4 - Houses - Scottsdale

Late 1960s (Through high school graduation)

In 1966, for the second time, we packed the car after Christmas and this time headed back east (for the first time) toward Arizona. The Interstate hadn’t made it as far as Phoenix yet so we arrived in Phoenix on U.S. Highway 60 and Grand Avenue which, as I recall it, was lined with farm equipment dealers.

I would later develop a strange fascination with U.S. Highway 60 which had once been the main east west road through Central Arizona. By the time I was in college very little was left of the old highway but you could find traces or hints of it across Phoenix and Tempe if you looked really carefully. I learned to recognize it by the paving -- blocks of cement with tar filled gaps. It was easy to notice the abandoned bridge over the Salt River at Tempe and you could then follow the paving through older neighborhoods until it disappeared at an irrigation canal. 

In Phoenix I recognized the paving on an otherwise average street off Van Buren -- the new main drag. Wherever I found remnants of the roadway I would also find other elements from the past (old stores or houses) that didn't quite fit in to the current world. Souvenirs left over from a time long past that always intrigued me.

Then we drove all the way across town and arrived in Scottsdale where my father had already found and purchased a house. At that time Scottsdale branded itself (pun intended) “The West’s Most Western Town.” My parents had brought me to Hicksville. And instead of being an about-to-graduate “old“ ninth grader, I was now a mid-freshman year newbie in a new (1961) high school with air conditioning and the mid-century look of steel reinforced, coffered (waffle like) concrete shade structures to protect us from the harsh desert sun.

While this was a very questionable move for me, it was great for my dad as he now had as his sales territory the whole of the (fast growing) state of Arizona. Of course that meant he would be doing even more traveling than before.  At various times his company would have the concession to provide paint for military PXs or the stores on Indian Reservations. On breaks from school I got to go along and help inventory and restock both institutions. The air bases were lots of fun for me (with jets screaming overhead) and visiting the big Navajo reservation up near Four Corners was always interesting. We even took a tour (not a common occurrence with my dad) of Canyon De Chelly near Window Rock, which is one of the great, lesser known, scenic wonders of Arizona.

High School

My new high school wasn’t that much further away than my old school had been but it lay on the other side of a floodplain that, aside from the occasional winter flood, was mostly dry and barren. When I arrived the Army Corps of Engineers were in the process of turning the area into a park. This process would continue for years, but at this point it meant I would have to dodge huge earth-moving machines as I passed to and from school. Exciting.

Nothing really interesting happened at school until my senior year, so I will just say I started out with culture shock trying to make my way in this shiny new school among people who all seemed to know each other from birth (except for the military brats that I tended to gravitate towards since they moved around as much as I had.)

One thing that impressed me as a newcomer, flip-flops or zories were the footwear of choice for kids in Scottsdale but the really cool thing was to walk barefoot from your car to the store, across the griddle-like summer asphalt. This was the pampered, suburban teen equivalent of South Asian holy men walking on hot coals. I worked up to doing it through much of the spring but once it got really hot I was out of that game.

Heat and weather and Prescott

What they tell you about the desert is that it’s a dry heat, which is true -- for the most part. Up to 105 F (40.5 C) really isn’t bad. But once it gets up into the teens it is uncomfortable no matter how dry it is. And then there’s the monsoon. Around mid-summer, moisture is pulled up from the gulf of California in a big way and Arizona is blessed with frequent and glorious thunderstorms. That’s really nice and I still miss those storms, but the bad news is that it also gets humid. So now it can be over 110 and humid. Anyone with a brain tries to get away from the Phoenix area after July 4th when the monsoon traditionally starts.

There are actually many pleasant areas in Arizona where you can get out of the heat. We discovered the Prescott area and tended to go up there to play golf when my parents could get away from their jobs -- my mother was now working in the Chemistry department at ASU. Prescott is a great, very old fashioned little city with a county courthouse in the center of a square block park, and several colleges to make it not quite as backwards as most of Arizona was at that time. And it’s high enough in elevation to be pleasant in the summer. The first summer I was there with my parents from time to time playing golf, and the next two summers I worked at a YMCA camp in the mountains just outside Prescott. The first YMCA summer was 1968, so the previous summer had been The Summer of Love in San Francisco -- the reverberations of which would reach us soon.

To Drive, perchance to Fly

My parents were eager for me to learn to drive as I approached the age of 16 but I wanted to learn to fly instead. There were negotiations. I learned to drive and on my birthday I got a trip in a Cessna type small plane.

Someone, probably my dad, thought it was important for me to learn to drive manual so my parents paid for lessons with a professional instructor in a car with a column shift. (If you don’t know what a column shift is don’t look it up, just be thankful). For the record, my advice would be to first learn to drive then learn to use a stick shift. The only part of his plan I agree with is the support for manual transmissions.

All I recall about my instructor is that he called the center lane on a two way, more than two lane road the “suicide lane.” Driving in that lane, from his point of view, was just asking for someone to hit you head on.

I got my drivers license and on my 16th birthday I also got my flight. Arizona is a big and scenic place so hiring a plane for a tour is not that strange. Of course when the pilot my parents hired learned the details, that I wanted to learn to fly, he was more cooperative than my parents might have anticipated. He put me in the left front seat and let me taxi the plane to the end of the runway. Then he told me to keep the controls as he talked me through the takeoff. My father swore until his dying day that he still had scars from the way my mother gripped his arm as I lifted us into the air.

I learned that an airplane’s controls are much more sensitive than a car’s. I struggled to keep us on the course my “copilot” was setting. It was great. I didn’t understand all of the navigation stuff, but that’s hardly surprising. From Phoenix I flew all the way to the Mogollon Rim near Payson. Everything, aside from my dad’s arm, was going great. Then my copilot offered to take over so I could enjoy the view. 

I’ve never been airsick before or since, but, for whatever reason, I got profoundly nauseous while looking out of that plane at the not-that-spectacular forests on the Mogollon Rim. I didn’t get actively sick, but I was miserable all the way back to Phoenix. And that was the last anyone heard of my determination to learn to fly. I’ve flown in small planes since then and never gotten sick. I can only speculate on what happened, but given the cost of flying lessons, I’m sure that this flight was the best money my dad ever spent.

The day after my birthday and The Flight, in my first act as a fully licensed teenage driver, I took a car load of schoolmates to some mock governmental event sponsored by the YMCA (I think). Coming home, after solving the worlds mock problems, I was driving in the non-suicidal lane of a four lane street (Van Buren, come to think of it) when an uninsured driver from another state opened his door just as I was driving past. The door hit the rear fender of my mother’s dealer display Oldsmobile Cutlass. (Rear fender is important because it means that I was even with the car when the fucking asshole opened his door. There was nothing I could have done about it even if it wasn’t the day after I got my license. )

Heart attack and Dad

You’d think that if you were a middle aged man with a family history of heart disease who smoked three packs a day, drank to excess, didn’t eat particularly well and was mostly sedentary, you would train your son on how to get you to the ER expeditiously should you have a heart attack. But then again, if my dad had been thinking that clearly he would have stopped smoking. We were both at home one afternoon -- not a common occurrence -- when he got the classic, left arm grabbing, indications that he was having a heart attack.

Knowing then what I know now, I would have called an ambulance (the emergency 9-1-1 number had even gone into effect at about this time) -- why he didn’t do this I don’t know, maybe because he was not thinking clearly because he was having a heart attack. Anyway, we jumped in the car, which I could now drive, and I drove him to the hospital. The thing is, I knew where the hospital was but I’d never paid any attention to where the ER entrance was -- so I took him to the main entrance and the poor guy had to walk all through the hospital to the ER in the back. I still feel bad about this. One great reason to come to the ER by ambulance is that you get priority when you arrive. My dad had to convince the people at the desk he really was having a heart attack before they could start treating him, so more wasted time.

Still, despite what looks in hindsight like an attempt to kill my father, he survived and went on to endure a variety of heart procedures, including open heart bypass surgery (which finally stopped his smoking because it turns out that cracking your chest open can affect your golf swing), before he finally exceeded his doctor’s ability to make him whole again.

Clive and me

I drove my mother’s Oldsmobile frequently, especially while my dad was in the hospital. It seemed like I spent all my free time driving to and from the hospital with the radio blaring. What I most remember listening to around this time was the Beatles hit “Hey Jude” and an ad for Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring Janis Joplin, that was played constantly. I at first assumed, because of the expensive way they were being promoted, that Big Brother was the latest Monkees style corporate music phenomena. But the more I listened to Janis’s vocals, the harder that was to believe. Now I know this was one of many instances of Clive Davis spotting the latest (real) thing and jumping all over it. Pretty soon I was a fan of Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver… never was a big Grateful Dead fan.

Senior year of high school

I discuss my experiences on my high school’s newspaper elsewhere (see Power 2 the Pupils), but a bunch of the students on the paper were also in some of my other classes. In particular, many of us were in a Foreign Literature class with one of the exceptional teachers at the school, Mrs. Autenreith.

We became known (to teachers mostly) collectively as the “Autenrieth Bunch” which suggested a certain level of intellectualism but also a tendency to cause problems for lesser teachers.

I also started the year with an excellent Social Studies teacher who I had been eagerly anticipating because of a previous, similar teacher. Sadly, he didn’t last the year (I think he got fed up with school politics) and we ended up with a brand new teacher who was actually a retired army colonel. Some of us made his life hell for a week or two until he sent three of us troublemakers to the library to work on our own. Smart move. I had passed from Marxism to the Utopians by this time and spent the rest of the year studying all the varying forms of secular and religious utopian communities.

Besides my “intellectual” friends in the Autenreith Bunch, I mostly associated with a slightly overlapping group of stoners. I worked briefly at a Western bar and restaurant way out on the (then) north side of Scottsdale called The Handlebar - J (I think) where I was a bus and bar boy. Before we opened, I prepped things in the bar, garnishes mostly, like slicing limes and the like. And then I bused tables for the rest of the evening. I have reason to believe I was not great at this because I distinctly recall diners throwing silverware at me to get water or rolls. What I liked best about the place was the biscuits I usually ate for dinner, served with a delicious gravy.

One night one of my more idiotic friends came by to speak to me and the owner sent him away because I was working. I seem to have taken offense to this, though I have no idea why now, and quit in protest. Mostly this meant that I now had more free time on my hands so I started hanging out more with the group of guys whose lives revolved around this pickup truck with a home built camper shell. If you’ve seen Spicoli spilling out of his van in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, you’ve seen us and that truck. Scottsdale borders an Indian Reservation that is part farmland and part desolate desert. We would drive out into the more desolate areas, get stoned, and then drive back to the closest corner convenience store where we would fall out the back of the truck and stumble in to buy munchies.

As I prepared to graduate from high school, I could look forward to attending university and also participating in the 1971 draft lottery that would determine if I would continue in school or go to prison -- going to Vietnam wasn’t an option for me. All things considered, it isn’t surprising that, for me, the ‘60s ended not with a whimper but a bong. (See also: Sky-Y Summer 1, Sky-Y Summer 2. Next: 5 - Apts - ASU years).