The Phoenix, Arizona that never was, and why we believe in it


I like collecting old photos of Phoenix, and sharing them on Facebook, and one of the most common things I've always heard has to do with some description of the Phoenix that never was.

As an old Marketing guy, I have a theory about this. It has to do with how information is presented in advertising and promotion. And while I wouldn't go as far as to say that "In Advertising there's no such thing as a lie, only the expedient exaggeration" (Cary Grant said that in "North by Northwest"), I do understand that when we try to reconstruct the past based on only information that has been carefully presented, by the Chamber of Commerce, or advertising agencies, it's easy to imagine that it really was like that. That everything was perfect back then.

Now waitaminute, I don't want to be an "Adam Ruins Everything" kind of person. I'm as happy as the next person with what I call the "West of the Imagination", I don't need to always be correcting everyone, and saying how bad it actually was. My experience is that people who do that make people feel bad, and stupid. I don't want to do that. Also I don't want a punch in the nose!

Railroad Bridge over the Salt River in 1888, Tempe, Arizona. Artistic license is expected!

But no, Phoenix wasn't ever 73 degrees year 'round (not even in the Ice Age). It's a brutally hot desert, and while the maps may say "rivers" and even be colored in in blue, those were never rivers, they were riparian washes. The list goes on and on, and after many years people believe what was never true.

So I collect it all. The stuff that I'm pretty sure is real, and the stuff that I'm pretty sure is an "expedient exaggeration". I figure if I look at all of it, I'll be able to draw my own conclusions. Phoenix goes back way before anyone who is alive today could ever remember (it was platted in 1870), and even my oldest friends, with the sharpest memories, can only do so much. And they're not immune to advertising, and promotion.

Image at the top of this post: Advertisement for Herz-Rent-A-Car in the 1950s at Camelback Inn in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Not to be taken literally.

 If you liked this article, and would like to see more in the future, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! Your pledge makes this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more