Being in your twenties in the '20s in Phoenix, Arizona


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 changes in her town, and will see an absolutely explosion during the "roaring twenties". Because it's true - money flowed easily, credit was easy for anyone to get, and investments flourished. Of course it all crashed in 1929, and you can even see the rate of growth slows down considerably for Phoenix at that time, and only picks up again after World War II, when she would be nearly fifty.

Anyway, it's the twenties, and if she's like most thoroughly modern young women she drinks and smokes. Yes, I know that selling liquor is illegal in the 1920s, but that didn't slow down the amount of drinking. In fact, it was such a chic thing to do at the time, I can't imagine that she would have said no if she were invited to a speakeasy, or a blind pig (an illegal bar). And of course no one had any idea that tobacco caused lung cancer, it may have offended some of the fussy old folks who wouldn't have considered smoking to be ladylike, but I'm gonna say that our heroine here wouldn't have paid much attention to the old folks. She even bobbed her hair!

Her outfit in the photo, by the way, would have been absolutely outrageous. Not her revealing her neck and arms, but the fact that you could see her knees! Eek!

As I write this, there are only two more days until the '20s start again. And if you want to know what it was like 100 years ago, just look around - Phoenix is throwing up a LOT of new buildings, and the young people are going about their business without paying much attention to the warnings of the older and wiser crowd. Hopefully there won't be another stock market crash!
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