Phoenix — City on Wings

Ritz; the Don Cossack Chorus; Frank Northrop, lecturer in philosophy; and Tossy Spivakovsky, violinist. The Friends of Music current season includes Ray de la Torre, classical guitarist; Gezaanda, pianist; the Los Angeles Septet; and the Beaux Arts Trio.

Arizona State in the last few years has produced outstanding athletic teams, its 1956 football team achieving national recognition in several departments. Basketball, baseball, track, golf, and rodeo also receive a large share of attention in intercollegiate competition.

Nor are these three local institutions providing the only opportunities for higher education in the Phoenix area. The University of Arizona, Tucson, offers a number of well attended extension and evening courses in Phoenix, while there are large numbers of private, specialized schools in greater Phoenix offering courses in arts, electronics, business, and secretarial subjects, trades, and other fields.

One of the more revealing evidences of Arizona's and Phoenix's deep interest in higher education was published in 1954 by the National Education Association of the United States. The NEA discovered that Arizona was fourth in the nation in point of the percentage of the population twenty-five years of age and older with four or more years of college as of 1950. The United States as a whole had an average of 6.0%, while Arizona had 7.4%.

This relatively high percentage of better educated people is reflected in the cultural life of the Phoenix community. Its public library is housed in a strikingly beautiful new building which has received attention throughout the country. Almost before the new building opened in 1952 it was apparent the avid demands of its patrons would necessitate its expansion, and plans now are afoot to expand not only the physical plant but its collections as well. The constantly growing population with its many and varied tastes will also force the city government to appropriate larger annual amounts to enlarge the present 181,000 volume collection. The library has an exceptionally competent and courteous staff which helps make the institution one of the most generally appreciated in Phoenix.

On the same beautifully landscaped grounds is the building of the Little Theater. In this excellently equipped facility Phoenix thespians present a full schedule annually,and their professional-quality productions consistently play to full houses. Plans now call for the library and theater to be connected by a ramada to each other and to a proposed Phoenix Art Museum to be erected on the same square. The ramada will serve as an outdoor auditorium, accommodating four thousand people for lectures, concerts, etc.

SOMBRERO PLAYHOUSE

Phoenicians are proud, too, of their Sombrero Theatre, one of the finest in the country. Sombrero annually presents some of America's foremost actors.

The Phoenix Civic Opera Company is an outstanding light opera organization. Their productions stay within the generally accepted field of light opera but range from The Student Prince to South Pacific, from the Red Mill to Guys and Dolls. Time after time the consensus is their performances are fully the equal of Broadway or Hollywood productions of the same score.

Another extremely popular and successful Phoenix organization is its Symphony Association. Under the direction of Dr. Leslie Hodge, the Phoenix Symphony is composed of seventy-five to eighty members and annually presents a series of about eight concerts between the end of October and late April. Composed principally of businessmen, students, teachers, and other citizens of the Salt River Valley, the orchestra this year has been buttressed by a number of musicians brought in from the East and the West Coast.

Each winter Phoenix also has a number of concerts, programs, performances and lectures by world famous groups and individuals. One of the perennially most popular is the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo which plays to packed houses. Concerts by such organizations as the New York Philharmonic always are sold out well in advance, and qualified speakers in such fields as photography, travel, world affairs, religion, philosophy, or almost anything else seldom fail to attract excellent crowds.Two museums and a State Library and Archives at the capital further enrich the cultural life of the city. The Heard Museum of Anthropology and Primitive Art is a most attractively arranged display of prehistoric and historic relics. While the largest part of the pieces have to do with either the Indian or very early Spanish history of Arizona, two collections come from far distant points, one from the Indian lands between southern California

PhoenixWhat to do-What to See in the Sun

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 horsedrawn 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 wonderous 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, Jay 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.

and Point Barrow, the other from the homes of European, Asian, African, and Chinese cultures.

The north end of the museum consists of an auditorium where free lectures and educational motion pictures are given, the latter usually on Sundays. Furnishings of the auditorium-massive, intricately carved tables, desks, chests and chairs of Spanish origin-are fascinating pieces, while on the wall hangs a rich embroidered Chinese wall hanging.

Arizona history is the primary interest of both the Arizona Museum and the Arizona State Library and Archives. The former has an excellent collection of early Arizona relics and a small library and art collection. The latter has one of the state's two finest collections of Arizona books, documents, manuscripts, and records, including copies of almost every newspaper ever published in what is now Arizona with only a few notable exceptions. It is located in the State Capitol and boasts well over 300,ooo titles, more than twenty thousand of which are contained in the Arizona collection.

The cosmopolitanism of Phoenix is reflected as dramatically in its churches as in any other aspect of the community. In the telephone directory for metropolitan Phoenix are listed some 386 churches of 41 or more different persuasions. They range from Baptist to Buddhist, Methodist to Mennonite, Mormon to Serbian, Episcopal to Unitarian. There are two Spiritualist churches, twenty Catholic, forty Mormon, three Jewish, three Greek Orthodox, two Quaker, one Religious Science and so on.

One phase of Phoenix most frequently noticed by