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!
Help support history adventuring, and see a lot of cool old photos of Phoenix on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more