Having red hair in old-time, and modern Phoenix, Arizona


Where I grew up, Minneapolis, Minnesota, there were a LOT of people with red hair, so it was fairly common. I really never gave it any thought, but I'm thinking about red hair now, in Phoenix, and also in old-time Phoenix. And it makes me think about how these people, who seemed to get a sunburn just thinking about going out in the sun, could cope in a place with as much sunshine as Phoenix. The answer is, of course, technology, and also taking advantage of the 24 hours in a day.

I don't have red hair myself, and although I've been badly sunburned once (while tubing on the Salt River in my early twenties), I find that with SPF 50 I can be out in the Phoenix sun, even in the summertime, for several hours, and not get burned. Of course this technology is fairly new as compared to the history of Phoenix, which began in 1870. And even air conditioning is a fairly new invention based on that timeframe. People lived in Phoenix for many generations before the invention of modern air conditioning, and sunscreen.

But all you gotta do is wait for the sun to go down. I suppose some people had such delicate skin that they had to stay away from a full moon, but overall nighttime activity is how a lot of people functioned quite well in Phoenix. I've always enjoyed the daylight myself, and function very poorly at night (I had a girlfriend who claimed that I "turned into a pumpkin" at 9 pm, and she wasn't far wrong), but many people thrive at night. So people who had red hair, who needed to stay out of that burning sunshine, worked at night, and many still do.

Of course nowadays anyone who needs to stay away from the burning Phoenix sun just needs to be lucky enough to have a job in an office, a car with tinted windows, that sort of thing. It still makes me a little nervous to think of these people, but they do fine.

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more