Spell Phoenix F-r-i-e-n-d-l-y

Many bright stars loom on the Phoenix horizon, but her two most valued resources will remain the natural assets of sun and water and a never empty reservoir of human energy and talent.

-Editor Raymond Carlson Arizona Highways Magazine April, 1970 Photo credits (CLOCKWISE, FROM LEFT) Jeff Kida, John Willard, John Willard, J. Peter Mortimer, John Willard, John Willard, Jeff Kida. (CENTER PHOTO) Peter Ensenberger.

It all started with some Indians, but they left.

When they disappeared, about the time of Columbus, they left behind traces of a civilization that had flourished in the Salt River Valley, notably a network of irrigation canals.

Just after the Civil War, a diverse group of pioneer types-ex-soldiers, prospectors, and farmers-began redigging the ancient canals. One of the group, with a classical education, suggested that the little farming settlement be called Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rose again from its own ashes.

The imagery is apt; not just because the city is built on the ruins of a past civilization, but because so many of the hundreds of thousands who have migrated to this place have done so, in part, to begin life anew. "The cowards stayed home; the weak died on the way."

They still come, from Indiana and New York and Ohio and Michigan.

They didn't come all that fast, at first. In 1910 Phoenix was a frontier town of 11,000 hardy souls. The city didn't pass the 50,000 mark until the early 1930s.

Today, despite its late start, Phoenix is the ninth largest city in the United States, with a population of 875,000, and 1,700,000 in its metropolitan area.

And that's pretty surprising, really, for Phoenix is not all that logical a setting for a major city. It's a bit off the beaten track, and it's in a challenging environment-the desert. The major waterway, the Salt River, was never quite a major waterway. Historically it had two rates of flow: too little, and too much. Today, its water diverted by dams and canals, it is, as one writer put it, largely ceremonial. To be taken, as it were, with a grain of Salt.

Other cities grew up for obvious, natural, logical reasons. Phoenix sort of happened. But people still came.

Bill Gleason came from Massachusetts in 1923, because his sister had asthma and needed a dry climate. The trip, by Model T Ford, took nineteen days.

In the sixty years between the arrivals of Bill Gleason and Joe Chott, the population of the metropolitan area grew from 100,000 to 1,650,000. Some people were born here. Contrary to popular belief, there are native Arizonans. A lot of them are pretty young.

But most Arizonans, and Phoenicians, came from someplace else. That's important.

It gives them a special commonality; they came by choice.

And that has a lot to do with a rather surprising aspect of life in Arizona; all these rugged individualists, all these immigrants from the rest of the country, all these modern pioneers, get along together remarkably well.

Phoenix is a friendly place. A warm place-especially in July and August. And even that may have something to do with it.

"The pavement stopped in Davenport, Iowa," he recalls.

Gleason helped remedy that. He spent much of his career helping to build roads and dams and railroads. He's seen a lot of changes, and played a part in making many of them.

Joe Chott arrived from Missouri last year, to accept a managerial job at Motorola, the area's largest employer. He flew out for the interview in three hours.

"I thought it would be flat, just sand and no water," he said. "I was pleasantly surprised. There's a ten-mile canoe trip not far from our house."

"It's a relaxed, no-necktie kind of culture," said Joe Stocker, a writer who's been here since 1946. "Phoenix is an informal, out-of-doors town where you know your neighbors, and can be as friendly with them as you want to be."

Town, he said. The ninth largest city in the country, and he calls it a town. Which it is. A lot of old-time Phoenicians tend to take this Big City status with equal portions of pride and amusement. (An old-time Phoenician is one who's been here ten years.) The ninth largest city has misplaced its downtown, and has horses and sheep grazing a few blocks from high-rise office buildings. It isn't sure if it's a great city, an overgrown frontier town, or a giant suburb stretching for miles in every direction. And, in the main, it doesn't seem to care.

Ben Avery, outdoor writer and conservationist, came to Phoenix in the '30s from the eastern Arizona ranch where he was born in 1909. He's actually a native.

"It's a lot bigger, but it hasn't changed all that much except for size," he said. "It's always been a very friendly city, and still is. That's its best trademark. Phoenix has just spread out all over; a good thing is bound to mushroom."

Newcomers are accepted here more readily than almost anywhere. Perhaps they have to be; there are so many of them. And those who are doing the accepting were newcomers themselves just a few months or a few years ago.

In the last two years 170,000 new residents arrived to settle in the Valley of the Sun. That isn't a net gain; people come and go in our mobile society. But from 1975 to 1980 the Phoenix metropolitan area registered a net gain of 246,000 immigrants from the rest of the country. Phoenix welcomed them.

"The friendliness is an old Western tradition," said Dr. Leonard Gordon, chairman of the Department of Sociology at Arizona State University, which, like Phoenix, has exploded into one of the nation's larger, with almost 40,000 students.

"From early settlement days, the West has opened to strangers more quickly," he said. "You don't have the large establishments, the enclaves, of older communities. We noted how friendly, how responsive, people were when we came (from Detroit) in 1967."

Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology at ASU, agreed.

"There is a cordiality here that springs from the newness of the community," he said. "Back East-you think of Boston, particularly-there are long standing traditions and a sense of established territoriality. Newcomers are often treated as outsiders who are encroaching, who are violating unwritten laws.

SPELL PHOENIX

"You don't see much of that sort of hostility here, although we sometimes tend to react this way to snowbirds."

Ah, snowbirds: Arctic ternabouts, northern shovelers, scarlet tanners-otherwise known as winter visitors. It is said here that leaves don't change to mark the seasons; license plates do. Throughout the winter the streets of Scottsdale and Mesa, in particular, are crowded with cars from Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Saskatchewan.

Some people object to this traffic and sneer at our "fair weather friends," who depart before the desert really heats up. But winter tourists are a significant factor in the area's economy, and thousands of permanent valley residents came first as snowbirds.

Others came first as convention delegates, again usually in the winter.

"Something plants a seed," said Rick Counts, director of planning for the City of Phoenix. "Perhaps a guy comes here for a meeting of Nebraskan osteopaths, and it's a pleasant experience. Then one bad winter in Lincoln, and if the opportunity comes to move here, he'll move."

There is, Counts said, a definite correlation between the harshness of northern winters and the number of people moving down the next year.

"Growth can be almost a self-fulfilling prophesy," he said. "A momentum begins to build."

Joe Stocker, the free-lance writer, said the same thing.

"It's growth feeding on growth," he said. "One person comes, and sends for another. Family members and neighbors follow them out, and send for more."

Sun City, the retirement community of nearly 50,000 people northwest of Phoenix, has a number of unlikely organizations with a geographic base, such as a large

Largest Employers, High Technology, Phoenix and the Valley of the Sun

1. Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector, 5005 East McDowell Road-Started here in 1955. Semiconductors. 7500 employees.

2. Garrett Turbine Engine Co., 111 South 34th Street-1951. Propulsion engines. 5740 employees.

3. Motorola Government Electronics Group, 8201 East McDowell Road-1957. Electronics systems. 5500 employees.

4. Motorola Bipolar Integrated Circuits Group, 2200 West Broadway Road, Mesa-1967. Bipolar integrated circuits. 5000 employees.

5. Sperry Corporation Flight Systems Division, 2111 North 19th Avenue-1956. Instruments for airplanes and spacecraft. 4500 employees.

6. Honeywell Computer Large Products Division, 13340 North Black Canyon Freeway-1970. Computers and software. 3000 employees.

7. Intel Corporation, 2402 West Beardsley Road, Phoenix and 5000 West Williams Field Road, Chandler-1978. Semiconductor devices. 2800 employees.

8. ITT Courier Terminal Systems, 1515 West 14th Street, Tempe-- 1969. Computer terminals. 1900 employees.

9. Garrett Pneumatic Systems, 1300 West Warner Road, Tempe. Split in 1981 from Garrett Turbine Engine Company Controls and components for aircraft, weapons, and nuclear power plants. 1600 employees.

10. Goodyear Aerospace, Litchfield Park-1941. Radar, military shelters, intelligence data and missile transportation systems, transparent armor. 1500 employees.

11. Hughes Helicopter Inc., 6000 East McDowell Road, Mesa -1982. Military helicopters. 1400 employees.

12. Digital Equipment Corporation, 2500 West Union Hills Drive1974. Hard-copy continuation engineering. 1200 employees.

13. Honeywell Process Management Systems Division, 2222 West Peoria-1979. Systems for measuring and monitoring processes, such as refining. 1100 employees.

collection of retired Detroit policemen, and the Western Springs Club. The latter is a group of a couple hundred people from Western Springs, Illinois, a small suburb of Chicago, who followed each other to Sun City over a span of fifteen years. There's even a Texas club.

Sons follow fathers, or fathers follow sons. And all, directly or indirectly, follow the Sun. For the climate of the Phoenix area, like that of other Sun Belt cities, has been the most important single factor in its development and growth. Other major factors, such as life-style and even employment, are related to climate, at least in part.

"When we came, in '46, everybody was coming for health," said Stocker. "Asthma, allergies, arthritis. And you heard such stories of miraculous cures. Maybe the climate cured them, maybe a lessening of stress. Probably both."

Twenty years earlier a tent city of tuberculosis patients was growing at Sunnyslope, a distant suburb eight miles north of downtown Phoenix. Sunnyslope is now just a part of the city.

"As time went on," continued Stocker, "people came less and less for health reasons. They just wanted a change. They got tired of New York and Chicago and sought a different way of life."

Different sorts of people came at different times, according to Earl de Berge, a public opinion analyst and member of state and county planning and zoning boards. And another native.

"In my father's day, in the '30s, there were a lot of blue-collar entrepreneurial types-mechanics and such-from the Upper Midwest, people who moved out to do their own thing. It wasn't really a popular place yet. It had, and they had, a frontier mentality."

The real population explosion came after World War II, much of it from ex-servicemen who had been stationed in the area or received flight training at two air bases here, and thought Phoenix would be a good place to start their new postwar lives.

"The migration was divided into two waves," said de Berge. "During the '50s and '60s they were mostly from the industrialized Great Lakes states, an upwardly mobile group, bringing their fairly conservative politics and life-style with them.

"They wanted to relax in the West, in their own home on an acre of land-the single family residential American dream."

Economic reality usually stopped the dream a bit short of the full acre, but it didn't matter.

A new wave of people, said de Berge, headed to Arizona in the '70s and the movement continues. Most still originated in the Northeast and Midwest, but many

F-R-I-E-N-D-L-Y

came from the state of California.

"We've had a lot of backflow," de Berge said, "people from Ohio, say, who had gone to California, become disillusioned, and flowed back into the Rocky Mountain states." These new people, he said, brought an entirely different point of view, more liberal in all respects. And both of these waves, he believes, are creating a new Arizona. These newcomers are much more willing to get involved.

"It's the democratic nature of the town,"

said Stocker. "You don't need family or tradition to work your way into the establishment. You join an organization, show a willingness to work, and end up president." But newcomers to the area not so long ago weren't so eager to get involved.

"They didn't participate," said de Berge. "They wanted the Wild West to get in on the good life, not to become involved with issues. But that is changing. The newer people are more active. They see that the issues make a difference to them-freeways and fine arts and schools.

"Paradise is in danger, and they see that. Massive community growth is causing, or at least has the potential to cause, the same sort of problems they wanted to escape. And they realize that here they have an opportunity to see that the same mistakes don't happen again."

Rick Counts is only the third planning director Phoenix has ever had. Serious planning started around 1950, when the city had one-eighth of the population it has today.

"We haven't so much planned as we've ridden the whirlwind," he said, "trying to catch up and maybe get a little ahead. Every large city has had dramatic growth, but I don't think any other has sustained four decades of growth like this. Phoenix has been among the most rapidly growing cities for a very long time."

(LEFT) Phoenix World, 1984. Those in the trade of making predictions estimate that by 1990 Phoenix will swell close to (or slightly over) two million people, capping almost five decades of phenomenal growth. And if the prognosticators are right, the city will be the twenty-second largest metropolitan area in the United States.

And the growth goes on. Today most seek work. A lot of high-tech jobs at places like Honeywell and Intel and Motorola are serving as a magnet for young, adventurous, well educated people. Some move back and forth between Arizona and California in the mysterious (to the rest of us) realms of semiconductors and aerospace, but thousands of new residents are flocking in from everywhere else.

And still they march in. And still they are welcomed. Phoenix and its metropolitan area, pushing toward one million and two million people, respectively, in the next half-dozen years, is still a friendly place. It's strange. Folks don't ask if you're a Protestant or a Pole; they don't care. They ask what you do, what you can do. And they ask where you're fron, because maybe they came from there too.

Phoenix newspaper columnist Alan Thurber worked as a journalist in New York and Minnesota for twenty-five years before moving to Arizona.