Learning how to use stop signs in old-time Phoenix

When I first started teaching, back in the '90s, I was surprised at how precious little people knew of stuff that I had known for a long time, and had taken for granted, like creating a layer mask in Photoshop, or even working with simple vectors in Adobe Illustrator. I very quickly adapted, and it was a good early lesson for me in empathy. These people weren't "stupid", they just didn't know about certain things. Unfortunately, a lot of people never develop this empathy, even teachers, and they can be just awful. I learned empathy, which I call "seeing through other people's eyes", and although I taught all levels of classes, I especially liked teaching beginning classes. They were actually much more difficult than the advanced classes, you had to start with stuff that experienced people just take for granted, like explaining what a layer is, and how to use a mask, or what vectors are.

So, if your first reaction is to wonder "Who is stupid enough to not know how to use a stop sign?" you've fallen into that trap, and you can't to see it through the eyes of someone who had never seen a stop sign before. But of course there was a time when stop signs were brand-new, and even experienced drivers hadn't seen them. Let's time-travel back to old-time Phoenix.

The stop sign at the top of this post, which is at Camelback Road and 16th Street in the 1940s, must have been very puzzling to people who saw it for the first time. Note that it tries a bit to explain, because Camelback Road was a highway, and highways have through traffic. Through traffic? Of course, what it was trying to say was:

"Bring your car to a stop, look both ways, and let the cars going past you keep going. When it's safe to do so, you can cross the intersection, or turn onto the highway."

On a computer, and especially on the tiny screen of a cell phone, this is called an "icon". There really isn't enough room to be conversational in such a tiny space, so it tends to be a shape, a color, and the minimum of words. By the way, although that photo is black-and-white, I can tell you that stop signs were yellow at the time, and were only painted red starting in the 1950s. I've never seen a stop sign that said anything but "Stop", and it seems to me that if it said "Through Highway" it would have been spelled "Thru Hiway".

I very often see people become impatient with people who haven't learned something yet. And it is difficult to imagine that people don't know what a particular icon means, or a few short words, or an abbreviation. But the next time you feel like rolling your eyes at someone because they don't understand something that you've known for years, imagine rolling up to an octagonal sign for the very first time.

Thank you for stopping at stop signs in old-time Phoenix!

Image at the top of this post: Looking north on 16th Street at Camelback Road in the 1940s, Phoenix, Arizona. From the McCulloch Collection at ASU.

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