Want to dive into the collection without exploring full interviews? Here is an ever-growing list of short edits that we are producing for our friends over at Arizona Public Media.
Mixes:
Childhood:
Stella Jacobs spent her middle school years picking cotton in Marana, Arizona while rapidly learning English and attending school in Tucson. This story kicked off our twice-monthly segment of Archive Tucson material on Arizona Public Media.
Eating jackrabbit, killing the car battery by listening to the radio, and riding the rails over the flooded Santa Cruz River to school. In this edited clip from Archive Tucson, Trinidad Padilla tells of growing up in the--now ghost town--of Sasco, Arizona.
Sleeping outside on the back seat of a car, living on beans, and floating across the flooded desert in a mortar box—Ben Witt recalls childhood in a household of dust bowl refugees in the thinly-populated Amphi Neighborhood during the 1940s.
What was it like to grow up in an interracial, Chinese-Mexican family during the 1950s and 1960s? Lucy Estella Lim talks about identity, culture, growing up in a family-owned market, and... fisticuffs.
Cass Preston describes growing up in Tucson during the 1930s and 1940s, experiencing segregation, and playing music with his dad's band on Meyer Avenue.
Tallia Cahoon grew up in the lead and zinc mining town of Ruby, Arizona during the Great Depression. Though Ruby is a ghost town today, Tallia makes it come to life with this sketch of the people, pastimes, and knife-fights of one of Arizona’s last company towns.
Hiking across the Tucson Mountains, creepy taxidermy, and other anecdotes about a Tucson that is almost unimaginably small. Georgiana Boyer shares a few stories of her childhood during the 1930s and 1940s.
Barrio El Hoyo was the childhood neighborhood of Armando Campos until, in 1968, the City of Tucson forced his family to sell their home and way for the Tucson Community Center parking lot.
Alas, poor Pepe the Chicken! Romelia Sacina remembers childhood in Barrio Viejo during the 1940s and growing too fond of the chickens her mother kept in the back yard.
La Placita was, for many, the heart of downtown Tucson before Urban Renewal. Barbara Lewis describes her childhood there in the 1950s.
Olga Leon describes her childhood in downtown Tucson during the Great Depression.
Pool halls, cruising The Circle, and unintentionally walking into a nudist colony. Pedro Gonzalez takes us into a teenage life in the early 1970s.
Housing and Neighborhood:
Joel Turner describes the interactions, positive and negative, he experienced upon moving into a white neighborhood in midtown Tucson in the 1960s.
In the 1940s, Stanley Feldman’s family was asked to remove their name from their mailbox to discourage other “non-Christians” from moving into the deed-restricted Colonia Solana neighborhood.
Alva Torres describes the efforts to preserve La Placita during Urban Renewal in the 1960s and 1970s.
The construction of Interstate-10 erased many houses in Barrio Kroeger Lane and left the childhood home of Lydia Otero weirdly isolated next to the interstate’s Frontage Road. For another perspective, Cecilia Ybarra describes growing up in the neighborhood in the decades before the Interstate.
From 1968 to 1971, residents of Tucson’s west side campaigned for a neighborhood park near Barrio Hollywood. Perhaps the most iconic moment of this campaign was the occupation of the El Rio Golf Course in the summer of 1970, described here by Salomon Baldenegro.
Richard Davis describes the South Park neighborhood in the 1960s and the creation of LIFTS (Low Income Free Transportation Service, later SunVan).
Work:
In 1981, Yolanda Herrera became the first female delivery driver at United Parcel Service in Tucson, but some of her colleagues were not excited to have a woman in the workplace.
Howard Weiss recalls his stint as an officer of a Titan II missile crew in the late 1960s.
Anita Sueme describes her choice between careers in microbiology and policing during the 1970s and 1980s.
Dr. Christian Bime describes receiving the first COVID patient at Banner University Medical Center in the spring of 2020.
Jon Miles describes searching for Father Kino’s (questionably real) cache of silver in 1961.
Barbara Elfbrandt describes being one of the few women to enroll in the University of Arizona Law School in the late 1960s.
Midcentury Life:
Alex Jacome describes a classic world of drive-ins and street races in 1950s Tucson.
Charles Kendrick Charles Kendrick describes how people migrated from the South during the 1950s and 1960s.
Frances Walker describes studying civil engineering in the late 1940s, the employment prospects for female engineers, and tastefully vandalizing pin-up calendars at the Arizona Highway Department.
Peter Ronstadt describes his childhood at the family hardware store and shares some memories of downtown’s seedier side from the 1940s to 1960s.
Aureleo Rosano shares memories of Miracle Mile and Tucson House in the early 1960s.
First Impressions of Tucson:
University of Arizona basketball legend, former New Jersey Nets player, and longtime accountant Bob Elliott describes moving to Tucson in 1972 and finding a community very different from his home in Michigan.
Homebuilder John Wesley Miller talks about moving to Tucson in 1948 and how the city’s postwar housing shortage left his family living in a converted chicken house.
COVID-19 in Tucson:
Dominique Hamilton, an RN at St. Mary’s Hospital, describes conversations about vaccines with COVID patients in the intensive care unit.
Dr. Rom Rahimian, an emergency room resident at Banner University Medical Center, describes how the aftershocks of COVID continue to affect the hospital, even as COVID patient numbers have declined.