Note to national and international Rogue readers: As Arizona marks 100 years of statehood this month, you'll have to put up with more than the usual number of AZ- and Phoenix-centric posts.
In 1962, Arizona marked its 50th year as a state. It's a vivid memory for me, although I was but a child. I loved the commemorative seal with the cactus wren, so much more appealing than today's gaudy centennial emblem. Fifty years of statehood was a remarkable event for those still living who had witnessed statehood and lived in Arizona Territory, my grandmother among them. The state in 1962 had barely more than 1 million people, with Phoenix not yet at the half-million mark. Phoenix was becoming a big city with comforts unimagined 50 years before, especially air conditioning. Still, the frontier was close enough to touch, living history was all around and much of the state was still wilderness. Vast empty distances separated the settled areas and those were compact and clear in their purpose.
Prescott, for example, the onetime territorial capital, was an enchanting little town with appealing rough edges. None of today's sprawl existed. It had only recently lost its status as a division point on the Santa Fe Railway between Phoenix and Williams Jct. Mining and ranching were the economy. The highway up Yarnell Hill was notoriously treacherous. Flagstaff was a major railroad town, also depending on sawmills for the logging industry and Arizona State College. The Mogollon Rim was virtually uninhabited, just one of many parts of the state as wild as ever. The state highways were two lanes, taking you to rich history that wasn't across the street from a Wal-Mart. Even in Phoenix, you could see old cowboys, the real thing, living out their last years in the elegantly-designed-but-neglected old apartments that graced the neighborhood between Seventh Avenue and the capitol.
You can dwarf it against the 15,000 years — and some say 25,000 — that the race of man has spent in this land of the sun...Yet that half a hundred years, whose culmination Arizona now celebrates, was the flowering of all the promise of all the eons before. The half a century built a bridge from buckboards to jet engines, from mud huts in the mesquite to the gleaming towers in the sky. In those fifty years, the modern world discovered the splendor of Arizona. In five decades, Arizona became a magic word around the world...Here is a future that gives us good reason to venerate the foundations laid by the past.
Old man Pulliam no doubt wrote this, rather than pushing it down the line to some PR flunky. He certainly believed it, as we all did. The sense of pride was everywhere, at least among the Anglo population. But note how this "conservative" publisher wasn't afraid of retrograde nutcases who think the world is 3,000 years old. He was a booster, but he had much reality to cheer, from the mighty acts that created the Salt River Project to turning a small farm town into a new city full of promise, including with major industries Pulliam himself had helped recruit.
The supplement makes for fascinating reading — letters from President Kennedy and Gov. Paul Fannin are included, and lavish photography, including from Ansel Adams — but not least the advertisements. There's housing, resort and land-company ads, as well as multiple placements by the Salt River Project. But also one from the Nuclear Corp. of America, which based three divisions in Phoenix, including rare-earth manufacturing and U.S. Semcor's solid-state unit. AiResearch touted its 3,600 high-skilled manufacturing and engineering employees. Sperry bought a full-page ad: The "new Arizona" was a major center of aerospace. Production of aircraft components led in manufacturing employment, with electronics second. A report predicted electronics would be No. 1 by 1980. Motorola, the big dog, had a quiz: How many electronics products from them could you identify? The Reynolds Metal Co. touted its Phoenix extrusion plant. Goodyear made aerospace components, as well as owning Goodyear Farms in Litchfield Park, "specializing in cotton, citrus and forage crops and in custom cattle feeding."
The Western Cotton Products Co. took a full page and other ag companies were represented as well — the Salt River Valley, one of the world's most fertile river valleys, had some 500,000 acres under cultivation, including miles of citrus and the magical Japanese Flower Gardens. (An overhead photo is captioned: "Citrus grove pattern in Arcadia district"). Dairies were important businesses. In addition, the huge Tovrea stockyards and packing houses sat between Phoenix and Tempe; statewide, the cattle business was still substantial. Copper, too: Several copper giants had full-page display ads. Thousands worked in those union copper jobs, populating towns such as Bagdad, Globe, Superior, Morenci, San Manuel, Hayden and Miami ("Bonanza Country).
Old Zonies will remember Korricks, Yellow Front, Hayden Flower Mills, Madison Pay 'N' Takit, Bill's Records, Barrows, the Jewel Box (41 S. 1st Ave.), Stapley's, Chic Myers, Neptune's Table, the Islands, Lulu Belle and, of course, Goldwaters. Toy's Shangri-La makes it a point to say D.H. Toy is "a pioneer Arizonan, arrived in Phoenix in 1915...In 1917, Mr. Toy enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the AEF." Talk about a local economy. All the major banks were locally headquartered, as were the newspapers, television and radio stations.
Nineteen-sixty-two. Most of the old city of Phoenix was still intact, from the Fox Theater and the Deuce to all the Luhrs properties. The territorial capitol building with its copper dome hadn't been fouled by the brutal 1974 executive tower. Seven trains a day still stopped at Union Station. Carl Hayden still sat in the Senate, along with Barry Goldwater. The delegation had two big objectives: winning The Central Arizona Project, and bringing home as much federal money as possible. The state still tilted Democratic, although that was changing fast. To be sure, most Mexican-Americans and African-Americans lived in segregation and poverty, even though Mexico's proximity was only inviting and the "illegal" part of immigration a non-issue. The story on the border is entitled, "Good Neighbors."
But Arizona's population was growing fast, with Midwesterners coming after "the Arizona lifestyle." As the crops were harvested, the state was planting all the ills that would grow into today's dysfunction.
Semi-centennial was halftime for Arizona, as the popular Clint Eastwood Super Bowl ad would have it. And from here we made all the wrong choices.
Fabulous piece, Jon! No more words needed!
Posted by: morecleanair | February 06, 2012 at 10:07 PM
The themes that exercise the body politic today are not that different from those of 1962. Ev Mecham defeated an establishment Republican in the primary, Steven Shadegg, to run against ancient Carl Hayden for the US Senate. Mecham's Bircher politics played surprisingly well but Hayden prevailed. The Arizona Republic, considered hard right by most Democrats, endosed Hayden. Mecham was so incensed he decided to create his own newspaper, The Evening American, which lasted a few years before becoming a weekly, and then folding altogether.
Arizona's booming economy was predicated mostly in military Keynesianism but there were signs that real estate was turning into its own industrial complex. Land fraud was a big deal, and Arizona's proximity to Las Vegas seemed to feed this machine. It's odd to consider how wonderful life seemed back then while, at the same time, bodies of rubbed-out mafiosi would turn up in the desert and canals on a regular basis. After the Don Bolles slaying in 1976, Arizona's local power structure was subject to a withering analysis from the IRE, the group of national reporters harnessed to explore our local pathologies. The names they named were legendary, but there had always been rumors about the Goldwaters, Rosenzweigs, Marleys, and other players like Del Webb. The Mormon power structure, by contrast, seemed straitlaced and mildly reactionary by comparison. I used to wonder whether Ev Mecham's anti-establishment viewpoints derived from this dynamic.
Eugene Pulliam had to know that much of what made Arizona special was birthed in a fetid irrigation ditch. It wasn't just the cheap land, cheaper gas, and federal money either. The libertarian ethos that inevitably arose among our wide-open deserts and fields was based on the convenient lapses of logic we see today. Really, anything was possible here because there was so much money playing at the margins. CAP was going to be a huge game-changer and everyone knew it.
The dream died because it was based more on the opium of something for nothing. The sad truth is that we did some things well but we never really had to. And because we didn't cultivate this unforgiving soil with patience, when the good times finally went they took all the dazzle and oomph of that era with them. We got lucky, we blew our winnings, and now we wonder what the hell happened to us.
Posted by: Walter Hall | February 07, 2012 at 07:19 AM
Final score:
Arizona 13 - Sprawl 4,000,000
Game over.
Posted by: Supreme Commander | February 07, 2012 at 09:00 AM
Great column, John, and an insightful follow-up commentary from Walter Hall. It's funny, even when I'm pitching my family gift basket business or talking real estate with people in a professional or political setting, I keep running into some of the themes mentioned here. 1962 is a great marker for a potential do-over time reference. Our state produced things and we were proud of all that we had to offer at the time. This is partly what attracted people in droves -- not just the warm dry air that supposedly helped asthmatics heal. What a wild time it must have been. I wish I was there.
Posted by: ptb | February 07, 2012 at 09:26 AM
"We got lucky, we blew our winnings, and now we wonder what the hell happened to us."
Casino Culture.
Posted by: Supreme Commander | February 07, 2012 at 10:04 AM
Those names are like a Who's Who of local Superfund/WQARF sites.
Posted by: westbev | February 07, 2012 at 10:32 AM
A few typos...it's "Korricks"and "Jewel Box" and I think "Chic Meyers" ...maybe...all that's missing is the "Hinky Dinky Weather Bird" from KOY, "99, the weather's fine, in good ole Arizona"...
Posted by: Steve | February 07, 2012 at 11:19 AM
Typos fixed, Steve. Thanks. It was Chic Myers ("House of Television"). Excellent comment, Walt.
Posted by: Rogue Columnist | February 07, 2012 at 11:23 AM
"citrus blossoms and train whistles…"
--Concrete Desert— Jon Talton
Posted by: koreyel | February 07, 2012 at 11:46 AM
I remember it all.
Got my first pair of "cowboy boots" at Porter's.
Miss it every time I return.
Posted by: bearsense | February 07, 2012 at 04:19 PM
A 50' electrified fence with radar directed gatling guns should have been built around the state back in '62........................................................................................1862.
That way Cochise and Geronimo could have said, "We built it, you white bastards, we built it."
Posted by: Helen Highwater | February 07, 2012 at 05:06 PM
Just a note: I posted (or rather, attempted to, yesterday and today) a comment to the previous thread, "The 50.1 percent", rebutting Donna Gratehouse's erroneous assertions blaming anti-poverty tax credits like the EITC and the CTC for the fact that a large percentage of U.S. citizens pay no personal income taxes.
I also explained that percentage in detail, then pointed out why expanding the EITC, if done correctly, would serve both interests of social justice and the national economy as a whole.
Those who take an interest in tax policy may wish to take a look: but (again) I have had to ask Mr. Talton to post it, since the standard comment software here refuses to do so. So wait until it appears, please, if it is not immediately in evidence.
To Walter Hall: I am glad to hear that changing your name eliminated this problem for you. That said, if the two were causally connected, it suggests a hacker problem (how else could users be targeted by name?) which needs fixing, not least because it still affects some users and could recur for others; and if the two are not causally connected, there is no reason to change my name. Indeed, I am disinclined to do so, since I wish my comments here to be Google-able (my apologies for this neologism) using a single, consistent handle.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | February 07, 2012 at 07:44 PM
P.S. Also, a reply to Petro, which has already appeared. (Still waiting on the other...)
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | February 07, 2012 at 08:33 PM
From such promise to becoming the present day armpit of North America.
Posted by: jmav | February 07, 2012 at 08:40 PM
Emil, my original solution turned out to be a false one. What I'm convinced of now is that it's the length or word count of the post, which if surpassing some apparent limit, results in the post being "lost".
No need to change your name or e-mail address. If someone bothered to hack this site, it was apparently for the purpose of abbreviating our comments. Since we're the two most prolix commenters here, we would be the ones most adversely impacted.
Posted by: Walter Hall | February 07, 2012 at 08:57 PM
In "No Country for Old Men," the Javier Bardem character says, "That's the best I can do. Call it."
The best I can do is post your comment if the system fails. So save as you write, and email it to me if it doesn't post.
"Truth" may have been onto something with his thoughts about session time expiring. I don't know. If I did, I would be rich. Moving to another hosting service might or might not solve the problem. But it would be impossible to migrate four years of archives to the new hoster.
And yes, Emil and Soleri/Walt are the only two who have reported problems. I am still waiting to hear from Supreme Commander ;-)
Posted by: Rogue Columnist | February 07, 2012 at 09:39 PM
My father-in-law's best friend(both gone now) used to tell about driving down cameback road in the late fifties and pulling over to check his luggage.He thought his bottle of aftershave had broken,but it was the orange blossoms that he was smelling.
Posted by: mike doughty | February 07, 2012 at 10:41 PM
Today, Arizona pokes its head out the window of its battered, muddy, smoke-spewing pickup to spit a wad of its tabaccy onto the pavement, and . . . gags and pukes as it drives into the ditch.
Posted by: Conrad | February 08, 2012 at 08:02 AM
What is a PIONEER>
"A 50' electrified fence with radar directed gatling guns should have been built around the state back in '62.........................1862.That way Cochise and Geronimo could have said, "We built it, you white bastards, we built it."Posted by: Helen Highwater
Helen, I think you need to slip down lower in the water U R starting to smell like buffalo! Is it true Helen that u were held captive by the Apaches.
Following is a quote from author Charles Bowden that I received a few days ago after mentioning to him that I had found a copy of his book “Down by the River’ in a antique store in Payson, AZ.
He had signed it after writing the purchasers name and a short comment on the front inside page.
My google indicated the purchaser of the book was a member of a Arizona “PIONEER” family.
His response follows.
yep, i think she was from that pioneer stock. all of my life i have been around people who think their arizona vanished after world war 2. when the boys and girls set the pioneer society in tucson in the 1880s, they made the cut off for membership the arrival of the railroad. i am certain the tohono o odham and the pueblo people see the end of the world when the apache and navajo blundered down from great slave lake.i think my arizona was murdered long before i was born and i await its return.
chuck
Posted by: cal Lash | February 08, 2012 at 11:27 AM
100 years and counting? Who’s counting? I got 62 years here and now I find little reason to stay in the Valley of the Sun. In 50 when I arrived it was snowing in Sunnyslope. I thought WTF. I just left Iowa where I almost froze and starved to death. But shortly I knew I was in that heaven my people talked about. Life was good until the eighties but by then it was too late to save Arizona. Now the girl friend and I are planning to escape this smog bowl called the Valley of The Sun. Ha what a laugh. Valley of Death might be more appropriate. Phoenix is mired in un breathable air and the State of Arizona is trapped in absurd politics.
Talton’s post of a Pulliam quote describes the issues.
“You can dwarf it against the 15,000 years — and some say 25,000 — that the race of man has spent in this land of the sun...Yet that half a hundred years, whose culmination Arizona now celebrates, was the flowering of all the promise of all the eons before.
The half a century built a bridge from buckboards to jet engines, from mud huts in the mesquite to the gleaming towers in the sky. In those fifty years, the modern world discovered the splendor of Arizona. In five decades, Arizona became a magic word around the world...Here is a future that gives us good reason to venerate the foundations laid by the past.”
America was a great place until about 1400.
Posted by: cal Lash | February 08, 2012 at 12:28 PM
Emil: if your posts are a problem, why not try shortening them? They may draw even better readership. This comes from an hombre who was rapped across the knuckles by a journalism professor who at least partly curbed my tendency toward verbosity.
Posted by: morecleanair | February 08, 2012 at 02:06 PM
or as Supreme commander would say; Shrinkage!
Posted by: cal Lash | February 08, 2012 at 02:26 PM
In response to the AZ Republic's excellent series on air quality last week, one Paradise Valley toff (love the word!) wrote that it was the golf tourney week and thus improper to call attention to the bad air in our WORLD CLASS city? No doubt that's true if your circle includes El Chorro and the PV Country Club. I used to hang with some of that crowd but they were old Phoenix types and wore their affluence in unassuming ways.
Posted by: morecleanair | February 08, 2012 at 05:31 PM
El Chorro - sticky buns
Posted by: Helen Highwater | February 08, 2012 at 07:38 PM
Cal Lash wrote:
"or as Supreme commander would say; Shrinkage!"
That's what happens when you're left out in the cold. Speaking of which, I left a couple of replies to you in the previous thread ("The 50.1 percent").
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | February 08, 2012 at 08:08 PM
"They fear dissent. Why? Because the dissent comes from folks who use reason, common sense, and divine revelation and they want no part of any of those things." - Wrick Santorum
Reason and common sense indicate that Wrick is insane.
Posted by: Supreme Commander | February 09, 2012 at 08:34 AM
The closer one approaches to Wrick Santorum, the sleepier one becomes...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v642/shakespeares_sister/shakes4/610x-7.jpg
Posted by: Supreme Commander | February 09, 2012 at 08:38 AM
Walter Hall, while it's true that you and I are known for long posts, and it's true that we two seem to predominate (reported) incidents of the posting problem, it doesn't logically follow from this that long posts are the problem.
For one thing, the hypothesis is easily testable. I have just successfully posted a VERY long post to the "Housekeeping" thread (seemed appropriate) under the alias "Long Posttester".
Second, within my own body of work (comments here), the correlation between length and posting problems is very weak. This is a recent problem; it occurs more and more frequently for me; my comments these days are no longer than they used to be; and since I keep my comments on file, I know there are plenty of LONG comments that posted just fine, and shorter comments than did not (though nothing extremely short).
As for the hacker hypothesis, I don't want to give it too much weight, since a hacker would typically commit denial of service attacks or website sabotage which would affect all users broadly; however, that would also be easy to detect, easy to fix, easier to track down, and would only discourage use in the very short term.
You jocularly suggested that any putative hacker wanted to abbreviate our comments, but there is another possibility. A subtle hacker, attempting to discourage active, articulate, and (certainly in your case) eloquent participants, might use either posting frequency or word count as criteria for targeting active users. We both qualify in any long-term search, on both counts. I really don't find the hacker idea plausible, but any systematic attempt to determine the problem needs to check the code and file structure integrity anyway, just looking for viruses and file copy or backup errors.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | February 09, 2012 at 03:14 PM
"morecleanair" wrote:
"Emil: if your posts are a problem, why not try shortening them? They may draw even better readership. This comes from an hombre who was rapped across the knuckles by a journalism professor who at least partly curbed my tendency toward verbosity."
See above. Also, presumably your professor doesn't knock the New York Times and yet, its news stories are considerably longer than my comments. So, it's a question of content and relevance. Your logic professor should have warned you of the fallacy of arguing from the particular to the general.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | February 09, 2012 at 03:26 PM
Without holding an audience's attention, relevant content is irrelevant.
lalalalalaldododadad!
Posted by: soy loco leche | February 09, 2012 at 04:51 PM
Walt,
The Sisters Brothers made it home.
Thanks
Posted by: cal Lash | February 09, 2012 at 06:57 PM
For what my opinion is worth, I like long and short posts.
Posted by: Rogue Columnist | February 09, 2012 at 07:03 PM
Well, I like short posts and long pants!
Posted by: cal Lash | February 09, 2012 at 07:19 PM
Here is a long but interesting post from the Rolling Stone magazine on that party I belong to.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gops-crackpot-agenda-20111207
Posted by: cal Lash | February 09, 2012 at 07:23 PM
I like short shorts and long legs.
"Everone is bullshitting their way through life. Some guys just use bigger shovels."
Posted by: Helen Highwater | February 09, 2012 at 08:08 PM
I use a spoon, but shovel at light speed, dazzling the yokels.
Posted by: Supreme Commander | February 09, 2012 at 08:27 PM
Emil, that stream o' consciousness poem you posted over there blew my freaking mind.
That bit about binuclear hockey was sublime.
Posted by: Petro | February 10, 2012 at 12:52 AM
Help me out here Petro. Where is the Poem?
Posted by: cal Lash | February 10, 2012 at 09:04 AM
Hey, Cal - I was just teasing Emil on his gibberish test post over in the "Housekeeping" thread. :)
Posted by: Petro | February 10, 2012 at 01:13 PM
"Without holding an audience's attention, relevant content is irrelevant. lalalalalaldododadad!"
You should love Twitter.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | February 10, 2012 at 04:43 PM
Sorry, I thought we might have found the next ee cummings
Posted by: cal Lash | February 10, 2012 at 05:24 PM
I don't know... I see some potential there! :)
Posted by: Petro | February 10, 2012 at 05:35 PM
Who named "El Chorro"? LOL
That is Spanish slang for the shits, Hershey squirts...diarrhea.
Posted by: phxSUNSfan | February 10, 2012 at 07:47 PM
Have to quibble a bit, Jon. I, too, was in Phoenix in 1962. It wasn't compact anymore, especially by the standards of the day. Sprawl was already under way. Maryvale had been launched; Paradise Gardens was being constructed up above the Dreamy Draw, on the other side of the Phoenix Mountains.
The dream of the casual lifestyle blending city and country is an old one, and by 1962 it had already significantly influenced the pattern of building in Phoenix. Far-flung subdivisions such as Windsor Square north of Camelback had been launched by the late 1920s. When the first homes were built in 1929 along Medlock and Pasadena just east of Central, that area was three miles north of town. Leapfrogging is not a new phenomenon.
It is true that these developments pale in comparison to today's Anthem and San Tan Valley, but they set the theme for the sprawl that was to come. Sprawl didn't pop up out of nowhere after 1962. It was already happening and was a continuation of preferences and patterns set long before.
We didn't make good decisions before 1962 and then bad ones thereafter. Post-1962 Phoenix was a continuation of what had already been set in motion.
Posted by: Joe Schallan | February 10, 2012 at 11:48 PM
"The state in 1962 had barely more than 1 million people, with Phoenix not yet at the half-million mark. "
These numbers are a little low, Jon.
The US Census for 1960 showed Arizona with 1,302,161 residents, and Phoenix with 439,170 (metro area 663,510). You'd have to adjust these figures somewhat upward for 1962. (It is interesting to note that Phoenix's 439,170 for 1960 represented a staggering 311 percent increase over 1950's city population of 106,818. This puts an exclamation point on the wave of sprawl that had engulfed the close-in citrus groves, cotton fields and dairies during the ten years of the Fifties.)
A comparison to the US Census for 2010 is in order: It shows Arizona with 6,392,017 residents, and Phoenix with 1,445,632 (metro area 4,192,887).
I can imagine that the 2010 numbers would have delighted the civic leaders and boosters of 1960, who, as you may recall, were gung-ho on growth. I can also imagine that at least some of them may not have been delighted with the unintended consequences of those numbers. One booster was Senator Goldwater, and he certainly voiced his doubts in his last years about what the growth had wrought.
Posted by: Joe Schallan | February 11, 2012 at 12:19 AM
Chic Myers was my Grandfather and my Mother's Dad.
Posted by: matt wise | May 26, 2012 at 11:17 AM