The Vacations: 1959-1960

My Father had a close set of friends from high school who stayed close friends afterwards. So he and my mother and one of those friends went to Phoenix for a vacation out west. You have to realize that for someone from back east of, say, Missouri, the West looked completely different... everywhere - and there was so much, it even got monotonous. When would it change? To be in the West was to be truly somewhere else. They fell in love with all they saw in Phoenix in those days.
Vacations back then were a little different. They were not physically active. Instead, one stayed at a destination motel, did sightseeing, and basically vegged-out. But the trip sparked a desire in my parents (Mom especially) to actually live there. So their sightseeing was tinged with this idea of what it would be like to actually move there. As a result, they looked at neighborhoods and churches and shopping centers and how to get around the Valley. When they returned and showed the slides to us boys, we wanted to go there, too. And so my parents did something we never did again. . . they returned to Phoenix again for a vacation the very next year, and this time with us boys.

I only remember staying at the Motel that second year, mostly spending as much time as I could at the pool. I learned to swim there that summer. I also remember buying the rubber horned toads, scorpions, and snakes they sold at the motel office for souvenirs. Surely I got a real cowboy hat - one made of sisel instead of the usual felt ones! I remember the building architecture of that pseudo-adobe, squished mortal bricks and the timber trim in the rooms. I also remember watching "77 Sunset Strip" on the TV in the evenings. Hey! That was in L.A., just a day's drive away! So close!
I remember a dust storm so dusty that my dad had to literally wash the dust off his '51 Caddy - it would not wipe off. And I remember some of the trip on Route 66. It took us three long days in the back seat to get there. I remember us boys going to a Frontier Town in Oklahoma (Tulsa?) one night with my dad. It was an amusement park of sorts. And I remember feeling very special back in Ohio because I had actually been in the West in Arizona in Phoenix. But of course, none of my friends or classmates knew just how to respond to that boast. But I wanted to go back.

Living There: Jan.- June, 1961

To my great excitement, I learned we were going to Arizona after Christmas of '60! Texas took two days to cross. Appropriately, we made Tucson on New Years Eve of '61. A new home in a new year! On to Scottsdale!
We stayed two weeks with a college friend of Dad. It was tight with two families on top of each other. They lived across from the new Coronado High School being built. My Dad had a job and soon we had a house and I entered 3rd grade at Tonalea Elementary. Much happened there. I tried little league (got beaned too many times and quit), was bit by the neighbor's Weimaraner, went to the hospital for five days for asthma (first of more to come), learned to ride a bike (I was finally tall enough to ride a 15-incher), went to Disneyland for my 9th birthday (two families in one '52 Fleetwood), and enjoyed being a kid in perpetual summer. But my Dad was laid off and decided to move us back to Ohio. I did not want to leave and for the next year in Ohio I wore my cowboy shirts and bolo.
But all that was "back then," in what is now another time. Only 10,000 lived in Scottsdale then, and now, a quarter-million? I went back in '83 thinking I would live there, but the town I remembered no longer existed. It was one big suburb, like back east - only hotter, and with all the same allergens. So I left.