THE 1950s:

ROCK 'N' ROLL, MARILYN MONROE, JOLTIN' Joe, “I Like Ike” … the 1950s were the All-American decade. Or, as the beatniks might have said, “It was like fat city, man.” The Hula-Hoop was born in the 1950s, and so were super glue, Saran Wrap, color TV, Tylenol, Velcro, Mr. Potato Head, AA batteries and the microwave oven, a newfangled appliance that cost a whopping $1,300 when it hit the shelves in 1955 — that’s the equivalent of $12,276.77 in today’s economy.

Gunsmoke, which starred longtime Phoenix resident Amanda Blake as Miss Kitty, also debuted in 1955, the same year that Rock Around the Clock spent eight weeks at the top of the Billboard charts and the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series. Locally, the 1950s welcomed spring training to Phoenix, where the population surpassed 200,000. Arizona Highways was growing back then, too.

In 1946, the circulation of the magazine was 70,000. By 1950, that number had soared to 175,000. In the first issue of the first year of that decade, Editor Raymond Carlson marked the milestone with his usual smorgasbord of vowels and consonants.

“The arrival of a new year is an adventure,” he wrote. “We hope it will be better than the last, and indeed it should be because we are older and wiser and should know better to extract the full measure of happiness and contentment from each and every passing day. A new year brings new horizons, roseate and promising; new hopes to be fulfilled; new and cherished wishes that may be realized. We start out with our best foot forward, full of staunch resolve, and if it eventually turns out that this, the new year, is the same old bore as the last, surely it is no one’s fault but our own.”
 

Turns out, the new year, and the next nine years of the decade, would indeed be “better than the last.” The booming prosperity of the Eisenhower years was reflected in the pages of Arizona Highways as the circulation eventually eclipsed 200,000 issues per month. Mr. Carlson’s magazine was a juggernaut. Like Elvis Presley, overhead-valve V8 engines and the Montreal Canadiens. Stories about the Chiricahua Mountains, Sonoita Creek, Jerome, Taliesin West, Mission San Xavier del Bac and fishing holes in the White Mountains graced the covers. The photography was large-format, four-color and spectacular. And subscribers from around the world, such as Dr. Jerzy Loth of Warsaw, Poland, wrote letters expressing their appreciation for the magazine: “The first number [issue] for 1955 has arrived. It was quite a sensation, not only for me, but for a bunch of my friends, who are regularly perusing your wonderful paper with great interest.”

Because of the state’s beautiful landscapes — the Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley, the saguaros down south — most of the images in the magazine were focused on broad panoramas. But there were lifestyle shots, too, and it was one of those that inspired this issue.
 

A few months ago, we posted an image of Sedona (left) on Insta​gram. It was from November 1951, back when Sedona was still a sleepy little village surrounded by apple orchards, a Hollywood movie set and a few guest ranches. In the photo, all you can see is a dirt road lined with a café, a motel and a camera shop. In the background are Steamboat Rock and Wilson Mountain. The photo caption reads: “Transient accommodations are offered to the traveler to the Sedona area.”

The Instagram post generated a lot of response, mostly from flabbergasted readers who couldn’t believe how much had changed in a relatively short amount of time. “Absolutely love it,” Marisa Corti wrote. “It makes me want to time travel just to see it.” In another comment, Lisa Frias shared her personal story: “That’s about the year my parents were looking for a place to settle and raise a family. They looked at Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona, but ‘didn’t think the area would ever amount to anything.’ So, they chose Phoenix instead. If only they’d had a crystal ball at the time.”

Although the change has been most dramatic in Sedona, just about every other place in Arizona has been recast over the past 70 years. For better or worse depends on your perspective. For us, pulling this issue together was a chance to dig through the archive and relive not only Arizona history, but also the history of this publication, which was in a renaissance in the middle of the last century. Enjoy the trip back in time. We think it’s a pretty good one.
 

September 1956
If you live in or have visited Phoenix lately, you know much has changed since Herb McLaughlin made this photograph of Camelback Mountain. It appeared on the inside back cover of the September 1956 issue, which was primarily focused on aerial photography. Today, the population of Phoenix is more than 1.6 million people (based on 2016 data from the U.S. Census Bureau), and it’s estimated that approximately 700,000 people hike Camelback Mountain each year. Recently, the Echo Canyon Trailhead, a popular starting point for a trip to the top, underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation.

 

April 1950
In our April 1950 issue, we explored the history of Cave Creek, a community north of Phoenix. At the time, author Nora Woods wrote, the town was celebrating the paving of the road to Phoenix. This photo, credited to McLaughlin & Co., shows residents gathered outside Cave Creek’s small community center. Someone commuting to Phoenix, Woods wrote, “can still find land from $50 an acre in large tracts to $500 an acre for choice sites on the main road.” Land is a little more expensive today, but Cave Creek remains a small community. Its population is around 5,000.

 

November 1957
Canyon Lake, northeast of the Phoenix area, was the scene of this Allen C. Reed photo in our November 1957 issue. It accompanied a story, also by Reed, about water skiing on Arizona’s reservoirs. “Motorboats on trailers towed behind family cars are quite a common sight along Arizona’s cactus-lined desert highways,” Reed wrote. From Phoenix, Canyon Lake is accessed via the Apache Trail (State Route 88), and it continues to host water skiing today. It’s also known for its fishing, and the species there include largemouth bass, rainbow trout and channel catfish.

 

May 1955/November 1951
In the 1950s, Sedona was a place of expansive red-rock landscapes, farms and small homesteads — a far cry from the major tourist destination it’s become. These photographs — Ray Manley’s Sedona, the Red Rock Country (above) and Mike Roberts’ A Home in the West (below) — reflect the town’s agricultural roots. The area is nourished by perennial Oak Creek, and many families grew fruits (primarily peaches and apples) and vegetables for home use during the era. Some even carted their wares to markets in Flagstaff and Jerome.

 

April 1957
When construction began on Phoenix’s Encanto Park in 1935, plans included a lagoon, a boat dock, a golf course, a playground and a band shell. Three years later, the park was complete, and the brainchild of millionaire philanthropist William G. Hartranft soon became a major recreation destination. These photographs, Encanto Park Swimming Pool (above) and Encanto Park Lagoon (below), appeared in an issue of Arizona Highways that celebrated Phoenix’s growth. The park’s south side was renovated in 1982, and the lagoon and channel system were revamped — along with other updates — in 1986.

 

 

 

February 1959
“We address ourselves this month to the most pleasant proposition that fishing is good in Arizona,” Editor Raymond Carlson wrote in our February 1959 issue. Most of the issue was devoted to anglers and angling, and the photos of the state’s various fishing spots included Bob Bradshaw’s shot of Oak Creek (above) and Ray Manley’s photo of a “lucky strike” on Big Lake in the White Mountains (below). From a revenue standpoint, the fishing is still good in Arizona: In 2015 (the most recent year for which statistics are available), the Arizona Game and Fish Department reported nearly $6.5 million in revenue from fishing licenses, plus nearly $10 million from combination hunting and fishing licenses.

 

 

April 1958
Although the population of the copper, silver and gold mining town of Bisbee had dropped to fewer than 6,000 people by 1950, it remained the Cochise County seat. This Ray Manley photograph, Bisbee, Amid the Hills of Old Cochise, appeared in the April 1958 issue of Arizona Highways as part of an issue dedicated to Cochise County. In his editor’s letter, Raymond Carlson wrote: “And then we come to such modern places as Douglas, Bisbee and Fort Huachuca and yesterday is forgotten. Old Cochise is today and tomorrow.” Today, Bisbee is best known as an artists community and tourist destination.

 

Phoenix: The City’s Government
Excerpted from our April 1957 issue

It takes a heap of doing to keep a wildly growing city like Phoenix from coming unstuck.

In a period of just six years — from 1950 to 1956 — the city’s population ballooned from 106,000 to 172,000 and its area (via annexation) from 17 square miles to 36. This means not only collecting taxes from a lot of new citizens, but providing them with municipal services in return for their money. And as any city employee will tell you, nobody is in a bigger hurry than a newly-annexed property owner wanting police protection, fire protection and sewer connections. He’s willing to wait until tomorrow, but if he has to wait until the day after tomorrow, the city manager is liable to get a testy letter.

That Phoenix’s city government has been able to measure up to this towering challenge is attested by its winning of no less than 23 different awards from national organizations in the last two years. All these, in addition to its designation by the National Municipal League in 1950 as an All-American City for improvement in municipal government.

The fact of being a city in the middle of the desert serves only to complicate the problems that pile up at City Hall.

Take water, for instance. Phoenix laps up more than 45 million gallons of it during an average 24-hour period. In summer, when people begin to understand how a grilled cheese sandwich feels and swimming pools start filling up with water and human beings, consumption jumps to 89 million gallons a day.

Then take streets. The city has to maintain streets not merely for the people living within its limits (and paying city taxes), but also for the people living outside (and not paying city taxes). There’s about an equal number of both, or a total of 350,000 living in the Greater Phoenix area. All of them have to get downtown to their jobs, to the movies or to shop for Uncle Willie’s birthday present. And so they all use city streets, whether or not they contribute much to their maintenance.

Consider, too, the fact that Phoenix is a city that people like to come to from somewhere else. They pour in during the warm winter months, and, because Phoenix is now nicely air conditioned, they keep coming even in summer. So the parks have to be supervised the year around. There have to be enough cops on hand to keep great quantities of people — both citizens and transients — from banging up their fenders at street intersections. And there have to be enough firemen around to tidy things up after somebody falls asleep in his motel room with a cigarette in his hand.

Somehow, though, these things get done, and a great many other things besides. As, for example, installing nearly 40 miles of arterial street lighting in only five years. And treating more than 7 billion gallons of sewage every year. And teaching little children to be safe drivers when they grow up, by giving grade-school driver-training courses with miniature cars and simulated traffic conditions.

What all this adds up to is that Phoenix, in just a trifling few years, has grown from a small, cozy, mañana-type town to a big and slightly frenetic city. The end of this growth is not in sight. For thousands of people are still being attracted by the magical Phoenix combination of big city plus Western living plus a climate that seems to be good for what’s wrong with them.

Governing a city where this sort of thing goes on is enough to give a mayor and city manager the twitches. But then maybe the climate is good for that, too.

 

November 1957
The distant Four Peaks formed the backdrop for this Allen C. Reed photo of cars pulling motorboats toward the reservoirs along the Apache Trail (State Route 88). “One of the most devoted and inspired groups to take advantage of Arizona’s waterways is the Desert Boat and Ski Club of Phoenix,” Reed wrote in our November 1957 issue. “A typical periodic outing of this 72-family organization starts with an early Sunday morning take-off for their desert rendezvous on Canyon Lake.”

 

February 1959
This Cliff Segerblom photo appeared on our back cover in February 1959. Titled Trolling — Lake Mead, it shows the reservoir’s Wishing Well Cove, which is on the Arizona side of Boulder Canyon, about 15 miles upstream from Hoover Dam. The photo was made less than 25 years after Hoover Dam, which impounds the 247-square-mile reservoir, was completed. Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which also includes the smaller Lake Mohave, offers numerous boating, camping and hiking activities. Nearly 8 million people — more than double the 1959 total — visited the recreation area in 2017.

 

June 1956
Camerama. That might not be a word you’ve heard before, but back in the 1950s, it described a camera that photographer Luis Azarraga invented to capture panoramic views. “The extraordinary lateral range of the Camerama — it’s 160 degrees — is greater than the human field of vision and almost twice the sweep of other wide-angle-lens cameras,” our story said. Azarraga made this photograph of Globe with the device, which he mounted to a tripod and cranked to 18 feet high. At the time the photograph was made, Globe was a booming mining town, but its population today hovers around 18,000.

 

May 1952
Since 1941, Prescott’s Friendly Pines Camp has hosted young summer adventurers. It and other Arizona summer camps were featured in R. Alice Drought’s Camping Is High Adventure in Arizona Highways’ May 1952 issue. This photo by Bob Towers opened the story. Back then, campers practiced packing burros, setting up tents and more. Today, though, they’re more likely to ride, swim, craft, and practice archery and fencing — along with learning the basics of camping.

 

August 1955/February 1954
These two photos — Esther Henderson’s (above), from August 1955, and Hubert A. Lowman’s (below), from February 1954 — show the Central Arizona mining town of Jerome in a time of transition. In the early ’50s, mining operations ceased at the mountainside town, and its population dwindled to fewer than 100. Jerome then turned to tourism, which is what sustains it today. Visitors can learn about Jerome’s mining history at Jerome State Historic Park, whose centerpiece is the Douglas Mansion — an adobe structure built in 1916 by James S. Douglas, developer of the Little Daisy Mine.

 

Tucson: Dude Ranch Capital of the World
Excerpted from our February 1958 issue

Around Tucson there’s a tale told about the time, many years ago, when a stranger hiked into a nearby cattle ranch and asked if he might take room and board there while he wrote a novel. The rancher allowed as how it would be all right, and so the stranger stayed.

 His name was Harold Bell Wright. The novel was called The Mine with the Iron Door. And that — according to the legend — was the start of the dude-ranch industry in and around Tucson.

 Since then a lot of dudes have gone over the saddle horns, for there are today no less than 43 guest ranches in the Tucson area. Every year people from everywhere distribute themselves among these 43 ranches and settle down to some of the rugged-but-not-too-gosh-darned-rugged living that such ranches afford. Then, a few weeks or few months later, they go home — perhaps a little tougher, certainly a little tanner, and with an odd tendency to drop their “g’s” and speak of “chuck” when they mean “dinner.”

 In case you didn’t know, not all dude ranches are alike. Some specialize in entertaining family groups, with plenty of facilities for the kids. Others prefer adults — married or single. Several combine cattle with guests. One caters exclusively to people who are reducing.

 Some of the guest ranches are rustic, with adobe buildings, wooden sidewalks, benches in the dining room and chandeliers made out of old wagon wheels. Others look a little like a piece of the Statler plucked out of Manhattan and transported to the Arizona desert. You rough it in tiled swimming pools and on carpets as thick as a cowboy’s tongue on Saturday night, and you pay accordingly.

 While we’re on that not-irrelevant subject, let it be said that dude ranch rates range from about $75 per week per person to $35 per day per person. The price usually includes meals, horseback-riding, sight-seeing trips and other normal activities. Bear in mind that a somewhat-better-than-average motel makes an in-season charge of $8 or $9 per day or somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 per week (and that’s without meals). Thus it becomes apparent that a dude-ranch vacation isn’t necessarily an improvident indulgence.

 The typical guest ranch in Southern Arizona is a higgledy-piggledy of buildings scattered over an acre or so of desert. There’s a large structure containing a dining hall, kitchen and living room. There are smaller, individual cottages or sleeping rooms for the guests, set apart for privacy. There’s a corral, swimming pool, shuffleboard court, perhaps a tennis court, maybe even a putting green or polo field.

 How many other guests will you find at your dude ranch? That depends, naturally, on the size of the ranch (and how good the season is), but the ranches in this area run from about 15 guests at the smallest to 60 at the largest. The latter, of course, would be very nearly in the resort class.

 Every ranch has its dude wrangler. He conducts the horseback rides, keeps the dudes and the horses reasonably at peace with each other and serves as the ranch handyman. Occasionally (although not as often as the movies would suggest) he marries one of the guests and goes off to become prince consort of a Long Island mansion.

 Well, that’s dude ranching in the Tucson country. If it sounds as though this is for the likes of you, write to the Tucson Chamber of Commerce or Sunshine Climate Club for a list of ranches. Pack a couple of pairs of blue jeans and a bottle of suntan oil. Buy yourself a ticket to Tucson and ... Have fun!

 

November 1959
The Apache Trail (State Route 88), which at the time ran from east of Phoenix to the Globe area, was the focus of our November 1959 issue. This Cletis B. Reaves photo, one of several that accompanied our story, shows a fishing camp below Theodore Roosevelt Dam, which its namesake dedicated in 1911. Theodore Roosevelt Lake, which is impounded by the dam, is the oldest and largest of the reservoirs along the Apache Trail. SR 88 now ends at the reservoir, and its former route farther east is now part of State Route 188. The author of the 1959 story was Joseph Stacey, who succeeded Raymond Carlson as editor of Arizona Highways 12 years later.

 

November 1957
Water skiers traverse Canyon Lake, northeast of Phoenix, in Allen C. Reed’s photo from our November 1957 issue. Reed used a 4x5 Crown Graphic camera and Ektachrome film to make this photo at 11:30 a.m. on a March day. “Canyon Lake is long and narrow,” he noted.

 

April 1957
“For April, in this wonderful year of nineteen fifty-seven, we present with pleasure and pride: PHOENIX, City in the Sun,” Editor Raymond Carlson proclaimed for this issue of the magazine. On the inside front cover was a Ray Manley photograph of the Arizona Canal in Phoenix. Based architecturally on the Hohokam people’s irrigation systems, the canal dates to the 1880s and now is managed by Salt River Project. In 1957, though, Carlson reminded readers of Phoenix’s farming history in his caption for this photo. “Miles of canals, carrying irrigation waters to the agricultural areas encircling Phoenix, are constant reminders of the fact that the economy of the city is based on farming,” he wrote. “The growth of Phoenix began when Roosevelt Dam was built to store waters of the Salt and the Tonto, thereby assuring a stable source of water for thirsty acres in the Salt River Valley. Water, desert lands and the flowering of Phoenix into one of the great American cities — this is truly a Cinderella story for America.”

 

September 1956/May 1950
In September 1956 (above) and May 1950 (below), Arizona Highways presented two different views of the Northern Arizona city of Flagstaff. The 1956 shot, by J.G. Moore, was made aboard a Cessna 170 flying at approximately 9,000 feet. It was part of Skyways of Arizona, an Edward H. Peplow Jr. celebration of aerial views of the state. The 1950 photo, by Jerry McLain, was shot on Mars Hill, which overlooks the city and is the home of Lowell Observatory. Flagstaff has grown considerably since the 1950s and now boasts a population of more than 70,000.

 

October 1959
A Winter Day in Sabino Canyon, by Ray Manley, appeared in the October 1959 issue, along with this caption: “This picture was taken part way up Sabino Canyon Recreation Area northeast of Tucson. Sabino Canyon offers the photographer good photographic subject matter in most all seasons. Occasionally, it has been known to have snow in it in the upper levels, covering the fall colored leaves in a freak snowstorm in late November. A short drive to this beautiful canyon brings Tucson residents to beautiful picnic and recreation grounds.” Mountain biking, hiking, horseback riding and wildlife watching remain popular activities for visitors to the canyon, which is nestled at the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains.

 

January 1957
A Sunday Crowd at Saguaro Lake was the title of this Harry Vroman photo, one of several that ran with Vroman’s story in January 1957. “Come Saturday,” Vroman wrote, “there will be a gathering at Saguaro Lake of the great boating fraternity; those fortunate ones with their own boats, others renting at reasonable rates a safe boat with outboard motor in which to explore and be enriched by such close contact with the good earth and its multitude of splendid attractions.” Created by Stewart Mountain Dam in 1930, the reservoir has a surface area of more than 1,200 acres when full.

 

June 1951
The boat dock at Willow Beach was one of the Lake Mohave sites photographed for our June 1951 story on the Colorado River reservoir. Cliff Segerblom made this and other photos that accompanied the story, and his wife, Gene, was the author. The same year the story was published, Davis Dam, which impounds Lake Mohave, was completed. The reservoir’s creation spurred the growth of the lakeside cities of Bullhead City, Arizona, and Laughlin, Nevada.

 

October 1958
Rolling Merrily Along on 70 was the subject of our October 1958 issue, published shortly after the route was realigned away from Coolidge Dam. Editor Raymond Carlson heralded U.S. Route 70 — the shortest of four federal highways that crossed Arizona at the time — as a “friendly, sunny road” and published nearly a dozen color photographs of the route, including this one, U.S. 70 in Graham County, by Josef Muench.  Running west from North Carolina, the highway once terminated near the Pacific Ocean in California. By 1969, though, the route had been truncated at Globe. It now runs for 2,385 miles.

 

August 1956
Frequent Arizona Highways contributor Ray Manley’s Stone Avenue, Tucson appeared in the August 1956 issue of the magazine. “There is a time in the evening when the sun has set and its afterglow gives even the commonplace a new feeling of beauty,” the caption read. “Though Tucson’s man-made monuments are not comparable in size with those of larger cities, they are the landmarks that identify the city as the Old Pueblo.” Architect Roy Place designed the Pioneer Hotel, which was one of Tucson’s first high-rise buildings. Sadly, a fire gutted the building in 1970, killing 29 people. Today, offices occupy the old hotel.

 

Phoenix:  What to Do, What to See in the Sun
Excerpted from our April 1957 issue

There are all manner of pleasant ways to spend your time in Phoenix, quite apart from just lazying in the sun. It depends on what piques your fancy.

Shows? Phoenix, of course, has gobs of movies — both drive-in and sit-in. Also a fine winter “straw-hat” theater, the Sombrero, with plays starring Hollywood and Broadway personalities. Also a fine Little Theater.

Sports? There’s big league baseball during the spring training season, with three teams converging in this area to work out the kinks: New York Giants at Phoenix, Chicago Cubs at Mesa and Baltimore Orioles at Scottsdale. There’s tennis, with lots of courts all over town. There’s golf, with several good courses to play on and a top-drawer national tournament to see in mid-winter.

There’s also horse racing (at Turf Paradise and Fair Grounds) and dog racing (at Greyhound Parks). There’s horseback riding on the desert and fishing in the mountain reservoirs northeast of Phoenix. And there’s that exciting and indigenous divertissement of Western folk — rodeo. Phoenix puts on the state’s biggest rodeo and the nation’s biggest horse-drawn parade every March. It likewise stages a unique junior rodeo (for kids) in October. And many of the smaller communities around Phoenix offer rodeos intermittently through the season. Wickenburg, for example, has one approximately every two weeks at various of its dude ranches.

If it’s desert flora that interests you, there’s a wondrous display of it at the Desert Botanical Garden in Papago Park, east of Phoenix. Here are hundreds of Arizona desert plants plus other species from arid regions all over the world. You also can see many different kinds of cactus on the grounds of the state capitol.

At Encanto Park you’ll find 1,200 specimens of trees and shrubs marked with identifying labels. The city’s parks and recreation department started collecting them back in 1937. Then, in 1949, Joy Egbert, a retired Phoenician and tree-lover, volunteered to label all of them. The more exotic specimens include South African sumac brush, Eustis limequat and Australian bottle tree. One of the favorite leisure pursuits of Phoenix visitors and homefolk alike is to take an Encanto Park “tree walk.”

With its tremendous growth, Phoenix has begun to come of age culturally, too. The city has a fine symphony orchestra, now ten years old, and the fall-and-winter concert season features some of the greatest names of music. There’s also a separate and varied concert series staged by Mrs. Archer Linde at Phoenix Union High School auditorium. And Arizona State College at Tempe sponsors major musical events through the fall and winter.

As for art, there are private galleries in Phoenix and Scottsdale, exhibits at the Phoenix Art Center, frontier murals at the State Department of Library and Archives in the capitol and a handsome collection of American art at Matthews Library on the campus of Arizona State College. (And, incidentally, the Arizona murals at the new First National Bank in downtown Phoenix are well worth seeing.)

Lectures and book reviews? Frequently — all through the winter season. Keep an eye on the newspapers.

Square-dancing? Almost every evening. Watch the papers here, too. And the square-dance clubs (there are 23 of them) welcome visitors.

It all comes out at this: You can have a lot of fun in Phoenix, and you don’t need a lot of money to do it. Phoenix is that kind of town.

 

May 1954
This Tad Nichols photograph, titled Evening in Glen Canyon, appeared in the May 1954 issue. “Every summer many people, in many types of boats, float down this quiet stretch of the Colorado River from Hite, Utah, to Lees Ferry, Arizona,” the caption read. “The clean white sandbars make ideal campsites, and driftwood is plentiful. This boat party is making camp near the junction of the San Juan and Colorado rivers.” As he often did, Nichols shot with a Rolleicord camera, a Schneider Xenar lens and Ektachrome film.

 

April 1952/April 1958
“This is the story of a desert laboratory in Arizona, where great dreams in agricultural, industrial and human progress are made to come true,” read a story about Goodyear Farms in our April 1952 issue. Allen C. Reed’s Litchfield Park: An Air Study in Color (above) and Mechanized Cattle Feeding (below) accompanied the article, which focused on the growth of cotton in Arizona, as well as the state’s booming cattle industry. Those are just two of our state’s famous “Five C’s”: cotton, cattle, citrus, climate and copper. An unofficial “C”: chiles. They were celebrated in April 1958 with Western Ways’ Chili Harvest in Sulphur Springs Valley (bottom). Today, crops make up 53 percent of Arizona’s agricultural production, while livestock is the other 47 percent.

 

 

October 1954
Allen C. Reed documented Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, “Air Travel Center of the Southwest,” through his words and photographs in the October 1954 issue of Arizona Highways. Nicknamed “The Farm” because of its then-remote location, Sky Harbor was built in 1935 and boasted only one terminal until 1962. But it was popular among travelers because of its quirky cartoon billboards that proclaimed things like “Welcome, Amigos, to Phoenix.” The airport celebrated its 75th birthday in 2010. Today, it has three terminals, the largest of which has 86 gates.

Phoenix: Those Busy Air Waves
Excerpted from our April 1957 issue

If you’ve just moved to Phoenix or are planning to move, and if you have some money and can’t think of a way to invest it, why don’t you open up a new radio or television station?

Everybody else is doing it — or so it must seem to some of the be-dazzled old-timers in the industry. “Until 1940,” said one of them, with an audible sigh, “we had only two radio stations in Phoenix. Then all heck broke loose.”

He didn’t really say “heck,” of course, and you can understand why he didn’t when you scan the list of stations presently operating in and about Phoenix:

Television — KOOL, KPHO, KTVK, KVAR

Radio (AM) — KHEP, KIFN, KONI, KOOL, KOY, KPHO, KPOK, KRIZ, KRUX, KTAR, KTYL (KIFN is almost exclusively Spanish)

Radio (FM) — KELE, KTYL-FM

That comes out at four TV and 13 radio stations, which is considerably more than par for the course. Detroit, for instance, has only four TV stations. Tulsa has two. And Oklahoma City has no more than seven radio stations.

Why so many around Phoenix? Nobody knows, except that the answer must be related in some way to people — the quantities that already have moved to Phoenix and the quantities more that can be expected. In other words, if the town isn’t yet big enough to support all those stations, everybody anticipates that it soon will be.

The city’s pioneers of electronics communication were KTAR and KOY, both licensed in 1922. KTAR (then KFAD) was the 36th station licensed in the U.S. The two of them had things all their own way until 1940, when KPHO set up shop. And then, after that, the floodgates were down.

As befitted pioneer broadcasters in a pioneer state, Phoenix’ early-day broadcasters blazed some unique trails. KTAR took its microphones down into a copper mine and up in a dirigible. KOY interviewed four governors, all at one table, but each sitting in a chair inside his own state (that was in the Four Corners country, of course). And KTAR launched the Grand Canyon Easter broadcasts 21 years ago, fed them into NBC and has kept them going right up to the present time.

TV, too, has had its pioneers in Phoenix. KPHO, for example, was one of the first to telecast a show under water. It was in a swimming pool at a downtown hotel, and a watertight case had to be made for the camera, and the camera man had to operate it with a periscope. (Presumably that was before snorkels, or else the budget didn’t allow for them.)

Along with such feats as these, the Phoenix broadcasting industry also has produced some distinguished personalities. John McGreevey was one of them. He was a writer for KTAR, and now he’s living in North Hollywood and is the author of many network TV dramatic shows.

And then there was the case of the young fellow who wrote continuity for KOY …

He was attending Arizona State College at Tempe and holding down the radio job part-time. Pretty soon he worked up a songs-and-patter act with a Mesa boy named Wendell Noble. They were on the air three mornings a week for five minutes, sponsored by a local drugstore. But when the station manager went to the druggist and asked him to pay each of the boys 50 cents extra per broadcast, he shook his head. Said he didn’t think they were worth it.

Well, Wendell Noble is now in Hollywood and doing very well in radio and TV.

The other fellow?

His name was Steve Allen.

 

April 1957
It’s hard to believe, but this Ray Manley photo from our April 1957 issue shows Phoenix’s Arizona Biltmore. The resort, one of Arizona’s oldest, often is credited to Frank Lloyd Wright, but it actually was designed by Albert Chase McArthur (although Wright was the consulting architect on the project). The golf course and the spacious homes lining it are still there today, but much of the desert between the Biltmore and the mountain has now been developed. The mountain has changed, too: At the time of this photo, it was known as Squaw Peak, but it’s been renamed Piestewa Peak to honor Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier from Tuba City who was killed in Iraq in 2003.

 

April 1950
“We use the expression Boulder Dam,” Editor Raymond Carlson wrote in our April 1950 issue. “We anticipate the angry letters our use of the name ‘Boulder Dam’ instead of ‘Hoover Dam’ will bring forth, but we can’t help it. Congress has named the dam ‘Hoover Dam.’ The Arizona Legislature has never changed the name from ‘Boulder Dam.’ It is ‘agin the law away out hyar’ to change legal place names.” The apparent controversy didn’t stop us from featuring the dam and Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir it created. In this William Belknap Jr. photo, sightseers traverse the lake by boat.

 

July 1959
Navajo Rodeo, a story in our July 1959 issue, was a family affair: Joyce Rockwood Muench wrote it, and her husband, Josef Muench, and son, David Muench, provided the photos. “Late summer, when the rainy season has spent itself and great white sails of clouds balloon across the sea-blue sky, is a fine time to be out on the Navajo Indian Reservation,” she wrote. Among shots of roping and riding were several scene-setters, including this one. “At an event of this kind, the spectators are as interesting as the event itself,” the caption read. Rodeo continues to play an important role in Navajo culture, and Kayenta, Window Rock and other cities on the Navajo Nation host events annually.

 

March 1957
Motorists enjoyed a view of Marble Canyon, the upstream section of the Grand Canyon, in a Jack Moore photo published in our March 1957 issue. The Charles Franklin Parker and Jeanne S. Humburg story it accompanied was 89: The Highway of International Grandeur, and the authors celebrated the Arizona section of U.S. Route 89 — which, at that time, ran from the Arizona Strip to the U.S.-Mexico border. Today, U.S. 89 enters Arizona near Page and ends in Flagstaff; the road that crosses Marble Canyon is now U.S. Route 89A. And a newer Navajo Bridge, completed in 1995, now carries vehicle traffic. The original bridge, finished in 1929 and pictured here, is still used by pedestrians.

 

Tucson: A Civilized City
Excerpted from our February 1958 issue

Elliott Arnold, the author of Blood Brother and other notable works, once wrote that Tucson is a city with a “personality.” This being the case (and who, having ever seen Tucson, would deny it?), what are the ingredients of its personality?

Everyone probably would answer that question differently. But surely everyone would include one particular ingredient, i.e., Tucson’s affinity for the arts of civilization.

This cultural flowing is manifested on every hand in the Old Pueblo. You see it in the numbers of art galleries and museums and in the variety of artists and writers holding forth there. You see it also in the city’s durable symphony orchestra, its in-season concerts (no less than three separately sponsored series each winter), the little theatre groups (two of them), the Saturday Morning Musical Club, the formidably ambitious Tucson Festival ... well, the list could go on indefinitely.

Consider, for a moment, those two last-named groups. They’re typical of the way Tucson goes about the business of fostering the arts.

The Saturday Morning Musical Club dates all the way back to 1907. It was and still is predominantly a women’s organization. But its impact on the life of the community goes far beyond what you might expect of the average women’s club. For, over a period of many years, the club has brought some of the greatest personalities of the concert stage to Tucson. And, besides, it built an auditorium in which to present them. The auditorium is known as the Temple of Music and Art, a faintly mid-Victorian name which somehow seems to fit both Tucson and the Saturday Morning Musical Club.

The Tucson Festival is not nearly so venerable an organization, having been founded in 1950. But it, too, is leaving its mark on the community and, in addition, is a measure of the extent to which Tucson may be considered a truly civilized city.

What the Festival set out to do — and has quite clearly succeeded in doing — is to weave together in a single fabric the many artistic threads of Southwestern life. Each year Tucson gives itself over to its Festival. There are exhibits of paintings. There is fine dancing. There is music. There are lectures. For two weeks this goes on, and the whole community is a part of it, and when it’s over, Tucson and its people are a little richer for the fact that it happened.

Why this cultural vitality in Tucson?

Well, there’s the state university, for one thing. Its mere presence gives sanction and stimulus to the arts. The university teaches music and art and drama. Its faculty people share their talents and enthusiasms with the community. And thus the university has become a kind of cultural fulcrum for Tucson.

There’s another factor — the very setting of Tucson. It is a city of great beauty, surrounded by the greater beauty of mountains and desert. And so there have come to Tucson many practitioners of the arts — painters, writers, musicians — who find in the beauty of their physical surroundings a balm and an aid to creative production.

Thirdly, the fact of having a reputation for being an “artistic” city helps to make Tucson all the more “artistic.” People interested in the arts are drawn to Tucson every year for no other reason than that others were drawn there before them. They know they will find a cultural climate sympathetic to their kind.

There are other factors, probably. It would be pointless to list them all. The important thing is that Tucson is hospitable to the arts, and that makes it a very nice town to visit and, in many ways, even nicer to live in.

 

May 1954
Tad Nichols photographed a sunbather along the Little Colorado River for our May 1954 issue. “This blue lagoon is formed where the Little Colorado meets the Big Colorado,” the caption read. “Springs of clear water, ten miles above the mouth of the Little Colorado Canyon, flow the year around, and minerals dissolved in the water give it the beautiful color.” Several of Nichols’ photos accompanied Folk Songs of the Colorado — a story by Katie Lee, who frequently explored the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon with the photographer.

 

December 1952
There are many “lonely roads” in Arizona, and this one — the road to Ruby — was photographed by Esther Henderson for our December 1952 issue. Every word in the magazine that month belonged to Editor Raymond Carlson, including these from the story: “The less hurried find pleasure and adventure following the solitary roads through the lonesome and enchanting land.” Ruby, a Southern Arizona mining town, began its evolution into a ghost town in 1940. Today, it’s open to visitors four days a week. Arizona Highways, of course, is still finding adventure following the solitary roads through this lonesome and enchanting land.