As the United States entered World War II, the above photo and the following essay appeared in the February 1942 issue of Arizona Highways.
This, an American home, stands today as the citadel of liberty and freedom before the storm of destruction hurling its fury over the seven seas and the intervening continents of the world today. Neither prince nor potentate, neither king nor colossus is half as important as the person who herein dwells. He alone will dictate the final paragraph that History, the sharp penman, writes today in the story of freemen prevailing and persevering against bestiality and brutality.
This is the home of an American citizen. It might be a cottage in Maine by the sea. It might be an apartment on Park Avenue. It might be a farmhouse on a Kansas prairie. In this particular case, as here pictorially portrayed, it is a ranch home in the hills of Yavapai County, Arizona. But wherever it may be — this American home — it represents the mightiest monument against Oppression there is today.
This American home is something more than four walls and a roof. Its nails were driven at Valley Forge, at Gettysburg and in the forests of the Argonne. The spirit that binds it together and makes it the impregnable fortress of freedom that it is was written in the Constitution, the Bible, the Bill of Rights. This American home didn't just happen. It is the result of the rightful thinking of free and courageous men and women since the golden age of Pericles of Athens centuries ago. Many people in many ages contributed to the lasting quality of the American home as it stands today, for the cause of freedom knows no beginning or no ending. The tired voice of Abraham Lincoln proclaiming the proposition that all men are created equal sums up in words of granite the philosophy of the American home and the country where it is enshrined.
The folks who live in such a house live simply and quietly. They are intrinsically people of peace — but great is their fury when their home is endangered and their philosophy of living is threatened.
From such homes as this ranch home in the hills of Yavapai County come young men of spirit who in a few short weeks become the equal of the automatons drilled and tested for years. It brings out the old knowledge that you fight when you have something to fight for.
So the years pass, the sun comes up and sets, there come days of peace and days of war, but through the turmoil the American home remains solid and firm.
Herein Freedom sits down with you to breakfast, and Liberty joins in the evening prayers. Here Kindness and Goodness and Charity help do the cooking and here Courage and Honor and Resolution and Fortitude sit around the table like members of the family. Here Independence does her knitting. Here is Greatness.
Favored, indeed, are the people who live in such a home.
— Raymond Carlson, Editor