Sun City, Arizona, U.S.A.

Sun City spreads like a vast mosaic across former cotton fields.

Between, through and among 17,000 homes wind nine golf courses, wide streets in varied patterns, and the irregular shorelines of two large man-made, fish-stocked lakes. Five recreation centers, successively more sumptuous and imaginative, offer a wide variety of activities-swimming, shuffleboard, lawn bowling, arts and crafts, tennis, miniature golf, lectures, meetings of all kinds for which residents pay an annual fee of $24 per person.

Sun City Stadium is the spring training home of the American League's Milwaukee Brewers. Through the summer it hosts some of the nation's finest men's and women's softball activities.

The Sun Bowl, an outdoor amphitheater, just this year featured such artists as Lawrence Welk, Freddy Martin, Roberta Peters and the King Family. The auditorium at Sundial Recreation Center overflowed this season for such lecturers as Neil Armstrong and Sam Levenson.

Sun Citians are served by six major shopping centers, 14 bank branches, ten savings and loan association offices, two stock brokerage offices, 17 churches, a movie theater, a 16-lane bowling alley, two private country clubs, the 200-bed Walter O. Boswell Memorial Hospital, a 60,000 square foot medical arts complex and a variety of modern motels and restaurants.

This enumeration is already obsolete, for Sun City is constantly building. But to see Sun City only as an inspiring display of buildings is to contemplate an empty glass. The glass is filled by the people occupying and using these buildings. Its more than 30,000 residents came from almost everywhere, have done almost everything, and represent wide ranges of economic, social, political, religious and ethnic backgrounds. Doctors, electricians, professors, farmers, lawyers, ministers, foremen, postal workers, company presidents, civil servants, merchants, insurance salesmen, diplomats, motion picture veterans, utility company employees, artists, stockbrokers, writers, teachers all live and mingle with people from dozens of other professions and occupations.

Sun City is people.

Sun Citians generally have at least three common denominators. They are not poor. They are not young in years. They are youthful in spirit. Residents are drawn from middle income, upper middle and even upper income ranks. Their financial means have helped stimulate and make possible the mobility that brought them there. They are more curious, more active, more positive than many of the fellow retirees they left behind in their hometowns. They are in Sun City by choice, after a cautious selection process, drawn by its challenges as well as by its attractions.

At least one member of each household is over 50, and at the time of the initial sale of each house no prospective resident is under 18.

The youthful spirit of Sun Citians runs far deeper than the "Rah! Rah!" type. Age is a unifying, not a competitive factor, and each person is judged for himself rather than by the number of winters he has seen. Sun City represents a new start, and in this mutual undertaking each newcomer is figuratively a "young upstart." To really partake of Sun City, a resident will try new things, make new friends, think new thoughts, discover new interests and talents. The quiet follower, freed of frustrations and insecurities that have long bound him, may speak out assertively, even assume leadership. The domineering ex-boss may be compelled by his new peers to listen and learn. The lapidaries, silvercraft shops and ceramics studios breed not just dabblers but skilled craftsmen, many of them veterans of 40 years behind a desk. The introvert is invited to the world of the extroverts, or permitted an understood privacy he could find few other places. All of this occurs within an environment that gears its pace, services and conveniences to the needs of the retired.

Most Sun City residents have responded well to its opportunities. Golf courses, pools, craft facilities, recreation centers, and entertainment and cultural activities are used constantly and appreciated. Residents have organized more than 150 clubs and organizations spanning hobby, service, civic, charitable and recreation groups all the way to a 65-member symphony orchestra. Sun City is a unique real estate development.

The Del E. Webb Development Company, a subsidiary of Del E. Webb Corporation, set out to fuse the proper elements into a living, self-animating community. Sun City is a product of private enterprise, developed almost totally without Federal or other public involvement. It may well be the most commercially successful community development project ever built.

The development company did create the idea of Sun City, plan it, build it, promote it, sell it, direct it, stimulate it and - perhaps most important did not forget it. Unlike so many real estate developments, Sun City opened in 1960 with a golf course, recreation center, shopping center and motel, a two million dollar investment to serve non-existent residents. The community grew to 15,000 residents in its first ten years and has doubled its population in the past four. Sun City has a multitude of salesmen, most of them unofficial and unpaid, for almost half of all new home buyers report they were first attracted to the community through the recommendation of a Sun Citian. They do just as effective a job selling themselves. The turnover rate on Sun City homes in 1973 was a low 7.7 percent, about half the national rate for FHA housing. Of those residents selling their Sun City homes last year, more than 40 percent bought new homes in Sun City. More than half of Sun City's homebuyers pay in full with cash.

Sun City is a planned community. This may be an important point in these times when public officials, ecologists, academicians, real estate promoters and reformers-at-large attribute Merlin-like qualities to city, land and social planners. True enough, Sun City also has had all of the usual brightly-colored land use maps, feasibility studies and planning trade gobbledygook. But, to say that today's Sun City was master-planned at its beginning in 1959 is about as accurate as saying Columbus had a tight, pre-planned itinerary on his first voyage to the New World. The developer's initial planning effort apparently was sound, for Sun City almost instantly sparked to life and has evolved into a commercial, aesthetic and sociological success. However, the real planning job has been the dynamic role of monitoring Sun City's growth, continually assessing its changing needs, and responding creatively.

Sun City Symphony Orchestra, Jennings Butterfield, Conductor. — PAT HARPER

Sun City is a sociological phenomenon. It is innovative and significant in a variety of ways. It is one of the largest and most successful of new communities. It is also perhaps the most nearly self-contained. It is evidence that retirees can form successfully an urbanized society of their own - tailored to their needs, serving their interests, providing activities and challenges within a pleasant environment. It is the most politically potent city of 30,000 population anywhere. It is also one of the country's largest and most complex unincorporated communities.

As a retirement community it sidesteps some of the worst pitfalls that stymied other new communities: 1. the need for job opportunities, 2. adequate transportation facilities for commuting to jobs, and 3. educational facilities equivalent to those available in longer-developed areas.

Lest anyone be deluded into thinking Sun City is ShangriLa, it is not. It is the home of 30,000 keen, active minds with time and motivation to question, analyze, criticize. Few issues in the community are settled before they are exhausted.

The issue of incorporation as a city is always being debated. In the absence of municipal government, Sun City has developed a fascinating complex of quasi-governmental and pressure groups that have collectively given the community much of the effect of local government without the citizens' ceding any real authority. Recreation Centers of Sun City, Inc., owns and operates (through a popularly elected, nine-member board that serves without compensation and a salaried direc-