Being a Booby, who belongs in a Booby-Hatch, in old-time Phoenix


If I pointed at you and laughed, called you a Booby, and said that you belonged in a Booby-Hatch, you would probably question my mental stability, and figure that I needed to be placed in a Mental Health Care Facility. Or you could call me crazy, and say that I should be in an Insane Asylum. The language has changed.

I doubt whether you, dear reader, are old enough to have ever called 24th Street and Van Buren in Phoenix (which is where the Insane Asylum has been since the 1800s) a Booby-Hatch. I wouldn't have ever been familiar with the term if I hadn't read a James Thurber story, in which a man's wife tries to get her husband sent to an insane asylum, and she ends up going there instead. The punchline of the story was "Never count your b__bies before they're hatched", which is a play on words for "never count your chickens before they're hatched". Funny then, but in modern language, very confusing. In my lifetime I've never hear the word used like that, only the other definition, which springs to just about everybody's mind. In fact, I won't even write the word here on Google Blogger, as the 'bots might catch it, take it out of context, and see it as a violation of their terms, which I accept. I don't write obscenity here!

But make no mistake, calling someone a Booby, who belongs in the Booby-Hatch was a very rude thing to say. I can picture kids saying it, laughing and pointing, but polite adults would have never said that. They would have said the polite thing, that someone was insane, and should be in the insane asylum. Nowadays that wouldn't be very polite!

In a long life, I've seen my share of people that in my opinion are kinda crazy. Stereotypically, they're roller-skating backwards on the strand at Venice beach wearing a pinwheel hat, but it's all a matter of opinion. I've never known anyone who would pay thousands of dollars to sit in a stadium to watch the Super Bowl, but I defend their right to do something that I would consider slightly off-balance. I myself have done some strange things in my life, such as owning a Swedish sports car, or going out in the noon-day sun in Phoenix, but I like to consider myself eccentric, not a Booby!

Image at the top of this post: The Phoenix Insane Asylum in 1899.
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