Hey Shadow Mountain Matadors!

Glad you guys like'd that little trip down memory lane

• I saw Star Wars at Cine Capri (stood in line in 100° for it too) Town & Country was my favorite shopping center- especially the Tang's Imports and Ed Debevic's was the greatest- especially cheese fries
• I saw First National of Arizona become First Interstate become Wells Fargo- my brother & I both worked at that Bashas'. Anyone remember the Pizza place that was there that showed Laural & Hardy shorts and the servers wore straw hats (like a Farrelll's)? And what about Shea Plaza Cinema- $1.50 all seats/all times except for 50¢ Midnight Movies? We saw Raiders of the Lost Ark there every night for like two weeks one summer.
• I LOVED Thrifty's cylindrical ice cream scoops, really took the edge off summer.
• Remember when the Home Depot on Cave Creek and Thunderbird was a Woolworth's Woolco? Or when the SubWay was the Submarine Factory?
  
• Definitely had a birthday on the Ronald McDonald train
• SO miss Uncle Sam's Pizza, that was a Friday night before or after the game ritual
• Anybody else remember having to cycle through cruising Central Ave. with cruising Metrocenter because there was some law about passing the same point more than three times in an hour? Remember when Castles and Coasters was called Golf & Stuff?
• Anybody else see the Beach Boys on the 4th of July at Giant's Stadium? Remember the Booster Rooster at Phoenix Giants games?
• Who was at Shadow Mountain when someone had won the call in contest to KZZP and got "Tiffany" to put on a concert from Senior Square?
• How about that night when KISS, Boston and Chicago all had concerts in the valley on the same night, and some people actually tried to go to all three?
• Did any of YOU guys ever listen to the Red Radio Show on kUpd?
  

Remember everybody, no matter where you are, Feb 14th isn't about Valentines, it's about being a "Zonie," From the Arid-Zona. Be sure to celebrate Arizona Statehood Day! Have a Margaritta and a Chimi!

And special thanks to Wendy Lane who takes care of our SHMS Yahoo Group and the Alumni website at http://www.shadowmountainalumni.com

Maybe you can't go home again

"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.

Some more Arizona Favorites

Two cartoonists and an indigenous painter...

One of my all time favorite cowboy artists is a guy by the name of Bob Boze Bell. First he drew a cartoon called "Honkey Tonk Sue; Queen of Western Swing." It was for The New Times, an alternative weekly newspaper in Phoenix, full of scathing satire. I guess they were collected into graphic novels, but are very hard to get your hands on. He had an awesome, sleek, sexy, art deco sort of style. He also wrote a humor column. Later he became part of a morning DJ crew on KSLX FM "Radio for Men." All 60's-70's album rock. Today he is the editor/publisher of True West magazine for which he illustrates. He also does fantastic paintings of old gunslingers and such.
Of course, there's everybody's Phoenix hometown favorites, Bill Keane and his son Jeff. Sure, I'm more into Doonesbury myself, but come on- since 1956 Keane has been making it onto people's refrigerator doors and their hearts with his classic family gags.

Finally, my personal all time favorite John Nieto. I don't know if he's Hopi or Navajo and from Arizona or Zuni from New Mexico or Sioux from South Dakota- heck he could be a Kick-a-poo from Kansas for all I care. He's amazing. All I know is that I fell in love with his stuff in Scottsdale and have seen it in Sedona and if I ever get rich enough I want to own one. Being in a room with a Nieto holds the same thrill as Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, or O'Keefe. His colors are SO vibrant and alive and contemporary- yet at the same time so evocative of the actual colors in nature all over the deserts of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico it is absolutely breath taking.

I'm tellin ya, go see if the painting I did of my student Megan wasn't influenced by Nieto; I SWEAR, I didn't even realize it at the time, but now that I've been looking at Nietos I can totally see it.

The games people play

When you’re a little kid, you can lose yourself in your own reality do it with as many other people as you can convince to join you just about anytime you want, anywhere you want absolutely for free.

I remember playing for hours with my buddy Ron across the street. We played cops and robbers and we played cowboys and Indians. We’d watch “The Big Valley,” with Lee Majors, Linda Evans, and Barbara Stanwick riding their horses around 1870’s California and then we’d head outside and play cowboys and Indians. Our bikes doubled as horses. Being in Phoenix, there was plenty of desert for pretending in.

Then a new kid moved into our neighborhood. Juaquin was may same age, Ron was like a year and a half younger. Juaquin was half Maracoipa Indian. So we didn’t play cowboys and Indians so much. He’d get sick and tired of always having to be the Indian. It wasn’t any kind of political correctness, it was just friends being sensitive to our pal.

Of course then we’d play CHiPs (after another TV show, about the California Highway Patrol). When we played CHiPs Juaquin always got to play Erick Estrada’s character Frank “Ponch” Poncherello, the cool Hispanic motorcycle cop. Ron and I had to take turns playing his partner Jon Baker, the nerdy white guy. It’s okay, Jon could still jump ramps and wipe-out on his bike, even if he couldn’t get the babes. And after all, we were only seven years old. We didn’t care about being babe magnets, we cared about stopping bad guys.

It seems like no matter who the boys are or who their parents are or whether or not they have any toy guns, boys play guns. In fact, that was what we called it. “Guns.” Just “guns.” Eventually we didn’t call it “cowboys and Indians” or “CHiPs” or “Cops & Robbers,” or even “War” or “Army.” We just called it “Guns.”

Both Ron & my Dads had been in the Marine Corps. Mine was fortunate to be stationed on an aircraft carrier in Cuba during Korea. Ron’s was in Vietnam. Of course we had no clue about what he’d been through or what happened there. But somehow we both knew that killing and dying were bad. Kids know that. That’s why we always had the same argument-

“Bang! You’re dead!”

“Am NOT, you missed me!”

“Did not, I got you! You have to die sometime, you have to let me hit you”

“Did too! You can’t always hit me, people miss in real life, you know! Besides, I died last time, it’s YOUR turn to get shot.”

“Why do I always have to die?!”

So eventually we decided to take prisoners. The really scary part was the brainwashing. I know that in first through third grade or so we had no idea what that meant. Maybe we picked it up from some war movie or overheard our parents talking about re-education camps in Vietnam or about that “Manchurian Candidate” movie. All I knew was if there were more than two guys playing and someone was taken prisoner we’d say we “taught him a lesson” and basically that meant that the player switched sides.

I’m not hypersensitive or paranoid about all this. Boys will be boys. They all play war. Ban all toy guns and they’ll use their fingers or make a rock or stick into a gun. It’s not societal, it’s natural. And I guess I’d rather they PRETEND to shoot Nazis or Communists or bank robbers than light barns on fire or spray paint small animals for real.

The only time my bleeding heart Liberalism bothered me was once when I was watching my girls play among dozens of kids on the Louis & Clark playground in the Mall in Sioux City. A little boy had a brand new plastic toy Uzi machine gun. It wasn’t just that he was playing guns when everyone else was just climbing and tumbling and giggling. Part of it was that he was the only kid with a toy. Everyone else was playing on the equipment, so that was just sort of impolite. The other thing was probably jus that I’m a teacher and ever since the Columbine shootings, teachers are unnerved when they see one little kid pretending to shoot dozens of other kids. It was surreal. But I kept it to myself and didn’t reprimand the little guy or chastise his mom in an indignant manor or anything. I just sat there and dealt with my own chills.

Even girls have some aggressive pretending times. Sticks are all swords, not just magic wands.

“So how’d your day go?”

“So and so hit me.”

“WHAT???” trying not to fly off the handle. “What was going on? Did you say something to make them angry? Did you take a toy they were playing with? Did they just up and hit you out of the blue?”

“No, we were playing Karate and she got the first point.”

¡Feliz Navidad!

Growing up in Phoenix, my Michigander cousins would often pity us for never getting to enjoy a white Christmas. Usually I’d let it go, sorta like when they’d ask if we had to shake the snakes and scorpions out of our boots before we hiked to school. Eventually, I had had enough and sat them down with a globe for a history lesson.

"Look," I’d say, "here’s Bethlehem, see? Follow this line of latitude around and what do you notice about Phoenix?"

"Hmmm," they’d inevitably reply.

"Yeah, well, see, same latitude, similar weather patterns, so BACK OFF," I’d boast. I didn’t bother going into how at Lutheran elementary school we’d learned that Bible scholars suspect that Christ may have actually been born in April anyway.

I’ll admit though, that living in the subtropics doesn’t present an environment in line with the quintessential American ideal of a holiday season. This occurred to me just the other day at school. I set up a cardboard fireplace and hung stockings for Cheerleaders and Yearbook staffers. A student asked me "what’s the fireplace for," before I could explain about the stockings another kid answered, "for Santa, DUH!"

"But he comes down the chimney, there’s no chimney here."

I tried for years in vain to get my parents to move to a house with a fireplace for that very reason. But you don’t NEED a fireplace in Phoenix. It’s a desert. Perhaps to humor me, my parents would put up a decorative cardboard fireplace from Sears.

"But we don’t have a chimney," I’d protest.

"Well, uh, um, that’s Okay, Santa will come down our air conditioning vent ducts." Apparently that satisfied me. I mean, really, think about it, if a 300 pound, 500 year old man in a red velvet suit can circumnavigate the earth in one night with flying reindeer and fit down a chimney flue- he can fit through our AC unit and pop out our cardboard fireplace. It’s "Christmas Magic."

Iowegians may enjoy cookies, cocoa and casseroles, but one of my favorite memories were the tamales dad brought home at Christmas from a Mexican deli near the airport where he worked. It may have only been one or two years, but my memory elevated it to the stature of tradition.

A really neat Christmas tradition we had was going to the Sisters’. The Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary was a cloister of Lutheran nuns. That’s right, all you Catholics (and Lutherans) who just did a double take. The story was that a Sunday school class of girls were in the only building not destroyed when the allies bombed Darmstadt Germany. They pledged their life to the Lord. Their leader, Mother Basilea Schlink could drop names like Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom.

Their compound, Kanaan in the desert was in the shadows of Mummy Mountain. Ironically, just miles away from a POW camp for NAZI sailors during WWII. Some of them had escaped with a map and a raft, headed for the Salt River, little did they know that the Salt is a dry wash bed 11 ½ months out of year.

At any rate, these Lutheran nuns in the middle of the desert, like that Sidney Potier movie "Lilies of the Field," had the greatest Christmas cookies and tea, and elaborate German decorations around a Nativity scene where everyone would sing and listen to the Christmas message. All us tiny kids got to ring bells and tambourines. Instead of a tree, they used juniper branches. It smelled great.

Don’t believe in Lutheran nuns? Check out their website at www.kanaan.org

You can’t imagine all the poinsettias in Phoenix. At the art museum there was always a display of trees, the best ones were made of potted poinsettias. Of course it just wasn’t Christmas without a few wreaths made of chili peppers.

No, we didn’t have snowmen, but lots of people liked to decorate their Saguaro cacti with Santa costumes or spray tumbleweeds with flocking and stack them on top of each other to make "Frosty the tumble-weed man."

Luminaries and the celebration of ‘La Posada’ (Mary and Joseph trying to find a room at the Inn, the Posada) is a powerful image of Christmas for me. So are little Indian children and angels by southwestern artist Ted Degrazia. Arizona Highways always had the most beautiful pictures of Spanish missions or the Grand Canyon dusted with a little snow, you can probably see some at www.arizhwys.com.

I admit it, when it’s 3° out and I have to shovel snow I sometimes miss the bougainvilleas and balmy breezes, but now I get to cuddle under flannel sheets and sip hot cocoa. And just the other day, as we were driving through the countryside, my daughter gets to spy a heard of does in the corn stubble and announce to us that she sees "Reindeer!"

Coming home

Last week I flew back to Phoenix for my nephew Daniel’s Baptism. I didn’t get much sleep the night before I left and that was probably just as well. It meant I was too tired to be nervous about flying only days after the first anniversary of 9/11. Fewer people fly since 9/11, which meant that there was no one beside me to be disturbed if I happened to snore.

I scored a window seat, so I could survey the landscape as we made our decent over my native Arizona. They’ve just finished the late summer monsoon season, so there was fresh grass on the mountains that been scorched by the forest fires of this summer. There was even a little water in usually dry washes and river-beds that don’t usually have rivers in them. I noticed that instead of square sections, Arizona farms are disk shaped, due to the pivot sprinklers used to water crops in the desert.

When we came across Phoenix itself is when it hit me- that old saying about not being able to go home again. The reason you can’t go home again is because you can’t step in the same place in a river twice. The river is constantly moving and changing. Phoenix isn’t much like the western town I grew up in.

When I was a kid, we had a dirt road in my subdivision that they had to put oil on to keep the dust down. Across that road were horses and chickens. Today, Phoenix seems to be a vast expanse of concrete and winding freeways.

My folks picked me up and we left Sky Harbor International Airport and ventured out into the blinding sunlight and 104° heat. To my delight, my Mom bought tickets for my Dad and I to see the World Champion Diamondbacks play the Milwaukee Brewers that afternoon.

More evidence of Phoenix’s changes. As a kid we went to minor league games of the Phoenix Giants at a small stadium by the power plant. It smelled like soda and beer and sweat. Bank One Ballpark ("BOB") is more like the Mall of America, air conditioned and filled with shops, neon, and fast food outlets. Downtown used to be run-down, and nearly vacant. It used to be full of office workers, homeless people and police. Now it’s polished and "touristy," full of campy cowboy and southwestern statues and shops.

I loved it. Randy Johnson pitched 17 strikeouts for his 22nd complete game win this season. Junior Spivey hit a grand slam, Tony Womak stole two bases, and Steve Finely and Louis Gonzales caught pop-flies. Dad bought Daniel, Grace, and Ellen D’Backs clothes and we listened to the post-game show on the radio as we made our way up Central Avenue to the Squaw Peak Parkway.

The D’Backs have changed Phoenix too. As I graduated from high school, Phoenix was reaching critical mass. Growing up, it was home to Indians, Mexicans, and people who moved there after WWII or in the late 60’s. But, much like America, it grew almost uncontrollably and it’s different ethnic groups, religions, incomes and political interests were beginning to do one of two things; either cause conflict, or water-down and lose any sense of cohesive identity. Having a winning pro baseball team gives Phonecians something to rally around. Like the terrorist attacks have united the Nation, baseball has united Phoenix.

By the way, Kurt Schilling graduated from my High School, brag, brag. (As if I knew him) He was a Senior when I was a Freshman and Shadow Mountain High School had 2,300 students. My older brother Bart said he sat behind him in Algebra. Bart said Kurt struggled in math.

Monday morning I went for a hike in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve near my parent’s house. I got up at six, witch wasn’t hard since that’s eight, central time. I hiked up the east face of Shadow Mountain so that I could look out over the city and watch the sun rise over the Superstition Mountains. A coyote crossed my path under a palo verde tree. Of course, minutes later, so did a pair of joggers and their black lab. Further along the trail I smelled the sweet aroma of sagebrush and creosote and noticed a jackrabbit scurry across an arroyo under a mighty saguaro. Of course, minutes later, I also caught wind of a city bus and saw a police helicopter scurry across the sky.

As I flew back into Omaha, I noticed the colors go from tan to green as we came east over Colorado and Nebraska. A beautiful sight were the rolling hills. The square sections of farms reminded me of a great patch-work quilt, spread over an inviting bed or sofa. The sun was just setting as I drove into Charter Oak, St. Boniface’s steeple welcomes you home if you come in on L51 from the South. No sooner did I park in front of "Mallory Manor" (a.k.a. "the Butler House," or "the Weed House.) than Gracie came racing down the walk to give me a hug.

You can go home again. It’s just that where you call home may change. I still love Phoenix, but I really love coming home to Charter Oak, my home town.