Phoenix

In 1977, when I was working on the ambulance as an EMT-paramedic, I was temporarily exiled from the city and worked for Aids Ambulance (the former Mesa Ambulance Service). This involved rotating to stations in Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, and Apache Junction. At the latter, two 24-hour units were maintained and the crews could expect major trauma calls, even lake rescues, in largely empty country. We proclaimed ourselves the Junction Medics. Superstition Mountain loomed to the east, not unlike the late 1940s photo above.

In those days, we left behind Mesa around Gilbert Road and were enveloped by massive citrus groves. This continued for about 12 miles, broken only by an occasional trailer park. Not much was out here. AJ's population was closing in on 9,000.

We christened Rossmoor Leisure World, a pioneering gated property, "Seizure World" because of the nature of calls from its elderly retired population. Williams Air Force Base sat miles to the south, down two-lane roads crossing farmland. Completion of the freeway was years away, so Main Street in the Maricopa County part of our territory wasn't even named or part of Mesa. It was four-lane U.S. 60, primevally dark at night, no curbs or sidewalks, lethal to pedestrians. Otherwise, it was empty desert all the way to the iconic mountain.

I couldn't imagine it would be anything else.

Fast forward to the 2000s. Mesa had ballooned from 63,000 in 1970 to nearly 400,000, grown all the way to the Pinal County line. The little suburbs I served had grown supersized and merged together into a sprawling conglomeration called the East Valley. The groves and farms were gone. Superstition's slopes were profaned by subdivisions. And all that empty desert was the most coveted piece of land in central Arizona. The boosters called it Superstition Vistas.

Tempe History Museum photo

The recent derailment and fire of a Union Pacific train on the Salt River bridge is a reminder that railroads still play a role in Phoenix, even if far less than in the past. As the late David Myrick explained in his seminal Railroad of Arizona: Phoenix and the Central Roads, eight attempts were made to build a line to the Salt River Valley before the Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad's first train arrived on July 4th, 1887.

Among the many impediments — capital, supplies, heat, permission of the Pima Indians to cross their reservation — bridging the fickle Salt River was among the most persistent. The bridge above shows a "ten-wheeler" steam locomotive and two cars on the second iteration of the span. The first saw a flood destroy its approach trestle in 1890, then was severed entirely by the Great Flood of 1891, which also did substantial damage to canals and farmland; adobe structures collapsed from the rain.

In 1902, part of the bridge gave way without warning, dropping the locomotive 20 feet into the riverbed, killing one and severely injuring another, and leaving a passenger car hanging precariously. In 1905, the flooded Salt washed away a segment of this second bridge just minutes after a passenger train had crossed it. Similar washouts plagued the railroad's crossing of the Gila River.

Finally, the current heavy steel truss bridge was built in 1912-1913. UP says it will rebuild it — or at least replace one of the truss spans — which is good news for continued freight and potential future passenger service. Given Wall Street's pressure to suck profits from major railroads and Phoenix's relative unimportance on the system, I'd be surprised if UP built an entirely new and modern bridge.

Such was not always the case.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy campaigning at Chris-Town mall on March 30th, 1968, soon after announcing his candidacy for president. He would be dead from an assassin's bullet less than three months later.

Some are comparing this year's unrest to 1968 — not persuasively, to my mind — so it might be interesting to check in on Phoenix during that tumultuous year. Just what a different world this was is evident in a headline of the Arizona Republic on Monday, January 1st: "All The World Gay As Old Year Dies." Cultural language wasn't the only difference. The overnight low was 35 degrees, common then as Phoenix had several frosts each winter. The low would hit freezing later in the week. These are much more rare today amid the human-caused heat island. The paper carried Today's Prayer on the front page, as it had for years.

The sixties were a period of great change in Phoenix, where the magic of the old city's oasis was very much alive but the suburbanized future was coming — Maryvale and Sun City were abuilding. The city grew 32% during this decade. The city also entered the big leagues of sports in 1968 with the NBA expansion team Phoenix Suns.

Downtown was still a major retail center at the beginning of the decade, but it was in decline by 1968, hollowed out by Park Central and other malls, as well as low-cost retail buildings bulldozed to create Phoenix Civic Plaza with its convention center and Symphony Hall. This also leveled many single-room occupancy hotels and other parts of the Deuce. Critics warned the shattering of the city's skid row would send vagrants to nearby neighborhoods, which it did.

David W. Foster in 2016 at a celebration of his 50th year teaching at ASU, in the Old Main building. At left is his wife, Virginia.

My dear friend, David William Foster, Regents Professor at Arizona State University, died peacefully last night at age 79. His ASU bio doesn't begin to capture the man in full, but it's worth quoting at length because of the depth and breadth of his accomplishments:

David William Foster is a Regents Professor of Spanish and women and gender studies at Arizona State University. He has written extensively on Argentine narrative and theater, and he has held Fulbright teaching appointments in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. He has also served as an Inter-American Development Bank professor in Chile. Foster has held visiting appointments at Fresno State College, Vanderbilt University, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-Riverside, and Florida International University. He has conducted six seminars for teachers under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the most recent in Sao Paulo in summer 2013.

In 1989, Foster was named the Graduate College's Outstanding Graduate Mentor, and in 1994 he was named Researcher of the Year by the Alumni Association. He received the 2000 Armando Discepolo Prize for theater scholarship awarded annually by GETEA (Grupo de Estudios de Teatro Argentino y Latinoamericano) of the Universidad de Buenos Aires.In 2010, Foster was honored for his lifetime work on Argentine culture by the Centro de Narratoloia at a program held at the Argentine National Library. He is past president of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.

We've lost a man of astounding achievements, and this comes atop the crushing loss of historian Jack August in 2017. Arizona, and the world, are less for these passages.

History is written by the victors.

This marks the 40th anniversary of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act. The state Department of Water Resources said in a press release:

The 1980 Act was – and remains — the most sweeping state law in the Nation governing groundwater use. In addition to creating a coherent, manageable system for helping wean Arizona’s most populous regions from groundwater use, it enacted the framework for long-term groundwater-use reduction that continues to the present.

“In Arizona, we stand on the shoulders of giants — pragmatic, visionary leaders whose achievements have shown us the way and enabled our high quality of life,” said Governor Doug Ducey.

A score of things that made today's Phoenix:

1. ASU: In 1920, Tempe Normal School was awarding teaching certificates and providing high-school courses. From there it became Tempe State Teachers College (1925), Arizona State Teachers College (1929), Arizona State College (1945), and finally a university (1958). Today, under the dynamic leadership of Michael Crow, ASU is one of the largest universities in the United States. Among its five campuses/centers is the transformative downtown Phoenix location. The downside: Phoenix is by far the largest metropolitan areas in America with only one real, full-sized university.

2. Agriculture: A century ago, Phoenix was the center of a major agricultural empire thanks to its location in one of the planet's great alluvial river valleys. Anything would grow — just add water, which was abundant thanks to Theodore Roosevelt Dam and its successors. It's almost all gone. At one time, we could feed ourselves and exported produce and beef to the nation. Now Phoenix is almost entirely reliant on the 10,000-mile supply chain. A more foresighted place would have established agricultural trusts to preserve the citrus groves and Japanese flower gardens.

3. Air conditioning: Refrigerated air showed up in movie theaters and new hotels a century ago. Swamp coolers and central air units made Phoenix bearable for more people year-round (no more sleeping porches and wrapping oneself in wet sheets in summer). For awhile after World War II, Phoenix was also a center of air-conditioning manufacturing.