History Adventuring

When I moved to Phoenix, at age 19, no one suggested that I stay at the YMCA. In fact, it would have been a ridiculous idea - in my lifetime the YMCA was a place with a swimming pool, and workout rooms. But a generation earlier I probably would have immediately sought out the local YMCA, which was on 2nd Avenue and Monroe from 1912 until the 1950s. I'll see if I can explain using the lyrics from the 1978 song "YMCA", by the Village People. Sing along with me, and dance if you'd like: Young man, there's no need to feel down I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground. I said, young man, 'cause you're in a new town There's no need to be unhappy. Young man, there's a place you can go I said, young man, when you're short on your dough You can stay there, and I'm sure you will find Many ways to have a good time. Taking away the "smile and a wink" sarcasm of the lyrics, that's exactly what the YMCA was in old-tim...

As someone who taught at a Community College, I like to talk to young people about doing more than just working, about creating a career for themselves, getting paid for what they love. This really isn't the same as "getting rich quick", but most professional careers tend to pay better than "dead-end jobs", and besides the whole point is to do something that you enjoy doing, that inspires you to go to your job every day. Most of the people I've ever met hate their jobs, and wish that they could find a way to get rich quick so that they can quit. The rare people that I've met have loved the work they do (and I'm one of those oddballs, who loved being a graphic designer), are more inclined to talk about their projects than dollars and cents, and are anxious to see what the next interesting project will be, not imagining themselves sitting on a island somewhere, doing nothing. As I've often said, my wish is that I would never be poor, and neve...

I've never experienced a doctor making a house call. I've seen it in movies, read about it in books, but that's all. It's really hard for me to imagine, but I'm gonna try now, by traveling back to old-time Phoenix in my imagination. First of all, let's consider what my latest visit to my doctor was like. It was just a checkup, and I felt fine, but it wouldn't be something that I would want to do if I wasn't in top health. It required me to go to a building, fill out forms, and sit in a waiting room. I mostly find the whole experience just dull, and a little annoying, like waiting at the DMV, but it only takes a couple of hours of my time, and I understand how valuable a doctor's time is, and how valueless my time is by comparison. I sometimes feel kinda sorry for my doctor, who just has an endless assembly line of people to see one after another. She's in those tiny rooms all day long, with only a lunch break to relieve the monotony. I appr...

No matter how much you love LA, ya gotta hate how crowded the freeways always are. I've lived in Phoenix since 1989, and every once in a while I hear a complaint about the rush hour - with jokes about it lasting all day, you know, morning rush hour from 6 to noon, evening rush hour from noon to midnight. And it just makes me smile, because even back in the eighties, there was no rush hour on Los Angeles freeways, they're always very crowded, and very often came to a complete stop. Yes, a parking lot. You could get out of your car and walk around if you wanted to, but no one did. The cars were stationary, and every once in a while you'd see a motorcycle go by, splitting the lanes. If you're wondering what my solution to this was, sorry, it may not work for you - I simply avoided the freeways. I was fortunate in that I worked close to where I lived, and if I did need to travel some distance, I took out my Thomas Guide map and worked out a route on surface streets. B...

I rode over to Sun City yesterday. I live in Glendale, and it's really not so far, just a few miles. It was a beautiful day and I wanted to ride the Greenway Channel. And it was wonderful. Sun City is nice, and clean, and safe, but it has given me the hee-bee-gee-bees for over thirty years now. And I'm trying to puzzle out why? Now calm down here if you think that I'm criticizing Sun City, I'm not. In fact, if I told you would wonderful it is you'd think that the Sun City Chamber of Commerce was paying me to write this post. And since this isn't an infomercial, I'll let it go at that. If you've been there, or live there, you know. Sun City in 1971. It still looks the same today. For those of you who aren't familiar with Sun City, Arizona, it's a retirement community created by Del Webb, beginning in 1960. At the time you needed to be 50 to live there, and now you need to be 55. And since I'll never see 55 again, I kinda figured ...

Something that springboarded me into college, and wanting to have a white-color job, was working for a handful of Saturdays on an automotive assembly line when I was 18. It's brutally hard work. I was a very fit and energetic young man, but at night my body would just ache from the work. And in my sleep the cars would continue to roll by... If you've worked on an automotive assembly line you know, and if you haven't, you may be under the impression that at its worst it's dull, maybe just putting a bumper on a car, over and over all day. But it was hard work, which required a whole series of tasks that had to be done both at your work station, and on the cars that relentlessly rolled by. The year was 1976, and if you were there, or read about that time, you know that it was a huge shock for people in the U.S. who had been used to very cheap gas, and very big gas-guzzling cars. Actually the worst of it was 1973, when there were gas shortages, and people were waiti...

Cheating people is a very old profession, which didn't start with the internet, or email. It does, however, require a fairly high population to make it work, or people who visit a place, and don't live there. So if you go back far enough in Phoenix history, back to when everybody knew everybody, there really wouldn't have been much of a chance of being cheated. But things changed as Phoenix grew. There are, of course, people who have no conscience at all, and would steal from friends and relatives. They would lie to these people, and still be able to face them, and be able to sleep at night. But that's a very small percentage of people who can do that, and properly speaking they're psychopaths. Mostly people who do want to cheat and steal from people would rather that they do so from people that don't really know. If you plan on proposing to a man's daughter, you probably don't want to have swindled him out of his life savings. That's just huma...

If you've ever driven around Phoenix, you're aware of Greenway Road, which is a major street. I live in the west valley, in Glendale, and have been on Greenway Road more times than I can count. But it's only recently that I've discovered the Greenway Road less traveled. If you already know about it, you're smiling wisely, if not, please ride along with me, you'll like it. We'll be riding on my recumbent trike. Yes, I know that there's only room for one, but this is a journey of your imagination. Relax and get comfortable! I'll steer. We'll be starting out along the northwest edge of the original Sahuaro Ranch, which was 67th Avenue and Peoria. You know, where the Starbucks is now. We're going due north. I much prefer the road less traveled, and luckily, they're easy to get to. Most people drive on the main streets, which leaves the neighborhood streets very empty, even during rush hour. This is 71st Avenue and Canterbury...

I've been asking silly questions since I was a kid, and it seems as if the answers I've always gotten have just made me more confused. If I were to ask, for example, "how tall people were back in the 1920s?", inevitably the answer would include a bunch of terms that I never really could grasp, like average, and mean, and stuff like that. And then I would be asked to look at charts and graphs, and I would suddenly remember an urgent appointment somewhere else. But I think you and I can work out the answer, or at least get close. The short answer, of course, is that they were shorter. No one will argue that point. I'm about six feet tall (which is how most guys who are 5' 9" describe themselves) and on a daily basis, just wandering around Phoenix, I tend to be the tallest person around. Yes, there are a few guys who are taller than me, of course, but as a percentage there's not that many. As I walk around, I'm taller than just about all of th...

I don't recall watching KPAZ-TV, which was on channel 21 in Phoenix, when I first moved there in the '70s. I had a tiny little borrowed TV, and as I recall was glad to just get the VHF channels, and it didn't have a UHF antenna. By the way, VHF means Very High Frequency (which I always considered a vague term) and UHF is Ultra High Frequency (which I remember being able to get on the TV back home in Minneapolis, and made me feel as if I were getting something no one else knew about, although there wasn't much on the UHF channels.) Anyway, after I moved back to Phoenix, in 1989, I decided to continue to brush up on my Spanish, and so I would watch Spanish language television every once in a while. If you've ever watched it, you know that it can be, ahem, rather more revealing than the usual channels, especially when the weather forecast is being done. I would watch the weather forecast, and study my Spanish! I'm not going to say anymore here, as the English-...

One of the things that I remember my father saying when I was a kid was that "there's no fool like an old fool". And as harsh as that sounds, it shows a reflection of expectations, forgiveness for the young, but not for people who are old enough to know better. This set an expectation for myself, as I was determined to not grow up to be an old fool. Walking onto a city bus with my best friend in high school, and immediately blurting out the stupidest things that we could think of, as loud as we could, was age appropriate. The grownups would be annoyed, but they'd glance up, see that we were young and foolish, and forgive. We weren't old fools. Now calm down here, I'm not saying that being old necessarily makes you a fool - in fact, it should do just the opposite - with age comes wisdom. The kind of things that kids don't know become the kind of things that adults should know, like not parking in a handicapped spot, for example. Once I reached a cert...

I'd like to say that it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but for me going to high school in Minneapolis was neither. My memories of it are vague. Unlike most of my friends, I hated the snow and cold. And there's a LOT of snow and cold in Minneapolis. When I turned 19, I figured out how to read a map and use a compass and headed west. And yes, I walked to school for miles in the snow, and yes, it was uphill both ways. I lived on the extreme end of the school zone, and it was a goodly distance to it. The house was along a steep hill, which sloped down to a creek, called Minnehaha, and that walk took me along there until I had to walk up another steep hill to get to the school. So there were two steep hills both ways. I know that because I rode my bicycle often, and it was tough going up both of those hills, especially the one to the school. Of course that was only in the summer, and in the winter we walked. Yes, there was a school bus, and yes, it stopp...

Since I'm a graphic designer, and am aware of copyright law, I know that people often wonder if I'm in violation when I share an old publicity photo, or advertising photo. And as an old ad guy, it kinda makes me smile. What a question! I'll see if I can explain. A publicity photo, like the one at the top of this post, which is of Valley Center under construction in 1972, was created to encourage newspapers and magazines to share it, in print. A photographer was contracted to take the photo, paid by Valley National Bank, and then hundreds of prints were made and mailed out. A company does this in the hopes that it will get free publicity, which is free advertising, by getting this photo in print, hopefully with a story in a newspaper or magazine. As you can tell, there was no limitation on how it was used, rather it was hoped that it would be used a LOT! If you're concerned about how it all works financially, the photographer gets paid for their work, and then th...

If you're like me, and I asked you what sidearm that the G.I. Joes carried in World War II, you would say, "A .45". It's of course not a rifle, but somehow I never thought of it as a pistol. Pistols to me conjure up cowboys, and if female "pistol-packing mamas". As you can tell, I'm no gun expert. So when I first heard of a 1911 pistol, which to my eyes looked like a .45 from World War II, I wondered if the number was just a random number, or if it meant 1911, because I figured that it had been invented in the '40s, or maybe the '30. Nope, it meant the year 1911. So I jumped onto the Library of Congress website of old newspapers and looked around. I'll tell you what I found in the Abbeville Press and Banner, March 26th, 1902. Here's the link as a pdf if you want to go read it there https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/scu_joshwhite_ver01/data/sn84026853/00237287150/1902032601/0030.pdf , but I'll sum it up here. ...

Let's time-travel and go see the beautiful bathing belles of old-time Phoenix. Or, if you're not familiar with the old-fashioned terminology, the beautiful swimming girls. The term "bathing" really isn't used much anymore to describe going into water other than in a bathtub, but it used to be common. People would go for a bathe, the way that they now go for a swim. And the term "belle", which means a lovely woman, is usually only heard in the old-fashioned phrase "the belle of the ball", which meant the loveliest girl at a dance. The language has changed, but something that hasn't changed is how much everyone likes to look at bathing belles. I do, of course, being a straight (my gay friends would call me grim) man, and I know that women like to look at them to see what the fashion is, or how they're wearing their hair. It's 1915, so let's look at some wonderful bathing belles. These lovely young ladies are standing next...

Although to our modern eyes, the desert is beautiful, if you time-traveled back to the days when Phoenix was first beginning, the desert was a terrible and frightening place, a place of death, not of life. So when people started living there, and didn't want to just see "miles and miles of kitty litter", they planted trees. And in my opinion, Phoenix got it right, and has done the perfect balance of having trees, but keeping in mind that it's a desert, with limited water, and precious little rainfall. If you've ever wandered around old parts of Pasadena, you can see that what they did there was to try to re-create the look of the midwest in a dry, hot climate. Yes, I understand that it made the city more attractive than if it were left in a natural state, which is just scrubs, but it's wildly expensive to keep up, both in terms of labor, and water use. That being said, and I'm speaking strictly for myself here, I'm not comfortable living in a ...

In my lifetime, the only men who have worn hats are men who worked outdoors, and of course kids. I came of age when men who wore shirts and ties didn't wear hats, they drove cars, and that's the reason why you don't see men's hats anymore. As a fashion statement, of course, some men wear hats nowadays, but it's mostly functional. For what it's worth, the hood of a sweatshirt serves a similar function, it covers your head, which is nice on a cold desert morning! Men, like my father who began his career in the 1950s, who wore a shirt-and-tie to work, didn't ever wear a hat. Growing up in Minneapolis I can't even picture him ever wearing a hat, although he might have. The etiquette for gentlemen is to always take off your hat when you entered a building, and since men like my dad drove cars to work, where a hat wasn't needed, it certainly wasn't needed at work. Of course you see men in old movies wearing hats. I can't imagine anyone we...

It's Valentine's Day, February 14th, 1912, and Arizona has just become a state. We're in Phoenix, and the parade is about to begin. I really don't understand the difference between a territory and a state, but what does it matter? Let's celebrate! Yes, I know that it's only morning, and probably too early to be shooting off our guns, but I've been up all night, celebrating since midnight! Yee-Hawwww! You will have to go and buy yourself a new flag, one with two new stars! New Mexico is now a state, too! And if you have stationary, you'll have to change it from saying A.T. (Arizona Territory) to just saying Arizona. This is going to be difficult for me to remember. I don't suppose that the old-timers will ever get used to it. The Territorial Capitol, there on Washington, will now be the State Capitol, think of that! Hand me that bottle of whiskey, will ya, mine's about gone! Yuk! This is terrible! Where did you get this from? From Jack Sw...

Speaking for myself, I don't like to fight, or even argue. I enjoy discussing things with intelligent people, and hearing about different points of view, even political and religious, but I dislike fighting, or arguing. There really is a difference, and the difference has to do with whether something will seem to lead to a fist fight. Fisting fighting, or bare-knuckle fighting, has always been a popular pastime, and would have been very common in old-time Phoenix. Putting on boxing gloves, or using the Marquess of Queensbury Rules, during a heated political discussion would have been ridiculous. Of course, you would never know if the man you were fighting with might not pull a knife, or a gun. As you know, there are no rules in a knife fight, and really there are no rules in a fist fight. Biting and kicking may seem unsportsmanlike, but they would have been used to help drive home a point about whether a particular candidate was suitable for office. I've been lucky. I ...