The World's Largest Cactus in the 1940s. Well, some of them.


I just found this postcard of the World's Largest Cactus near Phoenix, Arizona in the 1940s. It's a saguaro, which are fairly common in the Sonoran Desert, and they get very big. Amazingly big. This one was in Paradise Valley. And I've found lots of photos of wonderful gigantic saguaros in the same area around the same time. There was a fairly new resort out there, called Camelback Inn, and back at the time it was pretty much all alone in the desert, with the saguaros.

Of course, these aren't really the world's largest cactuses (cacti?), but there's no "truth in advertising" law that applied to postcards in the 1940s. I like postcards, and they can be a lot of fun, but you gotta remember that, like Instagram, they portray a world that's just a little too perfect to be completely true. I'm OK with that.

Giant Saguaro Cactus in the 1930s, Paradise Valley, Arizona. Camelback Mountain is in the background.

If you live in Arizona, or have visited there, you know how amazingly big saguaros are. And they really are the symbols of the Sonoran Desert, and they only grow there (in spite of the fact that just about every cartoon that shows a desert shows a saguaro cactus). But as big as they are, they're small compared to their big brothers in Mexico, called cardons (Pachycereus pringlei). Hey, I'm not dissing the mighty saguaro, but if you've ever seen a cardon, they make saguaros look small.

Giant Saguaro Cactus in 1929, Paradise Valley, Arizona.

The Sonoran Desert must have been astonishing for people to see back in the 1930s and '40s. The photos that I find I'd like to think of as the first changing of the attitude of the desert from being a terrible place, to being a place of beauty, worth preserving, which is how most people feel today.

These giant saguaros weren't preserved in Paradise Valley, of course, but a lot were elsewhere in the Sonoran Desert. There's a whole forest of them that you can visit near Tucson, and it's worth a visit. And whether you see the World's Largest Cactus or not doesn't really matter, you'll still be seeing a wonder of the world.
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

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