In 1970, Life magazine published a story called “Look Down, Look Down, that Loathsome Road” dubbing East Speedway Blvd the “Ugliest Street in America.” (Speedway Blvd is seen at the crossroad of North Country Club Rd in the photographs below, taken from the article.) Awww, we could not have been prouder.
The following are photographs from 2022 of me returning to places in which I once spent a lot of my time back in the 1960s and 1970s, starting with homes in which I grew up.
My first home on Baker Place:
The photos below are of me and my brother revisiting that house on the cul-de-sac, and includes a shot of the backyard pool in which our younger brother once almost drowned as an infant. When we were little kids, our parents would take us out to the empty desert to watch this adobe home being built – it was the first house to be constructed in the future sub-division. During our time staying there, Sahuaro High School, from which I would one day graduate, went up on the next street over. I lived in this home until I was nine. Every day from age six to nine, I walked from this house to Schumaker Elementary School, almost a mile away, and back home again. I walked alone, without an adult accompanying me, through a desert and a vacant lot or two, down allies, across busy streets, over bridges and in strange neighborhoods. Times were different then, I guess, and society more trusting. Either that, or my parents really didn’t care if some transient hobo jumped up from behind a creosote bush and killed me in the desert.
When I turned 10, we moved into my next home on Bellevue Place.
I lived on Bellevue until I was 15. From here, I walked first to Wrightstown Elementary School for 5th and 6th grade, and then to Magee Junior High School, which was across the street from our neighborhood on Speedway Blvd. Later, I walked from this house to my high school, Sahuaro, which was exactly one mile away.
At the end of all the streets in the neighborhood ran a wash (pictured below), which we played in all the time, digging roads and caves and whatnot on the sides of the wash for our Hot Wheels, GI Joes, and Major Matt Masons.
My third home was on Sneller Vista Drive, in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains. It was a beautiful home that we had built especially for us, based on my mother’s floor plans. Somehow, we kids managed to convince our dad to let us have brightly colored shag carpeting in our bedrooms, and even picked different colors for each room. My brothers selected radiant blue and lime green; mine was deep purple. It was the seventies, after all. I lived here until I moved away for college.
The aforementioned schools. Schumaker Elementary School:
Wrightstown Elementary School:
Magee Junior High School:
Sahuaro High School. Here is what it looked like on its grand opening day, August 16, 1968, including photographs of the interior of the two-story library and the dressing room of the beloved Little Theatre:
Here is the snack bar as it looked in the 1970s. Chocolate and maple long johns were 15 cents; a BBQ sandwich on a bun was 30 cents.
My 2022 visit:
Below is the infamous Vicksburg Street, the place where students ditched class to hang out and smoke cigarettes and pot, until the boys’ dean, Bill Ismay, would drive up and chase everyone back to school. The students who regularly gathered here became known as “Vicksburgers.”
My first real job was at “Chelsea Street Pub” (later changed to “Putney Street Pub”), which was a bar and restaurant with live country music situated inside a shopping mall. I was a cook and later the kitchen manager, all while I was still in high school. The mall was called “Park Mall,” and it was built in 1975 adjacent to the Sears department store in the Sears Park. Sears became the first anchor store for the mall. Other original stores included Diamonds (which became Dillard’s in 1986), the Broadway (which became Macy’s in 1996), a Furr’s Cafeteria, the Mann Theatres, and 51 other stores. I distinctly remember dipping into Putney’s on payday to grab my paycheck, cashing it at the Safeway next door to the mall, and rushing back to the mall’s record store to spend the majority of it on the latest vinyl releases (Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here!” Heart’s “Dreamboat Annie!” Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run!” Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti!” Zappa and the Mother’s “One Size Fits All!” Queen’s “A Night at the Opera!” David Bowie’s “Young Americans!”)
In 1999, “Park Mall” became “Park Place.” Most all of the former anchor stores are gone. Where “Putney Street Pub” used to be located now stands an “Aeropostale.” The brick facade from Putney’s is still there, however.
An after hours stroll through the mall in 2022 brought back a flood of memories, but alongside the nostalgia was a great appreciation for the wonderful and beautiful architecture that has survived for over 50 years.
Other old haunts from the 60s and 70s include the following:
Below is the Loft Cinema, a two-story movie theatre. I remember seeing “The Front Page” with my parents on the upper floor, while “Earthquake” (in Sensurround!) played on the lower floor, shaking the entire building and nearly knocking us out of our seats.
Below is a photograph of General Hitchcock at the 13th milepost on Mt. Lemmon, where the picnic table we sat at to smoke weed and eat cheese, salami and crackers back in high school, still stands, albeit covered in some weird table cloth by previous partiers.
Drive-ins were a great place to go, both as a kid and as a teenager. When we were kids, our parents would put us in our pajamas and grab us each a dinner box of fried chicken, fries and garlic bread from Lucky Wishbone, and take us to the movies. As teenagers, we loaded up lawn chairs, blankets and ice chests of beer, with an occasional passenger hidden in the trunk, to sit out under the stars and enjoy a film or two. Alas, the theaters are no longer open for business. The Cactus shut down on Oct. 27, 1976. The Midway on Dec. 1, 1976. The Prince on Dec. 8, 1976. The Biltmore-Miracle Mile on Sept. 6, 1978. The 22nd Street on Sept.12, 1979. The Rodeo on Jan. 28, 1981. The three-screen Apache in Sept. 1994. The Cactus reopened as the DeAnza in 1977, then closed on Oct. 3, 2009.
Speaking of Lucky Wishbone, here is a shot of their iconic neon sign:
Another truly iconic sign is that of the El Con shopping mall, on the west side of town:
On our birthdays, our parents took us to Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, a family tradition. The restaurant gave out styrofoam “straw” hats to the birthday boy, and we enjoyed pizza and “Mojo” batter fried potato wedges while a banjo player and a piano player entertained. The musicians were a couple of elderly guys who would get the crowd singing old-timey songs, while the lyrics were projected on the wall above them using comically illustrated slides. They often let us kids sit on the piano bench while they played. The piano had a glass front with the strings painted in fluorescent colors and a black light inside, and we would stare, fascinated at the brightness of anything white as a result of the black light. Years later, my friends and I would go to Shakey’s for the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet, and stuff ourselves for a couple of bucks, and then return home where we would lay on the sidewalk and moan in gluttonous agony.
In 1971, a food truck began parking on the hill next to Magee Junior High, selling candy and lemon slush drinks to the students as they got out of school for the day. I recall buying the slush drinks, which were unlike the sugary Mr. Mistys, Icees, Slurpees, and Slush Puppies, with which we were all familiar. Eventually, the two dudes who owned the truck and the recipe for the slush drink, Edmund Irving and Robert Greenberg, combined their initials (“E” from “Edward” and “G” from “Greenberg”) to come up with a name for the drink, “eegee,” and began opening up shops all over town. I frequented the eegee’s on Kolb Road often. Did you know Southern Comfort tastes pretty darn good in a strawberry eegee? My high school girlfriend can attest to it! She will also be the first to tell you it may result in your crawling down the hallway to your bedroom late at night so as not to wake your parents from your stumbling into, and bouncing off of, the walls.
I performed in plays and did art and advertising at Trail Dust Town, home of the Pinnacle Peak restaurant, famous for cutting off customers’ neckties and hanging them from the ceiling. The fact that steaks were grilled over open flames, and that thousands of ties dangled overhead, may have helped contribute to the restaurant burning down on more than one occasion.
Next door to Trail Dust Town stood the Magic Carpet miniature golf course, a wild and trippy play area with a giant tiki statue that had stairs inside you could climb to the top, a huge monkey with a swinging tail, a sphinx, and an assortment of other oddities including castles, dinosaurs, caves, snakes, and spider webs. It was a great place to hang out, but eventually it was torn down and replaced with a swap meet. The iconic neon sign, however, continues to light the nights downtown on Miracle Mile, restored by the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation and Pima Community College, along with several other historic neon signage saved from obliteration.
Bookman’s used book store originated in Tucson, and it was there I began collecting old issues of National Lampoon magazine, by rolling them up and sliding them down into my socks underneath the legs of my pants, secured in place with rubber bands. I am definitely going to hell. But I will have a lot of great reading material to help pass the time away.
I leave you with one of my favorite places to spend time after high school – Wilmot Public Library (now “Murphy-Wilmot Public Library”). It is in the corner of St. Joseph’s Hospital, where my dad worked, and I would take the bus down to Park Mall and hang out with friends, then walk to the library and wait there until my dad got off work, to drive us back home to where we were living in the Catalina Mountain foothills. It was at this library that I acquainted myself with the Dewey Decimal System, and began my life-long love affair with books and magazines. It was also there that I experienced my first kiss with a very pretty girl, as we stood outside between the library building and a security wall, in the rain, listening to Nilsson’s “Without You” playing on a transistor AM radio.
Tucson
< Back
TUCSON, ARIZONA
My Home Town
In 1970, Life magazine published a story called “Look Down, Look Down, that Loathsome Road” dubbing East Speedway Blvd the “Ugliest Street in America.” (Speedway Blvd is seen at the crossroad of North Country Club Rd in the photographs below, taken from the article.) Awww, we could not have been prouder.
The following are photographs from 2022 of me returning to places in which I once spent a lot of my time back in the 1960s and 1970s, starting with homes in which I grew up.
My first home on Baker Place:
The photos below are of me and my brother revisiting that house on the cul-de-sac, and includes a shot of the backyard pool in which our younger brother once almost drowned as an infant. When we were little kids, our parents would take us out to the empty desert to watch this adobe home being built – it was the first house to be constructed in the future sub-division. During our time staying there, Sahuaro High School, from which I would one day graduate, went up on the next street over. I lived in this home until I was nine. Every day from age six to nine, I walked from this house to Schumaker Elementary School, almost a mile away, and back home again. I walked alone, without an adult accompanying me, through a desert and a vacant lot or two, down allies, across busy streets, over bridges and in strange neighborhoods. Times were different then, I guess, and society more trusting. Either that, or my parents really didn’t care if some transient hobo jumped up from behind a creosote bush and killed me in the desert.
When I turned 10, we moved into my next home on Bellevue Place.
I lived on Bellevue until I was 15. From here, I walked first to Wrightstown Elementary School for 5th and 6th grade, and then to Magee Junior High School, which was across the street from our neighborhood on Speedway Blvd. Later, I walked from this house to my high school, Sahuaro, which was exactly one mile away.
At the end of all the streets in the neighborhood ran a wash (pictured below), which we played in all the time, digging roads and caves and whatnot on the sides of the wash for our Hot Wheels, GI Joes, and Major Matt Masons.
My third home was on Sneller Vista Drive, in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains. It was a beautiful home that we had built especially for us, based on my mother’s floor plans. Somehow, we kids managed to convince our dad to let us have brightly colored shag carpeting in our bedrooms, and even picked different colors for each room. My brothers selected radiant blue and lime green; mine was deep purple. It was the seventies, after all. I lived here until I moved away for college.
The aforementioned schools. Schumaker Elementary School:
Wrightstown Elementary School:
Magee Junior High School:
Sahuaro High School. Here is what it looked like on its grand opening day, August 16, 1968, including photographs of the interior of the two-story library and the dressing room of the beloved Little Theatre:
Here is the snack bar as it looked in the 1970s. Chocolate and maple long johns were 15 cents; a BBQ sandwich on a bun was 30 cents.
My 2022 visit:
Below is the infamous Vicksburg Street, the place where students ditched class to hang out and smoke cigarettes and pot, until the boys’ dean, Bill Ismay, would drive up and chase everyone back to school. The students who regularly gathered here became known as “Vicksburgers.”
My first real job was at “Chelsea Street Pub” (later changed to “Putney Street Pub”), which was a bar and restaurant with live country music situated inside a shopping mall. I was a cook and later the kitchen manager, all while I was still in high school. The mall was called “Park Mall,” and it was built in 1975 adjacent to the Sears department store in the Sears Park. Sears became the first anchor store for the mall. Other original stores included Diamonds (which became Dillard’s in 1986), the Broadway (which became Macy’s in 1996), a Furr’s Cafeteria, the Mann Theatres, and 51 other stores. I distinctly remember dipping into Putney’s on payday to grab my paycheck, cashing it at the Safeway next door to the mall, and rushing back to the mall’s record store to spend the majority of it on the latest vinyl releases (Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here!” Heart’s “Dreamboat Annie!” Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run!” Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti!” Zappa and the Mother’s “One Size Fits All!” Queen’s “A Night at the Opera!” David Bowie’s “Young Americans!”)
In 1999, “Park Mall” became “Park Place.” Most all of the former anchor stores are gone. Where “Putney Street Pub” used to be located now stands an “Aeropostale.” The brick facade from Putney’s is still there, however.
An after hours stroll through the mall in 2022 brought back a flood of memories, but alongside the nostalgia was a great appreciation for the wonderful and beautiful architecture that has survived for over 50 years.
Other old haunts from the 60s and 70s include the following:
Below is the Loft Cinema, a two-story movie theatre. I remember seeing “The Front Page” with my parents on the upper floor, while “Earthquake” (in Sensurround!) played on the lower floor, shaking the entire building and nearly knocking us out of our seats.
Below is a photograph of General Hitchcock at the 13th milepost on Mt. Lemmon, where the picnic table we sat at to smoke weed and eat cheese, salami and crackers back in high school, still stands, albeit covered in some weird table cloth by previous partiers.
Drive-ins were a great place to go, both as a kid and as a teenager. When we were kids, our parents would put us in our pajamas and grab us each a dinner box of fried chicken, fries and garlic bread from Lucky Wishbone, and take us to the movies. As teenagers, we loaded up lawn chairs, blankets and ice chests of beer, with an occasional passenger hidden in the trunk, to sit out under the stars and enjoy a film or two. Alas, the theaters are no longer open for business. The Cactus shut down on Oct. 27, 1976. The Midway on Dec. 1, 1976. The Prince on Dec. 8, 1976. The Biltmore-Miracle Mile on Sept. 6, 1978. The 22nd Street on Sept.12, 1979. The Rodeo on Jan. 28, 1981. The three-screen Apache in Sept. 1994. The Cactus reopened as the DeAnza in 1977, then closed on Oct. 3, 2009.
Speaking of Lucky Wishbone, here is a shot of their iconic neon sign:
Another truly iconic sign is that of the El Con shopping mall, on the west side of town:
On our birthdays, our parents took us to Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, a family tradition. The restaurant gave out styrofoam “straw” hats to the birthday boy, and we enjoyed pizza and “Mojo” batter fried potato wedges while a banjo player and a piano player entertained. The musicians were a couple of elderly guys who would get the crowd singing old-timey songs, while the lyrics were projected on the wall above them using comically illustrated slides. They often let us kids sit on the piano bench while they played. The piano had a glass front with the strings painted in fluorescent colors and a black light inside, and we would stare, fascinated at the brightness of anything white as a result of the black light. Years later, my friends and I would go to Shakey’s for the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet, and stuff ourselves for a couple of bucks, and then return home where we would lay on the sidewalk and moan in gluttonous agony.
In 1971, a food truck began parking on the hill next to Magee Junior High, selling candy and lemon slush drinks to the students as they got out of school for the day. I recall buying the slush drinks, which were unlike the sugary Mr. Mistys, Icees, Slurpees, and Slush Puppies, with which we were all familiar. Eventually, the two dudes who owned the truck and the recipe for the slush drink, Edmund Irving and Robert Greenberg, combined their initials (“E” from “Edward” and “G” from “Greenberg”) to come up with a name for the drink, “eegee,” and began opening up shops all over town. I frequented the eegee’s on Kolb Road often. Did you know Southern Comfort tastes pretty darn good in a strawberry eegee? My high school girlfriend can attest to it! She will also be the first to tell you it may result in your crawling down the hallway to your bedroom late at night so as not to wake your parents from your stumbling into, and bouncing off of, the walls.
I performed in plays and did art and advertising at Trail Dust Town, home of the Pinnacle Peak restaurant, famous for cutting off customers’ neckties and hanging them from the ceiling. The fact that steaks were grilled over open flames, and that thousands of ties dangled overhead, may have helped contribute to the restaurant burning down on more than one occasion.
Next door to Trail Dust Town stood the Magic Carpet miniature golf course, a wild and trippy play area with a giant tiki statue that had stairs inside you could climb to the top, a huge monkey with a swinging tail, a sphinx, and an assortment of other oddities including castles, dinosaurs, caves, snakes, and spider webs. It was a great place to hang out, but eventually it was torn down and replaced with a swap meet. The iconic neon sign, however, continues to light the nights downtown on Miracle Mile, restored by the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation and Pima Community College, along with several other historic neon signage saved from obliteration.
Bookman’s used book store originated in Tucson, and it was there I began collecting old issues of National Lampoon magazine, by rolling them up and sliding them down into my socks underneath the legs of my pants, secured in place with rubber bands. I am definitely going to hell. But I will have a lot of great reading material to help pass the time away.
I leave you with one of my favorite places to spend time after high school – Wilmot Public Library (now “Murphy-Wilmot Public Library”). It is in the corner of St. Joseph’s Hospital, where my dad worked, and I would take the bus down to Park Mall and hang out with friends, then walk to the library and wait there until my dad got off work, to drive us back home to where we were living in the Catalina Mountain foothills. It was at this library that I acquainted myself with the Dewey Decimal System, and began my life-long love affair with books and magazines. It was also there that I experienced my first kiss with a very pretty girl, as we stood outside between the library building and a security wall, in the rain, listening to Nilsson’s “Without You” playing on a transistor AM radio.
< Back
Return to Top
© 2024 Dry Ice Graphics by Crawford. All Rights Reserved.