Being crazy in old-time Phoenix


I remember hearing the comedian Chris Rock say several years ago, "Whatever happened to crazy?" And as he and I fall into roughly the same age category (old), he was talking about how the word crazy was used to describe people who were, well, crazy.

Of course that's not a very nice word to use, and I can't imagine that it ever was, even in old-time Phoenix. Nowadays it's more polite to use a more clinical term like "mentally challenged". I may cheerfully call my friends crazy, but I'd never it to describe someone who was walking along the street, shouting, and randomly running out in front of cars.

So I think that I can answer Chris Rock's question - crazy has never left, it's always been around, and as long as there are people with brains that, ahem, go off the rails sometimes, it always will be around. As someone who genuinely enjoys people with quirky personalities, I believe in wide range of interpretation. As a creative person myself, I prefer to be called "touched", you know, the type of person that the Indians would leave alone. I wouldn't say that I would be called "possessed", but that must have been a popular way to describe someone who was, uh, crazy in old-time Phoenix.

A polite term, back in the 1890s, would have been "insane". Yes, I know it's not used today, but it was then. There was a big Arizona Territorial Insane Asylum just outside of Phoenix, at where 24th Street and Van Buren is today. But I'm not really talking about clinical insanity, I'm talking about day-to-day crazy, like taking risks when you really should know better.

Watching a parade sitting on the edge of the Professional Building in the 1930s, Central Avenue and Monroe. Are they crazy?

I've known a lot of crazy people, people that I would describe as "not playing with a full deck" or "whose elevator doesn't go all of the way to the top" who have done some amazing, and dangerous, things. And if you look at old photos of Phoenix you'll see a lot of craziness - people not wearing seatbelts, people sitting on the edge of buildings watching a parade. Whether it's crazy or not of course depends on your point of view.

My heavens, what on earth possessed you to do that? Are you crazy?
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