History Adventuring

Every once in a while I will see a comedian, or a comment on social media, laughing about Drive-In Liquor Stores, which have been around in Phoenix for as long as I can remember, and are still around. I've never really been a heavy drinking man, although I like to have a couple of beers with friends, and have been known to enjoy a gin-and-tonic on special occasions (like on my birthday, at the Stockyards - hint-hint). I moved to Phoenix when I was 19, a year after I had graduated from high school, and unlike most of the people I've ever known, I was not a drinker. In fact, I didn't have my first beer until I was 25, and I did that, along with teaching myself to drink coffee, to be more sociable. Anyway, I really have no memory of liquor stores in Phoenix, but I do recall one near where I lived, which was across from Lopers. It had a drive-up window, and I really never gave it a thought. But it was there, and I also just found a picture of one today while I was ...

I've always enjoyed history, and while for me it starts with reading some books, it also includes going there, and of course sharing it, which I love to do on this blog. It's all about your personal reference point, however, and if you don't have one to Phoenix history, I wouldn't blame you for having no interest in what I share. It just makes sense. No offense, but even if you're a friend of mine I would have no interest in your collection of sea shells, especially after the first two hours of your explaining every detail to me. I have no reference point there, sorry. If you're here, I'm assuming that you have a personal reference point to Phoenix history. If you're just reading this because you're a friend of mine, I appreciate that, but don't expect me to listen to you go on and on about your sea shell collection. Sorry. But let's talk about you. I really have no idea what your personal reference point is to Phoenix history, so I...

When I made the decision to move back to Phoenix in 1989, it happened very quickly. I had been visiting a friend, and decided to go look around at apartments in the greater Phoenix area. What I found astonished me, and I had signed a lease even before I had told my landlord in Canoga Park (a suburb of Los Angeles) that they would be losing me. I knew that I would lose my deposit, but I didn't care, I wanted out. I borrowed a van from a friend in Phoenix and went to go get my stuff, what there was of it, in a tiny studio apartment. I had a couch and some tables, but mostly I just had some clothes. Anyway, when I got ready to fill up the van I decided that I would hire some help. I knew that there were some young men, about my age, living in the apartment just across from mine, so I took out a twenty dollar bill, knocked on the door, and asked if someone could help me. At first I tried to communicate in Spanish, but that wasn't their language (I never really found out what ...

Ride along with me, and let's go visit one of my favorite places in the world, the historic Sahuaro Ranch in Glendale, Arizona. This is the time of Social Distancing, during the Coronavirus pandemic, and yes, it's perfectly fine what we're doing, and it's well within the guidelines of the governor. The ranch, like all of the parks around here, is open so that people can use them to get outside, breathe some fresh air, walk their dogs, and just generally, well, be somewhere other than on their couch while we all wait for the Covid-19 vaccine to become available. No, no one really knows when that will be. In the meantime, the idea is to leave a fair amount of space between you and the next person, so no squishing together in stadiums, in parks, that sort of thing. And things really haven't changed all that much for me. I've never really been a squishing together kind of person. You wouldn't find me sitting in a stadium, or in a bar, or anywhere like that...

Although the building itself of the Peoria Train Depot was moved to the Scottsdale Railroad Museum in 1974, its location, near 83rd Avenue and Peoria Avenue, remains, mostly empty. I go there quite often. If you've ever been to the Walmart on 79th Avenue and Peoria, and looked west, across Cotton Crossing, you can see the last remaining building, still sitting there, all alone. Why it's still there, or what it's used for nowadays, I have no idea. It sits on Market Street, surrounded by dirt and weeds. It's an ordinary old building, nothing special about it at all, and presumably it was filled with stuff brought in by the trains that could be distributed to the local consumers. Just ordinary marketing stuff, hence the name of the street. The photo at the top of this post I found while looking through the Duke University Libraries Digital Collection. The collection is all about billboards, but that's not what I'm looking at mostly. I'm looking a...

Even though I've been buying things online that are delivered to my home for many years now, I never really liked doing that before the invention of the internet. And if you think that shopping from home is something new, it's not, and in the early days of Phoenix mail order items would have been very important. Of course, as Phoenix grew and more and more stores carried just about everything you could want, there was less of a need to place and order and wait for it to arrive in the mail. The order form at the top of this post, from the Phoenix newspaper of 1917, would have been typical. Sears, Roebuck and Company and also Montgomery Ward were very big on mail order. Most homes in the United States would have had both of their catalogs. In fact, my mom in Minneapolis in the 1960s would order things through the Sears catalog and go to the Sears building just to pick them up. It was less of a hassle, I guess, than dragging kids through a store (although my brothers and I...

I had a lot of fun working for Bank One in downtown Phoenix. Don't get me wrong, I worked hard, as a graphic designer for the Marketing Department, but I was one of those lucky people who made a career out of what I studied in college. When I first started at ASU I had no idea what a graphic designer was, but once I got my degree I knew that it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Well, until about forty, which is when I figured that I would move on to something else. Doing corporate graphic design is a high-pressure, fast-deadlines job that requires the kind of youthful energy that I knew I wouldn't have forever. So, like I say, I had kinda figured that when old age crept up on me, by my late thirties, I'd find something else to do, probably sales. In that pic of me there in 1994, posing for my photo with the new One Card, I was already feeling a bit long in the tooth. If you're not familiar with Bank One, here's a quick explanation. Bank One to...

Run with me, and let's go back to 1983, and jog around the Hollywood Reservoir. It's the kind of place that I've found wherever I've lived which makes people think that I'm kidding. There are people who have lived in Los Angeles for a long time and can't even imagine it. But I was there, and I'd like you to go back there with me now, just to kill some time. Because that's about all I did in 1983, was to find inexpensive ways to kill time while I waited for a response to the various jobs that I'd applied for. I didn't call it "History Adventuring" back then, it was just a way to pass the time in an interesting and inexpensive way. Although I've always been an athletic and active man, I really haven't done much running, but you gotta admit that it's a cheap form of exercise. I didn't have a bicycle at the time, and I sure couldn't afford a gym membership, so when a neighbor of mine suggested going for a run wit...

It's April 4th, 2020, and I'm doing my part to flatten the curve of the corona virus, by social distancing. And since it's something that I've been doing for over thirty years, it comes naturally to me, and is just plain weird to most people. Walk with me, and let's visit the Rancho Los Encinos in Encino, California. For reference, the Los Angeles community of Encino is on the San Fernando Valley side of the hills that Beverly Hills sits on. And in case anyone asks, Encino is Spanish for oak. There were a lot of oak trees there at one time, and there still are a few, some over 500 years old. I found some photos of the rancho online, and nothing really looked familiar to me. I certainly never went inside of any of the buildings, and mostly I had no interest in what most people like to do, which is squash together. I roamed around the grounds. Nowadays with my gimpy right ankle and my grey hair I'm sure that it seems a little less weird when people see m...

It's April 3rd 2020, I'm doing my part for social distancing, and a good friend of mine has been delivering a to-go coffee from McDonalds to me in the morning for the past few days. Then we hang out in my garage and talk. Just the two of us, six feet apart. When my friend asked "what if they don't come up with a vaccine for the corona virus?", I glibly said, "Well, then that would be the end of our species". Of course, it wouldn't, because humans have survived things like this before, and besides, the vaccine will be ready before we know it, and everything will be just fine. In the meantime, well, you know me, I'm letting my imagination wander, and as I looked around my suburban Phoenix neighborhood yesterday I got to wondering what it would look like if people went extinct. It's actually pretty easy to see what it would look like - just go out into the desert. The Phoenix metro area is pretty big, but the Sonoran Desert is enormous. ...

If you're the kind of person who likes museums, and displays, and guided tours, you really won't like the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. Don't get me wrong, there's a museum there, and displays, and even guided tours, but if you spend your time there you'll miss seeing the tar pits. And that's because it's simply a chunk of land that was set aside years ago with masses of oozing tar. Personally, I've always loved going to the tar pits. My sneakers were always stained with tar when I lived in LA. When I used to go there, in the 1980s, there was no admission to the tar pits, and I can't imagine that there is one now, although parking has gotta be more difficult. The tar pits are simply a big grassy area, and when you walk around, you get tar stuck in the soles of your shoes. If you sit on the grass, your pants get stained with tar. You can smell the tar, it oozes. It smells terrible. I've gone to the tar pits many times alone and a few ...