Evening

When the Editor asked me to contribute an article to this anniversary issue that would evaluate the prose contents of the first fifty years, I was not enthusiastic. "I should go back through 600 issues?" I protested. "Why not get a computer to do it?

"Certainly," he agreed. "Tll assign our best computer to you. I'll even give it time off so that it can go home with you."

"You're much too willing. What would my wife say if I brought a computer home to dinner?"

And so I thought I had joked my way out of the Editor's toils. I failed to reckon with my own curiosity. What would be found in that fifty-year back file? The problem was that I had no collection of the magazine to go through. Although I have been a faithful reader of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS for 25 years, I have never kept more than a few scattered issues.

During the cold winter of 1950 when we were living in London on short rations of food, and heat, a friend back home -- he was the Freight Agent of the Santa Fe sent us his copies as he finished with them. The Arizona scenės were so brilliant that we pinned up the brightest golden palo verde, lavender ironwood, crimson sunsets to heat the room.

Years later one of my students who had heard the story gave me the Christmas issue of 1950 that had warmed us. Although I did not know it then, a magnetic field had been charged that was eventually to make an Arizonan of me.

And so upon thinking it over I decided I'd better give thanks by writing something for the anniversary issue. There must be shortcuts, I reasoned, that would save looking at all of the 600 issues. Indexes, for example, that would list the authors and subjects covered.

Such proved true. The years from 1925 to 1962 have been cumulatively indexed by Donald M. Powell and Joseph Miller for the Arizona State Library Association and the State Depart ment of Library and Archives. Later years are separately indexed.

With these indexes as guides I ventured into the files. It proved a fatal thing to do. My curiosity was provoked, as by the entry "Arizona's Crown Jewels," an article by Witter Byn ner. It was apparently the only contribution ever made by that aesthete who came to the Southwest in the early 1920's and remained until his death fifty years later.

I was intrigued also by entries under Baboquivari, the sacred peak of the Papagos, one by Glenton G. Sykes, the other by Justice William O. Douglas. I had been reading Edward Abbey's account of climbing that mountain in his book Cactus Country, and I wanted to compare it with those earlier climbs of 1937 and 1951.

And so I went to the University of Arizona Library. The day was windy, and cold and the building's warmth was wel come. In the Special Collections department the staff trucked from the stacks all fifty bound volunies of the magazine, arranged them for me on a long table and I went to work in my own unsystematic way.

At other tables other readers were deep in their own. research projects. Happily islanded there with a far view of the Catalinas and their bajada we now call home, I recalled my boyhood joy of retreating to the attic and there in a corner by the window of poring through stacks of favorite reading matter dime novels, old magazines, and the Sunday comics (we called them the funny papers). If not in the attic, the reading room was at least on the top floor of the library, I followed where my fancy led, beginning with the Witter Bynner article. "Arizona Crown Jewels" proved to be on Indian jewelry.

"Let people be cautious against factories. For factories can take art away from Indians, And the fact is that many Americans, with their creative minds destroyed by the effect

FIFTY YEARS OF TREASURE The First Half-Century of Arizona Highways

by Lawrence Clark Powell Of factory products, can come even into this mountain country whose clear air should clean their taste, and prefer Indian jewelry made wholesale in factories. An unimaginative and tinny jewelry is being imposed upon credulous and tasteless buyers."

Was Witter Bynner writing last year or the year before? Those words were written in 1936. Now the factories are busy all the way from Tokyo to Teheran.

I turned next to the Baboquivari articles. Sykes reported mysterious rumblings heard on a climb made years ago with scientists from the Carnegie Desert Laboratory. They sounded like massive rock slides although there was no evidence of such fails. He concluded that the wind was responsible, sounding deep organ notes on the rocky surface of the mountain. The Papagos have always known that the mountain was haunted.

Justice Douglas's eye was taken by the richness of the flora as he toiled up through the life zones, and by the view from the top when on a clear day the Gulf of California may be seen.

I went on to other mountains Navajo, Bill Williams, the San Franciscos, Graham, and the ranges of Chiricahua, Hua chuka, Santa Rita, Santa Catalina, and Kofa, about all of which I found memorable articles, including many by the late Weldon Heald whose home was in the "Cheery Cows."

Rivers flow through those 600 issues, with articles by Eulalia "Sister" Bourne on her beloved San Pedro, Frank Waters on the Colorado, Edwin Corle and Ross Calvin on the Gila, and Ray Manley on the Verde where he grew to man hood. In 1961, upon the 50th anniversary of Theodore Roose velt Dam, the great barrier high on the Salt River that made the miracle of the Phoenix in the Desert, an issue was devoted to "Water and the Thirsty Land." No other work of man in Arizona has had a greater influence on the state than this one mighty piece of masonry.

Trees, including sycamore, mesquite, aspen and pine, are described by Donald Culross Peattie with poetic fidelity in excerpts from his Natural History of Western Trees. The desert is dwelled on by its two greatest artist laureates, John C, Van Dyke and Joseph Wood Krutch. There is superb descriptive writing on all parts of Arizona by Joyce Rockwood. Muench, wife of Josef and mother of David, two of the magazine's finest photog raphers. Esther Henderson's "My Southwest" is a nostalgic account of her travels as a photographer that deserves a sep arate reprinting.

Maynard Dixon, Ross Santee, Ted De Grazia, and Don Perceval appear as writers as well as artists. J. B. Priestley recalled a winter spent on a dude ranch near Wickenburg and a horseback ride with his two young daughters to then remote Rainbow Bridge, experiences also mirrored in his book Midnight on the Desert.

In those happy hours of random reading I looked through the magazine as through a colored window into Arizona's history, landscape, and lore. Bankers, merchants, missionaries, scientists, architects, poets, painters, printers and publishers have been profiled; museums, libraries, observatories, univer sities and colleges described. The counties and cities appear in articles, one of the most impressive being the one on Pima County by James Serven. Charlie Niehcus articles on fishing are like being there on lake and river.

Whereas Arizona's Indians are the subject of many features, the Hispano population receives less attention. A charming exception is Arnulfo Trejo's "Street Vendors of My Childhood Days," a nostalgic account by the University of Arizona professor of growing up in Tucson's barrio, with sketches by Ted De Grazia.

I came upon an old article that recalled the happiest assignment a writer ever had: Upon publication of a new edition of Martha Summerhayes's classic Vanished Arizona, the editor asked me to review it by going over her trail of the 1870's from Yuma to Ehrenberg, Fort Whipple, Camp Apache and down off the Rim to Fort McDowell on the Verde and Fort Lowell in Tucson. Go I did and in glorious winter weather, ranging from sunshine to snowfall and with a rainbow round my shoulder.

This half-century of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS is a treasury of Arizoniana that will prove increasingly valuable as the years recede into history and the land is changed by its inhabitants, many of whom were first drawn to the state by the magazine's alluring contents. A series of anthologies could be compiled from the files.

Although Arizona is the recurrent theme in all its brilliant diversity, the magazine sometimes went south of the border and devoted special issues to the neighboring states of Mexico. Another issue celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Mormons in Utah. The Arizona Strip, that remote land north of the Grand Canyon, was described by Jonreed Lauritzen, the novelist who makes his home there in the colored canyon country which is also the setting of Zane Grey's early novels.

To the east New Mexico's premier painter, Peter Hurd, was featured in the 1950's and again in the 1970's when Patricia Paylore, a native of New Mexico and lifelong resident of Arizona, beautifully captioned his paintings for each of the twelve months. A lone bow to California was made with a feature on Death Valley by Nancy Newhall.

If you were wiser than I and saved all of your back files you have probably already discovered what great re-reading they make. Needed is a single cumulative index to the 50years as a key to this treasury of Arizoniana.

As an official publication ARIZONA HIGHWAYS has wisely gone its neutral way, avoiding partisanship, controversy, and social criticism. There are other media for such. Yet at least once the editor kicked up his heels and published an article irrelevant to Arizona and yet pertinent to the millions who drink coffee. I recall reading it and pouring myself a second cup as a toast to the author, Don Black, then a neighbor in Malibu. His article on the prevalence of bad coffee and on how coffee should be made aroused the wrath of most restaurateurs. I like to think it did some good.

how coffee should be made aroused the wrath of most restaurateurs. I like to think it did some good.

My journey back through fifty years leads me to close with a tribute to the man whose presence is palpable through most of those years Editor Raymond Carlson whose love for Arizona was matched by his perception of its beautiful variety and his genius in producing issues that reflect the many

facets of the Grand Canyon state. ☐☐☐