History Adventuring

It wasn't until I moved to Phoenix, in my teens, that I saw so many wide-open spaces, right there in the city. I grew up in Minneapolis, in a neighborhood that had very narrow streets, and so many houses that you really couldn't get a sense of open space unless you were out on a lake. In fact, it's hard for me to picture Minneapolis before all of the development happened, as an open prairie. Not as open as the "Little House on the Prairie", which is further south, but the neighborhood where I grew up wasn't heavily forested, that sort of thing doesn't start in Minnesota until you're more north of Minneapolis. And so I learned about the luxury of space. I also learned it again when I moved back to Phoenix from Los Angeles, which is so densely built up that I could barely breathe there. And now I've learned why the luxury of space is so expensive. I have a good friend who recently left LA to go live in the luxury of space in Oregon. He had eno...

Since I'm fascinated with the history of Phoenix, I will often talk about things that I really know nothing about personally. I call that "looking at Phoenix through other people's eyes", and I love it. This can be very confusing to people who don't understand what I'm doing, as a quick glance at what I say can make them guess that it's a point of view, or lifestyle, that I prefer. I really don't, but I will defend. Please let me explain. As you may know, I prefer to live in the suburbs. I live in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix. I chose this house mostly because I wanted a garage. I've always been obsessed with cars, and I just hated the thought of them having to sleep outside, or be where they could could (gasp!) a door-ding in a parking spot. And this is my point of view, and lifestyle. But I will defend people's rights to live as they please, even if they (hard for me to believe!) don't want a garage, or even a car. Observation wit...

Something that has always puzzled me about people working outdoors in Phoenix is why they wear long sleeves. You actually see quite a lot of that, even when the temperatures are soaring above 100 degrees, people in long sleeves, with long pants, and brimmed hats. It goes back to the days before air conditioning and sunscreen, and once you get an historic perspective, it makes more sense. Speaking for myself, I've never had to work outside in Phoenix in the heat. So as soon as it gets hot I start wearing tee-shirts and shorts. But I know people who wouldn't think of that, and they've usually spent a lot of time working outdoors in Phoenix in the summer. I slather on SPF 50 and spend a minimum of time out in direct sunlight. People who work on roofs, or on roads, or telephone lines, or places like, that have no choice but to be under the blazing sun. I've known a few people like that, and they toughen themselves up to heat. Like I say, I'd be getting dizzy and...

The summers in Phoenix, Arizona are very hot. And I don't mean a few weeks of a "heat wave", I mean uncomfortably hot from the end of April right through to September. If you've ever spent a summer in Phoenix, you know. If not, it's probably impossible for me to explain it to you. It's HOT! And yes, it's been that way since before Phoenix ever existed. In fact, the Sonoran Desert has been terribly hot since the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. So if you wonder how people deal with it now, and how people dealt with it in past generations, here's what I know. Phoenix in the summer is best for people who like to get up at daybreak. I've been lucky, because that's me. I would be on the first tee when the sun was just coming up, and finishing up nine holes before the heat really set in (about two hours). I'm writing this at about 6 am, and although it will be close to 100 degrees today, right now it's about 70. In fact...

As someone who has a fascination with the history of Phoenix, and Los Angeles, I often hear comments about neighborhoods as being "nice" or "used to be nice" or are becoming "nice". And while I rarely hear someone come right out and describe what they mean by "nice", but I know what they mean - no poor people live there. In other words, these areas aren't affordable to anyone but the rich. If I do make the mistake of implying that people are being snobbish, they always assure me that they aren't rich - it's the other people higher up on the hill that are rich. And then of course if you talk to those people, they just keep pointing, and so on, and so on. I've met many more people who confess to being poor than confess to being rich. But I can tell if people have been really poor. And since I've been poor, and have lived in affordable neighborhoods, I have a perspective that many people don't have. Everyone needs a plac...

If you grew up in Phoenix, the ad at the top of this post probably just seems comical to you - "Bask and Bronze". Since I grew up in Minneapolis, I can really understand this. In fact, my parents used to vacation in Scottsdale, and come back looking "bronzed and fit". My dad was always one of those men who were never shy about taking off his shirt, and he would get a "movie star" tan. As I recall, mom would burn and peel, but she still tried to tan. I never had a suntan in Minneapolis in the winter. Some of the kids in my high school would come back with "ski tans" on their faces, and the wealthier ones would come back with a genuine tan that told everyone that they had been somewhere nice, like Arizona. Attitudes about getting a suntan have changed dramatically in my lifetime. Nowadays you're more likely to hear someone talk about melanoma than saying you look "bronzed and fit". But it's like a lot of things that people ...

Since I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and have spent my adult life in Arizona, and California, I had to learn to control my Minnesota slang. I found that it caused difficulty with communication. Of course if I'd never left Minnesota, I would have no idea that I was using so much slang - everyone there understands me. And if I had chosen to only hang out with people from Minnesota when I moved out west, I wouldn't have had to adjust. But I wanted to talk to people who were different from me, and when I did that, I realized how poor my communication was with the slang that I had grown up with. For people who live in one place all of their lives, this just sounds like nonsense - your culture is invisible to you unless you see it through other people's eyes. One of the things you'll hear me say is the word "yes". I will often say it as if it had a period after it: like this: Yes. Back in Minnesota, I rarely said yes - I said "You bet'cha"...

Let's time-travel back to Tempe, Arizona and find out why so many people were in favor of a movement that would sweep the country, the prohibition of alcohol. Nowadays it seems ridiculous that this was even attempted. Anyone who knows anything about Prohibition in the United States knows that it was a complete failure. The unintended consequences of it were to encourage a type of lawlessness that the country had never known. It was a "noble experiment", but it became a huge mess. Everyone knows about that. Even I know that, even though I hadn't studied the history much. And it led me to the question: who was in favor of Prohibition, and why? Since it's 1911, and we're in Tempe, I'm gonna say that we're living on a farm. Maybe we're a family who all works together. Up at daybreak, and tending to the chores. In 1911 chances are very good that if I were a young father I'd have the occasional glass of beer, and my wife and children would d...

Walk with me. Today, as usual, I'd like us to go explore the history of Phoenix. And if you're wondering where we're going, I really don't know. I have no agenda. I'm just looking. Having no agenda puzzles a lot of people. It's like having no destination, there's really no goal, you aren't traveling to somewhere that you already know, or expect to prove. It's just traveling. Don't get me wrong, there are things that matter to me. I like palm trees, and I would like people to be kind to animals, especially dachshunds. And it's human nature to have an agenda, to have things to set out to say, to prove. But that doesn't really appeal to me, it's too much work. Let's just walk. I know that most people will look and wonder what the point of the photo at the top of this post is. Is it a political statement? Am I trying to sell Sun City Real Estate? I understand. People look for agendas. I've even known people who assumed th...

Although there are parts of Los Angeles, and Phoenix, where you see people walking, walking is actually rare in those towns - these places were designed for cars, and grew up with the automobile. When I lived in Los Angeles, in the 1980s, I rarely walked. Of course I'd walk along the beach, or in a park, but very rarely along the street. There was a song at the time called "Walking in LA" which said that "nobody walks in LA", and more specifically "only a nobody walks in LA". In other words, if you didn't travel in a car, you were a "nobody". It's a tough attitude, and you still see it in Los Angeles and Phoenix, where cars are king and anything other than cars, such as bicycles or pedestrians, are seen as an annoyance. Of course things are changing, and many of the new neighborhoods, and the updated older ones, are now including what I call "human scale". Not just narrow sidewalks inches away from traffic, but nice w...

I've heard about millionaires, seen pictures of them, but it wasn't until just a few years ago that I met one face-to-face. It was in Phoenix. Whether this person was a millionaire or a multi-millionaire I really don't know, but he had become fabulously wealthy because of the increase in value of land purchased by his parents, which he inherited. No, I won't tell you who it was, or where the land was, that's private information, but he was I suppose in his sixties when I met him and he had grown up in a small house there on the property. The house was still there when I visited, although obviously no one had lived in it for a very long time. I'm no good at math, but I calculated that his parents bought that chunk of land in the 1940s. It was in the foothills of Camelback Mountain. I also really have no idea how much land there was but I learned later that there was going to be seven (7) luxury homes built there. A nice big chunk of land in a very desirabl...

As someone who needed glasses in first grade, wore contact lenses from age 15, had my vision corrected surgically in my late thirties, and now wears bifocal glasses, I'm very aware of what poor vision is all about. And of course when I think of old-time Phoenix I wonder what it would have been like to have poor vision. I suppose that it would have been like everything else - some people would never have the need for vision correction, the way that some people don't get cavities in their teeth, or need a doctor. Of course, if you needed it in old-time Phoenix it was available, but it would depend on if you could afford it. My best guess is that people who couldn't afford glasses just squinted, the way that people who couldn't afford dental work just pulled their teeth out. Old photos really aren't a good gauge for seeing how common wearing glasses was. I know that my mom wore glasses from the time that she was a little kid, and always took them off when she ha...

I'm an ordinary person living in an ordinary suburb of Phoenix. I'm not rich or famous, so you may wonder why anyone would consider me extraordinary. But I am! The more you learn about me, the more extraordinary I become. I have a wiener dog named Phoenix, who is just about the cutest thing you've ever seen. And yes, I'm bragging. And I can brag about everyone. Rich or poor, tall or short, fat or skinny, young or old, they're all extraordinary to me, and become even more so the more I learn about them. This puzzles a lot of people who haven't taken the time to see it. This makes me sad, because I can easily see by what they say that they consider some people not to matter. They may turn their backs on people who aren't just like they are, on people who don't share the same values, religion, skin color. I know. Walk with me and let's look at some extraordinary people of Phoenix. Today we'll be traveling back to Sunnyslope in the 1930s, and ...

Let's time-travel back to Phoenix in the 1930s. In fact, I'd like us to go back to 1934, when Bonnie and Clyde were out on their spree of bank robbing and murdering. It would have been a subject that everyone was talking about, and reading about in the newspaper. No, Bonnie and Clyde never came close to Phoenix. They would have liked it, as Phoenix has always been a city of banks. And the only reason that I'm thinking about them today is that I'm watching a movie on Netflix about them, set in 1934. And you know me, I'm looking at the cars, and the buildings, and what people wore, and what their world would have felt like then. In 1934 Prohibition had just been repealed the year before. That is, things like beer, wine, and spirits were no longer illegal in the United States. The 1920s had given people in the U.S. a taste for rebelling against the system, and flouting laws that most people considered unfair. And then things got really, really, bad in 1929, when...

Walk with me. Today we're going to Sunnyslope, Arizona, which is a neighborhood a few miles north of downtown Phoenix, along the southern slopes of the Phoenix Mountains. It's the 1950s. As a child of the 1970s myself, I know all about the fifties. At least I think I do. Everything was clean, everything was perfect, things only cost a nickel. Everyone had a brand new house, and great big brand new cars. And it's mostly true. The 1950s were a time of tremendous prosperity for the United States. My dad, by the way, was a classic example of that prosperity. He fought in World War II, came back home to the GI Bill, got a business degree, and raised a family. When I think of the 1950s I think of my parents, but that's not what everyone did. Now calm down here, I'm not saying that "everything you knew is wrong" - I'm just saying that there's more to the story. Let's walk down Hatcher and go to the Dunk 'N' Draw. We're teenagers in ...

If you're like most people who live, or visit, around Phoenix, Arizona, you probably don't pay much attention to the rivers. They've been crossed by bridges for a very long time, and if you notice them at all it might be just because of the name on a map. And since the rivers of Phoenix have always been washes (dry in the summer, wet in the winter, and muddy other times), seeing the word "river" can be confusing if you didn't know that. In fact, it would be reasonable to assume that New River had once been a mighty raging river, with ships sailing on it, until fairly recently when people flushed their toilets too many times, or something. No, it's been a wash for as long as the Sonoran Desert has been there, about 10,000 years. I notice the rivers. In fact, yesterday when I took the pic at the top of this post of New River, I intentionally walked behind the building that my friend and I were visiting (a frame store) to look at the river. And yes, that...

I wish that I could tell you all about what Phoenix was like in 1989, but of the more important things, like what was going on in the news, etc., I have no memory. But I know that I was there, because a friend of mine took this photo. I had just moved back to Phoenix from LA, so most of my thoughts were comparisons of the two places. And no, I'm not a big Dodgers fan - I just got the hat for on "free hat" day, and it was the only game I ever went to, and it was probably the only baseball cap I owned for a long time. The price was right! The photo is from December so I was probably wearing it to help keep my head warm. I recall that my friend and I went up to Sedona that day, so it was probably pretty chilly. And by the way, that's a Coke that I'm opening up there, getting ready to drive. I don't recall that the Mustang had any cupholders so I probably just held it in one hand as I drove. When that photo was taken I was still collecting unemployment from...

As someone who first saw Phoenix, Arizona in the 1970s, when you ask me where downtown Phoenix, I'll say right around Central Avenue and Washington. That is, about where CityScape is nowadays. For me, downtown isn't very large, it includes Chase Tower at Central and Monroe, and the ballpark, on Jefferson and 7th Street, and as far as Five Points, which is Van Buren, Grand Avenue, and 7th Street. Of course nowadays what is considered downtown for many people goes as far north as McDowell. I've even heard Indian School Road described as downtown. And as the city grows, the area that most people consider downtown grows, too. The exception is the railroad tracks just south of Madison. Anything south of there isn't considered downtown, it's considered South Phoenix. It was true back in the '70s, and it's still true today. If you go west of 7th Avenue, you're no longer downtown, you're in West Phoenix. East Phoenix is a little bit more vague, but it...

If you're an adventurer, and I'm assuming you are since you're here reading this, you like to get away from the dull and boring ordinary stuff of life. You want to see new places, see new things. And if you live in Phoenix or Los Angeles one of the ways to do that is to practice your conversational Spanish. It opens up a wonderful world of history. But be careful - there's a very strict etiquette about doing it. I learned a tiny bit of Spanish way back in high school. I've rarely practiced it, but every once in a while I decide to do that. Luckily, I've lived in the Los Angeles and Phoenix area for all of my adult life, and there are plenty of people who speak Spanish there. But like I say, you have to show courtesy and respect. Walking up to someone in Phoenix who looks as if they speak Spanish and just blurting out some Spanish is a terribly rude thing to do. And now calm down here, I'm not talking politics or anything here, I'm simply saying th...

I like cars. And I like trucks, and buses, and planes and trains. But they can't take me to the wonderful magical places that I know of in Phoenix. No, I'm not criticizing cars, or any of those modes of transportation, but unfortunately they need roads, and pavement, and at the very least a huge amount of space. The places that I love aren't of that gigantic scale, it just wouldn't work. So they're impossible to see by car, or truck, or bus, or planes, or trains, or whatever. You have to put your feet on the ground. I started finding these wonderful hidden places when I lived in Los Angeles, and I still seek them out in Phoenix. I've always been a nervous and anxious person, and these places are the best nerve medicine I've ever found. And I always hear the same thing from so many people - they've never been there, or even heard of these places. Or maybe they've heard of them but they never want to get out of their car. And when I describe the...

I'm a Western man, and I live by the code. I've only lived three places in my life - Minnesota (the Midwest), California (the West Coast), and Arizona (the Far West). And you may, or may not, live by the Code. The Code of the West may be invisible to you, and it may be something that you think of as only in movies, but it's very real. I'll see if I can explain. The Code of the West is a chivalry code. That is, it's a set of rules set down by and for gentlemen of honor. It's not a vague set of guidelines like the "Pirate's Code", it's something that men like me live and die for. We don't budge a fraction of an inch on the Code, we'd rather die. The Code of the West applies only to men. Sorry, I'm not being Chauvinistic here, but if you're not a man, there's no expectation that you need to follow the code. So women don't need to follow the code, nor do boys. Only men. It starts with an expectation of behavior whic...

The Phoenix Snowbirds arrive every October, and leave in April. If you're not familiar with the term Snowbird, it's a slightly playful, slightly negative term for a winter visitor to Phoenix, Arizona. Locals use the term, and winter visitors use it until they find out the slightly negative connotation. Of course if you understand the economy of Phoenix, you know that it relies on winter visitors, and has for over 100 years. The economic health of the valley is dependent on tourism, and people love to come there in the winter, as the winter climate is one of the very nicest on planet earth. There's bright sunshine, warm temperatures (not hot!), crystal blue skies, and well, it's just nice. Real nice. And people leave their dreary snowy climates to come out and bask, and play golf, and go to restaurants, and to just generally enjoy. And that means a LOT of money for Phoenix! If you have a business that relies on winter visitors, you know that. If you're like ...

If you've read about ancient Hohokam ruins being found on a construction site in Phoenix, and wonder why they're allowed to build on top of the site anyway, it may sound as if it were very insensitive on the part of the city, or the builders. But it makes perfect sense once you understand where the Hohokam people were. They were all over the valley, on every inch of it. The cities of Phoenix, and Tempe, and Scottsdale, and all of the cities in the Salt River Valley, sit on top of the Hohokam ruins. In fact, up until just a few decades ago, the Hohokam ruins scattered around the valley were so common that children played on them, pots were found everywhere by people hiking, or just walking around. So, in order to preserve where the Hohokam people lived, velvet ropes would have to be strung around all of the Salt River Valley, which you gotta admit would be kind of ridiculous. So when new buildings go up, like the ones on Block 23, in downtown Phoenix, the archeologists are ...

Since I collect photos of old Phoenix, many people ask me if I have a photo of what it used to look like, before a particular building was built, or a road, or a freeway, or whatever. And it's the same with my collection of photos of Los Angeles. But I really don't have a lot of photos of that sort of thing, only because it's strange to take photos of "nothing". So while I was waiting for my dentist's appointment last week, I walked out of the building and did a very strange thing - I took a photo of nothing. That is, what the area next to the dental office looks like now, in 2019, so that I will have a photo of what it looked like before more buildings are built. Phoenix still has a lot of wide open spaces. Standing there you can see waaay out to the mountains. I like that feeling, it's as if I can breathe easier. Of course, most of the people around me when I took that photo were enclosed in buildings, or cars. I'm sure that they wondered what i...