"Rawhide," Arizona's 1880's Old West Town closed, or got bought-out and moved. And it's expensive enough to discourage any parent from driving an hour across town to visit it in 100 degree heat.
Worse than that, the Miller Beverage Company of Mesa Arizona has gone out of business. Just as well since Rawhide's "Golden Belle Saloon" was just about the only place you could get it.
The CBS station is now FOX, the ABC station is now CW, the independent station is now CBS and the old Fox station is now ABC.
And the Phoenix metropolitan area has grown at least 20% in just the last 6 years! When I was a kid, our house was almost as far North as you could get in the city. The street next to our subdivision was dirt. The city put oil on it to keep the dust down. Neighbors had horses and chickens. Now there are houses and strip malls East- not just up to but surrounding the Indian reservations, West to the Air Force base and Nuclear power plant, North to what used to be distant towns along the Carefree highway, and South almost all the way to Tuscon.
Mind you, I appreciate having a major league baseball team and plenty of Starbuck's coffee shops- but the Phoenix of my youth was much more like Albuquerque or Palm Springs- the Phoenix of today may as well be L.A. A million and a half in Phoenix proper and pushing 13 Mill for the whole "Valley of the Sun."
Don't get me wrong, Phoenix will always be a part of me- but the Phoenix where Clint Eastwood filmed "The Gauntlet" at the brand new civic center and police headquarters, the phoenix where you could see South Mountain from North Mountain- unless there was a dust storm, the phoenix where Wallace and Ladmo gave out bags of treats on Chanel 5 and where streets were named for desert plants instead of land developers.
But whatchya gonna do? Pull up your roots and move to a sleepy little hamlet of 500-600 in the Iowa hinterlands? Wyatt Earp left Iowa for Dodge City, then Tombstone, then L.A. But the new frontier is finding your way back to the open spaces, and back to Jeffersonian agrarian society. Go East, young man. Go East.
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