History Adventuring

While I was busy being born in Minneapolis in 1958 (in April, if you wanna get me a card), there was a lot going on in Phoenix. I've been looking through my collection of photos labelled 1958, and I thought that it would be fun to go take a visit there. I'll set the Way-Back Machine to 1958. Let's start in Scottsdale, with the fashionable ladies at the top of this post. I don't know the first thing about ladies' fashion, but they definitely look 1950s to me. In fact, since it would only be two years until the sixties began, I'm inclined to think that maybe they really aren't so fashionable? The pic is from a magazine called Western Family. Anyway, let's go over to West Plaza in 1958, at 35th Avenue and Bethany Home Road. Those were just ordinary cars there, but nowadays I'd spend a lot of time walking around that parking lot - I just love those '50s cars! Of course 1958 is the year that Arizona State College became Arizona State ...

If the friends that I grew up with Minneapolis, the City of Lakes, heard me talking about fishing in Phoenix, they would just laugh. Fishing in a city that's in the middle of the desert? Yes, I mean fishing right in Phoenix, right in the city, and people have been doing it since the first canals were dug, which for the Phoenix pioneers was in the 1860s, and for the civilization came came before them, most often called the Hohokam, hundreds of years before that. I took the pic at the top of this post this morning, and while I'm no expert on fishing, I could tell that was going on. I just pedaled by, and I didn't see any catching, but it's called fishing, not catching. And if I recall correctly, there are catfish in the canals. OK, that's the end of my fishing expertise! As far as I can tell, the confusion sets in because most people don't realize that it's just river water flowing through the canals of Phoenix. And yes, there are fish in there! The wat...

In this imaginary journey, we're going to time-travel back to Phoenix in the 1950s, and go to Partin's Encanto Pharmacy, which was on the southwest corner of 15th Avenue and Thomas. We just call it Partin's. Yes, this is an imaginary journey - I was alive in the 1950s, but just barely, and I was nowhere near Phoenix! In this story, we're teenagers, students at West High, and we're just out galavanting around, the way that teenagers do. My mom has asked me to go pick up some toothpaste, but mostly we're just wandering around, looking at stuff. OK, let's go... You look terrible! What's with all that grease in your hair? And the back of your hair curls up like a duck tail! Fashion? What? And what's that rolled up into your sleeve? A pack of cigarettes? You don't even smoke! OK, if you don't mind looking like an idiot. Here we are at Partin's. You coming in? Hi Pat - I'm looking for a tube of toothpaste, what ya got? Oh, Colgat...

Come along with me on an imaginary journey back to 1973 in Phoenix, Arizona. This will be inspired by the photos in my collection that are labelled for that year. To get there, we'll have to take the freeway, and I think I'm gonna be in the Cougar there in the center foreground of the pic at the top of this post. By the way, this is the I-17 Freeway, and you're looking south towards McDowell Road. And yes, Shamrock Dairy is still there. Is that you in that Opel? Or, why don't we take the "Bug Line" and go to ASU? Just dig those groovy threads, man! Far out! Outta sight! Right on! Yeah, I guess you're right - we're better off driving. Central Avenue looks a little crowded at Indian School Road, but look at all of those cool 1970s cars! Those buildings are still there, the Financial Center, on the left, looks pretty much the same, as does the Mayer Central Building in the center, although it's surrounded by a lot more taller buildings. ...

Yes, I know you're not supposed to use the word "crazy" when you see a crazy person. There are other expressions that are kinder and more gentle, like challenged, or possibly insane. But I heard comedian Chris Rock say, "Whatever happened to crazy?" and I gotta tell ya, it's alive and well, and I've seen a lot of it living in the Phoenix area. Of course I'm sure being a crazy person isn't limited to Phoenix, but that's what I'd like to look at right now. Every summer my friends in California ask me if I'm crazy to live where the temperatures get over 100 degrees, and sometimes over 120. And they mean it in an affectionate way. In fact, that's usually how the word "crazy" is used nowadays, not actually directed at people who acting in a way that kinda makes you want to not look at them, and possibly quietly wander off. So, sanity is something that is hard to measure. When I'm out in public, I like to use the...

I was enjoying a cup of coffee with a friend of mine recently and we started talking about caffeine. He always drinks decaffeinated coffee, and I prefer regular coffee. I usually limit myself to two cups, because there really is a drug in coffee, called caffeine. Of course most people just think of illegal drugs when the word "drug" is used, but really, there's a lot more to drug use than whether you're gonna get busted using it. Let's time-travel back to old-time Phoenix. To 1908, in fact. We're beginning our journey at A.L. Boehmer's Drug Store. Nowadays, of course, stores like this are called pharmacies, and when I tell people that I'm picking up my pills for cholesterol, etc., I use the term "meds". It's just polite, and the words that we use can often blur what is, and isn't a drug. One of the wonder drugs that A.L. Boehmer would have definitely carried was acetylsalicylic acid. We call it aspirin, but at the time it wasn...

When I first started learning about the history of Phoenix, back in my forties, I decided that I would do my best to go straight to the source. That is, I looked at vintage magazines, not modern articles written about history. I also talked to people older than me who had lived in Phoenix "back in the day". And to my surprise, I found that there really wasn't much agreement about weather. My research of original documents showed me that the weather in Phoenix has always been very, very hot. And I mean miserable "who in their right mind would live there in the summer?" hot. Yes, the old newspapers showed temperatures over one hundred. And the more research I did the more I found that the climate of the Sonoran Desert, where Phoenix is located, has been the same since the last Ice Age, about ten thousand years ago. It's a desert, and a gigantic desert at that, that stretches on for miles and miles, and the city of Phoenix, as large as it is, is tiny by ...

Since I will be going to the dentist for a crown tomorrow, I've been pondering what going to the dentist would have been like in old-time Phoenix. I found an article at the Library of Congress about a Phoenix dentist named Dr. Morrison, and he seems to compare with the place I'm going to tomorrow, very modern and progressive. The pic at the top of this post is from his office, and I'll do a link at the bottom of this article if you want to read the whole thing. Looks like he used the Scientific Sanitary System. I like the sound of that. Kind of makes the other dentists seem as if they weren't using any kind of system at all, and not scientific, and not sanitary. Of course in 1915 there wasn't any regulation of advertising, which is what the article in the paper is after all, so you have to realize that they could say just about anything. Like the place that I'll be at tomorrow in Glendale, it looks like Dr. Morrison was very proud of the modern equip...

Phoenix has always been strongly influenced by two cultures: Mexico, and the Midwestern United States. And if you've ever been puzzled by the behavior of people from places like Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, or Minnesota, I think I can help. Although I left Minneapolis when I was 19, I was raised in that culture. And culture is a funny thing, because you really can't see your own culture, unless you look through other eyes. I've talked to a LOT of people who have no idea that they even have a culture, to them it's just "the way things are done". I've had a lot of fun looking back at my Midwestern culture. The first thing that I know that puzzles people is "Midwestern friendly". It's kinda like "Canada friendly", where people always wave, and if you ask them what time it is, they tell you. I have friends who grew up on the East Coast and if you ask them what time it is, they say, "What do I look like to you, Big Ben?!...

I biked along the wonderful trail that parallels New River in Peoria, Arizona yesterday. The best way to get to it, by the way, is at the Rio Vista Recreation Center, which is just north of Thunderbird Road, and west of the 101 Freeway. The photo at the top of this post I took from the trail, looking east towards the freeway, across New River. Because I have a silly sense of humor, I've always thought that New River was a goofy name. I mean, when the pioneers named it over 100 years ago, it was New River. And it still is. OK, well that's funny to me. Map showing New River in Peoria in 1909 But seriously, it's not river at all, it's a wash. In fact, the Sonoran Desert really doesn't have rivers, in spite of the names put on maps, they're washes. And technically, they're riparian washes, which just means that a little bit of water flows all of the time, which may not even be visible, but that water supports the kind of vegetation that you don...

The Sonoran Desert, which is where Phoenix, Arizona is, gets rain two times in the year - gentle rains in the winter, and thunderstorms in the summer. The term that locals have been using for as long as I can remember is "monsoon". Whether the term monsoon was originally said in a sarcastic way by radio personalities in Phoenix or not, I really don't know. I'm inclined to think it was, because a real monsoon, like the type that the tropics gets, goes on steadily day after day after day. In Phoenix it can ran hard, especially in the summer, but it usually stops very quickly. I grew up in Minneapolis, and I remember it raining day after day, all night and all day, and the next day, and the next night, and that's really what monsoon weather is like. Although I'd never heard the word monsoon in Minneapolis. It was just called rain. Lots of rain. Lots and lots of rain. I'm no expert in weather, but I know that it fluctuates. There can be rainy years, and...

To really understand Phoenix and its history, you have to follow the water. That is, you have to see how canals have been used since prehistoric times to bring in water for irrigation. I have always had a fascination with the canals of Phoenix, which to most people driving around are completely invisible. They really aren't - they're open canals that always have water in them, and you can ride your bike next to them, or fish in them, if you want to. If you had lived in old-time Phoenix, not only would you have seen the canals, but you would have seen the laterals. Laterals are the little "mini-canals" that bring water from the canals directly into neighborhoods. They're still there, and most of them have been covered. But in some areas of town, like where I was in Peoria this morning, you can still see open laterals. That's a lateral there in the pic at the top of this post, which I took just a few hours ago. No, there's nothing special about it, it...

I was out noodling around early on this morning, and since I love to wander, I went on roads less travelled, and roads well traveled. I took the pic at the top of this post because the combination of the name and the food sold made me smile. And then I got to thinking about failed businesses in old-time Phoenix, of which I've seen a lot. It's actually on Grand Avenue in Peoria, which is a suburb of Phoenix. I'm an old Marketing guy, and while I can make recommendations to clients, and design ads, I really don't know what makes for a successful business. To me, it's like a hit song or movie, sometimes it comes as a complete surprise. And sometimes even when everything seems to be done correctly, it's a dud. My first thought was that maybe I would have advised the owners of a Chinese Buffet to change the name from El Catracho to something more appropriate, but hey, it could have worked. Obviously it didn't, as I went past the building, which was boarded...

As someone who never even considered using tobacco, I've been lucky all of my life. I'm OK with people being free to do what they want, after a certain age, but I simply dislike the smell of tobacco smoke. And I'd really rather not stand there talking to someone who is spitting tobacco. I've never seen anyone push snuff up their nose, but I can't imagine that would be pleasant to watch, either. The smell of tobacco smoke has kept me away from many places, not because I have a moral problem with it, it's just because I've never smoked, and I find the smell, and the plumes of smoke, offensive. So I've stayed away from places where people have done that all of my life, including smoky bars, smoky cabarets, and even the school bus when I was in high school. Yes, I walked because of that. But like I say, I've been lucky in spite of my dislike of tobacco smoke. When I started my first job after graduating from ASU, it was at a health care company in...

Since we can time-travel to any time in Phoenix, and be anyone, I thought that it would be interesting to be a little girl in old-time Phoenix. I found a few pics in my collection, so let's go. I thought maybe we could start by being these cute little girls in the 1960s at the Japanese Flower Gardens at 40th Street and Baseline. I'm not sure what kind of flowers we're holding, but I'm sure they smell sweet - like us! OK, now we're in Gold's Alley in 1914, which is over by where the baseball stadium is in downtown Phoenix. I really have no idea how old we are - ten, twelve? Five, six? Good dog! Now we're Native American girls standing in front of what was called the Indian Sanatorium in the 1940s. The building is still there, at 16th Street and Indian School Road, and still serves the Native Americans people of Arizona. And I thought it would be fun to be some of the Luhrs girls, George H.N. Luhr's kids. It's 1897, and we'...

As a kid in Minneapolis, I learned how to get around town by riding the bus. It stopped, literally, right in front of our house on Bloomington Avenue, and for a quarter you could go anywhere in the Greater Minneapolis metropolitan area. I learned how to ask for transfers, and the buses ran so often that there was never any need for a schedule, there was one literally every twenty minutes. When I moved to Phoenix as a teenager I found that this wasn't true. I tried riding city buses a few times, but it was miserable. The only place I found with worse bus service was Los Angeles in the 1980s. But times have changed, and I was on a Phoenix Metro bus just yesterday. And it was modern, bright and clean, and it ran on time, which I was able to check precisely with the Smart Phone app. And it made me wonder about how Phoenix used to be. Let's go back to 1945. We're at the corner of 1st Avenue and Washington, and will be taking the bus to Encanto Park. And what a bus! Th...

I'm hungry, and I thought it would be nice to do an imaginary visit to some restaurants in the 1950s in Phoenix, Arizona. And since my favorite meal is a nice big steak, I thought we would start at the Stockyards. Actually, they're still there, at 50th Street and Washington, but if we visit in the '50s we can see some cool cars in the parking lot! That was delicious, but I'm still hungry. How about some Mexican Food at Macayo's? If we go there in the '50s it will be on Central just south of Indian School Road. How about a chimichanga? Whatever you want! Chinese Food? Of course! Let's go to the Cathay Garden restaurant at 1320 N. Central. Classy place! No, I don't know how to use chop sticks, I hope they have forks! How about going over to Mesa, and eating at the Feed Bag? I have the address right here, 554 W. Main. Will you drive? I really don't know my way around Mesa! And since this is an imaginary visit, and the bud...