Rogue Columnist

The Westward Ho tragedy

When Carl Hayden stood for his last U.S. Senate term in 1962, he faced a state that had been radically changed by population growth in the late 1950s and early '60s. He was also confronted by a radical Republican challenger in car dealer Evan Mecham who found purchase with many of these newcomers.

Hayden's crafty aide Roy Elson came up with a "re-introduce Carl Hayden" campaign — even though Hayden had served Arizona in Congress since statehood and was the indispensable man on water, especially the Central Arizona Project. For the showpiece, he angled a Carl Hayden Day featuring President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

The location was never in question: the Hotel Westward Ho at Central and Fillmore, the premier hostelry of Phoenix since it opened in 1928. The event was a huge success and Hayden won the election.

Within little more than 13 years, with downtown dying, the Westward Ho was a target for demolition. The iconic Luhrs Hotel and others had already met the wrecking ball. The beautiful Hotel Adams had been torn down, replaced by a box containing all the charm of 1970s brutalism. The Ho was saved by making the building into subsidized housing for seniors and the disabled. After falling out of family ownership, the property was repeatedly flipped and eventually sold at a sheriff's auction. Now the owner is using $44 million in a "multifaceted refinancing project" to upgrade the building. And it will continue as elderly housing.

Is this really the best Phoenix can do?

Reality show presidency

The conventional wisdom keeps waiting for Donald Trump's latest outrageous statement to bring him down. So Republicans can nominate someone from the party's "mainstream," say Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

But the latest poll from Fox News has Trump still in the lead, at 26 percent, up a point from last month. Ben Carson has 18 percent. And the rest of the GOP clown car is in single digits.

In the new Quinnipiac poll, Trump leads with 25 percent, down three points from last month. Carson is at 17 percent, followed by Carly Fiorina at 12 percent.

One way of looking at this is that three quarters of those surveyed don't want Trump. But his rivals are cannibalizing each other. Especially on the losing end is Jeb Bush, the supposedly establishment candidate.

Arizona economy update in charts

The Great Recession, which hit Arizona hardest than any economic downturn since the Depression, has been over for more than six years.

One big difference: In the Great Depression, Arizona was a huge beneficiary of the New Deal. Another is that it wasn't the epicenter of the calamity. This time it was, with its massive dependence on housing.

This is part of an ongoing update for how the state's economy is performing.

Total gross domestic product adjusted for inflation has still not recovered. It it badly lags Washington, a similarly populous Western state, which has recovered and reached new highs:

Housing starts, the gold standard of the old economy, continue to struggle. They are around where they stood in the early 1990s, even though population has increased increased significantly:

The workforce is still smaller than before the collapse. It gets worse: ASU's Lee McPheters estimates that 44 percent of the adult population is not working:

A train to Tucson

When I was a boy, the Southern Pacific Railroad operated six trains a day between Phoenix Union Station and Tucson. They were part of the fading American passenger-rail system, once the finest in the world.

The top of the line were the crack Sunset Limited, SP's flagship running between New Orleans and Los Angeles (once it went all the way to San Francisco). Phoenix to Tucson took less than two-and-a-half hours. Then the Golden State Limited, another premier train operated by SP from Los Angeles to Tucumcari, N.M., where it was handed off to the Rock Island for the trip to Chicago. Finally, there was the remains of the Imperial, once a fine train in its own right but by the 1960s a mail train with a single coach.

But the trains were dying, helped along by the Postal Service canceling the vital mail contracts in 1967-68. Amtrak took over a much diminished Sunset — three days a week — and it left Phoenix in the 1990s when the state would not help maintain the northern main line. Phoenix is the largest city in America with no passenger trains.

I mention this history as the Arizona Department of Transportation studies passenger rail between Phoenix and Tucson. It has gotten press. But is it possible?

The first deportation

Led by Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidates are embracing the policy of deporting some 11 million Hispanics in the country illegally.

If implemented, it would be a humanitarian calamity and a stain on the nation. But it wouldn't be the first time "American exceptionalism" took such a cruel turn.

During the Great Depression, some 1 million Mexicans were deported from the United States to Mexico. An estimated 60 percent were American citizens. In 1930, the U.S. population was only 123 million.

The overt intention was to free up more jobs for "Americans" (read Anglos) when unemployment was 25 percent or higher. But it was invariably twined with racism, score settling and ethnic cleansing.

The most definitive scholarly account is found in the book Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, by Francisco Balderrama and the late Raymond Rodriguez. They focus heavily on Los Angeles County, where the deportation was active and records were kept.

The degree to which it was carried out in Arizona and Phoenix is less documented. The late historian Bradford Luckingham writes of the intense anti-Mexican sentiment in Phoenix in the 1930s. In a six-month period during 1933, 130 Mexican families were "repatriated" from Phoenix. They received food and clothing from Friendly House, the city's oldest immigrant-assistance charity.

Sinema's way

At least based on Facebook comments, U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has finally alienated many liberals for good, based on her vote against President Obama on the Iran nuclear deal.

In a statement defending/ explaining her vote, Sinema slyly says, "I was a principled opponent of the Iraq War and spoke out early against the U.S. invasion." One must wonder if she considers some opponents unprincipled. But the more important fact was that back then she was a recent Green Party candidate for Phoenix City Council.

Since then, she climbed the ladder to the Legislature and then Congress as a Democrat. She frequently alienated the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, such as when, serving in the state Senate, she called the odious Russell Pearce, "my president." He was president of the Senate, but "my president"?

On the Iran vote, Blog for Arizona commented, "Sinema’s excuses for opposition are on matters entirely outside of the negotiated nuclear agreement, and thus not on the merits of the actual agreement itself. Like every Tea-Publican, Sinema wants total capitulation by Iran, something Iran would never agree to in a negotiation. This is a ridiculous expectation."

Who murdered Don Bolles?

They still meet at the scene of the crime. The breakfasts at the Hotel Clarendon are informal reunions of the lead investigators of the murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. The hotel itself, redone in the 2000s, has created a shrine of sorts to Bolles, photographs of the event along a hallway. No longer young men, they still have sharp, vivid memories. If one is fortunate enough to snag an invitation, bringing a reporter's notebook is impossible. It would shut down the conversation.

As difficult as it is for some of us to believe, next June will mark 40 years since the bombing. It remains the most enduring mystery and troubling crime in modern Phoenix history.

I have two minor personal connections. I was on duty that day on the ambulance and, as it turned out, one call rotation away from being there. My partner and I caught an auto accident with injuries, or 962 by the radio codes, at 16th Street and Southern. Next up was an explosion in Midtown. One of my friends took that call and was holding the mortally injured Bolles when he said, "They finally got me... Mafia, Emprise, Adamson... Find Adamson..." That's what she told me later in the squad room. (The excellent Paul Rubin of New Times has slightly different wording in this recollection of the event).

Also, in those days I was living in an apartment at 36th Street and Campbell, one of those classic Phoenix buildings surrounded by citrus trees with a grassy, shady courtyard. My neighbor was a young man named John. I noticed that whenever he came home at night, he would repeatedly circle the block. Over time, he told my mother that he and his mother had been relocated to Phoenix by the FBI after his father had died in a mob bombing in Chicago. The Bolles killing unnerved him. "He had been warned," he said. "They always warn you." Followed by, "I've said too much." He was even more reluctant to come home at night.

Huddled masses

One of the many unhelpful gifts to the republic from the right wing has been to make it virtually impossible to have a sane discussion about immigration.

Thus, Donald Trump's anti-immigrant ravings are resonating with the most extreme "white nationalists." Arizona has offered some of the most odious examples of bigotry, hate and hypocrisy.

But there is — dare I say it? — a "national conversation" to be had.

It has little to do with the Mexican illegal immigrants, although it must be admitted that immigration legal and illegal in the 2000s was the largest wave to hit the United States in history, greater even than the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It carried costs and benefits still being debated.

Nor is my concern about Anglos becoming a minority by 2040 if current trends continue. The automobile, sprawl, oligarchs and their agenda, the "market" degrading everything good to make a quick buck — all this has done more to destroy American civilization than brown people.

The issue is more about the future.

Signs

I'm not a scientist, man, as Senator (and presidential candidate) Marco Rubio said. But more than 97 percent of the scientists who actually specialize in climate science agree that climate change is real, heavily human caused, and getting worse faster than expected.

I'm also a witness. Sure, having moved to Phoenix in 1990 now makes you a "pioneer," but my experience goes back a but further.

The dust storms that make such good visuals, and popularized as "haboobs," are not new. They, like the monsoon, have been a part of the Phoenix and Sonoran Desert landscape for tens of thousands of years. The same is true of intense rains and floods.

What seems to be different is the severity of monsoon storms that come into the city, especially destructive "microbursts" and tornadic winds.

One hit Midtown a few years ago and mowed down telephone poles along Third Avenue, as well as uprooting trees, including priceless old-growth trees in Encanto Park. The events have increased since then, including a severe storm Monday night. Trees came down all over the metropolitan area.