Telling tall tales as a Phoenix old-timer


As I was listening this morning to a, ahem, older gentlemen (who's really not that much older than I am), I got to wondering how much of what he was saying was the plain truth, and how much was exaggerated for effect. Of course I'll never know, and that's what makes it difficult for me, as a historian. Telling tall tales, exaggerations, or "stretchers", has always been a very typical thing for old-timers in Arizona to do. There are other places in the world with liars, but Arizona seems to grow a lot of them. Well, "liar" is too harsh a word, so I'll just use the word "imaginative".

Speaking for myself, I'm old enough to remember the 1970s in Phoenix. If you weren't there, I wouldn't blame you for being suspicious of the stuff that I talk about. And this blurred image of the past has many reasons, only one of which that there are a lot of old people who think that they've lived such boring lives that they have to make stuff up. And this makes me sad.

Speaking for myself, my life hasn't been one giant thrill ride after another. I'm no "International Man of Mystery", I'm just a senior citizen living in a suburb of Phoenix. And for most people, whatever their age, that kind of thing is just plain boring.

So a lot of old-timers like to add some interest to their stories, by making something into a dramatic "brush with death" or something. And that means that people who actually have had a dramatic brush with death kinda hard to believe. And so for most old-timers who start talking to me, grabbing my lapels with glittering eyes, I smile, wish them well, and wander off. If they seem to have something to say, especially about being young in Phoenix, then I try to encourage them to share. Many of these people have no idea how interesting it is to hear that you could make a phone call for a dime, or that there was a time when there were so few telephones in Arizona that it all had the same area code, and you didn't need to dial 602.

It does seem a shame that so much interesting stuff is lost this way, buried under either a thin layer, or a mountain, of exaggeration. But not everyone who is a senior citizen considers an ordinary life to be boring, and I'm one of those people. Every once in a while I share what Phoenix was like for me "back in the day", and I don't exaggerate, even if I say that I once owned an orange car!
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