What is your favorite Arizona memory from 20 years ago?


I was talking to the administrator of the Facebook page "Arizona Memories", who told me that lately young people have been joining the group, but then dropping out, presumably because there's nothing that catches their attention. Most of the posts there go waaaaay back, like to the twentieth century, and if you're thirty or younger, those may be either hazy memories, or maybe you weren't yet even alive back then. But if you were alive twenty years ago, and you have an Arizona memory that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear it.

As they say on TikTok, I'll go first. It's January of 2021 as I write this, so I'll my fondest memory of twenty years ago was my brand new Mercury Cougar. That's me up there in the parking lot of my parents' trailer park - oops, I mean mobile home community (they were very strict about that!) in Peoria, a suburb of Phoenix. And by the way, twenty years ago there was no connotation to the word "cougar", the way there is now. It was just the name of a big cat.

In 2001 I was no longer young enough to drive a little sports car anymore, as it would just look like "mid-life crisis", so I was pleased with the Cougar. It was sporty, and fast, but it wasn't a tiny little car like the cars I'd owned before, which included a Saturn SC, a 5.0 Mustang, a Saab Sonett, and an MG Midget. The Cougar seemed age-appropriate for me, and it brought me into the 21st Century with style.

It was a great car, although it got terrible gas mileage, but I liked it. The doors were very long and very heavy, and I remember that they always seemed to attack my girlfriend. But otherwise it was a comfortable car, with great A/C (very important in Phoenix!) and out on the road it tracked like a laser beam. I drove that car until 2006, which I actually did get a mid-life crisis car, a Saturn Sky.

OK, I could go on and on, and I probably will, but now it's your turn - tell me about twenty years ago in Arizona! I'm listening. Twenty years ago, no more, no less.

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Learning to drive in the 1970s

Image
Although most of my history adventuring is done in my imagination, traveling into the distant past or future, I was actually there in the 1970s. In fact, that's when I learned how to drive a car. Time-travel with me. I learned to drive on my parents 1973 Ford Torino Station Wagon, which was a monstrous, clumsy boat of a car that had a hood that a friend of mine in high school described as "getting there fifteen minutes before you did". In fact, the nose of the car was so ridiculously long that my dad actually made a bump-out at the end of the garage for it to fit so you could close the garage door. Parking that car in the tiny garage that my parents had was like threading a needle! By the way, we're in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the neighborhood where I grew up, which was built in the late 1920s. But don't imagine that it was some kind of historic neighborhood, it was just old, and very worn. The streets were terribly narrow, and even more so after it snowed (which...
Read more