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National Geographic : 1977 Oct
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"At first, I got homesick," she said. "But when I went back to visit, we had two snow storms, the temperature got down to nine degrees, and Phoenix looked awful good." More than 80 percent of Arizona is occu pied by Indian reservations and public lands such as national parks, monuments, forests, and wildlife refuges-a whole lot of empty countryside to explore. People tell of swim ming in Phoenix in the morning and ski ing near Flagstaff in the afternoon. They imply that folks back home must be slightly cracked not to join the station-wagon trains heading west. A few blocks from the Colemans' place, Sandra Aehlert was aggressively watering her carnations. Didn't she like the increas ingly popular cactus-and-gravel landscaping? "I can go out in the desert and see that junk," she shot back. A native of Chicago's South Side, she misses the city, the Loop, the excitement. "People who have been west awhile don't seem to care anymore. They get into a slow paced life, and that's it." She tossed her head toward the farmland that begins where development, for the mo ment, stops. "They've got sheep over there. All night we hear them, and some nights we smell them. Country living is not for me." Hers was a minority report. The slow paced life, the "Arizona life-style," a much exercised phrase, attracts many. Lives Change in Western Ways North of Camelback Mountain in dude country-become-development, I visited the home of old friends from Chicago, Len and Karyl Drefs, and their daughter, Lisa. We caught up on family news and reminisced, sit ting in a room filled with western touches: tile, rough beams, massive furniture, colors and patterns of Mexico and the Navajos. When evening balanced on the pivot between day's heat and night's chill, we moved to the patio, where reflections from the swimming pool spattered us with wavelets of light. I asked Len if he would like to return north sometime. The look on his face began around his eyes and nose and spread into a grimace, as he raised his hand to ward off the demon of that possibility. Our talk and laughter mingled with chatter from thousands of patios and vanished with the mountains into night. Later we went back inside to a room I hadn't noticed before, where the furniture, upholstered, blue, and formal, seemed lonely, a museum set piece from an old life left behind. Business Seeks the Sun Belt A newcomer might arrive on a Greyhound bus, stay in a Ramada Inn, charge it to an American Express card, and watch a Moto rola television while planning to visit a de velopment of the Del E. Webb company, perhaps Sun City. Each name is a service or product of a company that has its national headquarters, or a major regional facility, in central Arizona. They typify the service oriented, minimally polluting industries the state solicits and attracts. Of these, the ultimate symbol may be the 20-story Greyhound Tower, home office of the conglomerate Greyhound Corporation. With 207 subsidiaries-only one runs the familiar intercity buses-it is among the nation's hundred largest companies. Nothing is manufactured inside the tower, but as board chairman Gerald Trautman explained, just the first wave of executives to occupy it poured 21 million dollars into the Phoenix area housing market. But why did Greyhound come to Phoenix? "When Greyhound acquired Armour and Company, we studied a number of sun-belt cities. We were looking for a favorable busi ness climate and good living conditions." Phoenix jumped to the top of the list. Yet skeptics raised some doubts about the move from Chicago, Trautman recalled. "Some of our people thought we would be out of the mainstream of finance. But in the first two years after we moved here, so many bankers and investment bankers came by that I jokingly said we (Continued on page 503) On deck for fun, Karen Peters and her cousin take time out from softball on the Gila River reservation, home to Pima and Maricopa Indians. The Hohokam Indians, first to irrigate this desert, had settlements nearby until about 500 years ago. They left an agri cultural tradition the tribes of desert Arizona still follow. National Geographic, October 1977 498
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