History Adventuring

Since I'm a time-traveler, I sometimes move forwards, instead of backwards, in my travels. Today I would like to travel to the time when I will be going to the University of Arizona. Now calm down here, I'll always be a Sun Devil, and my plan to go to the UArizona is easily explained. I will be donating my body, when I'm done with it, to the medical school in downtown Phoenix. If you haven't been in downtown Phoenix lately, you may be surprised to see that there's a University of Arizona Medical School there. And besides, it really doesn't matter to me as long as I get to stay in Phoenix. I've never been one of those people who gets all excited about "the big game", and rivalries between schools. To me the Universities in Arizona are places of learning, and research. I don't have anything else to donate to them, like money, and I'd like to encourage them, so they can have my body. I decided on this many years ago, and I have to adm...

As a man, I'm completely oblivious of everything that women have to go through. When I stop and think about it, it seems overwhelming, and of course to make it even more overwhelming for me I try to imagine how it was for ladies in old-time Phoenix. But I want to try, anyway. Come along with me. Let's time-travel to 1921 and see things from the point of view of ladies who are being encouraged to go Christmas shopping. The ad that I found in the Library of Congress gives me some type of view, but I'm a man, and if you think that I'm not seeing what they're saying clearly, especially if you're a woman, please let me know. First of all, let's start with the word "lady". Speaking for myself, I've never really understood the distinction between a lady and a woman. But in 1921 it would have been a matter of sophistication. This isn't a put-down of the term "woman" or "female", but lady meant something, the way that the ...

If you've ever been puzzled as to why schools encourage students to play sports, and not just always be studying, it's a very old concept called "mens sana in corpore sano" and the young men playing football in 1899 would have definitely known what that meant - Latin was a requirement for students both at Arizona University and the Tempe Normal School (what is now Arizona State University). It meant "a sound mind in a sound body". So make no mistake, these were educated men. In Tucson, which was already a University, they were preparing to become the world's leaders. And in Tempe, which was a Teacher's College, they were preparing to become teachers. Whenever I wear my ASU colors, inevitably someone asks me about "the big game". And I understand. Marketing brings in a lot of much-needed money to both Arizona and Arizona State. But these are schools. I'm a college man. In my lifetime I've seen that scoffed at by people, who ...

If you visit just about any parking lot in the Phoenix area that was built (created? laid?) before the 21st Century, after it rains, and for several days afterwards, you will see a typical Phoenix parking lot lake. The one I walked past this morning was built in 1985 (and yes, I am calling 1985 "old time") in a suburb of Phoenix, Peoria. And as I walked by I got to thinking about how these parking lot lakes have always made me feel. Usually annoyed. When I first moved to Phoenix, in the 1970s, it absolutely amazed me that the parking lots, and the streets, turned into lakes after a rain. Yes, it does rain hard in Phoenix, but not often, and certainly not as much as it does in Minneapolis, where I grew up. I pondered why parking lots turned into lakes, and thought that maybe the engineers out west didn't understand how to build drains, but now I realize that it's just a matter of economy. If I were an investor in old-time Phoenix, I doubt that I would have willi...

Although I technically live in a separate city from Phoenix, Arizona - Glendale, I never say that I'm "going to Phoenix". I might say that I'm going downtown, and everyone I know would assume downtown Phoenix. If I were going to downtown Glendale, I would have to specifically say "I'm going to downtown Glendale". But today a friend of mine who lives not far from me sent me a text that said that he was going to Phoenix. I knew what he meant, but it still struck me that I'd never heard anyone say that, in over twenty-five years of living in Glendale. And I think it just has to do with how all of the suburbs of Phoenix have merged together over the years. My friend has recently moved here from California, by the way, so he is seeing distinctions that to everyone I know have long been blurred. If we time-travel, there will be a definite difference between the towns of Glendale and Phoenix. And you really don't have to go all that far back - go...

As someone who was a professional graphic designer, specializing in print, I've seen a LOT of typos get into print. Human beings are far from perfect, and at some point the presses have got to roll, and whatever mistakes that were made in the design go onto paper, and stay there, forever. When books are reprinted, there's an opportunity to make corrections, but if the first printing says "Sunsyslope" like in the Sunnyslope Directory up there from the late 1950s, it can't be corrected. You can't go back and gather up all of the copies, destroy them, and try again. It doesn't work that way. By the way, if you're wondering why there are so many errors in printed material, actually there really aren't. Someone one explained to me that if a printed piece were done with 99% accuracy, which is pretty high in most industries, it would mean that one word out of one hundred would be misspelled. On the stuff I worked on there was no way to measure the ...

When I moved back to Phoenix from Los Angeles in 1989, I had to put on a brave face about the move, and not complain about it. The reality was that LA proved too much for this man, and when I got laid off from a great corporate job, I took a good look around me, and didn't like the big city. So I moved back to a small town, Phoenix. Now waitaminute, I don't mean that Phoenix had a tiny population in 1989, but it sure wasn't LA. And the attitudes of a big city versus a small town were obvious. The first thing that struck me was that there could be one big event in Phoenix that everyone knew about, and everyone was talking about. It's still true. That's not true in LA, and it wasn't even true back in the '80s, when I lived there. You couldn't say "How about the big game last night?" or "Did you go to the big concert?" in LA, there were too many things going on at the same time. When Los Angeles was still fairly small, in the 1940...

Although the term "fake news" is fairly recent, the concept of it isn't. Before the internet, it was usually called "the spin", and it was a way of delivering, ahem, less than straight-forward information to people either to sell them something, or convince them of something, usually political. In my lifetime, which spans over sixty years now, reputable newspapers and television stations have always separated out, very clearly, the news from paid advertising. It wasn't always that way, and the blur caused so much confusion that by the 1950s there were new laws to control it. Newspapers in Phoenix, like the Arizona Republican (they dropped the "N" in the thirties) were created for two reasons: to promote a particular political agenda, and to sell advertising. By the way, in case you're wondering what newspaper was the voice for the Democratic party, it was called the Gazette. And whether you considered the news presented in each newspa...

Let's time-travel back to Phoenix in the time of Star Wars! No, I don't mean long ago in a galaxy far far away, I mean at the Cine Capri Theater in 1977. I'm no fanatic of Star Wars, but I have a good friend who is just crazy-mad for it. I asked him about it, and this is what he recalled "Lines around the building for every showing for months. Showed there exclusively for a year. It blew my mind. I came home, 14 years old, got in our Doughboy pool that night and stared at the stars. It was definitely the most impactful film I’ve ever seen." The summer of '77 is when I got to Phoenix, and I'd seen Star Wars back home in Minneapolis. I liked it a lot, thought that it was a fun movie, but that was about it. I was already 19, so I was too old to collect the toys, and the phenomenon just kinda went past me. My memories of 1977 were mostly trying to keep my little MG Midget running, and learning for the first time how hot Phoenix was (I moved there in Aug...

There's nothing quite like Christmastime to bring into sharp focus that there are people who have, and those who have not. Of course, hunger knows no season, but the display of wealth that is traditional from Thanksgiving to Christmas just seems to be "an embarrassment of riches". Speaking for myself, I often say that I never wanted to be rich, and I never wanted to be poor, and I got my wish. I am blessed to have a roof over my head, and food in my stomach. I've been lucky. In the article at the top of this post, the word "Poor" is used. It's not a word that you hear much anymore, you usually hear "needy" or "homeless", or something else. And that's probably because it's really hard to define what "poor" means. I've known people who have described themselves as so poor that they had to drive an old junky car, or eat the dollar menu at McDonalds. I've never been poor, but I've seen it. And it has...

My electricity went out yesterday for about two hours in my little suburban neighborhood of Phoenix, Arizona. And while it certainly wasn't life-threatening (it was a beautiful day in the mid-70s), it was a reminder of how much I take electricity for granted, and find it hard to imagine living without it. But people did for most of history, and people did in old-time Phoenix for quite a while, too. If we time-travel back to 1872, when Phileas Fogg was traveling around the world in 80 days, there would have been no electricity in Phoenix. Of course people knew about it, Benjamin Franklin being the most famous person who did, but as a practical tool it had quite a way to go. And like any technology, it was slow in coming to remote places, which is what Phoenix was in 1872. And like any new technology, not everyone got it at the same time. My best guess would be that the fancier businesses got it first, then the people on Millionaire's Row in Phoenix. It's like having a...

I was history adventuring a couple of years ago with a good friend of mine here in Arizona when he used the expression "inland". We were traveling north on I-17 towards Flagstaff from Phoenix, and were looking for an exit to go to the right, and of course he meant "east". He had grown up in Southern California and I lived there in the '80s and neither of us gave the expression any thought - we both knew what it meant. And then it hit me what he had just said. Southern California is considered from San Diego to Santa Barbara. No one really pays attention to the exact geography, it's just a given that San Francisco is in Northern California, and Monterey is in Central California. And while overall the coast of California goes north and south, the cities that are built on the coast aren't necessarily at right angles to the Pacific Ocean. Speaking for myself, I'm pretty good at North-South-East-West, but anytime you're close to the Pacific Oce...

Since Christmastime is coming around again, I'm seeing a lot of something that never seemed to exist in my lifetime - a kindly old man. That is, Santa Claus. In my lifetime, which has spanned over half a century, old men weren't the kindly ones, it was the old women who were. That is, men were cranky old guys who shouted "get off my lawn!" and women were happy and smiling, and maybe even offering muffins to the kids. And since the Christmas holidays are a time of tradition, they give a view into history. Let's go back to Phoenix in 1919 and be kids. As we walk around the neighborhood, most of the really old people that we see are women. Women have always tended to live longer than men, so it's not surprising. And our fear of these old women is based on the stories we always heard, of witches, and evil old women who tempted children into their houses to eat them (with gingerbread houses!). These women tended to be very skinny, and dental technology being n...

I really don't see many dogs off-leash roaming around my little suburban neighborhood of Glendale, and attitudes about dogs have changed so much in the past couple of decades, if you're younger than me it may be hard to imagine the dogs that roamed around neighborhoods. Personally, I never owned a dog until thirteen years ago, and my dog entered a world of dog leashes, and owners carrying around little plastic bags. And since I've lived in my current house, for a little over twenty-five years, if I ever see a dog walking down the street I assume that it has just run away, and some distressed owner might be coming by. If I can safely approach the dog, and read its tag, I will call the number so that it can go home. This would have been a ridiculous thing to do in old-time Phoenix. The dog that you see up there on the northwest corner of 1st Avenue and Washington, may or may not belong to the man standing nearby. And if a whole bunch of dogs went by, no one would notic...

Like a lot of people, I occasionally get a craving for Colonel Sander's Kentucky Fried Chicken. In fact, I just had lunch there, and it was easy, there's a KFC just a few blocks from where I live, and there's another one just down the road, and another one. But if you were in Phoenix in 1962, you could drive around with that craving, and think you were out of luck, but you're with me, and I know where we can get it: at Harman's Ranch Restaurant. Let's time-travel to 1962. Let's see, the closest one is at 20th Avenue and Bethany Home Road. Do you mind driving? Or if you want a scenic tour, we could go to the one on the Mesa-Tempe Highway. I don't know exactly where it is, but don't worry, we'll see it, there isn't much out there between Tempe and Mesa. Here we are at Harman's. Yes, it's a full-menu restaurant, but look here, they have North America's Hospitality Dish - Kentucky Fried Chicken. It's Finger Lickin' Good...

Like breaking a leg, or shaving your head, I think that everyone should be fat at least one time in their life. And by fat, I don't mean "pleasingly plump", I mean being so fat that the other kids would call you a "water rat" (which rhymes with fat). Speaking for myself, I got pretty fat in my mid-forties, which put me in the category of "obese" in the height-weight charts, but living in 21st Century America, no one really noticed (except my doctor, who would raise an eyebrow every time I saw him). And of course now I'm thinking about what would qualify you as "fat" in old-time Phoenix, when it's obvious that most people were what we would now consider thin. Let's time-travel back to 1905. No, I'm not going to do any "fat shaming" here, so if you're looking for a fat person in the pic up there, don't bother. Maybe you'll find one, but I just picked out that pic from my collection as a typical gro...

It's been quite a while since I was a student at Arizona State University, but every once in a while I wonder if the parking there is quite as challenging nowadays as it was when I was going there. When I visit Tempe, I see big parking garages, which of course weren't there back "in the day". Parking was a tricky thing, as some parking lots were for students, and some weren't, and some streets were OK to park on as a student, and some would get you a ticket. But if you'll excuse me for bragging, I never got a ticket. No, it wasn't that I knew the Dean personally, or the police commissioner, or whatever, I did something that at the time I took for granted, and in later years realized wasn't all that common. I could read, and comprehend. Now calm down here, I know that everybody can read, but taking that information and putting it to practical use isn't all that common. Since you're reading this, you're probably in that rare category o...

As much as I enjoy the West of the Imagination, including Spaghetti Westerns, I often wonder what life was really like when men walked around with a gun on their hip. And of course, once you think about it, you realize how ridiculous "fast draw" competitions are, because men who were quick with a gun in the real West didn't necessarily have lightning-fast reflexes, and weren't always sharp shooters. They had an attitude, which is an attitude you can still see today. Being fast with a gun in old-time Phoenix would have meant the same thing as being fast with a knife, or fast with your fists. It meant striking without hesitation. And I've known a lot of people like that, and it isn't me. Yes, I have lightning-fast reflexes, and superb eyesight (with my glasses on!), but I would hesitate. And that would mean the end of me. So while I know the techniques, my unwillingness to hurt someone would have been fatal to me in old-time Phoenix. So, even a Winchest...

Like everyone who drives, certain signs are absolutely invisible to me. You can't read everything, every sign, as you drive by. I've lived in this neighborhood for over twenty-five years, and if you had asked me if there was a "Slow children at play" sign just a block away from my house, I wouldn't have known. Of course there is, it's been there since 1985, when this neighborhood was built, replacing, to the best of my knowledge, cotton fields. And the only reason that I'm noticing it now is that I noticed that the neighborhood just north of me just put up a brand new "Slow children playing" sign. And today on my walk I took some photos so I could study them more carefully without looking like an extremely strange guy standing there staring at a sign. I know that you understand, but most people wouldn't, it would just creep them out, or they would probably think that I'm some kind of inspector. So let's take a closer look at th...

In the past hundred years Phoenix has changed a lot, but what hasn't changed is the glaring sun. The skies are not cloudy all day, and the sun glares. If you've ever driven into the sun in the morning, or late afternoon, you know what I mean. And in the winter months, when the weather is at its best, the sun is very low in the south, so you get glare in that direction all day long. Mostly nowadays people wear sunglasses, which have been popular for so long that it's difficult to imagine a time when they weren't around. I suppose I could Google when sunglasses were first invented, and probably before that picture of Sheriff Carl Hayden was taken in 1916. And even if they were available to him, I'm sure that he wouldn't consider looking ridiculous out in public, and wearing "smoked glasses". He wore a wide-brimmed hat. As you can tell, it shaded his eyes, and that would have been important for a man who needed to shoot people, as necessary. As...

I'm not really a drinking man, limiting myself mostly to having a couple of beers with friends, but every once in a while, on special occasions, I like to have a cocktail, especially if I'm going somewhere with the right atmosphere. Today I'd like to time-travel back to the 1950s and have a couple of quick ones at the cocktail lounge of the Arizona Manor, which was on the northwest corner of 24th Street and Camelback Road, in Phoenix. Have a seat. There's just something about the red leather upholstery that makes me feel as if we're someplace special. Or is that naugahyde? Either way, it looks great. What'll ya have? Me, I'd like a gin and tonic. Yes, I'm sure the house gin will be fine. Of course, a lime. For you? A what? A daiquiri? Oh no you don't - you're not sitting here next to me drinking something with a little umbrella sticking out of it! Waiter, my friend will have two fingers of Scotch, neat. I've got my eye on that little ...

I'm too young to have ever seen door-to-door salesmen, like the Fuller Brush Man, but I definitely remember seeing them in the funnies, especially when Dagwood Bumstead would kick one. And my parents' generation had to deal with them, and from what I understand they were a very common pest. You really don't see many door-to-door salesmen anymore, in spite of the signs on many doors that say "No Soliciting". Speaking for myself, since I have a peephole in my front door if I see someone carrying a clipboard and wearing a polo shirt, I wait until they go away, which they do. And of course now I'm thinking about what it would have been like to have been a door-to-door salesman in old-time Phoenix. Let's time-travel to 1922, ring some doorbells, and sell some Fuller Brushes. I'm a personable and nice-looking young man (at least my mom thinks so), so I really have all of the tools that I need for this job. I have a nice white dress shirt with a smal...

I've always enjoyed how people use the English language, especially slang terms that come and go. I myself am a child of the seventies, but know enough not to use "far out" and "out of sight" when I'm talking to young people. I still use "cool", and I often hear the word "awesome". But some words just give me a time-traveling feeling, so let's go to old-time Phoenix and be numbskulls who were hoodwinked. OK, let's start with numbskull - that means someone whose brain isn't functioning very well, as if it were numb. Being hoodwinked is being cheated, or fooled, which you can see can happen if you're a numbskull. But wait, you may be saying, "What's with all of this rigamarole?", meaning my confusing talk, and you might even think that I'm an old codger, which is an old-fashioned word for an old person who is, well, something of a numbskull. They're also probably decrepit, and you may want to hel...

I just started watching the movie "Step Brothers" on Netflix and I like the basic premise. It's about two full-grown men who are still living with their parents, one is forty and the other is thirty-nine. I just started it, so don't tell me how it ends, I'm hoping for a happy ending. And in the meantime, as you've probably guessed by now, I'm pondering being a full-grown man in old-time Phoenix. The first question that I need to answer is what a full-grown man is, and was. Speaking for myself, I considered it eighteen, when I graduated from high school. People who are the next generation older than me have tended to often push the timeframe back for when they considered themselves full grown men. I've known people who were considered full-grown when they could ride a horse, or ride a tractor. I've known people who have gone out into the cold, cruel world at age 12, and I'm not talking about running away from home - they considered themselv...

I've never known anyone who is a bicycle thief, but I know that they're everywhere. My own personal experience is that I was told to never leave my bike anywhere, even locked, when I was a kid in Minneapolis, and the bike that I bought when I moved back to Phoenix from Los Angeles in 1989 was stolen just about right away, even with a nice sturdy lock in a well-lit area in a nice apartment complex. And no, I didn't even consider owning a bicycle in LA! And all of this has got me to thinking about being a bicycle thief, and specifically in old-time Phoenix. Time-travel with me to turn-of-the-century Phoenix. There are very few automobiles, the streets aren't paved yet, but there are a lot of bicycles. Oh yeah, and horses, too. Like horses, bicycles could be stolen. I've never seen a photo of a horse padlocked to a hitching rail, and bicycles were just there for the taking, too. Of course a lot of people "parked" their horses in a livery stable when th...

As someone who grew up in a tiny old-fashioned neighborhood in Minneapolis, I really wasn't prepared for how dangerous Phoenix would be for humans on foot. Back in 1977, when I was nineteen, my only experience had been driving on the little streets of my hometown, most of which didn't even have stop signs. They were called "uncontrolled intersections", and you looked to see what was around you, and yielded as necessary. Yes, of course the major streets had street lights, and there were stop signs, but mostly you just had to watch what you were doing. Most of the year you couldn't see the lines on the road because of snow, or slush, and often the signs were just completely covered with snow. Like I say, you had to look. When I got to Phoenix, I found that cars really didn't have to look. There were clearly marked lines on the road, and every intersection had either a stop sign or a traffic light. And the streets, like the major streets near where I lived...

As someone who collects old photos, people often ask if I have a photo of a particular location before the modern buildings were built. It's a reasonable request, to see what a familiar area looked like before the condos were built there, but I really have very few of those pictures. And that's because it's just kinda strange to take a picture of, well, just about nothing. So I did that this morning, because, maybe some day it will be interesting to see what the area looked like before the condos were built. Of course it's nothing but some dirt, a plowed field, and some buildings way in the distance. When the condos go in, there will be streets built, and probably a big grassy area, a playground, that sort of thing. And possibly in the future people will wonder what the area looked like before the condos were built, and maybe they'll find the photo I took this morning, and like it. I was out adventuring today, and after I stopped at the Walmart Neighborhood M...

I really don't know when I saw my first rolled curb. And if you're not sure what I mean, go take a walk in a fairly modern city, like Phoenix. It's a curb that isn't at sharp angles, it just does a gentle roll to the sidewalk. Where I grew up, in Minneapolis, where the neighborhood had been built in the 1920s, there were no rolled curbs. In fact, there were no driveways in the front of the houses, the garages were accessed through the alleys. But in more modern neighborhoods, the driveways lead out to the street, crossing the sidewalk. My neighborhood was built in 1985 with rolled curbs. Whether you consider 1985 to be modern, or old-time, depends on you, of course. The neighbor that I just waved to wasn't even born in 1985, so I'm sure that he has a different point of view than I do - I was two years out of college in 1985. As you can see, a rolled sidewalk continues to roll even where there isn't a driveway. It's been explained to me that this...