Mistaking traffic lights for Christmas decorations in old-time Phoenix

It's the holiday season, and here in Phoenix, Arizona it's the best time of the year to visit. I call this "Chamber of Commerce weather" and it's just gorgeous.

Phoenix has been a tourist destination for most of its history, and it brings in people from all over the country. This is just wonderful for the economy, but it can be challenging for drivers. No, I'm not gonna point fingers, or blame, it's just the way it is, and once you understand that, you can calm down a bit. Stay with me on this.

Although traffic laws are fairly consistent all over the United States, their interpretation can vary widely. And since sharing the road is a social thing, it can be frustrating for people who have one idea on what the correct thing to do is, and other people who have different ideas. And this morning I was thinking about one of my favorite short stories, written by James Thurber, who described the time that he was a passenger in a car and realized that the driver wasn't familiar with traffic lights, and thought that the green and red lights were just festive Christmas decorations.

Time-travel with me to old-time Phoenix when the transition was happening from traffic cops standing in intersections to just red and green lights to tell drivers if they should stop, or go. I don't know if some people just mistook them for Christmas decorations, but I'm inclined to think so. And of course people honking at them, and shouting, were just joyful Christmas spirits! Not sure what the yellow lights meant? Eggnog?

Of course, Thurber's nerves were wrecked by that ride, and after he got out safely he vowed to never be a passenger in a car again during the holidays. As for me, I just try to stay away from traffic as much as I can, and when I see someone do something strange in a car, I try to imagine that they thought that it was perfectly normal.

Happy holidays! Let's be careful out there!

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