History Adventuring

If you're from a place that's energetic, such as Minnesota, like I am, the slow and often flaky behavior of people in California and Arizona can come as a surprise. I was born and raised in Minneapolis, and respectable people always had the snow shoveled from their sidewalks by 9 am, and the grass was always mowed. In fact, that's part of the reason I left Minnesota, the attitude is more than just energetic, it's kinda crazy! I moved to Phoenix when I was 19 and immediately fell in love with the more relaxed attitude. The manager of the apartment where I lived, who was also from the midwest, hated it, and called it a "mañana attitude". And that meant that whenever he tried to get something done by someone, they would not show up, and insisted that they would be there tomorrow (which is technically what mañana means, but in reality it means "maybe sometime in the future, maybe not"). And now waitaminute, if you think I'm picking on Hispanic p...

I collect old photos of Phoenix, including ads, and I get a big kick out of how things change. Buildings change, streets change, and the way we use the language changes. A good example is the difference between what is meant by "calling" and "phoning" when telephones were new. Nowadays, of course, to call means to pick up the phone and, well, call someone. I've lived a long life and I've never heard the word used any other way. But when telephones were new, there was a difference between "call" and "phone" - call meant to visit in person, phone mean to, uh, call on a phone. Confusing! Of course, it's like any new technology. I've seen it all of my life. The young people take it for granted, and the old-timers are usually hesitant to adopt to it. Phoenix has been around since 1870, so it originally had no electricity, and no telephones. If you wanted to talk to someone, dag-nab it (as the old-timers would say), you had to ca...

I collect old photos of Phoenix, and post them on the internet, and it often comes as a surprise when people see how awful the parking was back in old-time Phoenix. Maybe it's because when we look back with nostalgia at the "old days" we usually see advertising that shows someone driving along with no traffic, or in a movie the hero always parks his car right in front of the building. I lived in California, and for my friends that know what really, really terrible parking is like, we just laugh. If you've never driven around for blocks and blocks, desperately looking for a parking spot, it can be hard to imagine. And it started in Phoenix just about right after cars were invented. If you didn't drive before the 1950s in Phoenix (and very few people who are reading this did), you would have no idea how really, really bad the parking situation was in downtown Phoenix. Attempts were made to alleviate the problem, including the Luhrs Parking garage (which is st...

If you're familiar with downtown Phoenix over the past forty years, you would be amazed at what has happened to it in the last decade. At the risk of sounding like the Chamber of Commerce, it's been reborn. There's much going on there nowadays, like ASU, the Light Rail, I could go on and on. And it's been a process of rebirth that has taken a LONG time. As near as I can figure, downtown Phoenix started to slide into, uh, less-than-desirable status at about the same time that places like Uptown Plaza, Park Central, and Christown were built, that is the late 1950s and early '60s. I collect old photos of Phoenix and downtown was a happening place right up through that time. People shopped there, and the sidewalks were crowded. Traffic must have been terrible, and I suppose that not being able to find a parking spot drove people away from shopping downtown. If you look at photos of Uptown Plaza, the first thing you see is a GIGANTIC parking lot (nothing impressive ...

Unlike most of the kids I grew up with in the old neighborhood in Minneapolis, I left. To me, it didn't really matter where I went, I just wanted to get away. I could drive, I could read a map, so I left, and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. If that's you, then you know that you can never really fit in "back home", and you'll never really be a local where you live. I use the term local, but you can also call people who grew up somewhere, and stayed put, as "natives". And they can be kinda cool, and often more than a little bit frightening. When I lived in California, I remember that the locals would guard the best surfing areas (although I never surfed), and their bumper stickers said, "Save California! When you leave, take someone with you!". Well, not all of them. I got to know a lot of locals, who showed me the best places in town, the best beaches, the best places to get tacos. I didn't want to be seen as an outsider, or a tourist, so ...

When I turned fifty, I decided that I would call myself "middle-aged" until I was 100. But now that I'm knocking on the door of sixty, I've decided to go ahead and call myself a senior citizen. I've earned it, simply by staying alive this long. I'm eligible for senior discounts based on my age, not what I've done, or who I am. I'm a senior citizen in Phoenix, Arizona. I've always been fascinated by senior citizens in Phoenix. I live in Glendale, which is not far from one of the the most famous retirement communities in the world: Sun City. I used to go over to Sun City, and I would wonder what it would be like to be a senior citizen. Over the years I've determined that there are many ways to do it. I'm still figuring it out, and it looks like I'll have a lot more time to do it. Here are some options: • Being a grumpy old man. I learned how to do this from comedian Dana Carvey in the 1990s. His character on Saturday Night Live was...

I was over at the Glendale Community College Fitness Center recently, and while standing by the check-in desk, the subject of what happened on September 11th, 2001 came up with someone who is about my age, that is someone who remembers it vividly, as if it were yesterday. I'm not very good at math, but I wondered if the young person sitting there at the counter remembered it. As of this writing, it was sixteen years ago, so most college students now were kids, some as young as three. Of course, it wasn't something that just happened one day in the news, so most young people know about it, even if they don't remember that morning. I remember that morning. I live in Glendale, near GCC, and I got an early morning call from a friend who told me that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I was barely awake, and the conversation was brief, and I recall being slightly annoyed at being woken up by the phone (this was back before you could set ...

I have a fascination with maps. Maybe it's because I'm a visual person, they just seem to make more sense to me than if someone says, turn left, turn right. If someone gives me directions, I grab a piece of paper and draw a map. If someone wants directions from me, I sketch out a quick map. I know that this isn't how most people feel about maps, but it's what I see in a map, and if you see it, too, let's face it, you're kinda weird. Maps do more than guide me, they help me to time-travel. When I look at a map of Phoenix before any freeways were built, I'm transported back to that time. When I see "city limits" on a map in an area that is now considered the middle of Phoenix, I can imagine what the streets looked like, and felt like, at that time. I like pictures of things. When I can't find pictures, I like maps. If someone starts talking about stuff, I zone out. I didn't realize just how weird I was until I started listening to GPS ...

One thing that old-timers really like to do is rant. This is natural, as they know what is what, and have been around a while. They know how things should be, and are outraged when they're not. Let's time travel back to Phoenix after the turn of the century (let's say 1907) and I'll do an old-timer's rant. "First of all, what's with all of the bicycles? They're everywhere, zooming past you, hardly watching where they're going. Maniacs! Some of those darned things don't even have any brakes, and they just have to keep going until they run into something, like my horse. Speaking of which, what's with all of the horses? A few years ago there was a reasonable amount, now they're everywhere, making messes, and stinking up the town. And those young folk don't know the first thing about caring for horses - look at that mare tied up over there. Disgraceful! And don't get me started on those &!#@ horseless carriages! There ou...

I collect photos of old Phoenix, and post them on a Facebook group page, and one of the most common comments I see deals with thoughts of the summer heat. It's usually something like this, "Wow, that photo must have been taken in the winter - they're wearing jackets", or "they have long sleeves!" It's something that I don't notice, because I never had to deal with the heat of Phoenix summers, not really. I grew up in Minneapolis, and my career in Phoenix has been one of comfort and ease. I always went from an air conditioned house to an air conditioned car to an air conditioned office. I never had to walk to school in the heat, I never had to work outside. My mind boggles about people who do! And of course my first thought is about what people in old-time Phoenix did before air conditioning. If you're young, that is, born after the 1920s, you probably wouldn't be able to imagine what the heat must have been like in old-time Phoenix. No...

Let's go to downtown Phoenix in 1993. That was the last year for Valley National Bank, and the first year for Bank One (which is now Chase). Walk with me. We're employees of Bank One, and the future looks bright. The 1980s were a bad time for Arizona, and even Valley National Bank, which had celebrated its 90th year, was in terrible financial trouble. Bank One had been buying up banks all over the country, in anticipation of national banking, which became legal in 1996 (that is, banking over state lines, which had been illegal since the Stock Market Crash of 1929). Although the photo at the top of this post shows me eating a meal at the San Carlos Hotel, I never really did that. It was a photo that was used to promote the bank, in flyers that went out with statements. I would normally brown-bag it, eat my lunch quickly and then walk around downtown. The Bank One Building (now called Chase Tower) is like a space ship. You really don't need to leave the building, ...

I'm fascinated with the history of Phoenix, and I'm overjoyed when someone tells a story of "back in the day". It's actually a very difficult thing to do, and it's been my privilege to listen to people who are very good at it. I plan on living a very long life, and I'm hoping that I will be able to talk to people about what Phoenix was like before, well, whatever they're doing out there right now. If you've been tempted to talk about what you remember about Phoenix, I encourage you. If, however you are boring and opinionated, you may find that people would prefer you to keep quiet. You may be surprised to find that it isn't the subject that people don't want to hear, it's you. As an old Marketing guy, and a teacher, I now know tempting it is to "sell the sizzle, not the steak". That is, to tell people how wonderful, or how terrible, something was - to draw conclusions for your listeners, without really ever sharing info...

If you like Phoenix history, like I do, you've probably wondered what the area looked like in its virgin condition, before people started building dams. You know, before the Starbucks, and the freeways, and all of the stuff we look at all of the time. Luckily, it's easy to see. Sonoran Desert near Phoenix, Arizona. Saddle Mountain, near Tonopah. No, you can't see it where the dams are. But you can see it anywhere else in the Sonoran Desert where dams were never built. It's just called the desert, and the areas where water flows are called washes. If you see a wash going through an area that has canyon walls on each side of it, there you go. That's what the Salt River looked like before it was dammed. Or you can pick any dammed river you want and go where a dam wasn't built, and see what it looked like for the past ten thousand years (after the end of the ice age). One of my favorite places to go is Saddle Mountain, near Tonopah. Except for beavers (a...

I like history adventuring, both in my imagination and in real life. And to me, those two things aren't really so far apart. I've always been this way, even when I was a little kid, and I'm hoping to continue doing it until my old bones are too brittle to risk walking out of the house. If you're wondering where you should go, and when you should do it, the answer is here and now. If you think that you could only have an adventure during a week of vacation, or you have to travel to somewhere miles away, you're missing the point. And you're missing out on adventures. As a little kid, I wandered around my grandma's little town, just looking at stuff. She would ask me where I went, and I would say that I went to the park to swing on the swings. And maybe I didn't and maybe I didn't. The point was that grownups need to know where you're going, and why. I could have said "My final destination is right back here, grandma, and I'm just go...

I love learning about old-time Phoenix, and one of the most common things that I hear is that young people can't appreciate anything that happened before their time. The old-timers talk about stuff that happened before the young people were born, and the young people just roll their eyes. This makes sense. As a teacher, I call it a "reference point". It's a determination of whether something is interesting to someone based on how it makes some type of attachment to their experience. It's the reason that otherwise thrilling stories about the history of, for example, Cincinnati (which I don't know anything about, and have no connection to) leave me cold. But if you mention Phoenix, I'm interested. If you tell me more about something that I know a little about, that's the best. Since Phoenix has existed since 1870, if you're reading this, you're too young to remember most of its history. It's before your time. Sorry, you're just t...

Yesterday I got to look at a whole bunch of photos from around 1915 of places around Phoenix that I'm identifying, and scanning in. They're what most people would call "snapshots", and what was called "Kodaking" back then. What I enjoy is that everything pretty much has stayed the same since the invention of popular photography - people take pictures of their friends. Nowadays, of course, popular photography is done with Smart Phones, just like Polaroids were used in the 1980s. The photos aren't spectacular images, they're just pictures of friends, a window into ordinary life, which to me is the most precious thing there is. The friends in the photo at the top of this post, who are unidentified, are just typical college students in 1915. The building you see behind them, the Science Building, which was new in 1909, is still there, on the campus of ASU, next to Old Main, which is east of College Avenue on University Drive. Although photograph...

If you have an interest in preserving the history of the city you love, you can do something about it. And it may surprise you to find how easy it is. No, you don't have to sit on a committee to argue about what should or shouldn't be done. There are a lot of people right now, sitting on committees, accomplishing nothing. I have no interest in those committees, although I've been invited to them. Instead, you can do something. Start small, do what you can. I collect old photos of Phoenix, scan them in and share them on the internet. It's a small thing, but it's what I can do. I love Phoenix, and my hopes are that the photos will inspire people, maybe to not cut down every tree they see, or to bulldoze something because they had no idea what it was. You can find out how things work. If you didn't pay attention in Civic Class in High School, it's not to late to learn how your local government works. I see a LOT of people, especially on Facebook, procl...

I like old photos of Phoenix. I like to scan them in, ponder them, and wonder about what life was like back "in the day". It appeals to my childish imagination to "time-travel". And I get a lot of enjoyment out of sharing what I find. I'm not writing a book, I'm not teaching a history class, I'm not connected with any historical museums, I'm just having fun "dumpster diving". Because really all I'm doing is trying to rescue photos from being thrown away. Now waitaminute, calm down, it's not a conspiracy, man. People aren't sitting around right now, laughing manically about destroying Phoenix history by throwing stuff away. It's just a question of logistics. And luckily, all I need to do is to scan in the photo, save it on my computer, and share it on the internet. I don't have to sit in committees deciding what to do, and select what can and can't be kept. I can do it myself. I know that it's a race agai...

I just love old photos. I collect photos of Phoenix, but not the paper, just the digital image. I call it "digital archiving", because it's a way of preserving something that would otherwise probably fade away, get lost, get locked up somewhere, get thrown in a dumpster, or be destroyed. Since my specialty is Graphic Design, and I've been on a computer since my career started, I consider the digital world to be "the real world". I know that a lot of people really don't, but I disagree with them. That is, if something isn't on paper, or written on parchment, or carved in stone, it's not "real" to many people. But I've done a LOT of stuff digitally. The digital world is real to me. I do digital work, and my clients usually pay me with money that is electronically transferred into my account. I haven't had a client hand me pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on it for many years (although I would accept that). I live ...