Behind the Standard Oil Building (I've moved to the right front now), is the Sahara Hotel, which was where Hattie Mosher's house originally was, and is where the ASU Law Building is nowadays.

Let's go time-traveling back to 1899 in Phoenix, Arizona and watch them getting started on the construction of the Territorial Capitol Building. I spent the night in back of the Golden Eagle Livery Stable at 2nd Street and Washington. Not sure where you were, but I see that you're walking from the direction of Melinda's Alley, so I won't ask. The trolley line goes all of the way out to the Capitol Grounds, but since neither one of us has a nickel, I guess we'll walk. It's not that hot today. Well, not as hot as it's been lately. The Capitol Ground have been there for almost ten years now, and it's a good-looking park with trees, people picnicking, that sort of thing. I suppose after the new building is completed, people will still take the trolley out there to picnic. We've been walking for a while and my darned ankle is starting to hurt already. I wish we could jump on one of those cars! Yeah, I don't even have a penny, I sure can'

If you've lived in Southern California, anywhere from Santa Barbara down to San Diego, you know about the eerie feeling of the Santa Ana Winds. It's those rare occasions when the wind blows from inland, not from seaward. It starts in the Mojave Desert and blows down all of the way to Baja California. My favorite description of it is from Raymond Chandler, who wrote the Phillip Marlowe mysteries in the 1940s “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks." Of course, Chandler was referring to Los Angeles, and most people in LA aren't bothered by the Santa Ana winds anymore, they just turn on their air conditioners. But if you've felt it, you know it. My apartment in Santa

If you've read Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe stories, and are familiar with the greater Los Angeles area, you recognize his fictional "Bay City" - Santa Monica. Why Chandler chose to fictionalize the name, and still use familiar street names and landmarks, I have no idea. My best guess is that he wrote in kind of a hurry, and hoped that people wouldn't figure much out. I have no idea if they used "Bay City" for Santa Monica in the movies. I've seen the movies, but they've left little impression on me. The books, however brought me back to the 1940s. In fact, I was living in Hollywood when I first read them, just up from Franklin on Argyle, and Chandler's fictional hero spent a lot of time around there. If you're not familiar with Los Angeles, then Santa Monica and LA seem to be pretty much the same place. But they're not. Santa Monica is not part of the City of Los Angeles. It has its own mayor, its own police force. And

Everyone loves a sentimental journey - seeing the old neighborhood, that sort of thing. And luckily for me, one of my old 'hoods was Los Angeles in the 1980s. And that means that I can see it in the backgrounds of low-budget movies on Netflix. I do it all of the time. But it gets better. Because I'm not just interested in a sentimental journey, I like time-traveling to Los Angeles in any era. And since so many TV shows and movies were made in the Los Angeles area, I can see a lot of it, just by "background watching". A few days ago I discovered an old TV show from 1955 called "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". They're short stories (mysteries I guess you'd call them) shot in Los Angeles. And while I'm sure that the stories are wonderful, and the acting is great, I'm looking at the backgrounds. The first episode, called "Revenge" (remember that these were thrilling mystery stories) is set in a trailer court near the beach where th

If you've flown in to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Arizona, you know that there are Terminals 2, 3, and 4. And that gives you a pretty good clue that something is missing. It is - Terminal 1 is just a parking lot nowadays, and not a terribly big parking lot, which gives you a good idea how small Phoenix was in 1952, when that Terminal was built. But I remember using it in the 1980s, so Phoenix old-timers, and historians, know about it. But it's not the original Sky Harbor Terminal. When one of my fellow history adventurers wanted to go find the location of the original Sky Harbor Terminal a few days ago, I scoffed. I had seen old photos of Sky Harbor in the early 1930s, when it was just a landing field, with a few scattered buildings. But by the late 1930s it was a real airport, with real terminal buildings. Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon Click here to become a Patron! Take a look at the photo at the top of this post. Yes, there's a te

Let's go to Walgreens in 1933 Phoenix. It's on the southwest corner of Central and Monroe. If you live in Phoenix nowadays, and don't recognize the picture in the building, that's not surprising, it hasn't looked like that since the bricks were covered up just a few years later when it became Owl Drug. And over the years the facade has been continuously updated, to keep it looking modern, smooth, and shiny. And maybe that's because Phoenix didn't want its buildings to look "old fashioned". If you had visited this corner ten years ago, the old Central Methodist Church had been there. In 1925 it was torn down and this new building went up. Now, don't worry, the congregation built a nice new church just a few blocks north, between Pierce and Fillmore. OK, let's go back to the southwest corner of Central and Monroe. Wow, everything is so modern! Phoenix went through a huge building boom in the '20s and my old town is hardly

Let's go to 1943 Phoenix, Arizona. Luckily, we have a nice new car, and luckily, we're right near Paul Bennett's Super Station, which was on the northwest corner of Van Buren and 2nd Avenue. You may be saying, "Now waitaminute, we've got a brand new car, shouldn't we be able to just get in it and go?" But it's 1943 and even brand new cars need a LOT of maintenance. Maybe not as much as in the old "Model T days", but a lot more than they would need in the 21st Century. The most important thing is regular lubrication. The guys who work there are often called "grease monkeys" because they're always covered in a lot of grease. I have no idea how many lubrication points my car has, but it's a lot. And they need to be attended to on a regular basis. Yeah, I could get a grease gun and do it myself, but luckily I'm wealthy enough to have Bennett's do it, and do it right. Of course I'm going to have Goodyear

Let's go history adventuring to an area of downtown Phoenix that should look familiar to you - looking south on Central from Monroe. What should look very familiar is the building there in the background, the Luhr's Building, which is on Jefferson, and the building at the right, the Heard Building, still looks pretty much the same, although it's gone through some face-lifting since this photo was taken in 1926. The trolley tracks there are on Monroe. There wasn't a track down Central until the new Light Rail went in. On the left is the Western Auto Supply Company, which was in the old Post Office. Next to it is Pinney and Robinson, Sporting Good Exclusively (the one with the rifle above the sign). And then there's the Builder's Exchange. All of these buildings were replaced in 1931 when the Professional Building was built there (originally the headquarters for Valley Bank, now the Hilton Garden Inn). Then there's the alley (originally referred to as Mel

One thing you can always say about Phoenix is that it's constantly changing. If you go away for a few years, and come back to Phoenix there are always new buildings. And the old buildings have disappeared! Of course, if you look very carefully, you can see familiar buildings. Let's visit downtown Phoenix in 1933. We're on Central between Adams and Monroe, looking southwest. The first thing that I notice is the Heard Building, where Dwight Heard publishes the two newspapers, the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette. It's no longer the tallest building in town since the Luhrs Building, at Central and Jefferson, went up in 1925. But the buildings north of it have disappeared. The old Occidental Boarding House is gone. In its place is a modern-looking building with the Great Western Business College (I think that's Lamson Business College!), and on the ground floor is McDougall and Cassou, Lucille's (I think that's a dress shop) and a Florist. Hey,

I love the sound of a train whistle in the distance, and the click-click-click of a train going by. In the distance. My house in Glendale, Arizona is just a few miles from the train tracks and I love it, especially at night. There's such a wonderful, lonesome sound of a train passing. In the distance. Of course, if it were a few feet away from me, I'd think differently. The sound of a train whistle right nearby late at night, or the clatter of a train going by every closely is annoying loud. And trains are dirty, they burn diesel fuel, and before diesel it was even worse, pouring out black smoke, and soot. And that's why it's always puzzled me that some of the most expensive real estate in Santa Barbara is right next to the railroad tracks, near the beach. It made me wonder if people "back in the day" didn't mind being woken up by the noise of a train going right past their house. Or if somehow they weren't bothered by the smell, and the smoke

I really am a small town person. I grew up in Minneapolis, so I'm "Minnesota friendly" and some of my best memories are of visiting my grandmother in Bovey. Like her, I'm a "homely person" (yes, she often said that of herself - but she knew she was being funny), I like a small group of friends, I like my neighborhood, my local businesses. I'm no dazzling urbanite! But after I got my degree at ASU, Phoenix felt too small to me. I wanted to go to "the big city", and that's Los Angeles to me. So I gathered up my earthly belongings (which wasn't much) and moved to LA. And it was awful. It was so crowded, and so noisy, and there was so much traffic. I felt like I was in a beehive, and no one seemed to know anyone else. I got what I called the "LA hee bee jee bees", which was a feeling of being overwhelmed by all of it. My solution was history adventuring, which I still do now, although it's not quite as a medical necessi

If you've ever wondered about what people say about the massive consumption of whiskey in the Old West, even in old-time Phoenix, yes it's true. But like so many things that we look at in the past, it can be very difficult to imagine it with our modern eyes. As a 21st Century man who enjoys a glass of whiskey now and then, I can understand the attraction. Of course, I only have small amounts, in moderation, and only in moments of relaxation. I've never been a big drinking man, and after a shot or two I'm mostly glued to my chair, and then I need to go lie down. I can't imagine doing anything constructive with whiskey inside of me, like building a city, or fighting in the Civil War, but a lot of people did. Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon Click here to become a Patron! History Adventuring blog posts are shared there daily, also there's "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, and super high-resolution photos of histo

Time-travel with me to Phoenix in 1922. The image that we're about to dive into is from the McCulloch Brothers Collection, which ASU just released online recently. This is the west side of Central Avenue between Adams and Monroe. Specifically, it's just north of the Heard Building (the one on the left, which is still there). Back when I worked for Bank One in what is now Chase Tower, in the mid-1990s, I used to wander around these streets on my lunch hour. I would try to figure out what all of the buildings were, and I figured that many of them were much older than most of the people I talked to suspected. But it wasn't until the internet was invented that I was able to get the answers that I had been looking for for so long. And I'm having so much fun with this! Come along with me and let's visit the Occidental in 1922. Oh, in case you're wondering why I say it's 1922, it's because that's a 1922 license plate there on the car to the left. The

The existence of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles has always puzzled me. And no, I don't mean the existence of Ice Age animals who lived there (they lived all over the world then), or the existence of pool of black gooey tar. I'm puzzled as to why such a large area in such a crowded city has been preserved. I recently listened to Adam Corolla's comical take on the La Brea Tar Pits. And not only is it brilliantly funny, it really makes sense. He wonders why a city would bother to preserve a big open area of grass, mud, and tar. And yes, if you've never been there, that's really all the La Brea Tar Pits is. Sure, there's a little museum, and there are fiberglass statues of Ice Age animals, but the place is really just about tar pits. Yes, pits of tar. That black, gooey stuff that sticks to your feet after you've been on the beach in Southern California. Adam mentions that, and it's true. I always had to scrape tar off of my feet when I came home fr

Walk with me in old-time Phoenix. It's 1915 and Phoenix is a city of trees. There are old-timers who remember Phoenix before the trees. Fifty years ago this area was just open desert, with riparian areas of a tangle of mesquite, wide and low to the ground. Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon Click here to become a Patron! History Adventuring blog posts are shared there daily, also there's "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, and super high-resolution photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona Then the canals were built, starting in the 1860s, after the Civil War. Jack Swilling saw the big abandoned canals left by the Hohokams, and formed a company to start building modern canals. And the first thing they did was to plant trees. Looking north up Central from Monroe in 1919 towards a city of trees. You're standing in the Heard Building, which is just north of Adams. Trees were planted along the canals, along the laterals, along