ALONG THE WAY

Like the Fish That Got Away, These Towns Got Bigger and Better With Each Brag

Weather wimps should read the Arizona Good Roads Association Illustrated Road Maps and Tour Book published in 1913. The authors never met a climate they didn't like.

Right after Arizona took the wrapper off statehood, the Arizona Good Roads Association in Prescott invited the state's towns to describe themselves for the motoring public. Their glowing self-assessments were compiled in the tour book. A discouraging word never is heard in the book - about the weather or anything else.

Decades before air-conditioners and evaporative coolers, almost every Arizona town in the book claimed the best weather on the planet. Wickenburg's boast that "The climate is not surpassed anywhere in the world" was typical.

Mesa's writers were spinmasters: "The summers are balmy; the temperatures sometimes high in July and August the heat is at no time oppressive. Sunstrokes are unknown."

Phoenix and Yuma were more reserved. Phoenix boasted "the finest winter climate in the world." Yuma said nothing about weather.

Tucson professed "a matchless climate," meaning perhaps that you didn't need matches to start fires on a summer day. Tucson's neighbor to the south, Nogales, raved about "the most enjoyable and healthful climate in the world, with a dry and bracing atmosphere the year through."

But these claims pale alongside Florence's glowing tribute, which sounds like a line from a W.C. Fields movie: "Her climate is semi-tropic in mildness, with an atmosphere so dry and pure as to render the creation and propagation of disease germs impossible." Yes, indeed.

Clean air wasn't the only purity promoted by these early civic boosters. Thatcher proudly announced: "There is not a saloon within sixty miles...."

A quick look at the map suggests that the mining town of Clifton probably was the closest point where thirsty travelers could drink.

Mesa was too close to Phoenix to make such a contention, so it made the point its own way: "The class of citizenship is of an especially high order of intelligence and morality."

Many towns noted the presence of several fine churches. Only Yuma also advertised "active and flourishing lodges of all the principal secret societies."

Little Thatcher touted a utopian society: "No poverty, conditions of equality prevail, no rich, no poor."

At the dawn of the automobile age, town boosters were quick to realize that the next best thing to being a destination was being located on the way to one. In 1913, Arizona towns were already touting themselves as the "gateway" to somewhere else.

Yuma was the "Southern Gateway to California," Flagstaff was the "Gateway to the Grand Canyon for Automobiles," and Nogales appointed itself "Gateway to the West Coast of Mexico."

Somehow, Needles, California, slipped into the book and used the grand title of "Gateway to Arizona and California."

Globe said it was the "Gateway to the Copper World," which probably did not amuse Bisbee, Clifton or Morenci, its major copper competitors to the southeast.

Springerville, near Arizona's eastern border, became the Mother of All Gateways when it crowned itself the "Gateway of the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway from the East into Arizona, and Junction of Roads West to Roosevelt Dam and to the Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon." This sounds more like a traffic jam than a gateway.

Some civic amenities we hold dear today were missing in 1913: The book holds no mention of a sports arena, or even a team.

Golf barely made an appearance. Bisbee boasted a ninehole course that was "the most sporty to be found in the Southwest." Douglas had a country club simply "with golf." A Castle Hot Springs photograph showed women in sun hats and ankle-length skirts playing golf or croquet. And that was it for golf. If there were golf courses in Phoenix or Tucson, no one bothered to mention them.

Some of the boasts have lost their meaning in the mists of time. Why did the Hotel Olive in Safford and the Hotel St. Michael in Prescott offer "free sample rooms"? Did dusty motorists flock to the Holbrook Hotel because it promised "Ladies and Gents' Bath in Connection"?

Much has surely changed in 87 years. Most of the businesses and some of the towns promoted in the book have faded into history. Others, like Sedona, Scottsdale and Sun City, literally not on the map in the tour book, are boomtowns today.

Like summer temperatures, however, some things haven't changed. The book's first boast, emblazoned on its front cover and last page, remains true: "Arizona the Wonderland." No brag, just fact.