A Hometown Tour

Disguised as tourists, two Arizona natives explore home ground. A HOMETOWN TOUR

I am related by marriage to every restored house in North America: Casa Loma in Toronto, Unsinkable Molly Brown's Victorian house in Denver, Mount Vernon on the Potomac, General Vallejo's rancho in Sonoma, California. It is recorded in the family bible that in 1969, in a fit of pique, I refused to stop at a famous antebellum mansion in New Iberia, Louisiana, but that I have promised to go back.

When the Gray Line guide said that the new owners of the Wrigley Mansion in Phoenix were offering tours, my wife Jerry looked at me questioningly. “I didn't know they gave tours,” I said.

The white mansion, built fifty-five years ago by chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr., overlooks the lush grounds of the Arizona Biltmore Resort Hotel. Our tour bus left the Biltmore, surely one of the more civilized settings in any city, andwithin half a mile was on Lincoln Drive, penetrating the raw desert of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve.

Jerry said, “You know, Phoenix is one of the more interesting cities we've visited.” Funny. We are natives, not a rare breed, but scarce among Arizona's adult population. Jerry's ancestors arrived in Arizona in 1879. By 1920, my grandfathers had driven in from Denver and Waco.

When we travel to another city, we may take a Gray Line tour to learn what that city has to offer (and where the mansions are), then find our way back to the things we want to see. If it works in New York and Toronto and Montreal, why not in Phoenix?

Natives of a place, embroiled in busy lives, become myopic. Are all the people who come here to visit, and to live, seeing things that we are missing? I have often wondered how Phoenix would seem if I had grown up in a green, humid, deeprooted place.

Our tour driver, Wayne Aldred, seemed to have been in Arizona a lot longer than we had. When he told of the mysterious canal builders who were here first— “Hohokam is what we came up with” — you got the idea that Wayne personally had excavated some of their pit houses. And when he told how Lord Darrell Duppa so appropriately named Phoenix, you could see Wayne and Lord Duppa sitting under a cottonwood tree discussing mythology.

When we boarded the bus at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Phoenix, Wayne's eyewitness style grated on my native ego. But Wayne was good theater. He had about ninety percent of his facts correct, and 100 percent of the spirit of the place.

“We've held up construction of a freeway for almost twenty years so we don't have to tear up Hohokam ruins,” he said. Not precisely true, but respect for antiquity has more drama than twenty years of civic dithering.

Wayne left the small, forgettable cluster of high-rises in downtown Phoenix and drove west on Washington Street through an eighteen-block-long governmental mall. There are unsightly, lost-our-lease gaps between the city-county complex and the capitol. Seeing things as the other passengers saw them was going to take some practice: an airy, open mall, almost wasteful in its use of horizontal space.

In a climactic moment of the movie Street Music, tour driver Eddie Beagle departs from his prescribed route to give tourists a shock tour of San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Wayne didn't have to leave Washington Street to show us the homeless of Library Park. The lost, the addicted, and the bewildered seek the sun on the grounds of a defunct library halfway between City Hall and the capitol.

“Now here's something I'm real proud of,” Wayne said as he approached the capitol. “This was one of the anchors on the battleship USS Arizona that was sunk at Pearl Harbor.” He declared a ten-minute break at the capitol, threatening to give us a quiz when we boarded again. Jerry wondered if a flowering orchid tree would grow in our yard, six miles distant and maybe eight inches higher in elevation.

Wayne engaged several people from Iowa and Taiwan in a lively discussion of Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Spanish missionary and explorer whose non-heroic statue stands on the mall; Frank Luke, the balloon buster of World War I; and Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian marine who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima.

Jerry and I stayed out of the conversation. We had vowed that if anyone asked where we were from, we would mumble something about Argentina, but no one asked.

Wayne's lecture on cacti and palm trees seemed knowledgeable. I am not stuck on cactus, or frond of palm trees. But this was the first time anyone had explained to me the differences among Mexican fan palms