HAPPINESS IS VOLUME ONE, NUMBER ONE

From as far away as Montana, Pennsylvania, and Canada they comethe collectors of Arizona Highways... HAPPINESS IS VOLUME ONE, NUMBER ONE

by Joseph Stocker (TOP) Mildred and Walter Bright of Tempe with their cowhidebound volume of 1940 and 1941 issues of Arizona Highways magazines. DON STEVENSON (RIGHT) Issues in which appeared portfolios of famous artists of the Southwest have stood the tests of time and continuing collector interest. From left, February, 1948, featured the works of W. R. Leigh; February, 1952, Nicolai Fechin; August, 1953, Charles Russell.

BY FRANK WATERS AUTHOR OF "THE COLORADO RIVER" AND "MAN WHO KILLED THE DEER"

Nicolai Fechin is one of the greatest portrait artists of our time. For a half-century he has won renown throughout both Europe and America for his unexcelled draughtsmanship and brilliancy of color. He is also considered one of the finest painters of the American Southwest.

These examples speak for themselves. They express more than an amazing virtuosity of technique, a penetrative vision of the characters and scenes they portray. They betray where his heart feels home.

"To tell the truth, my art belongs to this country more than to any other," Fechin himself writes simply. "To carry the past to it, like the paintings themselves."

Fechin is Russian by birth. His father's home village was Arzatus, a prosperous trading center on the Volga. In its many fine churches skilled craftsmen were neededwoodcarvers, ikon-makers, gilders and bodders of shrines. In all of these crafts Ivan Alexandrovitch Fechin was pro-ficient. So opened his Here, in dar). Nu later the lives this and lis was by "The from life and Consider, for the moment, that odd and wonderful species Collectus americanus. Profoundly addicted, undeniably obsessed, possibly just the slightest bit pixilated, this distinctive specimen collects things every imagin-able kind of thing: political campaign buttons, beer cans, cigar bands, salt and pepper shakers, world's fair spoons, airline swizzle sticks, antique medicine bottles, and...

Arizona Highways magazines! Yes, Highways is right up there with stamps, old railroad timetables, and baseball cards as objects of collector affection. Indeed, dealers in back issues say that the sixty-one-year-old publication is the only one of the many state periodicals that collectors a discriminating lot-seem to bother to acquire.

If there is any doubt of the degree of collector interest accorded Arizona Highways, it was dispelled at a party given by the magazine in April, 1985, to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary. Dozens of collectors turned out for that segment called the "swap shop," sponsored by the Friends of Arizona Highways. They came to trade and buy and sell old issues of the magazine.

"We were so busy we didn't leave our table until 3:00, there was that much traffic," said Mildred Bright of Tempe (she and Walter, a retired Scottsdale elementary school principal, collect not only Highways but also things like barbed wire and old railroad nails).

"People came with their 'want' lists," recalls Wilma Elmer of Scottsdale. "They'd go down their lists: 'I need January, 1947...I need July, 1946.' Everybody was working on a collection." Mrs. Elmer, whose photographer-husband, Carlos, is one of the magazine's senior contributors of both pictures and text, spent nearly ten years putting together an early-day collec tion of Arizona Highways. Then she and Carlos donated it to Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff. "It's in a special room, a kind of bank vault," he says. "Very impressive, like Jack Benny's vault, only without Carmichael the polar bear to guard it."

People came from everywhere (it seemed) to attend that swap shop last year. There was Betty Swatsenbarg, for instance. She and her husband, Bob, live in Citrus Heights, California, near Sacramento. "My trip to dreamland is walking through those pages," she exults. "I'm a desert fan. I've always loved cactus and pretty desert flowers, and I'm not afraid of snakes."

The Swatsenbargs packed eight cartons -about 850 copies of the magazine - into their motor home and headed for the Highways party. "We used the party as an excuse for going to Arizona," says Betty. "We also wanted to see the spring flowers and go to Roosevelt Lake and the BoyceThompson Arboretum [near Superior]." Betty wasn't at the swap shop to make money. It's a kind of sideline for her, she says-picking up old Arizona Highways at garage sales and flea markets and from dealers and helping collectors fill in the niches in their sets. And, of course, while she's at it, rounding out her own collection as completely as she can.

into their motor home and headed for the Highways party. "We used the party as an excuse for going to Arizona," says Betty. "We also wanted to see the spring flowers and go to Roosevelt Lake and the BoyceThompson Arboretum [near Superior]." Betty wasn't at the swap shop to make money. It's a kind of sideline for her, she says-picking up old Arizona Highways at garage sales and flea markets and from dealers and helping collectors fill in the niches in their sets. And, of course, while she's at it, rounding out her own collection as completely as she can.

Once, says Betty, her daughter Becky went to a flea market in Roseville, California, where a man was selling old Highways for a dollar an issue. Becky said she couldn't pay that much, that the magazines were for her mother. He said (as recounted by Betty): "Any girl as lucky as you are, to have a mother who appreciates beautiful things like Arizona Highways, should have them." He knocked the price down to fifty cents.

There are many other collectors who, like Betty Swatsenbarg, don't even live in Arizona. One is William Snyder of Monessen, Pennsylvania, a steel town twentyfive miles south of Pittsburgh. Snyder is "kind of a semi-retired carpenter," who, years ago, took one of his five children to a doctor in Pittsburgh and, while his wife stayed with the child, went walking around the city. He stopped in a bookstore where he found two old copies of Arizona Highways with covers torn off. Price: twenty cents a copy. “I started leafing through them, and I just fell in love with those damned things,” says Snyder. “I bought them, and I have them to this day. In June, 1966, I subscribed to the magazine, and I’ve been a subscriber ever since.”

around the city. He stopped in a bookstore where he found two old copies of Arizona Highways with covers torn off. Price: twenty cents a copy. “I started leafing through them, and I just fell in love with those damned things,” says Snyder. “I bought them, and I have them to this day. In June, 1966, I subscribed to the magazine, and I’ve been a subscriber ever since.” When he vacations in Arizona, he visits flea markets and used bookstores, and he runs advertisements in newspapers and collector magazines around the country, asking for back issues. The ads bring strange results. A fellow in Montana sent him a wastebasket with color pictures from Highways stitched on, outside and in. (That’s not the only esoteric use to which those pretty pictures in the magazine have been put. Recently a woman wrote to the editor that she’d made a collage of scenic photos from Arizona Highways and decorated her toilet seat with it. Did the editor mind? she asked, somewhat after the fact. No, he responded, it’s all right with us.) Bill Snyder has made his own interesting use of old Highways. He has lined the walls of his office at home with framed reproductions, taken from the magazine. They're of paintings by the late Tucson artist Ted De Grazia, and there are about forty of them. “I was a big, big, big De Grazia fan,” Snyder acknowledges.

Arizona HIGHWAYS

Shirley Mark of Tucson, while she and her husband, Howard, were still living in Canton, Ohio, telephoned a call-in radio program one day and said she was collecting old Arizona Highways...and picked up 100 or so back issues. “People had just kept them around because they had nice pictures. Too nice to throw away,” says Mrs. Mark.

The Highways hobby bug has bitten Martha Macon, a retired Phoenix art teacher, although she's not so much a collector as an agent for collectors. She just enjoys finding hard-to-get issues and helping collectors expand their acquisitions, and she tries to make a “modest profit” while she's about it.

Mrs. Macon became interested in all this while she was teaching. She had a stack of Highways magazines in a cupboard at school and somebody stole them. “I decided if they were that valuable, they were worth collecting,” she told me.

Her clients are varied. She sells to descendants of pioneer families interested in their roots and Arizona's, to newcomers to the state, to people interested in particular aspects of Arizoniana, such as Indians, western artists, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest. She also finds back issues for people who want beautiful photographs as subjects for their painting. And once, some years ago, a young woman about to move to Saudi Arabia, where her husband had taken a job, asked Martha Macon to put together a collection of twenty-five years of Arizona Highways to keep her from getting homesick. Mrs. Macon obliged. She says that, overall, collectors of Arizona Highways are “supernice” people.

According to my own research, the person with the largest number of old Arizona Highways is Carol Caldwell. Sixtyfive thousand copies is her estimate. They're stacked in boxes and occupy a third of a 2000-square-foot barn on her place at New River, Arizona.

Carol and her husband, David, do business as the Daisy Mountain Trading Co. (It's not their sole occupation. He sells real estate, and she's an accountant with a Feed and seed company.) Daisy Mountain does Arizona Highways business with people all over the world. The Caldwells have customers in France, Germany, and Poland. "Poland surprised me," says Carol. "I didn't think people in countries like that even knew about Arizona or Arizona Highways." Some of the German customers are military pilots who trained at Luke Air Force Base near Glendale. "I've had several of them write and tell me how much they love Arizona," she says, "and they want this particular issue or that one with pictures of places they especially liked."

I would guess, again based on my own research, that the dealers with the next largest quantities of old Highways are John Devere and Ed Turner. Devere operates Al's Family Bookstore, just east of downtown Phoenix, and has a stock of some 14,000 copies. (They came with the store.) Devere does a mail order business with collectors all over the United States. He told me he is within one issue of completing a full set, back to Volume 1, Number 1, for a collector in Denver.

Ed Turner, by his own estimate, has 12,000 to 15,000 copies in the back of his ice cream store in Phoenix's Metrocenter. He, too, deals with collectors all over the country.

And what kinds of prices do professional dealers like Devere and Turner get for their old Arizona Highways? You can hear almost as many answers to that question as there are dealers.

A kind of unofficial/official price list was put together by the magazine in collaboration with one or two large-scale dealers. Prices on the list range from forty to 100 dollars (depending on condition) for an authentic Volume 1, Number 1, and other very early issues, to a buck or so for recent ones.

Turner claims he received 100 dollars each for some 1928s and 1929s. Bill Hirsch, a Scottsdale dealer, reports hearing of people asking up to 200 dollars for 1920s issues. Doug Parshall, who operates Royal Bookstore in northeast Phoenix, thinks Volume 1, Number 1, in mint condition, might sell for as much as 1000 dollars. "It's scarcity that dictates value," says Aaron Cohen, proprietor of Guidon Books in Scottsdale. Certain old issues are more cherished by collectors than others. The Fechin issue-February, 1952-featured the work of the Russian-born artist, Nicolai Fechin, who came to the Southwest in the 1920s and painted Indians and cowboys and the region's grand landscapes. Ed Turner says he sold a Fechin for fifty dollars, although Martha Macon doubts that one could count on more than twentyfive dollars now.The Charles Russell issue is another in demand. Russell, a turn-of-the-century artist whose bronze sculptures of Indians and cowboys are well-nigh priceless, was profiled in the August, 1953, magazine.Some collectors fancy what has come to be known as the Goldwater issue. That would be January, 1941, in which Barry Goldwater-now Senator Goldwaterwrote and illustrated with his own photographs an account of his journey down the Green and Colorado rivers. "When a man has an itch for the greater part of his life, there comes a time when scratching is inevitable," wrote Goldwater. He scratched his itch by traveling in a party with eight others from Green River, Utah, to Lake Mead, long before the running of the Colorado became commonplace.Old issues featuring the famous Arizona-based architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, are popular. (Al Regalado, general manager of Everybody's Magazines in LaVerne, California, near Los Angeles, claims the most he ever received for an old issue of Highways-forty-eight dollars-was for a Frank Lloyd Wright issue.) De Grazia issues and Larry Toschik issues are popular also. Toschik is the contemporary wildlife artist whose ducks and deer and Gambel's quail have been featured numerous times in the magazine. And, he admits freely and joyously, the resulting publicity has literally made his career. Soon after the very first Toschik issue was published, he received a call from the president of American Airlines in New York wanting to buy his paintings. The deer-and-quail business has been very good ever since.

And then there's the matter of the 1974 Joe Stacey "collector issues," so-called. Stacey was editor of Arizona Highways from 1971 to 1976. In late 1973 came the gasoline crunch, and Stacey decided "there was no sense in making highway travel too attractive for people," since they weren't going to be able to travel on highways anyway. So he devoted the January, 1974, issue to turquoise jewelry and subsequent issues to the products of other American Indian crafts-pottery,beadwork, weaving. He thought readers might get angry because the magazine wasn't publishing its traditional photographs of cactus and desert flowers and the Grand Canyon. Instead, the Indian crafts issues were a huge success. The turquoise issue went back on press three times. The Royal Bookstore's Doug Parshall says a mere mention in that issue of a book about turquoise made so much money for the publisher he was able to build a warehouse with the proceeds.

Stacey's 1974 collector issues still fetch nice prices. My wife saw a set of them on sale for 100 dollars in a gift shop not long ago.

So much for prices. Next question: How many complete collections of Arizona Highways are in existence? Collectors generally will tell you there are four. I've found only two-the magazine's own permanent file and another in the Arizona Department of Library and Archives. The Elmer collection at NAU lacks one issue of being complete. The Elmers had to borrow February, 1926, from the state library and photocopy it-they just couldn't find one anywhere. And although you'll hear that the Barry Goldwater collection (which the senator donated to the Ari-zona Historical Foundation at Arizona State University) is complete, Dean Smith, executive vice president of the founda-tion, says that, regrettably, it is missing the first two issues - April and May, 1925.

Not even the Library of Congress in Washington has a complete collection. When I telephoned, a staff member there told me the library has no issues before 1928, and is missing others, as well.

Dealers say there are "closet collectors" with complete collections they don't want known about. It doesn't really matter. What counts is that, along with barbed wire and cigar bands, swizzle sticks and old railroad timetables, people are excited about collecting old Arizona Highways. And Highways is just as excited that they do.

Arizona Highways' FIRST FULL-COLOR ISSUE

In December, 1946, Arizona Highways introduced the nation's first general circulation magazine that was full-color from cover to cover. The issue featured glimpses of Arizona recreation-from ski-ing on San Francisco Peaks to motor-ing over the Apache Trail-as well as an invigorating look at winter in the "sun country."

The cover showcased a colorful photograph on the Navajo Indian Reservation by Barry Goldwater, now a U.S. Senator. Included inside was an Arizona calendar that Editor Raymond Carlson said would "give you some idea of the things taking place out here in the deep West."

Now, forty years later, Arizona Highways has reproduced this historical first as a nostalgic and beautiful memento. To order Arizona Highways: The First Full-Color Issue, write Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85009. Order by telephone by calling (602) 258-1000, or dial toll-free within Arizona 1-800-543-5432. The price is $6.95, including postage.