Phoenix — Indians in the Sun

PHOENIX City Growing in the Sun

When somebody living outside of Arizona has a lettuce salad for dinner or half a grapefruit for breakfast . . .

If he takes a trip in an air-conditioned, pressurized-cabin airliner . . .

or buys a transistor radio . . .

or a squaw dress . . .

or an aluminum pan . . .

As and when any of these mundane events occur, you can lay fair odds that it contributes to the economic sustenance of the 360,000 people who live in Greater Phoenix.

As any jittery chamber of commerce in a one-industry town would testify, this is an enviable and healthful condition. It means, of course, that if any particular segment of the economy hits the skids, the town isn't necessarily in trouble, until and unless the bottom falls out of everything. And, at the moment of writing, the bottom seems securely in place.

What are the major components of the city's economy? There are six of them - crops and livestock, manufacturing, retail sales, tourists, governmental expenditures (federal, state, county and local) and construction. And hereby educated estimate-are the sums that each component contributed last year (since the figures are actually for Maricopa county, you can figure Phoenix' share at about four-fifths): Crops and livestock - $180,000,000.

Manufacturing - $250,000,000.

Retail sales - $715,000,000.

Tourists $80,000,000.

Governmental expenditures - $160,000,000.

Construction - $150,000,000.

Phoenix, as its earlier residents well remember, didn't always have such a nice variety of ways in which to make its living. It took a war, plus a postwar boom of fantastic proportions, to produce this diversification.

Prior to World War II, farming and tourists were very nearly all that the city had to depend on for outside revenue, disregarding a few federal offices, state offices and a scattering of small manufacturers. The dollar that went into the pocket of Mr. Average Phoenician could be safely said to have arrived there because somebody in Des Moines bought a head of lettuce or a bunch of broccoli. Or his cousin in Chicago hopped aboard the Golden State or El Capitan and headed Phoenix-ward for a January vacation.

The war changed all that, or at least began the process. First came Uncle Sam, shopping for weather. It was a particular kind of weather, in which student pilots could fly almost every day of the year and thus swiftly learn their business. Finding Phoenix' weather precisely to his taste, Uncle forthwith established no less than six military air bases in the immediate vicinity.

Those were welcome and pleasing additions to the city's sources of livelihood, although they weren't particularly surprising. Phoenix folk had known for a long while that they had splendid weather and thought it was about time that somebody else discovered it.

But the big surprise was yet to come. And it came with the location here of several major war industries, concerned mainly with the production of aircraft and aluminum.

Large factories in the middle of Arizona! That was unexpected. Arizona, after all, had been considered to be well out in right field, industrially speaking, what with the long freight haul to the East and access to no particular raw materials except copper.

Still, of course, the reasons for establishing defense plants in Phoenix were not so much economic as strategic. It scarcely would be considered economic, for example, to ship bauxite ore from Arkansas to the Northwest, make it into ingots there, then ship them to Phoenix for aluminum extrusions, to be shipped in turn to the East or West coast. But America's Eastern industrial complexes and its two coastlines were, for the first time in the history of warfare, potential and feasible targets. The password out of Washington was "Disperse!" And the coming of big factories to Phoenix was part of that dispersal.

And so, with the factories and the air bases, came people - thousands of them to work in the plants or on the bases, or simply to be close to relatives who did. And the population boom was under way.

The whole thing might have stopped with the end of the war. In fact, most of the old-timers thought it would. They thought, moreover, that Phoenix would go back to being pretty much what it had been before the war - a cozy, quiet little city making its living off tourists, vegetables and grapefruit.

And it looked like the old-timers were right. For, with the cessation of hostilities, the war plants closed up.

But then, almost as quickly, something else happened. Actually, two things. First, the Cold War broke out. And, secondly, the great postwar migration into the West started rolling.

With the outbreak of the Cold War came the reopening of the war plants (in one case that of the aluminum factory under different auspices). With the Cold War, too, went any lingering apprehension lest the air bases close down. The bases three of them, anyway were here to stay.

And with the postwar migration came more people - tens of thousands of them. If Phoenix' population had spurted during the war, it mushroomed now.

The great in-surge of people was both good and bad. It meant more customers for things being sold in Phoenix. But it also meant a great and growing demand for jobs.

Thus Phoenix reached the point of decision. It could industrialize or not industrialize.

The predominant thinking thitherto had been against industrializing, over and beyond the few defense plants which had come in through no particular seeking on the city's part. Why have more factories? They'd just clutter up the pretty Arizona landscape and smoke up the pretty