Stocks; Ambassadors of Beauty from Arizona

Flower. However hardy as they are travel wise, they require great care and attention, while a wide variety of hazards constantly haunt these industrious Japanese-American gardeners who raise them. Frost, wind, heat, rain, and insects are the ever-present threat that can overnight damage or even lay to waste entire fields, wiping out a heavy investment of both time and capital. Though crop growing is always under the shadow of risk, and with stock seed at seventy-five to one hundred and twenty-five dollars a pound, with a total growing cost from four hundred to six hundred doliars per acre, the stakes are rather high. However if nature is kind and insecticides are properly applied, there is much to be hoped for and gained by the grower, with select stocks selling for as much as a dollar a dozen and with a possible harvest of around four thousand dozen to the acre.

At harvest time the mature stocks are cut or pulled and transported quickly to the packing sheds.

A variety of weeds sprout up with the stock plants from the rich desert soil, requiring many man-hours of hand picking.

Early history of the stock is obscure. The first authentic records indicate they were known to the Greeks and Romans and were prized by them chiefly as a medicinal herb. In 1568 a Belgian botanist described stocks in a paper as a fragrant flower suitable for chaplets or garlands.

This plant is unusual in that it has two distinctive types, the single and double-flowered forms. Only the single flowering forms produce seed though it is the doubles that are desired by commercial growers. Because of this, there is active competition among growers of stock seed to produce high double-throwing strains. A wide variety of soft colors are produced such as white, pink, lavender, yellow, purple, peach and red illusion with white considered the most popular in eastern markets while colored blossoms are preferred in the south.

Perhaps few persons who stop to admire or purchase colorful bouquets of stocks on display in the nation's flower shops are aware of the amount of effort and teamwork that goes into making these flowers available. The prime requirement is a mild winter climate as found in the warm sunshine of the Phoenix area. In September the flake-like seeds are deposited into bed rows, with the aid of modern mechanical planters, where they will begin to germinate with the first irrigation. Within a week the tender plants break through the surface to begin their trial for survival. When the mature flowers are harvested they are rapidly conveyed to process-ing sheds conveniently located close by. Here they are sorted, graded, trimmed, bunched and placed in buckets of water for as long as fifteen hours while the blossoms cool and harden to be properly conditioned for shipment by truck, rail, and airline. These swatch-like fields of color and fragrance in full bloom are a major visitor attraction. In season motorists by the thousands jam the highways around the growing areas near Glendale and south of Phoenix while busy packers prepare fresh blossom bouquets for shipment like advance symbols of spring to carry a bit of Arizona's bountiful desert sunshine to all far-off parts of a yet winter-locked land.

Confessions of a Free-lancer... BY HUBERT A. LOWMAN

Inasmuch as my misspent youth is now behind me, perhaps it is safe to reminisce. Frankly, I admit that almost from the time I can first remember I had a secret passionfor my father's old No. 3 box Brownie!

Photography was never suggested to me as a profession, however. Dad had been born with an unusual artistic talent but had failed to establish himself as a serious painter in oils. He assumed that I had inherited his ability and decided I should become the artist he had wanted to be, but a commercial artist so that financial reward would be more likely.

Poor Dad! An artistic career would have been pure ecstasy for him but alas, I found it more like banging my head against a wall. Accordingly, I had not been a commercial artist very long before I was seeking a more compatible vocation. My interest turned increasingly toward photography as I enthusiastically rode the hobby from the box camera to the Graflex stage.

Ray Atkeson-premier Pacific Northwest scenic and winter sports photographer, also now a contributor to ARIZONA HIGHWAYS-lived on our block in Kansas City, Mo., when we were kids. Ray ostensibly left there to escape the rigors of the Midwestern winters, but then I heard that he had become a winter sports enthusiast and had helped organize the first ski club on Mt. Hood in Oregon! He had gone to work as a hypo splasher for a big Portland commercial studio, had bought a camera of his own and was successfully selling prints from shots made on week-end jaunts to newspapers and magazines all over the country. "That's for me!" I shouted, and rushed out to buy one of the new Speed Graphics.

But I had to wear out a depression and a war before I was able or brave enough to kick over the traces and take off on a free-lance career of my own. (And to say that I am actually established yet would be presumptuous!) One thing I certainly inherited in full measure from Dad was his love of the West. He saw it first as a small boy from a covered wagon, and he filled our house with great museum-size paintings of the Old West he remembered and, I am sure, longed for. Many developed before my eyes because he was always working on one-the buffalos, one of whose shaggy hides had kept him warm on winter nights in his frigid corner of the loft-the antelopes, which he had hunted not for sport but for food since usually the only meat on his family's table was wild game -timber wolves, those gray ghosts of the West-plus horses and cowboys and Indians and wagon trains-and mountains and plains and desert. Then, too, Dad was an inveterate reader of the National Geographic magazine, and through its pages my already aroused interest in the West was fanned into an ambition to be a part of it.

Happy day in the 1930s when I was able to buy my first automobile and head for Arizona! With two friends who had never been far from home either, we sought entrance the hardest way but knew exactly where we were going to Monument Valley! I'll never forget the roadside sign at the jumping off place in southeastern Utah beside the double row of wheel tracks-which apparently had never seen a grader-stretching off into a mysterious distance. It read: We had a most memorable lunch with Harry Goulding, whose role as good-will ambassador to the Navajos was not very well defined as yet in those days. Indians we met on the road had given us a wide berth, staring sullenly as we went by. One girl watching a little flock of mixed sheep and goats had fled precipitously when I stopped the car, and before we had made any move to get out. The first words spoken to us by Harry Goulding were not in cordial Western greeting but rather warning us to lock the car before entering the post. Later he told us three bucks sitting outside in the shade of the building were unknown to him and he couldn't trust any Navajo he didn't know. Since then, of course, Harry has thoroughly reconciled the Navajo "Irreconcilables."

The next stop was the incomparable Grand Canyon. Much has been written about the exclamations of various visitors, famous and otherwise, who look into these depths for the first time. We were at Yavapai Point for my first Grand Canyon sunset and it was a dilly, but I only remember remarking that I supposed I would never see another sunset like that one after we had color film, and to this day I have impressed on my mind a gorgeous parade of colors, flame and violet and amber, which has never been matched on any shot of mine.

Other vacations followed. I spent two weeks a year in the Southwest, and so weeks printing and planning for the next two weeks of shooting. After a particularly successful trip in 1941 I dared for the first time to submit some of my stuff to several publications. I was overjoyed when I won the Desert Magazine annual cover contest, the prize shot of Betatakin ruin being published on the June 1942 cover and an honorable mention appearing later. Then I was delirious indeed when I saw myself on the cover of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS the following month, with several pages inside as well. There followed another spread in ARIZONA HIGHWAYS as well as features in several other publications. I was also represented in the beautiful book, "Fair Is Our Land," published by Hastings House.

But the war was on, and my thrilling and promising avocation had to be put on the shelf. War work moved us