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I have decided to do a series on the cities and communities in the Valley of the Sun. Why not? I know them as well as anybody and I keep my eyes open - and somebody has to do it.
I will start with Tempe. It is, or was, my home town after all. Although I was born in Phoenix, in the old Good Sam, my folks moved to Tempe from Maricopa in about 1953 I think. All in all, I think my Tempe credentials are pretty good: Ritter school (gone! well almost), first class at Broadmor, McKemy, McClintock (class of '67, the first) and circulating among names like Curry, Connolly, Smith, Hall, Bowles, Birch, Guildy, Calderwood, Karp, Bozivitch, White, Livingston, Yount, Todd, Sellah, etc… They probably don't remember me but I was there - watching.
The Tempe of my youth is gone. In the mid 50's everything south of Broadway was farm country. We used to hunt crawdads in the ditches with nail-tipped poles (mean!) and build huge tumbleweed forts at Rural and Broadway. Later I lived off Spence Ave near the RR tracks, not too far from Rural and Apache. We had irrigation and the greatest naval battles seen since WWII. All the old stuff is gone: the Teepees, Chicos, VFW, the smelly cattle pens down the street, the choo-choo café, the Bayless store, Franks, and of course, Harmons. Yes Harmons, a big red barn of a landmark between Tempe and Mesa. I have never seen any references to the mountain lion they kept out in a pen in front. The only person I know that remembers it is Shirley Monti. That poor, poor animal! Enough said.
map1952t - Topo tempe
ASU was ASC - Arizona State College. Not a real school, at least to the folks down in Tucson (always pronounced TUK-son, of course). I still remember going down to the Devil's Den with my Aunt and watching games in the Old Stadium, also long gone. Summers were hot and so we slept on the porch. Fun was a daily trip to Tempe Beach public pool, with a stop at the old Dairy Queen for a 5 cent cone. And there was always the Old Bridge to play around, never mind the big holes in the middle of the structure and the 100 foot drop to the dry riverbed. Speaking of the Salt River, it wasn't. But at least the riverbed was a jungle of trees, brushes, small pools and lots of wildlife. It wasn't the sterile, lifeless, scrapped-clean ugly river bottom that we see today. I will never forgive them for that.
As Arizona State College became Arizona State University; Tempe and the rest of the Valley began to grow dramatically. From the 1960s until the 1980s - while I was away - expansion was constant. New schools were built by the dozens. Farm lands were replaced with thousands of new homes. Tempe moved mainly south, but the folks in Chandler were a little faster and soon Tempe found itself land-locked, with nowhere to go. As Tempe grew, ASU did also, but faster. From a small teachers College to one of the biggest universities in the US in a little over two decades. - Not bad! It got a new world-class auditorium (imported from Bagdad, kind of), a new stadium, Frank Kush and fame as a fun school. Students and people poured in by the thousands.
I guess it was in the late 1980s that Tempe - its growing days over and having nothing else to do - developed an attitude. Wait, I am not talking about the people, but the schools and most of all the City Government. They were the best, yes sir ree - and much more enlightened than the weirdo Mormons in Mesa, the farm boys down in Chandler, or the hicks in the West Valley. Of course, Tempe never understood Scottsdale (still doesn't today!), which had been nothing and suddenly was both rich and famous. Only Phoenix deserved some measure of respect, but only because it was the State capital and 15 times bigger. It was to this city that I moved back to in 1989 with a wife and three kids.
It took a few months for reality to hit me, and the first blow can from the Tempe Schools. The boys bikes were stolen at school and all the school administration had to say was "so what?" One day I ask the kids what they learned in ESL class and I am told it was how to say the names of colors in Chinese. A teacher at a Tempe elementary school declares that foreign students take up to 7 years to learn the English language (which I guess it is true if the student is unfortunate enough to be in her class, otherwise it takes about 3 to 6 months on the playground. Discipline? What is that? I still remember Mr Birch and his paddle down in Broadmor, but that was the 1950s. Over at McClintock High School they have kicked out Huck Finn, but have added a nursery to take care of the girl's babies, so they can get their diplomas -- when they are not meeting with Social Workers the School has brought in to get them on Welfare. I go talk to the Assistant Principal, whose name I forget, and he tells me not to yell at him. I call James Buchanan at the District office and he makes pleasant, meaningless, breathless sounds. Later I find out he was probably chasing some skirt around the room while talking to me. Probably the only person I ever talked to that made sense was a lady named Parker (?), but she was fight a losing battle.
The fact is that there was no educational theory (or fad) that was too stupid or untested for any of the Tempe Schools (all, K-12) not to adopt and love. They had the whole enchilada and every side dish on the education establishment menu: new math, whole language, bilingual education, the "modern" history standards, progressive discipline, multiculturalism and so on. The fact that most of these hindered rather than helped the children meant absolutely nothing to most of the "educators" (what they call a teacher that can't teach) in the Tempe schools. I am still waiting for the NEA to get up and apologize for the damage they have inflicted upon a generation of American children - but that will be a cold day in hell, for sure. If it hadn't been for the parents, the voters and legal mechanism such as referendums and voter initiatives, things would be much, much worse. Of course the educational establishment fought tooth and nail to keep all these ineffective programs, with all their little cute, fancy dime-a-dozen buzz words and phrases.
There is an old custom in Arizona, from I don't know when, of putting a big letter on a local hill to represent a school. In fact, any college or high school that was anybody at all had their letter engraved on the nearest mountain, peak, butte, or even anthill. In fact, schools with "letters" always kind of looked down on those poor schools that weren't close enough to a hill to tag it with their symbol. And when I say "close" I am not even talking 100 or 200 yards, or even a mile or so. In some cases the "Letters" were miles away (Pima Butte is sometimes called M Mountain because of the M for Maricopa, 6 miles away), but the school has a letter.
With the priviledge of having a letter comes great responsibility! Usually there is a painting cerimony every year, in which the 30 or 40 foot cement-based letter is cleaned and painted. And there is the bigger and more important issue of protecting your letter from rival schools that do such dasdardly things like paint it with their own school colors, or write unkind things on it, or - oh horrors - even pee on this almost sacred symbol.
I grew up in Tempe, which has a nice big "A" on Tempe Butte, right next to Arizona State University (formerly Arizona State College). Anyway, once in a while those evil Wildcats from the University of Arizona in Tucson would sneak up to the Valley and paint the sacred "A" in Blue and Red, the U of A colors. Very insulting. Of course that demanded retaliation. So, back and forth, for generation after generation, the ASU "A" and the U of A "A" have been painted about 700 times each, in their own school colors, in the rival school colors, in patriotic red, white and blue, in gold, in white, in pink and who knows what 
. Before the big U of A / ASU football game, there are usually some stupid students that stay up and freeze all night while "guarding" the "A" from enemy paint jobs. Go figure. Since ASU took Tempe Butte for their "A", the local Tempe High School had to go use the Twin Buttes (or sometimes Double Buttes) to paint their big "T" 
.
Arizona has changed and painting big letters on the sides of hills is frowned upon and considered a desecration of nature, so the tradition of painting school letters on local desert hills is fading away, like the letters themselves.
Oh yes, one more thing about ASU and U of A... I remember in the 50s, when ASC became a university, the University of Arizona fought hard to prevent it 
. There was never any love lost between the two universities: when I was a boy the Sun Devils (as the ASU team is known) could lose every game of the season, but if they won the big game against the Wildcats (as U of A is known) it was considered a good year!
And there was the parking meter controversy. A few years ago (about 2000?) some genius in the City of Tempe government decided that people were taking advantage of the fact that un-expired time on vacated parking meters was being used by other people to park for free (oh horror!) and thus depriving the City government of a few nickels each day per meter. So what did they do? They got rid of the traditional parking meters along the curbs, that had been used for decades, and put in a more modern system that used numbered spaces and central collection points. It was a disaster - not user friendly at all. The new system required a person who wanted to park to note the space number, go to a central computerized meter box up to 50 yards away, hope it was the right meter for that space, input the space number, pay, receive a ticket with a time stamp, and hope the machine wasn't out of paper or screwed up. Of course, since there was no individual meter or visible time-remaining indicator, a person parking would not know if there was any free time left, so, in theory, the City not only saved on labor collection costs, but also would thwart those uncivil folks that did not pay for a few minutes of left-over free meter time. The citizens of Tempe hated it! Well, the meters were bad, but it gets worse. The Government of Tempe was so alert and in tune with the people and local traditions that it did not even notice that all the new fancy computerized meters and signs for the new system -- all over downtown Tempe -- were painted in bright blue and red, the colors of hated arch-rival University of Arizona. A case of insult added to injury. The old parking meters are back!
) on Fifth Street are in the process of expropriating some private land to give it to another group of private owners, for the good of all humanity, of course. Not that this is anything new; these are the people that have given away millions of dollars to their pet contractors (ie, Brickyard, Rio Salado, etc...) on failed projects, and without even an 'oops'. The City of Tempe is easily the most Politically Correct town in Arizona, which would be fine if being PC meant being Polite and Considerate. The fact is that the Government of Tempe is probably the most discriminatory organization in the Valley of the Sun, with a record of abuse and favoritism that would embarass anybody else (read the 'audit report' here: 
). Remember, these are the people that used to empty the water from Tempe Beach (a public pool, long gone 
) after 'Mexican' day (Fridays), so not to contaminate whites, I guess. We are still waiting for an apology on that one. Somebody should tell the Tempe officials that the purpose of government is to provide specific basic services to all, hopefully in a fair and equitable manner, instead of blindly promoting pseudo-intellectual fads with cute names / words like "diversity", "multiculturalism" and "inclusiveness" -- which by official city policy must be used at least once per paragraph in all city documents and communications, and when used, must also be acompanied by one of the following words: celibrate, proactive and awareness. This is why I resigned from the Human Race and joined the folks from Planet Cynicuss (the lizard people wouldn't have me!).
The fact is that the city goverment in Tempe has chosen to take perfectly good ideas like "diversity", "respect", "tolerance" and "inclusiness" and turn them into a political dogma that has very little to do with real diversity, genuine respect, true tolerance and equality, and actual inclusivess, and everything to do with a political and social agenda, with different standards for different people and groups (This is used to be called hypocrisy, now it is called Political Correctness). This would be OK for a lobby group or a non-profit, as far as I am concerned, but should be anathema to a local government that is supposed to exist to provide efficient, cost-effective services to all, not indoctrinate people, saying one thing and doing another, a la Animal Farm. I had better stop here. Maybe I would be kinder if I had one of those "required sensitivity training" courses the City of Tempe mentions on its website 
-- but then again, maybe not. Instead of going on and on about this, I'll just write a page about Tempe, so not to mix apples and oranges, mountains and politics, good and bad. I have a couple of other issues with the City of Tempe that really make me mad. One last thought and I'll end this somewhat mindless diatribe. Why the government of the City hasn't tried to change its name to Tempce I don't know. Or maybe they should paint the Old Bridge 
bright orange and declare themselves San Francisco by the Butte, or Butt, or whatever.... Orwell would have had a field day! I ramble.
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The city of Tempe is back in the spotlight for allegations of discrimination and retaliation against a city employee as well as for allegations of failing to follow internal policies to protect employees during personnel investigations. (Tempe City Attorney Andrew) Ching wrote that Tempe hired outside attorneys from Ernest Calderón Law Offices to investigate an employee complaint of gender discrimination and retaliation (this time in the Water Utilities Department). A second "group" of employees claim Tempe has "failed to follow (or been inconsistent in the application of) its established internal policies and procedures regarding employee discipline, employee safe havens, personnel investigations, and employee ethics," the e-mail stated. ...The city's silence on the investigation drew the attention this week of Los Vecinos, a Tempe community group that backed a successful federal discrimination lawsuit filed in 2002 by a group of Hispanic men working Tempe's Public Works Department. The men's testimony outlined racial slurs, harassment and physical threats. The city eventually settled a $2.4 million judgment for the Tempe employees, acknowledged the prejudice in Public Works, made a public apology, hired a diversity director and began performing periodic diversity audits. On Friday, Meyer had cautioned against drawing parallels between the current complaints and what happened in Public Works.
