Making the ordinary extraordinary in any town, including Phoenix


I just finished talking to one of my PhDs (Phoenix History Detectives) who was kind enough to express his appreciation for a couple of my articles about ordinary people in Phoenix that I saw as extraordinary. And it really is how I feel about my town.

And if you don't feel that way about your town, whether it's Phoenix or not, I kinda feel sorry for you. It's like anything you love, everything inch of it becomes precious. And you get defensive if someone criticizes it, or if anything changes, anything at all.

I don't know when I started becoming fascinated with what most people think of as ordinary. I tend to think of "grownups" as people who wouldn't understand, so I guess I've always been that way. I used to spend hours just walking around the little town in Minnesota where my grandma lived, and when the grownups asked me where I'd been, or what I'd seen, I really had no answer. To them I was looking at rocks and weeds. To me it was so different. And at an early age I started drawing the things that I saw in an effort to really try to understand them. I still try to, but I know that I never will.

When I discovered the artist Andrew Wyeth in my teens I started to understand what he saw, and shared. I've known people who just don't get it, who travel to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and look around. And I know that if I went there I wouldn't see what Wyeth saw, but I know that I would try. But there really isn't any need for me to travel there. What he saw was color and light and texture. He was fascinated by the shadows on the hills. He visited his next-door neighbor, Anna Christina, who had to be the most ordinary person you could imagine, and he made a famous masterpiece based on her.

As a teacher, I'm a big believer in the old adage of "showing people where to look, not what to see". And I'm often saddened by people who won't bother to turn their head, or walk across the street, because "there's nothing to see". So here in my history adventuring blog, I share what I see. And what I see is extraordinary. If you can see it, too, that makes me happy. If you're standing there puzzled it makes me kinda sad. So thank you for letting me tell you what I see, and I hope that you find something worth seeing in the ordinary stuff that surrounds you. If you'd like, you can start by saying that Phoenix has great sunsets - most people will agree with you on that. And then you can take it elsewhere, into wherever you want to go. That's my plan, and if you come along with me I'll share what I see. It will be extraordinary, I guarantee that!

Image at the top of this post: Inside of my apartment in 1978, 4201 N. 9th Street, Phoenix, Arizona.
If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily. The basic tier is a dollar a month, and the PhD tier, which includes "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos, is five dollars a month, and is discounted for seniors, veterans, and students.

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

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

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