History

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Three score ten, life expectancy in years as measured in Biblical terms, has become reality for many humans of the 20th centu-ry. But not for magazines. Once-household names of deceased journals are freshly painful in the minds of people not yet old. Colliers. Look. Argosy Magazine. True. American Weekly. All gone. And others, like Life, Esquire, and The Saturday Evening Post, have transmogrified away from their traditions.

More so than the general run of print dailies, magazines are born with or acquire a humanlike persona. The best can fill a unique niche extending from the mind through the heart to the soul. As a kid I carried Liberty door-to-door in a cloth sack, and subscribers would greet me as if I were fetching home a favorite relative. When Liberty perished people wept. At about this time, I became aware of an-other magazine, named Arizona Highways, which was coming into its own as the world's premier regional travel and Western art publication. Against all odds, Highways arguably was the first national consumer magazine to print every one of its pages in full color (December, 1946).

That it reached this level of success in its first two decades defies all publishing logic. People have tried to explain how it came to pass, and people have failed. Says Hugh Harelson, publisher these past dozen years: "We've had the good fortune to attract and keep great talent. But a lot of failed contemporary magazines could have said the same. Some of the early Arizona Highways' editors seemed to abound in serendipity. They had the vision and courage to experiment. Whatever the reasons, we are heirs to extraordinary reader loyalty." The improbable birth of Volume 1,Number 1 in April, 1925, was conceived in a union of federal and state highway propo-nents. The country had some good roads Back East, but farther west the tracks were atrocious. The Baltimore News grumped, "Tourists who have driven from California to New York claim there are 500 miles of bad road. One mile is in lowa and the rest are in Missouri."

Not true. Of 115,000 rural miles in South Dakota, only 1,500 were surfaced. Wyoming could count only 710 surfaced state miles. Maine boasted of four times as many sur-faced roads as Montana. From Chicago to Los Angeles lay 2,200 miles of disjointed rural ruts. Not yet designated U.S. Route 66 across northern Arizona was all dirt, and the north-south crossing of the Colorado River was accomplished by ferryboat.America had worried itself through a spirited debate: should major modern roads be funded by traveler tolls or user taxes? The latter formula largely prevailed as a victory for the West. Distant horizons and thin populations weren't suited for in-terruptive, coin-hungry toll stations.

To help sell the user taxes (as applied to fuel), Washington prompted the variousstates to propagandize its citizens with pro-highway magazines. Twenty-three states obligingly launched what were in effect highway department house organs.

In 1925 the Arizona legislature appropri-ated $20,000. One thousand copies of the first issue of Arizona Highways were printed and offered for sale at 10 cents apiece. There were 26 black and white pages and plenty of paid advertising, such as a full-page touting the virtues of the Cedar Rapids One Piece Crushing and Screening Outfit. Between the cement and asphalt ads appeared a Phoenix-Yuma travelog, road reports, and the editor's unapologetic explanation: "The inauguration of Arizona Highways is the first big step for-ward to tell the people of Arizona and other states of the work being done by the Arizona Highway Department."

That attitude more or less prevailed until 1938, when Raymond Carlson became the sixth editor-in-chief, and George Avey was brought on board as the magazine's first art editor. These two teamed up until their retirement in the early 1970s. Apace with ad-vances in printing and photographic technology, they pioneered the generous use of artistic pictures, which evolved along with the highest standards of color reproduction.

Inferring the broadest definition of the magazine's revised mandate "to encourage travel to and through Arizona," Carlson issue after issue risked the unthinkable. He devoted an entire magazine to a celebration of the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora; another to adjoining Utah. Within Arizona's own borders, the lenses, pens, and brushes of Highways free-lance contributors visited numerous parks and monuments, Indian tribes, recreation areas, urban centers, forests and deserts, lofty uplands, wildlife refuges, prehistory sites, industries, dude ranches, and festivals.