History Adventuring

Let's time-travel into the future. I'm beginning to think that I won't live long enough to see it, being a man who is already in his sixties, but at some point cars will be driven by computers. That is, the fallible things called human beings, who make mistakes so often that cars just crash into each other every day, especially in the area where I live, Phoenix, will no longer be behind the wheel. And if right now you're panicking that self-driving cars will be dangerous, and crash into each other (more than cars do nowadays), I'd like to direct your attention to an even greater danger - the loss of revenue that many places rely on. And I'm not just talking about speeding tickets, I'm talking about moving violations, illegal parking, anything that has a fine associated with it. Speaking for myself, I really don't know how expensive any particular ticket is. Every once in a while I see a dollar amount posted on, for example, a handicap spot violat...

Two of my very best friends moved away from Los Angeles this year. I myself said goodbye to the City of Angels in 1989, and while it's easy to be glib about it, it's still tough to say goodbye to where you've lived for a long time. I've long gotten used to people making fun of California, and Los Angeles, and I understand. It's a goofy place in so many ways. It's a place of wacky celebrities, and botoxed movie stars, and people who will grab you by the lapel insisting that the only way to health and happiness is to eat 100% organic gluten-free avocados. I get it. But Los Angeles is home to a lot of people, and has been for much longer than most people realize. When I lived there I got interested in the history, which I found to go way back even before the Sherman Oaks Galleria was built. Generations have lived there, many generations. Speaking for myself, LA was the Big City. After I got my degree at Arizona State, I wanted to see what life was like in...

One of the courteous and hard-working employees at my local McDonald's, where I get my coffee every morning, in Peoria (a suburb of Phoenix) was kind enough to tell me that they were born in 2000. It's the end of 2019 now, and this person will be in their twenties in the '20s, which just kinda tickles me. And of course it got me to thinking about a hundred years ago, and how it must have felt to have been a twenty-something person in the '20s. The lovely young woman in the ad up there, from 1920, looks to my eyes to be about twenty. I really don't know, she could be in her teens, but I'm sure that she's not older than 29. So I'll try to imagine her life. This is just from my imagination, and what I've learned about Phoenix, I really don't know who she is. If my calculations are correct, she was born in 1900. If she's a Phoenix native, and for purposes of this imaginative story that's what I'll make her, she has seen a lot of c...

Many of my friends who grew up in Phoenix tell me that what really made the summers bearable for them as kids were the swimming pools. I've even talked to people who joyfully played in the muddy water during irrigation time, or swam in the canals. It just boggles my mind, since I grew up in Minneapolis, where the very best time of the year is summer. Don't ask me about the winters there! Anyway, in my journey of imagination today I'm going to try to ponder growing up in Phoenix with swimming pools, which have been commonplace in Phoenix for quite a while. Whether anyone had a swimming pool or not in my neighborhood in Minneapolis I don't recall, but to me the greatest joy of my young life was to get into a pool, so they must have been very rare. I recall the indoor swimming pools at the motels where our family used to stay when on vacation, and just thinking about it gives me waves of pleasure. I just loved swimming pools, they seemed the ultimate in luxury. By ...

I watched a documentary yesterday about the super-rich of New York City, who are now living in skinny hi-rise towers on "Billionaire's Row". Yes, there are so many of these people that they have to squeeze them in that tiny space. And of course that got me thinking about the super-rich in Phoenix, Arizona. Starting about twenty years ago (this is a history blog, after all) for me, I started going to the car shows in Scottsdale in January with some friends of mine, who were VIPs, buying and selling cars. It started at the basic entry-level show, which is the most popular, called the Barrett-Jackson. Over the years my friends moved to more, uh, snobbish venues, and I got to see some of the super-rich. Let me introduce you to some super-rich people. Over there! No, the person standing next to where you were looking, the unshaven one, wearing clothes that are an absolute embarrassment. It's not always true that most disreputable-looking people at the car shows are ...

As a time-traveler, I often think what it would have been like to be confronted by something brand-new, which nowadays we just take for granted. Today I'm thinking about parking lots. Using a parking lot is right up there with something that just comes no naturally that it's hard to imagine people getting it wrong, like knowing which way to go on a street, or what to do when a traffic light turns red. But of course there was a time when this was a brand new thing in Phoenix, and it really wasn't all that long ago. Automobiles (horseless carriages) were common on city streets of Paris many years before the first one appeared in Phoenix in 1904. And the first time any roads were paved in Phoenix (just a few, in the middle of town) was in 1911. Mostly you drove on dirt, and after it rained, mud. But things started changing very quickly, as more and more roads were paved, and more and more parking lots were built. If you drove onto a parking lot in the 1950s, at the bra...

I pride myself on having a pretty good imagination, but since I didn't grow up in Phoenix, it's often difficult for me to imagine how kids could grow up there. I've had it explained to me that kids would play in the summer, even when it was over 100 degrees, and although I can stretch my imagination that far, every once in a while I try to imagine growing up without a basement, and I'm stuck. If you yourself grew up without a basement in your house, I'll see if I can explain how ordinary they were to me growing up in Minneapolis. All of the houses had a basement. It's been explained to me that it's a necessity when building a house where it gets so cold, you can't just plop it down on the dirt like you can in Phoenix. Yes, I know some houses in Phoenix have basements, but they're rare, and they're a luxury. In Minneapolis, it was a given. A basement in a house is the same as a story, except that usually they're not quite as finished. ...

As a history adventurer, I like to look at things from various points of view. Big or small, rich or poor, celebrities or nobodies (like me) all matter to me. And oddly enough, a point of view I don't hear much about is wealthy people who have made California beautiful, and continue to do so. I'll see if I can explain. To me, it all depends on your definition of wealth. Speaking for myself, when I first moved to California, and wanted to register my car there, I found that I couldn't unless a particular part was replaced, which was part of the anti-pollution controls that the previous owner of my car had removed. My question was simple, "What if I couldn't afford it?" And the answer was just as simple, "Then you can't drive that car in California." And that was my introduction of how money was used in California for beautification - this case, air quality. Of course a lot of people don't see it that way, they see it as just part of a co...

One of the things that puzzled my grandmother, as I got older and older and remained a bachelor, is who "would do my laundry for me?" Laundry has never been anything that I've given a lot of thought to, it's just a chore that has to be done, but today I'm thinking about it, and how it was done in old-time Phoenix. Technology has made us forget about the old washerwoman, who relied on the money that she made doing laundry. I suppose when automatic washing machines were invented there would have been much ranting about the new technology putting people out of jobs, but to someone like me it's just beyond my imagination. Let's see how it worked. Let's go live on Millionaire's Row in the 1890s, which was Monroe east of Central. It's Tuesday morning and I'm going to work. As a wealthy wife, you would of course do very little domestic things, we would have a maid for that, and even a nurse for the baby. Oh yeah, and a cook, of course! Be ...

I always wanted to grow up and be like my dad. That is, I wanted to get a good corporate job, wear a tie, that sort of thing. I really wasn't clear on what he did, but he sat behind a desk, working for a big company. And today I'm pondering the world he lived in, which was starting to fade away while I was still a kid. I was born in 1958, and my dad's first job out of college was for a big company. He had served in WWII, used the GI Bill to get a college education, and stepped into a bright future. He had everything going for him, he was tall, handsome, intelligent, a veteran, and a married man. The United States economy was just perfect for him, and the types of jobs that a man like him could get were designed for married men, and especially for married men with children. It seems so far away now that's hard for me to imagine, but I'm gonna try. By the way, that's me on the tricycle there. Yes, times have changed. A lot. Back when my dad went looking f...

Every once in a while I ponder the cost of living. So of course today I'm pondering the cost of living in old-time Phoenix, so I'll time-travel back to 1978, when I was actually there, at age 20. Unlike my mom, who was always looking for bargains, and could have never been a very successful contestant on the TV show "The Price is Right", I had no idea what things cost. For the first eighteen years of my life my parents paid for everything, like food, shelter, clothing, and I never paid even the slightest attention to what it cost. I wonder if many kids do? Anyway, other than knowing that comic books had gone up from twelve cents to a quarter, you really couldn't have got much price expertise from me back then. Since I had been pondering moving away, I distinctly remember that one of my friends told me that rent for an apartment in Phoenix would be the staggering amount of three hundred dollars a month. That sticks with me, because there would have been no w...

I was talking with a friend of mine today who is very knowledgeable about Phoenix history, and he was wondering, since Phoenix was platted in 1870, what it would have sounded like if he could have walked around back then. Walk with me. First of all, of course, there would be no cars or airplanes. The train didn't even get to Phoenix until 1887, so there wouldn't be any noise like that. As we walk along Washington, let's listen to what we can hear. Of course we'd hear all of the sounds of the desert, there would be birds, and insects buzzing. I'm not kidding here, if you've ever gone waaaaay out into the desert, you know the loud sound of buzzing insects. In other words, it would be very quiet, compared to nowadays. We'd hear dogs barking, horses neighing (or is it winnowing?), and the cluck-cluck of chickens. Oh yeah, and there would be pigs wandering around. In fact, all barnyard animals would be within earshot. I'm a city boy so I'm not r...

When I first started collecting photos of old Phoenix, I was mostly interested in the buildings. I always wanted to be an architect, but I couldn't do the math, so while that never happened, my fascination with buildings has remained. And then I started seeing something in the photos that started to really fascinate me - the people. And I don't mean famous people, or people doing something spectacular, I mean ordinary people, doing ordinary things. And as I zoomed in, I started calling it a "slice of life". And like a lot of things that I do, this has always confused most people. Why would I care? Aren't those people nobodies? They're not celebrities, they're not famous, right? Yes, they're the ordinary people, like me, and possibly you (unless you're a famous celebrity, in which case I apologize!), who do the livin', the workin' and the dyin' in the town that I care so much about. I think I developed this attitude when I was...

As someone who came of age during the era of awareness of being a "litter-bug", I've always been aware of litter. As a kid I remember seeing a commercial of a proud Indian man standing by a highway looking at the litter, and watching someone throw trash out of a car. To this day it itches me to see someone throw something on the ground, even if I know it's perfectly biodegradable, like peanut shells, or a tiny piece of paper with a bit of tobacco in it. And of course I'm now thinking of how I would feel in old-time Phoenix. I'm sure that I would see a lot of litter in old-time Phoenix. If I time-traveled back to before the days of plastic, it would be paper, and banana peels, and the kind of stuff that recycles itself, even in the desert. Of course the streets would be littered with cigarette butts, and cigar butts, and no one would even notice, the way that no one notices the stench of gasoline engines burning all around us. And if I used the word ...

Since I enjoy time-traveling, today I'm wondering what questions that someone in 1950s would ask of me if I suddenly appeared there from the 21st Century. As I write this, it's almost the year 2020, which has got to sound pretty futuristic to someone in the 1950s. I suppose that they would have a lot of questions for me, beginning with why I'm not wearing a silver jumpsuit. Silver jumpsuits in "The Forbidden Planet" (1956) It seems as if every movie that I've ever seen from the 1950s, and the comic books, that shows the future shows everyone dressed in jumpsuits, usually all silver. I can't help but think that my wearing Levis blue jeans would come as a bit of a disappointment to someone in the 1950s. I guess I could show them that the rivets were taken off of the back pockets, but that's not much of a change. There is some sort of stretchy material in them to make them more comfortable, but it probably wouldn't get a gasp of amazement...

In my travels, in a longish life, I've known people who have seemed to be, well, a little off. The definition of sanity is of course difficult, even nowadays with modern medicine, and medical advice on the internet (which just seems to make it worse), and of course whether someone is rich or poor can be a big factor in whether they're eccentric, or just plain crazy. Phoenix has always had an insane asylum, but today I'm thinking of a more gentile madness, similar to that of Don Quixote. It's that hazy, delusional, madness that isn't really all that dangerous, especially if someone has plenty of money and isn't out wandering around in their nightshirt. If I time-traveled back to old-time Phoenix I would have to be very careful about what I said, for fear of being thought of as a madman. I could tell people that some day the streets would all be paved, and there would be machines traveling on those streets, going much faster than 25 miles per hour. But I d...

The first time I heard the expression, "A dog doing its dooty in the yard", I admit to being very puzzled. My grandmother said that, and it wasn't an expression that I had ever heard before. My parents would have never have said that, but grandma was more, well, plain-speaking. And all I could picture was a dog dressed up in a military uniform, possibly saluting, and doing his duty. I was a very puzzled little kid! And today I'm thinking about old-time Phoenix, and, uh, that stuff. You know, the stuff that no one talks about, not really. Because in addition to other things that people don't talk about, or think about, old-time Phoenix would have had a lot of dogs on duty! Well, doing their dooty. And of course also going on fire hydrants. Now calm down here, I'm not criticizing dogs, or their owners. Dogs are people, too, and they have to answer the call of nature. But I've never seen a dog using a public restroom, and from what I know about dogs ...

Since I've lived in Phoenix, and Southern California, for all of my adult life, which is, ahem, longer than I care to admit, I often look back on my midwestern upbringing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and scoff. I've never made it a secret why I left - I hate being cold, and Minneapolis is cold most of the time. Very cold. Very, very, cold. But the city is a beautiful one, and I was raised with good, old-fashioned midwestern morals and ethics, including being very thrifty. And as goofy as that sounds, it's served me well out west. I have to admit to being fascinated by the "laid back" attitude of Phoenix, and California. It seemed as if everyone back in the midwest was so uptight about everything, especially money. Midwestern people, especially my family, are pretty tight with a buck. I remember at the zoo that we kids weren't allowed to get soda, because, as I can still hear my mom saying, "We could buy twelve cans for that price, at the grocery sto...

I'll admit it, I like Coca-Cola. I've never been one of those people who drinks it out of a giant cup, but I do enjoy drinking it. I buy it in bottles at my local grocery store, and usually pour it over ice, sitting in my backyard. I consider it one of the small joys of my life. No, it's not like I dislike Pepsi, or RC, or anything like that, it's just that I decided that I wanted to be able to sit down and drink a Coke whenever I wanted to, and aside from coffee it's the most common drink I could think of, that I could get anywhere in the world. I used to imagine waking up in Shanghai, and still being able to get a Coke. By the way, before we time-travel back to old-time Phoenix, I gotta tell you that I'm old enough to remember when it seemed as if I'd never be able to drink Coca-Cola ever again. I was living in California when the taste was reformulated, as "New Coke", and I bought up a bunch of the original formula, in those little ti...

There's just something about Christmastime that makes a stranger feel even more isolated, even more alone. Maybe it's the Christmas specials on TV that always seem to emphasize that, no matter what, all that matters is that you're with friends and family. Speaking for myself, I chose to leave my friends and family, and move to a place that seemed so alien that at times it felt unreal. Don't get me wrong, I left Minneapolis because I hated the snow and cold, and wanted to see what the rest of the world was like, and I was happy in Phoenix, and still am. Every Christmastime the feeling comes back to me, year after year. I haven't seen snow in Minneapolis since 1982, when I made the mistake of visiting for Christmas, and was very glad to be back home, in my little apartment in Phoenix. But the sentiment remains. If you grew up in Phoenix, you take so much for granted. The lack of snow at Christmastime, the fact that cactuses grow right up out of the ground eve...

I've always known that I would have made a good confidence man. That is, someone who steals from people by making them trust him. In a long life I've known a lot of people like that, but it was never for me. I found my life jogged along quite nicely by being who I was, an honest, if somewhat innocent, person from the Midwest. I've done just fine that way, and plan on continuing to be that man for as long as I can. From Artful Dodgers to people who do "the Sting", you know that they're out there. People who will look you right in the eye and lie, and cheat, and steal. And many times these people prey on people's best instincts, to be kind, to help others. I'm sure you know what I mean. I grew up in a very protected world, in Minneapolis, and then threw myself into the great big world once I graduated from high school. I've lived in places with petty thieves, and even serious criminals. When I moved to California my eyes really opened to thes...

I thought about titling this "Biracial couples in old-time Phoenix", but to me that doesn't really make any sense, as I know that the concept of race is an imaginary one, and that there is only one race, the human race. But I've known a lot of people who disagree with me, and today I'm pondering mixed race couples. As as someone who was a teenager in Minneapolis in the '70s, mixed race couples were not unusual for me to see. There were a lot at my high school, and while it may have outraged the older generation, to me it didn't get a second glance. When I moved to California, in the 1980s, I saw a lot of mixed race couples, myself included (I'm a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but some of my girlfriends weren't). When I moved back to Phoenix in 1989, I prepared myself for a more, uh, traditional point of view. And I've been trying to understand. Nowadays, of course, mixed couples, whether of ethnicity or religion, are pretty much taken...

Although I moved to Phoenix in 1977, I left to go live in California during the decade of the 1980s, so I really don't have any IRL (In Real Life) memories of Phoenix at that time. But that won't stop me from imagining. Let's go back to the 1980s in Phoenix! I suggest that we start by going to Tempe. Here's the Earthen Joy Restaurant and the Gentle Strength Co-Op on 5th street just east of Mill Avenue. I never went to these places, but you might have! I recognize "A" Mountain! Go Devils! And let's say hi to Bill Andres and John Giese, and listen to some KDKB radio! KDKB Rooocccckkks Arizona! Grab a bumper sticker for me, will you? Valley Bank was still around in the 1980s (until 1992 in fact, which it was bought out by Bank One). Looks like you could get your face on your card. I'm not entirely clear what a Banking Card was, I suppose it was some kind of credit card? Maybe it was a check guarantee card? I know that it wasn't a d...

In my lifetime, pedestrians have had to stay off of streets. And not only for the law, but because it's extremely dangerous. As a kid growing up in Minneapolis, even with those small streets and even, uh, so long ago, I was warned by my parents to stay out of the street. And this morning, as I was walking for my coffee in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, I got to wondering what it would have been like in old-time Phoenix to be able to step out into the street and not have it be considered an act of suicide. And in my imagination those days will return, and I'm hoping that I'll live long enough to see it. Now calm down here, I'm not criticizing the wonderful engineers who created the streets of Phoenix. And I know that the drivers are doing the best they can, trying to stay always vigilant, never checking their cell phones for even an instant. But it's still deadly. So much so that people always tell me to be careful, just to walk a few blocks. Speed, of cour...

I kind of feel sorry for people who grew up in Phoenix, especially if their parents did, and their relations, and friends. I mean, what's the fun of having this glorious weather if you can't gloat about it to friends and family back east? You could, of course, be as obvious as this guy in 1893, who obviously sat himself down for a photo on Christmas Day in Phoenix, and even made up a little sign. Pretty obvious gloating! For me, I've always preferred a little more subtlety. I moved to Phoenix when I was 19, and left the snow and cold of Minneapolis behind me, and also my friends and relations. So I never missed an opportunity to let them know how nice it was where I was now living! While my friends were dealing with ice storms, I would casually mention that I was driving my MG with the top down. In fact, I always drove that car topless, wearing gloves when it got really cold, and turning on the heater, which is something you could never do in December in Minneapolis...