Being a young person living on inherited wealth in old-time Phoenix


Like most people, I've always had to work for a living. My parents helped pay for a part of my tuition at ASU, and my mom regularly mailed me "care packages", but other than that, when I moved to Arizona at age 19, I was on my own. I worked.

Now, as a man of leisure, living on Social Security income, I've been wondering about young people who've never had to work. That is, the people who never had to wake up to an alarm clock, deal with rush hour traffic, worry about what would happen if they got laid off, or fired, that sort of thing. And like most people like me it's made me insensitive to young people who live with inherited wealth. Gul-derned lazy little whipper-snappers!

I've known people who have had bundles of money, whose lifestyle made you wonder how in the world they could afford all of the gas for the number of cars they owned, or how much they paid the air conditioning bills for their large homes, but I've never known anyone who grew up, turned 18, or 21, and never had a concern for where the money would come from, for rent, for food, for life.

The alarm went off this morning on a clock that I had been fiddling around with yesterday. At first I thought that there was something wrong with my phone, which I keep at my bedside, and then I realized that the "Atomic Clock" on the wall was beeping. Apparently when I moved it yesterday I accidentally pushed the alarm button on the back, and it went off at six am. And while thirty years ago, I could have rolled over and gone back to sleep for several hours, now I'm up. Seems unfair, but I'm learning more about what it's like to live a long life. Because to me not waking up to an alarm clock would have been the best part of being independently wealthy!

The first thing that I think of when I think of a young person with inherited wealth is that they would never see six am. Or maybe they would see if if they were up all night, and came home "with the milkman". Phoenix has never been a town like Las Vegas, or New York, that has a "half-a-million things to do, all at a quarter to three", but my best guess is that if you had the money, and the time, there would have always been things to do to keep yourself entertained at night, which you would need to do if you slept until noon.


Being a young person with inherited wealth can be a good thing, or a bad thing. A young person can spend all of their time at bottle parties, eating lobster and caviar, and drinking champagne. Speaking for myself, I'd like to imagine that I would have done what the young Barry Goldwater did, which was take my camera and go travel around Arizona. Most people know him from his political career, and I hesitate to even mention him, but what fascinates me about Barry is that he just wandered around, looking at stuff. He talked to people, he took photographs.

Image at the top of this post: Looking southwest at 1st Avenue and Monroe in the 1940s, Phoenix, Arizona.
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