Wearing matching his-and-hers nightwear from Rhodes in old-time Phoenix


When I stumbled on this billboard, which is on the Duke University site ROAD (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions), I immediately thought of my top history adventurer, who has a particular horror of matching his-and-hers outfits. I really have no idea what he wears on a daily basis, but my best guess is that it's very casual, the way that I used to see the millionaires at the classic cars shows would dress - no need to impress anyone, and they would write checks for a million bucks to buy a car.


Speaking for myself, while I've never had any objections to following the suggestions of the Women in My Life, I've been fortunate that I've never even been asked to wear matching his-and-hers outfits. The Women in my life have understood that I'm a Man, not a Ken Doll.

Anyway, my point here is that I emailed this to my friend as a joke, instead of asking him to help identify the exact location, which he does for me. And to my surprise, he did identify the exact location, which of course is Phoenix, and it's at 16th Street and Highland. I'll see if I can explain his methods. I've tried to apply what he does, but I'm a bumbling Watson to his Holmes, so the best I can do is to try to narrate.

The first thing that he does is go look at vintage maps, presumably with a hunch as to location. It looks like this:

1969 aerial of Phoenix, Arizona


And if you look very, very careful at the lower right edge of the photo, you can see this:


And then the final piece of the puzzle is the number one, which you can just barely see on the Highland sign. And here I quote: "The number 1 would be the first of four numbers - 1600.  If it was 7th Street that number would be a 7, if it was 24th St., that number would be a 2, etc.  It can only be 16th St." My friend has never said, "You know my methods, apply them!", because he seems to know that I can't even come close to thinking like that.

Anyway, I've saved the file with the description, location, and date (which I estimate to be early 1970s), and I'm left to ponder his-and-hers matching sleepwear from Rhodes, which was at 18th Street and Camelback, and also at Metrocenter (although I have no memory of it).

As far as I can tell, the owl is either impressed by the detective work, or displeased by the matching his-and-hers sleepwear. The world may never know!




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. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

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

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more