History Adventuring

It's near Christmastime now and as usual, the season has me thinking of Christmases past. Like everyone, I have good memories, and no-so-good memories of Christmastime, and today I'm thinking of my very first Christmas in Phoenix, Arizona in 1977, when I was nineteen. When I've told people about it, I've paid careful attention to what their attitude about what Christmas is, and I've emphasized things that they want to hear, good or bad. But today I'll just present it, and let you decide. First of all, I was all alone, thousands of miles away from family, and the only friends I'd ever known. I wrote back to my mom, and my best friends, and always included some cartoons (the one there was saved by a friend of mine who returned it to me last year, it's from 1977.) And I'd leave the story there if I was going for a sentimental note, but the reality was that I was glad to be away from Minneapolis. In addition to always hating snow and cold, I really, real...

It's November 28th, 2020, and as usual I'm spending a lot of time on the internet, on my phone, and on my tablet. And since this is a pretty awful time right now, I'm watching some people seeing the end of civilization. As a person who is interested in history, I'm fascinated by the "end of the world" people. Well, to be fair, the world will go on with or without us. The world itself has seen so many species go extinct that it seems a cold, cruel world. Yep, nearly everything that ever tried to live on this planet has gone extinct. You can Google it if you want to, but it's kinda depressing. Speaking for myself, I have faith in the future of humanity. And that makes me seem like an absolute idiot to some people who know that it's all about to end. Right now it's a global pandemic, and I'm pondering other scenarios that would have scared people, with good reason, with the end of civilization. In my experience, I remember when the new millennium ...

Walk with me. It's 1953, and we're black people in Phoenix, Arizona. And if you're wondering how many there are of us in Arizona, it's right there in the Sun newspaper, 60,000. It's a time of segregation. A time when we can be denied service at restaurants, and thousands of other indignities based on the color of our skin. It's a shameful time, a time that isn't even talked about by many people, as if talking about it would make it seem as if it never happened. But it's also a hopeful time. If you've never seen, or even heard of, the Arizona Sun newspaper, it's not surprising. It isn't the typical kind of thing that you find in light and airy articles about the history of Phoenix. But let's take a look. The country is about to change, and one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." In Phoenix a judge at the Maricopa County...

I lived in the San Fernando Valley for several years, and worked in Woodland Hills, but I don't recall shopping all that much. I know that I did, but I rarely went to malls. But one day I decided to go to one of the malls in Woodland Hills to do some Christmas shopping. I had probably gotten a Christmas bonus from work, and money was burning a hole in my pocket. It must have been a weekend, and it's always crowded in the Los Angeles area, but I never gave it a second thought, I just got in my car and drove to the mall. And when I got there, I couldn't see a parking spot. Not seeing a parking spot didn't worry me, I knew that the parking lots were huge, and I was young and strong and I could easily hike from places that other people wouldn't bother even looking at. So I drove to the outskirts of the parking lot. And I kept driving, looking for a spot. I really don't know how long I drove around, even looking to see if someone might be backing out. Nothing opened ...

Something that changed my life, back when I was 22 years old, was meeting the motivational speaker Joel Weldon. I know that he's touched many lives, and I'm just one of them, but I thought that maybe you would like to hear about it. Let's time-travel back to 1980 and go to Scottsdale, Arizona. Well, actually, we need to start at Phoenix College, which is on Thomas Road and 15th Avenue, because that's where I saw a "help wanted" ad on the job board. It was to draw some cartoons, which is what I had been looking for. Among the many things that I had never heard of before at age 22 was a "motivational speaker". Yes, of course I know all about them now, but at the time it made no sense to me. Motivational speakers have always been around, and still are, and mostly they give the type of advice that salespeople need. But I found out that it ran much deeper. At the time, Joel was using an overhead projector to show cartoons while he spoke. He had been using...

Although California is a very big place, I tend to think of it as Los Angeles. And even back in the 1980s, it was a very crowded place. The freeways were crowded, the streets were crowded, the stores were crowded. Before I moved to California, I had spent seven years in Arizona, which wasn't crowded, and still isn't nowadays. And before that I was just a kid in Minneapolis, where it was crowded, but I never noticed it. But I remember the wide-open spaces of Phoenix, which I first saw in 1977, and I met people who were used to those wide-open spaces, and had never really lived where it was crowded. I liked the space, and I still do. When I was going to ASU I spent a lot of time with my neighbor's dogs, wandering around places in Tempe which are now industrial parks and apartment complexes. It never even occurred to me to put the dogs on a leash, or be concerned that they, uh, "did their doodie" anywhere. There was plenty of space! The car I owned then was missing p...

Since I collect old photos of Phoenix, and write about its history, a lot of people have confused me with one of those people who are pining away for "the good old days". But that's not me. I'm not a historian, I'm a time-traveler. When I imagine old-time Phoenix, I imagine being there, and always looking forward to better days. What you would call me is a "progressive". I really don't see any reason not to be. This is what Arizona historically has done, progress. Even the old Valley Bank logo at the top of this post has the slogan "Progressing with Arizona". If I had lived in Phoenix during the early 20th Century I would have been enthusiastic about a gigantic dam being built on the Salt River, about the possibility of statehood, a future when all of the roads would be paved, that sort of thing. I would look forward to a time when the city would control the terrible floods, which happened all too often. If I had lived in Phoenix right afte...

It's been a long time since I lived in Santa Barbara, but I have fond memories of it. The last time I was there, a few years ago, I was surprised at how much came back to me, and how easy it was to find my way around. And since I'm a history adventurer nowadays at my computer, I decided to visit Santa Barbara on the Library of Congress site, looking at old newspapers. I found an article from the Los Angeles Herald in 1897. Let's time-travel. The drawing is from the newspaper, and I tried my best to match it up using Google Earth. The angle isn't exactly right, but you can see the ocean to the left, and the mesa at upper right. The artist who drew this wasn't flying, he was simply standing on a ridge that nowadays has a road called Alameda Padre Sierra, which locals just call APS. The modern view is much higher, but it was best I could do. I don't see many buildings in the drawing, but of course they were there. Most of them fell down during the 1925 earthquake, ...

If you live in the flatlands, like where I am right now, in Arizona, you can easily get by with north-south-east-west for directions. Even if your sense of direction isn't all that great (and mine isn't!), that works just fine. But if you live along the coast in California, in places like Santa Barbara, or Malibu, you find yourself describing directions differently, based on whether you're heading towards the ocean, or away from it. If you've never lived right on the west coast, you assume that the ocean is, of course, west. But in some places the coast is to the west, and in some places it's to the south. Yes of course the ocean always is to the west, but if you're in Santa Monica you don't drive west (you could do it, but it would be silly) to get to the coast, you drive south. I lived in Santa Barbara for many years, and while I didn't spend much time on the ocean (I don't surf, I rarely swam, and I didn't have a boat), when you give direction...

I just love looking at maps of Los Angeles, and often there are names that lead me into some interesting history adventuring. And recently I saw the words "Brents Junction" on a map of an area that I know well, in Calabasas. Specifically, the intersection of the 101 and Las Virgenes Road. I used to house-sit for a friend who had a house just a few blocks north of there. I'd been there many times, and have always had an interest in history, but I didn't recall anyone using the term "Brents Junction". I even called my friend, who lived there for many, many years, and the best he could do was to say that he had heard of it, and that was it somewhere in the mountains near Calabsas. So I contacted my number one researcher, and asked if he could help. It wasn't easy, but I got my answer, and some great time-traveling. Here he is, E.J. Brent. He came to Los Angeles at the turn of the century and promptly made his fortune selling furniture, and decided to build ...

Wealth has many advantages that a lot of people don't even think of. When we think of wealthy people living in Calabasas and Malibu we tend to think of expensive cars, big mansions, that sort of thing. And it's true, but one thing that wealthy people have always loved to do is to get away to the wide open spaces. It's still true today, and if you visit the Malibu Creek State Park, you can still experience it. Nowadays you don't have to be wealthy to visit, because I've been there, but it's good to know a local who can guide you. I house-sat for many years for a friend who lived in Calabasas, and I would always try to get away to the wonderful places right nearby. Today I'd like to time-travel, and visit the Crags Country Club, near Los Angeles. It's 1910, and the Crags Country Club is being established. To get to it, you drive waaaaay out on Ventura Boulevard, and turn south at Las Virgenes Road, heading towards Malibu. Keep your eyes open for deer that ...

After Valley National Bank became Bank One in 1992, one of the things that had to be done was to redesign the brochures, and the job went to my department, Marketing. Of course I wasn't involved with any decision-making, I just worked as a graphic designer, and my boss assigned me the task of finding some appropriate stock photos. Back in those days we just had binders, and I sat in a corner for quite a while, flipping pages, looking through them. But the assignment was to find photos that represented the diversity of the people who were Bank One of Arizona customers, and back then there just wasn't much like that in stock photos. So I failed, and had to go to my boss and tell her so. Then it occured to me that there was a solution. The stock photos didn't have anything like female executives, but I was looking at one right there. And there were no persons of color in the stock photos, even though the building had plenty of them - 35 stories of them! And I suggested that we...

Of all of the things that made me feel that I was no longer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I moved to Phoenix, was stopping at a traffic light at the bottom of a river bed in Tempe, Arizona. It's such a vivid memory for me that a few days ago I started wondering if it was just my imagination. It's been a LONG time since I went to ASU, so I checked with my number one PhD (Phoenix history detective) and he asked around. Yes, it's true. Before the northbound bridge on Mill Avenue was built, the northbound traffic simply drove down into the river bed. And although my memories are from the 1980s, this went back as far as the 1960s, when traffic had just overwhelmed the two-lane Mill Avenue bridge, built in 1931. Of course, there was no water down in the river bed, and there hadn't been in 1885, when the Arizona Canal was completed, except of course when the dams up on the Salt River flooded, which they did every few years. And since it was a whole lot cheaper to simply clea...

Something that I set out to do after I got my degree from Arizona State University, was to go to the "BigCity". To me, the United States has only two: New York and Los Angeles. And since I grew up in the snow and cold of Minneapolis, I had absolutely no interest in living in New York, and besides, LA was much closer to Phoenix. So, after I accumulated enough credits to graduate, I moved to California. My degree was in graphic design, so I assumed that I would end up working for an advertising agency. But it never really mattered to me, I just wanted to work somewhere that I could put my skill in graphic design to work. I had never even heard of an "In-House" graphics department, which is where I ended up, at Blue Cross of California. I can't even begin to describe how happy I was there. It was a decent salary, with health benefits, and a free health club membership, in a suburb of Los Angeles called Woodland Hills. If you're familiar with the LA area, specif...

It's November of 2020, and like I do every morning I woke up at about sunrise, fed the dogs, and went pedaling around Peoria, which is a suburb of Phoenix. I just love getting out into the fresh air, especially because the weather is so nice right now. OK, enough "Chamber of Commerce" talk from me! Let's talk about what's happening right now all over the world, which I will call the Global Pandemic. I usually call it COVID-19, which means the strain of coronavirus that was discovered in 2019. But I realize that in the future this will become confusing, because the response to it didn't really start until 2020. At least that was my experience, this past April. The streets were pretty empty this past year, and have started to pick up a bit recently. Of course, I don't see much, I'm usually back home by 9 or 10 am, and I travel the neighborhood streets mostly, only crossing the major streets when I have to. I see people who take the bus wearing masks, and...

Lately I've been pondering my teenage years, especially when I was 18. No, that's not me in the pic up there, it's the most famous 18-year-old in Phoenix I could think of, Alice Cooper. And no, I'm not an expert on Alice Cooper, so if you want to learn more about him, other than I know that he went to Cortez high school in Phoenix, you can Google him. The reason that he springs to my mind is his song "Eighteen". If you're not familiar with the song, here are some lyrics: I got a baby's brain and an old man's heart, Took eighteen years to get this far. Don't always know what I'm talking about, Feels like I'm living in the middle of doubt. 'Cause I'm eighteen! I get confused every day. Eighteen! I just don't know what to say. Eighteen! I gotta get away. I remember hearing this song as I approached eighteen, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And I knew that I had to get away. It took me a little bit longer than I had wanted, because b...

I moved to Phoenix from Minneapolis at the age of 19 and I began my journey of dealing with people who just didn't know stuff. And since I loved my new home of Arizona, I had to accept these people. Nowadays, most people point to the internet as the source of easy misinformation, as if it all just started with that. But misinformation is as old as human communication, and if you'll excuse the expression, when I was a kid it was called "Old Wives Tales". And when I moved to Phoenix, it was the stuff that young people shared with each other, such as "you won't get a ticket if you drive a yellow car" or "If you hold your breath you won't get pregnant". The list goes on and on, and as a young person this was the kind of information that made me stop and think. I'm a reader, and a researcher. I can read a book, or an article, without being hypnotized by it, or brainwashed by it. And I give credit to my parents for encouraging me to read, whi...

Like everyone, I knew everything about everything when I was 18. And then I turned 19, the year I moved to Phoenix, and it's been all downhill since then. And I have a special fascination for people between the ages of 19 and 25, and today I want to time-travel to that time for me, and also to a time when I was reintroduced to being that age. We have to start in 1977. Time-travel with me. Since I grew up in Minneapolis, my most vivid memories of 1977 was that fall, and winter. Of course I knew that it didn't snow in Phoenix, but somehow it just didn't seem real until I saw it for myself. It's November as I write this, and I still marvel. I was about as green as a non-local could be, just out there trying to understand this miracle. My days of being a bored teenager were ending, and the more I learned more I knew that there was so much more to learn. In 1996, when I started teaching at a private college, I was suddenly confronted with people who were 19-to-25. Well, some...

Something that I very often hear nowadays is how much misinformation is going around, and that it's all because of the internet, and that it never happened before. But as an old Marketing guy, and a history buff, I beg to differ. Time-travel with me. It's 1893, and this ad in the paper promises that it will cure my lumbago, which is the old-fashioned term for lower back pain. I'm reading this in a respectable and prominent paper in Phoenix, and by golly it sure looks convincing! Latest patents! Best Improvements! Just put the belt on, turn on the electricity, and you're instantly cured. The current is instantly felt by the wear or they will forfeit five million dollars, in 1893 dollars! Wow! Of course, what happened over the years is that newspapers stopped accepting ads like this, and eventually even Federal laws were created to stop this spread of misinformation. "Truth in advertising" laws weren't, and aren't perfect, but it definitely slowed down t...

If you're interested in Phoenix history, and have never heard of the Rex Theater, it's not surprising. I had never heard of it until yesterday, when one of my Phoenix history friends sent me a photo of Washington between 2nd and 3rd Street in the 1930s. And it got me to thinking about how much history is just brushed aside, for various reasons. And then ultimately it gets lost forever. And there are people who'd rather not think about what segregated Phoenix was like, and I understand. But it's a part of the history of Phoenix, and I care about it. Let's time-travel to 1936 and go to the Rex Theater. This ad, by the way, ran in the Arizona Gleam, which was founded in Phoenix, Arizona, in November 1929 by Ayra Hackett, the only African American female newspaper owner in the state. Here's a direct link to the Library of Congress if you'd like to read more:  https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/az_dyingcowboy_ver02/data/sn95060626/00414216808/1936110...

It's November of 2020, and if you're reading this in the future I'll try to describe exactly what I'm seeing now, in Peoria, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. This blog is usually about things that happened way in the past in Phoenix, but I'm a time-traveler, not a historian, so past, future, and present are all the same to me. I like imagining myself at any point in time, as if I were able to dive into the river of time at any point that I choose. Right now I'm choosing right now. Speaking for myself, I feel great. I've never been so healthy in all of my life. I'm not kidding - I was a sickly little kid, I came down with colds so often when I lived in California in my twenties that I had my tonsils taken out at age 28, and when I started teaching at a private college in Phoenix, in my late thirties, I would inevitably get whatever was going around. It's a teacher thing. But this past year my human contact has been very minimal, and even when I stop in a...

If you live in the Phoenix, Arizona area, you've probably visited South Mountain Park many times, and you may have noticed an interesting rock just inside of the entrance. Nowadays we would call it a petroglyph rock, but when it was first moved in downtown Phoenix, in 1913, it was called a hieroglyph rock, and that it was Aztec. Before you scoff at their ignorance, consider that at the time this was what they knew. All of the ancient structures that we now call "Hohokam" were mostly called "Aztec". Yes, of course the scholars, like Omar Turney, were working on determining what these things really were, and the vague term of "Aztec" just kinda faded away from use. And to be fair, calling the markings on a stone "hieroglyphs" instead of "petroglyphs" really isn't all that different: glyph means writing, hiero means sacred, and petro means rock. It's really more accurate to say that these were stone writings, because even now w...

Whether you call it the United States or just America nowadays really doesn't matter. The individual states of America have been united for so long it's hard to imagine a time when they weren't. And if you're puzzled about a few things regarding politics, understanding states will help to bring things into focus. Time-travel with me to a time when the states weren't united. Massachusetts, where my family lived after they left England, might has well have been another country as compared to, say, New York. These places were founded by people who were not happy with being told what to do by a king, and the essential fabric of the fierce independence of what would some day become the United States was firmly set. Unfortunately, England was not happy with the behavior of some of the colonies, especially their unwillingness to pay taxes. The people in Boston had angered a very powerful country, and they really were too small to defend themselves. The idea, of course, was...