Growing up in old Phoenix

I grew up in a small town. Its name was Phoenix, and even though it had 439,170 people by the time I was four years old, in 1960, it still seemed like a place I could wrap my arms around and carry with me, just like the little towns in the movies. We lived near Cypress Street and Third Avenue, about a mile from the border of downtown. The houses faced the street, many had porches, the lawns were lush, the shade inviting.

My friends and I stashed fallen oranges and rolled them out into the rush-hour traffic on Third and Fifth — back then, before the Willo Soviet tried to wall off this neighborhood, these streets had three lanes each and carried substantial traffic twice a day, people going to and from work downtown. The oranges were also useful in friendly alley fights; more serious conflict escalated from dirt clods to rocks. Oh, we also ate them, because everyone had citrus trees in their yards and it was a quick drive out to the groves, where boxes of oranges could be purchased at roadside stands surrounded by the lavish bounty of the Salt River Valley. Some days we lay under the trees at Paperboys' Island, a pocket park at Third and Holly, and just stared into the cobalt sky, dreaming the dreams of young boys.

By the time I was eight, I was mobile and free, within limits. Specifically, I could ride my bike from Thomas to Roosevelt and Third Street to Fifteenth Avenue. It was an amazing landscape for a child. The library, art museum and Heard Museum were there. Soda fountains proliferated at drug stores, from the Rexall on Roosevelt and Third Avenue to Ryan-Evans at Seventh and McDowell to shops on Central. Every gas station had a drinking fountain with cold water, an essential for young desert rats. The firefighters at the old Station 4 on First Street and Moreland, as well as the Encanto/Seventh Ave. station indulged us. We bugged the people at Channel 12 and Channel 5 (Wallace & Ladmo's home!) for old reels of commercials — the apex of our ubiquitous trash picking. Encanto Park was a favorite hangout; it was where I decided I wasn't cut out to be a fisherman, but that didn't stop me from endless fishing journeys to the lagoons. The lovely moderne Palms Theater at Central and Virginia offered movies if we didn't want to hitch a ride downtown.

This part of the city was dense then with businesses. This was long before entire blocks were bulldozed or turned into dead space by parking garages. The buildings on the northeast and southeast corners of Seventh Avenue and McDowell, for example, were chock-full of small businesses. So was today's mostly empty Gold Spot — I got my hair cut there by Otis Kenilworth. Downtown was still the busiest shopping district in the state, followed by Park Central mall — both bracketing our neighborhood. I wasn't as fortunate as someone born a few years younger to sample the old city, but it was still pretty intact in the early and mid-1960s.

The big Valley Bank sign turned atop the art deco tower and other neon signaled downtown. Among the downtown landmarks was the Hotel Westward Ho, with its famed Thunderbird Room, where presidents stayed well into the 1960s. The skyscrapers going up along Central seemed signs of progress, not incoherent planning. I watched so many of them being built. My grandmother and I took the bus to shop downtown or at Park Central. This daughter of the frontier "traded," as she put it, at the small A.J. Bayless store at Central and Moreland. Just west were the shady median parks along Moreland and Portland, two of the few City Beautiful Movement touches Phoenix received. The parkways were lined by lushly landscaped apartment buildings. Every day, we drove downtown at 5 p.m. to pick up my mother at the Greater Arizona Savings Building, where the Interstate Stream Commission had its offices. It was amazing to see the crowds on the streets, just like a big city.

 

This was not a time of unalloyed sweetness. I was a child of the Cold War at its scariest, watched JFK deliver his address on the Soviet missiles in Cuba and heard my grandmother, who remembered the Spanish-American War, say, "this means we're going to war." Fiery nuclear annihilation haunted me and I knew the auditorium at Kenilworth School, where we stood against the walls and covered our heads, would not protect us. My lovely city would be incinerated (but Tucson, with its Titan II missiles, would get it first). Yet it drove me to learn every thing I could about nuclear war. I became a nuke nerd of the first order (ask me about blast shelters, throw weight and counterforce targeting even now).

The crime and social upheaval of the decade came through the television. But Phoenix had its share of excitement. I remember we were parked in the alley behind the old Valley National Bank building downtown when a man ran past us with two patrolmen, guns drawn, chasing him — he'd just robbed the bank. Phoenix claimed to be a place of Western equality, but a drive south of the tracks told otherwise, and there was anxious talk of a riot in 1968, hushed up by the Arizona Republic. Kermit Long, our senior minister at Central Methodist Church — another place we walked to — marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in South Phoenix, scandalizing the establishment. Bodies turned up regularly in the desert. I remember trick-or-treating in Palmcroft one Halloween and seeing two grown men in a Chevy with masks on. It was probably all in fun, but I was afraid.

Nor was school a land of Beaver and Wally. I stood out in a bad way within the cruel world of children and was relentlessly tormented by bullies. Until I turned on them in seventh grade, beat the crap out of several, and solved that problem without legislation or extensive intervention by the Helping Professions. It was amazing how bullies could be tamed with a punch or just a willingness to fight them, a valuable lesson for a journalist and other pursuits.

Even so, in so many good ways Kenilworth was the kind of public school that doesn't exist anymore. We had rich children from Palmcroft — including the Rehnquists — poor ones from south of Roosevelt, and those of us in between. It was mostly white but all races were represented. After sixth grade, a large number of Mexican-Americans came from Franklin School. We fought for half the year and then became good friends.

The teachers were superb in most cases, including the iconic Miss Metcalfe who said it was all right that I held my pencil differently (I still do). The school didn't have a parking lot, as it does today (and which has profaned the once lovely North High). Teachers parked on the streets. Students walked and rode their bikes. We didn't have "play dates" or mommies driving us around in minivans. Among the boys, we chose scouting, joining Troop 15, one of the state's oldest, which met at the Luke-Greenway American Legion hall. It was there that I met Silvestre Herrera, medal of honor winner from World War II. It was impossible not to absorb history living in this small town.

A larger world was clearly defined. North on Central or Seventh Avenue, for example, were acreages and some big haciendas (or small ones, as my great aunt had). There was no such thing as a six-lane "street." The roads were bordered by irrigation ditches and a rich canopy of shade trees. Farther north, across the canal, came Sunnyslope, exotic and desert-bound against the north mountains. West was Maryvale, where my uncle bought a new house from John F. Long.

These neighborhoods were sparkling, cutting-edge and fashionable compared to our old house on Cypress. My mother wasn't impressed, but I pined for an "all electric kitchen." Here and elsewhere in the newer subdivisions, pools proliferated. We didn't have many in the central city then, preferring to swim at Encanto Park or the YMCA. Beyond the city were farm fields and citrus groves. And then the desert, pristine except for a few settlements and the remains of the mining industry. I hiked every mountain surrounding the Valley as a Boy Scout. The train whistles at night spoke of a world even farther away. Sky Harbor was there, too, and I was enchanted by the Phoenix Rising mural in the then-new east terminal. But Union Station, not the airport, was my thing.

This was the golden age of driving. Arizona had only a little more than 1 million people, and the entire nation was more than 100 million lighter than today. Gas was cheap and congestion, in Phoenix, was negligible. Cruising Central was a big deal. The Bob's Big Boy at Central and Thomas was hopping at all hours, and locally owned drive-ins proliferated. The streets were relatively narrow — Seventh back then was a mere four lanes — and, with adulthood expected earlier than today, speed demons inside town were rare.

The summers were harsh and Phoenix hibernated in the manner of little desert towns — but temperatures were moderating by September. Our school had no air conditioning and didn't need it. Agriculture and places such as Encanto Park also kept the summer temps down, and it was much cooler overnight then. Winter had several hard frosts, requiring aircraft propeller engines to be mounted in the citrus groves to keep the air moving. The seasons changed with sublime softness. Once it snowed on one side of the house, and by the time I ran to tell my mother on the other side, the snow had melted. The monsoons were spectacular in their lightning and thunder, but violent microbursts were virtually unheard of. The storms came into the city.

Amid all this, the warning signs were unmistakable. Sprawl and the auto-centric ideas of the '60s. The vacant lots at Central and Moreland in anticipation of the freeway, although few thought it would ever be built. The passenger trains were dying. Milt Graham, the popular young mayor, was vehemently against transit. Even so, not even the adults could imagine the death of civic leadership or the narrowing of the economy that overtook this place — or that we would lose the groves and fields.

The sense of optimism transcended today's cheap boosterism. This was Phoenix. It was special. It would not make the mistakes of other places. We would not let the Easterners bring their problems with them. We lured the Greyhound headquarters and more would come. We were rich in aerospace — I watched the first drones being tested — and technology companies, and more would come. We had a new NBA team and it was yet another sign of how great this city would be. A monorail would connect downtown with uptown along Central. Hadn't we already learned the lessons of the Hohokam and tamed the wilderness, made it bloom, with our mighty works of technology?

So I was blessed to grow up in this small town and will always carry it in my heart. Today it's been scarred and divided by the freeway, laid waste with vacant lots, civic malpractice and flight of businesses. Thanks to some heroic efforts, the real neighborhoods where I come from are preserved as historic districts. They're the best places to live in all of the metropolitan area.

But few know how much was lost. My friend Grady Gammage, the real-estate lawyer and Morrison Institute scholar, has mused about how two natives of the same age could come to such different conclusions about Phoenix (although he's more in my camp every day). He lays out two thoughts: I left and lived in a variety of cities while he stayed. But also, unlike most Phoenicians of my generation, I grew up in the most cohesive, historic and non-suburban part of the city. He's right on both counts. Phoenix and I grew up together. We both changed.

RELATED: Growing up in photos.

———————————————————————————
 

My book, A Brief History of Phoenix, is available to buy or order at your local independent bookstore, or from Amazon.

Read more Phoenix history in Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.

 

Comments

[Jacob]

Funny how your outdated childhood home in Willo is probably a $300,000 house, while your uncle's fancy house in Maryvale is now worth about $20,000.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Mr. Talton wrote:

"I became a nuke nerd of the first order (ask me about blast shelters, throw weight and counterforce targeting even now)."

It's not much of a video, but the song is good and a great pop-culture reference to growing up in the Thermonuclear Age:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBruAooXPNU&feature=av2e

The New Frontier (lyrics)

Yes we're gonna have a wingding,
A summer smoker underground.
It's just a dugout that my dad built
In case the reds decide to push the button down.
We've got provisions and lots of beer,
The key word is survival on the new frontier.

Introduce me to that big blonde,
She's got a touch of Tuesday Weld.
She's wearing Ambush and a French twist
She's got us wild and she can tell.
She loves to limbo, that much is clear
She's got the right dynamics for the new frontier.

Well I can't wait 'til I move to the city,
'Til I finally make up my mind
To learn design and study overseas.

Have you got a steady boyfriend?
Cause honey I've been watching you...
I hear you're mad about Brubeck
I like your eyes, I like him too.
He's an artist, a pioneer,
We've got to have some music on the new frontier.

Well I can't wait 'til I move to the city,
'Til I finally make up my mind
To learn design and study overseas.

Let's pretend that it's the real thing
And stay together all night long
And when I really get to know you
We'll open up the doors and climb into the dawn.
Confess your passion, your secret fear,
Prepare to meet the challenge of the new frontier...

[bearsense]

Thanks Jon - -
So many memories of throwing the Republic onto front steps at 5AM on the east side of Central. Go Mustangs (NPHS) and memories of many of the kids of the owners of the buildings you mentioned.
The groves, the fields and the privilege of having a childhood in such a wonderful place.
Taught me a lot - - miss it still.

[azrebel]

I used to eat lunch at Bob's Big Boy, 2 or 3 times a week. If there are any retired waitresses from Bob's on this blog, I would like to personally apologize for my boss who would gather our money and handle the check. He would leave a dime tip, start to walk away, return to the table, pick up the dime and leave a nickel. Man, was he cheap. He was raised in the Texas panhandle, so 'nough said.

[Roger Ramjet]

Thanks Jon for a great reminesce. My memories began a long time before yours.We lived at 7th St. and Portland. We used to ride our bikes to Phoenix Country Club for a picnic and it was an all day affair. That was after the war when I was able to get a chain for my two year old bike. We had neighborhood ball teams. Rode the streetcar downtown and went to the movies. Fights among neighborhoods were done with fists and clods and words. No guns, knives, or bats. Yes was safer and simpler in those days.

we need to thank "Uncle" Carl Hayden and Barry for bringing us the Central Arizona Project. Phoenix would be a diffrerent place today without the CAP.

Those "good old days" really were good.

[Matthew]

Many thanks for the memories, Mr. Talton. During high school I bagged groceries at the A.J. Bayless at 59th Avenue and Camelback, and grew up just to the south in Maryvale. I recall sitting in the backyard at night, watching the planes make their final turn into Sky Harbor and breathing in the scent of citrus blossoms.

I tell my son about that now--about how the city once smelled of blossoms, even in Maryvale--and he just looks at me as if I'd turned green. C'est la vie.

[soleri]

Most of us here are "liberals". Instead of apologizing for that admission, maybe we could balance it out with some communitarian talk. Phoenix 50 years ago was a functional community in a way few American cities are nowadays (least of all Phoenix). There were neighborhoods where people stayed put, even successive generations of them. There were social buffers and organizations that integrated business with community purposes. Retail wasn't segregated by zoning laws - we had real corner markets as late as the mid 1960s. There was, above all, a unified culture and sense of shared identity. If politics seems acutely nasty today, it's probably a way of experiencing the tribalism we took for granted back then.

Real conservatism would seek to preserve this intricate and varied system that made community so richly rewarding. Instead, conservatism has elevated the market to status of an idol. Everything must bow before it. We'll blade the desert, plant stuccoed boxes where the Japanese flower gardens once bloomed, and demolish historical buildings if there's a way to make a quick score.

Ultimately, you have to love your city the way it is, not as it once was. If the place seems unloved, it's not because it's unlovable. It's because in our greed and thoughtlessness we devalued it by removing every consideration except the monetary one. Phoenix today looks like the aftermath of an orgy of vandalism. I'm not sure how you nurse the patient back to health, or if it's even possible.

We did this. None of us here is innocent. We did this in virtually every city and town across America. The soul-sickness of our nation is the direct byproduct of a value system that is devoid of the most basic human need. We Arizonans prefer cars to people, parking lots to citrus groves, and computer screens to chats with neighbors. We trashed our country and got rich. And now that we're poor, we don't even have the consolation of each other.

[azrebel]

soleri,
I don't know how or if you are associated with Arcosanti up near Cordes Junction, but I must say that when I first visited Arcosanti in the early 70's I came away with a feeling that said: "Wow, this is it. This is the way that we live on this planet and minimize our footprint." I thought I was seeing the future. Sadly, we went in the other direction. Arcosanti presented us with an incredible opportunity. Instead, all that caught on were the windchimes. Maybe Arcosanti is a few hundred years before its time. We'll see.

[soleri]

azrebel, my name is a homage to the great man, more for his architecture and art than as a visionary or social thinker. One thing about Arcosanti: it will be a fabulous ruin.

[Rate Crimes]

I grew up in a small, wooded village of 2,000 souls set amidst the corn and soybeans of fecund central Illinois. To us, as children, the nearby city of 40,000 was a megapolis. Around the time of the Civil War, that proto-megapolis was the home of one of the nation’s most powerful politicians. After the war, this national leader had his choice between making his hometown the seat of an agricultural college, or the site of a large Veterans’ Administration hospital. He chose the hospital.

A century later, that former seat of power was a desiccated husk slowly disappearing under the dirt of irrelevance blown by the harsh prairie winds. An hour’s drive away, the smaller city that had received the agricultural college had become a vital, growing community surrounding one of the nation’s greatest universities.

That university town was connected to the wider and higher cultures of the world, while the old husk remained adrift and tumbling: A tale of two cities.

A few years after graduating, I moved from that university town to Phoenix. Even two decades ago, Phoenix still had much of the charm described by The Hot Pen. It also seemed to have the vibrancy of my prior abode.

One would imagine that the dynamic of Phoenix would today - only a single generation onward - echo the more fortunate of the two paths from my old tale. Yet, it seems that in only the micro-moment of a cut-short gasp, Phoenix has succumbed in inverse scalar proportion to the epically tragic decisions of its fossilized power brokers.

[Rate Crimes]

In my view, the problem with Arcosanti is that -- just as for any of the planned communities that bloat The Sprawl -- it was, by design, a fossil the day it was built, or even imagined. If design omits the essential spiritual elements of irresistible change, it is little different from a mausoleum.

[azrebel]

A Planned community/mausoleum saves you time and gas on your Final trip. So it's got that going for it, right?

[Jim Hamblin]

Thanks Jon! Every time I read one of your wonderful tales of "Phoenix, then and now" I have heart pangs for our once beautiful city. Granted, we can't stop progress but for the most part, our march of "legal immigrants" has not been a positive influence.

(It would be interesting to calculate the percentage of our population that's lived in the Valley for 20 years or less.)

[Rate Crimes]

"Mausoleumopolis". New term coined? (trademark pending)

[mike doughty]

Phoenix and Az. is reaping the whirlwind of Eugene Pulliam and the Republican Party.They were the only game in town when I moved here in 1966 and now the public they indoctrinated has grown up and turned against them.I know the Dems do not have all the answers but,for God's sake-45 years of one party control of the state legislature is surely the definition of insanity.

[Rate Crimes]

I thought that the definition of insanity was the young Louisiana couple with six children calling for an immediate return to deep water drilling while crude was still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico in the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history. Those six kids will consume a lot of petroleum products throughout their lives; even if they eat less seafood.

[soleri]

I'm not sure which block of Cypress Jon grew up on (the 100 or 300 W) but a world-famous neighbor of his deserves mentioning. Milton Erickson, a psychiatrist who developed hypnotherapy lived on the north side of Cypress near Central Ave. His house was a small bungalow that was torn down about 20 years ago. He had moved in the 1960s to a house on 12th St a couple block south of Northern.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Erickson

[terry dudas]

Oh, stop gazing at your navels already.

[Pat Lynch]

"I was enchanted by the Phoenix Rising mural in the then-new east terminal." I have a photo of the floor mural of the Phoenix taken at Terminal 2 at home in Seattle, WA. It reminds me there's a place to go with an inviting poolside when the weather gets too gloomy in the Northwest.

[Kathy]

You bring back so many memories for me. My husband and Milt Graham were very good friends and, like you, memories of "old Phoenix" are memories of a time-gone-by. I married and moved to Phoenix in 1968, spent most of my time at the Phoenix Country Club, enjoyed sitting in a golf cart with Irene Luke, wondering who Charter Government was going to christen to run AZ, and even spent evenings at the drive-in at 7th St and Missouri.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

[Dan]

I attended Kenilworth through the fifth grade, in 1982. My last year was actually the relocated campus at the old Emerson while Kenilworth was gutted and renovated that year. Speaking of which, the new Emerson school built some 28 years ago looks like crap, while the solid structure it replaced continues to look grand as private office space, but I digress.

I lived in that solitary row of apartments between Central and 3rd Ave, the four or five units, all that was left of a huge (and from what I've been told) nice apartment complex. I could see my house from the school windows, there was nothing but dirt lots between the school and my home. I could walk home from the 2nd grade on, and I could walk around my neighborhoods and it was safe. Yes, even in the 70s and 80s.

Walking distance to schools, library, museums, performing arts. Swimming and hanging out with friends at the YMCA. People traded these things to be near shopping malls.

The businesses… not so much. A lot of empty storefronts between McDowell and Roosevelt. A few businesses surviving here and there. Gordon's Market on 3rd and Roosevelt lasted into the middle part of the 80s, I think. Liquor stores seemed to hang on. Go figure.

The diversity was still there, we had students from all sorts of cultural and religious and economic backgrounds. I remember a number of Sikh families moved into the housing just north of Roosevelt, they were very different (to kids a turban is different)

This was the era of the votes to save the school from being demolished for the freeway, and my mother was very involved with that campaign.

You could still smell the orange blossoms in the air at dusk.

The school is still there, thank science. And where we once lived is now the Deck Park, named after a drunken mayor. I went back for a visit not too long ago, my first since the park was built (I don't make it home very often, and of course, everyone now lives in the outer exurbs, so no reason to go downtown). It was… interesting. Maybe it was the time I was there, at a certain time in the morning, but I felt something I'd never felt before in that place: Fear.

I live in San Francisco now, in what is colloquially called an "affordable" neighborhood (meaning: good luck trying to get a taxi to pick you up), and I am used to being aware of my surroundings. I think I'm pretty good at reading people. But the vibe at the park was just spooky. Maybe it was because I was partially hoping to see ghosts through some rose-colored lenses, and expecting something impossible. But I did learn that I couldn't go home again.

I'm glad I grew up where and when I did. Even though it was being dismantled, at least I got to experience Phoenix in a way that few people my age ever did, a deeper connection.

Thanks for letting me ramble.

[juicy bags]

Over the years I have made it my very own, and I call this one a "keeper" after trying many different meatloaf recipes. My sister gave it the award-winning name, and I decided I liked that.

[Michael Goodman]

We were neighbors you and I Jon, though only a year or so, I moved out to the County line with my parents when I was 2. The County Line was at 36th Street and Camelback at the time. You were 1.

I've wondered at times if our paths crossed and likely they did back then. We were on the same street, I at 309. I wonder now as you write of then, it was a different place in a far different when. What would have happened if we'd been friends, and what of today would be told again.

This article more than any reveals the questions I have had for David and for Jon. More, it touches my soul for a Phoenix long forgotten. Thank you for breathing life back into my youth.