The Sun is Our Fortune

City In The Sunshine

Phoenix, Arizona, this city in the sunshine to which all of our pages this August issue are devoted, is the capital city of Arizona, the largest city in the state and the county seat of Maricopa county. It is a tourist city, and the center of the vast Salt River Valley agricultural empire. At an elevation of 1,090 feet the city is located in the south central part of the state. It is served by U. S. Highways 60, 70, 80 and 89; by the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroads; by the Pacific Greyhound Lines, Santa Fe Trailways and the All-American Bus Lines; by American Airlines and Transcontinental Western Airlines. By highway, railway and skyway our city in the sunshine is on the highroads of the world. For a glimpse of this city we refer you to our cover page, a study of the Phoenix skyline by McCulloch Brothers. The photograph was made in Encanto Park, whose vendure and beauty are in the foreground. In the middle distance downtown Phoenix, and far away are the South Mountains, patiently performing their destiny of watching everlastingly over the valley. The McCulloch Brothers have one of the pioneer photographic studios of the state and with their cameras they have made many and varied studies of this land and the city in which they live, and they have photographed the growth of Phoenix since close to the beginning of this century.

Phoenix is also a war city, one of the most important in the West. Around and about are four great flying fields Luke, Williams, Thunderbird I and II. And not far away is Falcon, near Mesa, where the English boys have been training. American, Chinese, English, Latin American-our cadets have come from all over the country and all over the world.

Industrially, Phoenix is contributing to the war effort. Aluminum Corporation, AirResearch, and Goodyear Aircraft are near the city, but of all these things we tell you nothing for the story of Phoenix the war city would be a story in itself and fill many more pages than we give you herein.

Phoenix was a great city before the war and it will be a great city after the war. We have tried to portray our city in the sunshine as a modern, progressive, prosperous city, young in years, not large in population but rich in good living and with a world of promise ahead.

In pictures and words we have tried to show you Phoenix as a clean, livable city, a city of homes, schools and churches. It is the kind of city where a family could live and lack nothing. In its very youth and vigor, Phoenix is the kind of city which needs and welcomes the newcomer who is willing to work and contribute to the development of the community. Happily it is still a western city, a western frontier town that grew up without losing the friendliness, the tolerance and the democracy of the old West. The social structure is not enmeshed with snobbishness nor is great wealth the only criterion of worth and achievement. Phoenix is a part of Arizona and Arizona is still the frontier and still the very heart of America's West.

In these pages, our portrait of Phoenix, we tell you something of the ancient history of the area as is written in the clay and relics found at Pueblo Grande, where life flourished centuries before European civilization came to these new, brave shores. There is a story, too, of the early history of the town when men came in to cut the brush from the desert to make way for the plow and the tools of the builder. We have a brief sketch of Darrell Duppa, a charming person learned in the classics, whose name will live forever in Arizona's history if for no other reason than he named the town. We tell you of our climate and our indebtedness to the sun, a celestial hanger-on who has been so liberal with us in his blessings. Here in this town many, many people have regained health and the years will bring many more for this is a healthful climate and we have enough to share with all people.

We tell you of our winter which brings so many people just to loaf and relax in the sun. We speak briefly of home and schools and churches and discuss at some length the amazing development known as "air-conditioning" which makes summer comfortable in a town noted for its summer heat.

Sometime when you come to our West, we urge you to pay us a visit. You'll like our city in the sunshine. It is the kind of a place where people come to visit for a week and find it hard to leave again. It is the kind of a place you feel at home in before you have had hardly time to unpack your grips. R.C.

Arizona Highways

the friendly journal of life and travel in the old west Published monthly by the Arizona Highway Department in the interest of good roads and devoted to the story of our people and our land. All communications should be addressed to ARIZONA HIGHWAYS, Arizona Highway Department, Phoenix, Arizona. Subscription rates: One Dollar per year, Ten Cents per copy. Printed in the U. S. A. "Entered as second-class matter Nov. 5, 1941, at the post office at Phoenix, Arizona, under the Act of March 3, 1879."

PAGE FOUR SPEAKING OF THE WEATHER, WE FIND THE BLESSED SUN IS ALWAYS WITH US AND OUR CLIMATE IS MADE TO PERFECTION BY A GENTLE AND GENEROUS PROVIDENCE.

FROM the day Oglug, the canny caveman, selected a rocky burrow with a southern exposure, man has recognized his indebtedness to the sun as the source of all our energy, food, and happiness.

Advanced medical thinking coupled with the results of scientific experiment now gives sunshine credit for much of our good health and physical well being. America has moved out of doors. Houses are designed to admit more sunshine. Schedules for work and play are predicated on the knowledge that sunshine is vital. Factory design, suburban and metropolitan developments are all planned to take advantage of the sun. And Phoenix, Arizona has sunshine to spare, sunshine to give away.

In the average year the sun shines warmly down on Phoenix eighty-four percent of all daylight hours, and almost everyone from the fourth grade geography student to the college professor knows about our sunshine.

The state of the weather probably receives more attention from human beings than does any other single factor in life. It figures in the planning of a battle, a wedding, a christening, a funeral or a world series. Farmers read success or failure in the sky. Romance, which some very learned people maintain is the mainspring of life, squirms under the now beneficent, now baleful thumb of weather.

Perpetual sunshine isn't in itself sufficient. In northern latitudes the sun shines on fields of snow and ice. And in certain areas the sun burns its way through stinging, sand laden winds, or is interrupted by steaming showers of rain.

A prescription for ideal climate would probably read: Bright, sunshiny days with a breeze but no high winds; rain or moisture translated into terms of comfortable humidity, cool nights, and mild seasonal change.

Measured against these conditions winter weather in Phoenix is perfect. In December the average maximum temperature is sixtyfive degrees and the minimum thirty-nine degrees. The high and low for January is within one degree of these figures. February is even warmer with an average maximum of nearly

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

BY STEPHEN C. SHADEGG

sixty-nine degrees and a minimum of forty-two degrees. In March the sun begins to smile in earnest to give us an average maximum temperature of seventy-four and six-tenths degrees and a minimum of forty-seven degrees. In April the Sun Valley justifies its name with an average high of ninety-one degrees and an average low of sixty degrees. Temperature doesn't always mean sunshine, but in this bright valley it does. In January, out of three hundred and eighteen daylight hours, Phoenix will enjoy two hundred and thirty-nine hours of sunshine. (All the figures here are the average established in fortyseven years of observation by the Department of Commerce Weather Bureau.) In February the sun shines two hundred and forty hours, in March three hundred and four hours, in April three hundred and forty hours, and in May three hundred and ninety-seven. Unless you have spent a winter in Arizona Unless you have spent a winter in Arizona and basked beneath our friendly sun, these figures are going to be hard to believe. Despite your suspicions, the Weather Bureau is not in the employ of the Chamber of Commerce. You may think of January as a cold, dismal, gloomy month, a month when the sun peeks out from behind a veil of clouds just long enough to get one glimpse of your snow and ice and then dodges back into concealment. For that is what the sun does in most sections of the United States. Write this down in your almanac and read it over next January. Your sunshine may be out to lunch, but Phoenix will enjoy two hundred and thirty-nine hours of the sun's friendly presence. Having defined our slice of sunshine, let's consider winds. Next to cold, a biting wind is probably most uncomfortable, but there is no wind in the Valley of the Sun. Practically none, anyway. The average velocity in winter is only five and three-tenths miles per hour, a baby of a wind, gentle and mild. Well, what about rain? It does rain in Phoenix, but if you ask the inhabitants they will have difficulty remembering the last storm. There are only thirty-eight days a year when precipitation is great enough to measure and the average rainfall amounts to eleven hundredths less than eight inches. There are only forty-five days a year when the sky is cloudy, and only eighty-eight additional days when there are any clouds in the sky at all.

Let's take a look at our winter skies. In December we can expect four rainy days and two days more when it is cloudy but doesn't rain. In January we'll have six cloudy days and on four of these it will rain. The same average figure holds true for February and March, and in not a single winter month will there be as much as one inch of rainfall. None of us goes around with a thermometer in one hand, a rain gauge in our hip pocket, and an anemometer to measure the wind fastened on our cap. So let's translate this winter weather into human terms.

A warm, sunshiny winter means that we can be out of doors much of the time. It means golf in shirt sleeves in January. It means the air is warm enough to make swimming pleasant during the middle of the day in any winter month. It means freedom from heavy overcoats, mittens, mufflers, ear muffs, and galoshes. It means that at recess time the school children can be out of doors absorbing healthful sunshine and mild fresh air. It means sun baths for the baby the year around.

There are other distinct living advantages. Winter heating costs are low, and money that goes up the furnace flue in colder climates can be spent for other things. It means that business traffic is never tied up by storms. Deliveries can be scheduled without consulting the forecast. It simplifies living. It takes the worry out of the family wash day, because here clothes dry quickly. Not one Phoenix home out of a thousand will have an indoor drying room. The friendly generosity of the sunshine is reflected in a thousand different ways, in the style of our architecture, in our convertible cars with their tops folded sleekly back, in the design of our cities, and in the disposition of our people.

Weather is no accident of nature. Weather and climatic conditions can be explained and predicted. What then are the factors which contribute to make Phoenix warm and dry in winter? To find the answer we must do two things.

First, look at a large relief map of the United States; and second, examine a few basic principles of the science of meteorology. Phoenix, in Arizona's great Salt River Valley, is virtually surrounded by mountains. It is protected on the west by the Sierra Nevadas and the Coast range, on the east by the Sierra Madres of Old Mexico and the Sangre de Cristos of New Mexico.

The meteorologists tell us that most of the weather in the United States is formed out over the north Pacific ocean. Maritime polar Pacific air masses moving in a general direction from northwest to southeast across the United States produce most of our storms. With this general movement in mind, let's watch the progress of a cold fronting forward under a banner of cumulus clouds and towing in its wake a heavy Nimbo-Stratus.This NS is the cloud of foul, stormy weather. Tucked in its amorphous folds beneath that black underside is sufficient moisture to mean rain for a week.

On its airborne trip to Arizona the Nimbo-Stratus finds it necessary to climb over the peaks of our western mountains. In that climbing process the air mass cools very rapidly (meteorologists set the rate at five and five-tenths degrees per thousand feet) and as our warm, water laden NS cools, it loses its capacity to retain moisture. Condensation occurs and rain spills out on the western slopes.

Actually, this mountain barrier acts as a huge wringer to squeeze the Pacific moisture out of the Arizona bound clouds long before they get anywhere near Arizona.

The same process occurs on the east. If our NS had started from the Gulf the peaks in Old and New Mexico would have drawn off his rain.

In addition to being protected by these two great mountain barriers, Phoenix lies far south of most of the storms crossing the United States. Proof of this can be found in the very slight barometric pressure changes experienced here. In fact, in this sub-tropical valley the regular diurnal change of the tropics is apparent on the barograph record sheets made here. All of the arid regions in the world are similarly protected, but Arizona enjoys the benefit without paying the penalty. Most of the rain clouds which do reach this region are caught on high mountain peaks in the north-eastern corner of the state. Their moisture is conducted by river and stream to this cen-tral valley where more than four hundred thousand acres are irrigated by stored water.

By utilizing the available water sheds this central section of Arizona has been developed into one of the most favored agricultural areas in the world. Since the farmers are not forced to depend upon rainfall and can control the distribution of their water, crops can be har-vested at their peak. There are no sudden storms coming at just the wrong time to keep men out of the fields. And there is little danger of rain to damage growing crops.

Since the day the first white man followed the wheel tracks of his covered wagon west-ward, men have loosely applied the term "des-ert" to that great area between the high Sierras on the west and the Rockies on the east. Unfortunately, that impression still ex-ists. Actually there is not a square foot of desert in Arizona, for to be properly applied "desert" means an uninhabited and uninhab-itable arid region where the ground will sup-port no vegetation.

The lower Colorado desert in California satisfies these conditions. It is truly a desert, a vast bed of shifting white sands. But the soil in Arizona is rich, and even where there is no irrigation, it supports an abundance of native vegetation. In the spring millions of wild flowers smile in answer to the first rain.

True, the growing season is reversed. Plants and trees lie dormant in the summer and grow in the relatively cool winter months. In snowbound climates, summer is the growing season. But surely no one on seeing the bare branches of the maple trees in New England when all plant life is dormant would cry "desert".

The irrigated section of central Arizona is larger than some eastern states, and here the