Growing up in Tucson in the early 50s
I was born March 19th, 1953 shortly after my mother had finished hanging up the laundry at 10AM in Tucson Arizona at St. Mary’s Hospital. Tucson in those days was a lot smaller in size. The population then was about 75,000. At that time we lived in a new housing development that had just been planted in the desert north east of 22nd St and Alvernon, which in those days were dirt roads.
The streets of my neighborhood were also unpaved. They were not paved until I was about 7. There were no curbs and natural desert landscape surrounded most of the houses, and there were large sections of pristine desert nearby, where I grew up playing with friends. We did not build tree houses, because there were no trees large enough. Instead we built adobe forts.
There was no mail delivery then. We drove our Nash Rambler to the nearest store, which was a pharmacy at Alvernon and Broadway, where there was also a post office in the rear of the store. It was there that we received our mail from the store clerk who doubled as the postal agent.
There was a new city park three blocks away, which was nothing more than a large tracked of open desert. At that time it was called Randolph Park, but years later it was renamed Reed Park. I recall several years in a row the city had a large Fourth of July picnic there where the fire department cooked two half steers on large spits over fire pits. The site is now the golf course.
Our neighborhood was predominantly Anglo, however, there was a small community of Hispanic children who attended the elementary school as well, so my day-to-day life was primarily Anglo.
In those days where my ethnic minority became apparent to me was whenever we drove to downtown Tucson to shop at one of the two large department stores, Jacome’s and Livi’s. There the staff were all bilingual and the customers were mostly Mexican-Americans, or Mexicans, who drove up from Mexico to shop at the nearest department stores for hundreds of miles, or they were Indians who drove from all over Arizona, even from the northern Hopi Pueblos and Navajo and Apache Reservations. I even recall Tarahumara in traditional dress walking around those department stores. I also recall a number of languages being spoken, not just Spanish and English. I heard these languages so often that I recall learning to tell them apart, but I did not learn to understand them.
An example of how non-Anglo our life was in those days is whenever we had parties we always lined the driveway with luminaria, which in those days was a brown paper lunch bag ¼ filled with dirt and a lit candle was inserted into the dirt in the bag. When my mother dressed up for those parties she always wore a squaw dress with a silver conch belt wrapped around her waist and she wore a squash blossom necklace, and Kaibab moccasins on her feet. The women who attended those parties dressed similarly. Our idea of going out to dinner was going to a Mexican restaurant and ordering burritos, or chimichangas, enchiladas, tacos, or tamales for dinner. I am not sure if there was any other kind of food available then in Tucson, other than the mix of Anglo and Mexican food that my mother cooked.
The first girl I recall having a crush on was a Hispanic-American girl who lived three blocks away. She had long black wavy hair and she was a real animal on the monkey bars. She could climb them like any of the boys. She did not speak much English.