As I do every year on December 1st I take a moment to remember the men who have touched my life and sadly are no longer with us…
Kent Kelly
Ken Cohen
Steve Golden
Dennis Shelpman
Jim Hagen
Chuck Krahe
Marty Kamner
Michael Nelson
Jim Nye
Kevin Ohm
Rick King
Ron Aiazzi
Grant Neilsen
Ric Hathaway
David Koston
Kim Holstein
Ben Walzer
Ken Borg
Harold Gates
Jim Girard
Keith Roseberry
Tom Farrel
Peter Whitman
Chuck Mayer
Richard Gulliver
Scott Woods
Bobby Farina
Brian Lea
Fred Sibinic
Steve McCollom
John Trapp
Philip Ruckdeschel
My sister is still going through our Dad's belongings, and over the past few weeks she's been sending me the detritus of his electronic life. Boxes full of diskettes, CDROMs and Zip (!) disks have been arriving with disturbing regularity. They're all coming Priority Mail, which makes no sense whatsoever, other than by spending an exorbitant amount to ship this stuff to me (instead of waiting until September when I'm in Phoenix and can ship the stuff myself), it's her passive-aggressive way of guilting me for not being able to come coming down for Dad's ash scattering last fall.
The other day a banker box arrived and I still don't understand why the postman decided to stuff it into one of the parcel boxes instead of leaving it at the leasing office. I was barely able to get it out and by the time I finally freed it from the box, I was cursing out my sister for spending $25 to send this…whatever it was.
It turns out I shouldn't have been so quick to judgment. While I was initially disappointed when opening the box and seeing Dad's old wool Navy blanket (something I'd told her repeatedly I didn't want), I dug deeper and found a small oil painting Dad had done of me as a baby and—this was an OH MY GOD moment—my old commercial aviation scrapbook from when I was a kid.
This was something I'd completely forgotten about, but seeing it's bright orange cover jogged that memory in an instant. As I gingerly opened the cover and saw the very first page plastered with Airline logos from the late 60s and early 70s, it all came flooding back.
Among the newspaper clippings, hand-drawn airplanes, airline advertisements, box covers from the models I'd built, boarding passes and printed paper schedules, were a dozen or so photographs I'd taken from the observation deck of Sky Harbor Airport. (This was pre-jetway Sky Harbor, when you actually got to talk on the tarmac to get on an airplane; back when there was an outside observation deck!) Being 40-plus years old, the photos were faded and discolored, but through the modern day magic of Photoshop, I was able to return them to their former glory.
Remember PSA?Remember Western?That's a Delta DC-9 and a Frontier 737 behind that Western 727.Air California, acquired by American in 1987,
And then there was the day the first 747 landed in Phoenix. It was a very big day as I recall, as the mayor came out to greet it as well the full media complement. I had seen a PanAm 747 from a distance when we'd flown through O'Hare earlier that year and I was in awe. How could anything that big actually fly?
I still find it amazing that for all the years I lived in San Francisco—inarguably one the most photogenic cities in the United States—I have so few photos of The City itself. Again and again I used to say, "I really need to grab my camera and just start walking the neighborhoods," but like going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium—something else that kept getting put off "because it'll always be there"—one day I woke up and realized I no longer had the opportunity.
Even though I'd been in San Francisco a couple years when the quilt was unveiled at Moscone Center in December of 1988, I was still semi-insulated from the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, having lost only two friends to the disease: Kent "Red" Kelly (who'd moved from Phoenix to San Francisco in 1979 and remarked shortly before his death in 1987 that, "Six years in San Francisco are better than sixty in Arizona," and Ben Walzer, a dear friend and "neighbor with benefits" from my time in Tucson who passed only a few days after Kent.
But like happened with so many others, the arrival of the horrible 90s changed all that.
I dated this one back in the day—about a year after these photos were taken for his spread in MEN magazine. We even lived together briefly. Very briefly. About three weeks after he moved in with me, he met some floozy at The Midnight Sun and became as smitten with John as I had been with him. He moved out shortly thereafter, and while I ran into him occasionally around town during the months that followed, we never spoke again. When I run across his pictures on the internet like I did here, I wonder whatever ultimately became of him.
He has such a common name that even in our internet-connected age it would be all but impossible to track him down—not that I have any desire to.
And just in case you don't believe me…
These were taken on Mt. Tamalpais shortly after we met and before he moved in and the ensuing drama occurred. I don't remember much about this particular outing other than I was sick as a dog—but wasn't going to let that get in the way of me spending time with him.
Michael Rose, aka "Justin Banks" is just one of several personal Tales of the City…
Ben Walzer
Ken Borg
Harold Gates
Jim Girard
Keith Roseberry
Tom Farrel
Peter Whitman
Chuck Mayer
Richard Gulliver
Scott Woods
Bobby Farina
Brian Lea
Fred Sibinic
Steve McCollom
John Trapp
Philip Ruckdeschel
…for my Dad, because he does pop in here from time to time.
During the 60s and 70s, Hallcraft Homes was one of the biggest homebuilders in the Phoenix metro area. For many of those years, my dad worked as their chief designer. You can't spit in Phoenix without hitting his work, and he's perhaps the most recognized but unknown designer in the city's residential history. Years ago he was questioning what he'd done in his life and I pointed this out to him. "But no one knows they're my designs!"
I responded, "Not now," but who knows what will happen in the future?
Years ago I visited the old neighborhood and happened to strike up a conversation with the then-owner of the house we lived in—a Hallcraft, naturally—when I was in high school and college. He was thrilled to meet the son of the designer and pointed out there was a quite a growing fan-base for that particular model, the "Horizon." (The model was even seen in Raising Arizona.)
I made the mistake of accepting his invitation to come in and take a look at the old homestead. I was surprised that with twenty plus years having passed, much of what I remembered about it was still intact, but the beautiful deck my dad had built out back was gone, as was the swimming pool my parents had installed about a year before I moved out. When people say you can never go home, they mean it.
But I digress…
I found these photos online while searching for pictures of the "Hallcraft Showcase of Homes." Unfortunately, it seems there are no surviving photos—or at least nothing online. I find this kind of unusual, because at the time (the late 1960s) the place was unique in that it provided a single location where buyers could tour all of Hallcraft's current single-family homes and close a deal without having to drive around to each of the far-flung subdivisions. With my budding interest in architecture and design, I always found it to be a bit of a wonderland, especially when discontinued designs were torn down or hauled away and new ones were built in their place. It also must have been a great money-saver for the company, because they only had to decorate a single set of model homes, not dozens. (There were still models to tour in each subdivision, but they weren't decorated.) Sadly, the place was razed in the mid 1970s and like so many other pieces of Phoenix history is now only a fading memory.
Thank you Mr. Bradbury, for taking my gaze outward and upward when I was but a wee young thing. From The Martian Chronicles to The Illustrated Man to Farenheit 451 to I Sing the Body Electric and countless others, you had a profound influence on my life and will not be forgotten.
When you were a kid, was there ever one toy that you wanted with all your heart and soul that Santa never brought you?
With me it was this:
That Christmas I implored the big fat man in the red suit to bring me this thing. Point a colored laser at your target, hold down the trigger and watch the thing disappear:
How cool is that? If only it really worked that way. Of course it wasn't a real laser, and just because your target didn't actually blow up made no difference to the imagination of a nine year old.
The fact that I never got this cool gun is one of those weird little things that stayed with me for years afterward. The fact that my parents absolutely lavished gifts on my sister and I that Christmas—and for many, many subsequent ones—never quite offset the disappointment of not finding a Plazer waiting under the tree.
Until a few weeks ago, I had completely forgotten about the Plazer, but then I stumbled across this site, and it all came rushing back. (And to be honest, rediscovering a hell of a lot of other toys that I did get that I'd completely forgotten about.) Further Googling led me to this—which probably explains why I never got the gun. I'm sure my folks tried it out in the store, discovered it was a piece of crap, and refused to throw away the $8.88 (which was a decent chunk of change back then) on something that didn't work to begin with.
Santa, you're forgiven—and thanks again for all the other amazing stuff you did bring me over the years.
Kent Kelly
Ben Walzer
Ken Cohen
Steve Golden
Dennis Shelpman
Philip Ruckdeschel
Jim Hagen
Peter Whitman
Chuck Krahe
John Trapp
Marty Kamner
Michael Nelson
Jim Nye
Ken Borg
Harold Gates
Jim Girard
Kevin Ohm
Scott Woods
Bobby Farina
Brian Lea
Fred Sibinic
Steve McCollom
Rick King
Tom Farrell
Chuck Mayer
Richard Gulliver
Ron Aiazzi
Keith Roseberry
Grant Neilsen
Ric Hathaway
David Koston
