Phoenix is a Desert for Handloaders?

[pcmacd]

When growing up we used to go to Saguaro lake. Some guys put up a mobile home and a big fountain in the middle of the desert and started selling property. We thought he was nuts. That is now Fountain Hills, a huge community.

Queen Valley was a real estate deal that went belly up several times. Now it is another huge community.

We use to go shooting at Thunderbird park. Now it is dead center in the middle of more housing.

Until the Indians give back the reservations there will always be an open space between Phx and Tucson. But, I bet when it gets to that point there will just be a few more big casinos put in there.


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I worked for Hewlett Packard years ago while living in Orange County, CA. The GM proving grounds near Queen Creak was my customer, and every time I went down that way I would stop into Magma Engineering and pick up some of their blue lube.

I asked the guys there where they went shooting and they told me to follow Ocotillo east towards Rittenhouse. There was this rough country north of the road where everybody used to go blasting.

Nowadays this same place is Crismon Heights or thereabouts. When I move here 5 years ago and made a trip to Magma E, I just could not believe how much the area had changed.

[WRideout]

I am also a California expat, and could never go back. Unfortunately, a great many California residents have moved to other (cheaper) states and brought their habits with them. California is in many ways schizophrenic. It is the land of Gavin Newsome and Jerry Brown, but also Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Arnold "the Guvernator" Schwarzenegger. As is usual in most states, the big voting blocks are in the major metropolitan areas, while the rural parts, with significantly different issues have much less clout.

When I was a kid growing up in Oxnard CA, it was a blue collar town whose primary industry was agriculture and the beet sugar processing plant owned by the Oxnard brothers. Most of the adult men I knew were WWII veterans, and the Korean war was still going on when I was born. Surplus weapons were everywhere. I remember stacks of Springfields, Enfields, and Arisakas stacked like cordwood in bins at Sears. The 45s were kept in the glass cabinets. If you had cried that guns are just for killing, the response might have been "True, what's the point?" It was not until the 1960's that things began to degrade noticeably.

During the 60s as Californians began to amass vast fortunes from high-tech defense industries, high finance, and a real estate boom, luxury became normal, and the citizens became more and more urbanized. Farmers and ranchers who decried the loss of influence by the once powerful Agriculture Industry could not resist the temptation to sell of their precious lands for housing tracts, at millions of dollars profit. Blue collar families found that they could no longer afford housing. Faced with the repeated boom and bust cycles that went on for decades many left California. The working class left for jobs and housing, while the upper class sold homes to finance an estate in a more pleasant environment. Vehicles with Oregon license plates had bumper stickers that said "Don't Californicate Oregon."

When aerospace took a nosedive in the late 1980's, I lost my job at Vandenberg AFB. The company moved me to Oak Ridge Tennessee, where I worked on the nuclear clean up at the original research facility that prepared the atomic bomb. In the late 1990's the Department of Energy pulled the plug on much of the clean up work, and I once again was looking for work. This time I ended up in Pennsylvania, which is definitely swimming against the current. I am beginning to think that I have a gift for finding dying industries.

Now that I live in Butler PA, I am surprised at how much it resembles my home town in Southern California during the 1950's, (except for the weather.) It is a medium-sized town, close to a major urban area, but in the middle of an agricultural region. We do have decent gun stores here, even with the plague of big box stores. Deer hunting is a religion, and the State Game Lands provide public hunting for everyone. There is a general sense of "leave well enough alone," and so far the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has not tried to protect everyone from everything (Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are exceptions.)

When I meet people, I will explain that I am from the State of California, not California PA, and ask that they withhold judgement of me.

Wayne

[firefly1957]

ATFSUX thanks for the update I kind of figured the same One of my classmates (class of 75) moved out near Litchfield said the entire town was brand new! From the way she described it it was where a third grade classmates father owned a cotton gin . He used to tell stories of how all the illegals kids would stay in their house when Immigration came around and the parents "took a vacation " closing the mill for a week or two. Some things (illegals) seem to be the same .

During the big Phoenix lights news stories I saw the surroundings of the LUKE A F B gate where we used to pick grapefruit and grapes was all houses!

I could not understand the big deal about the phoenix light either I remember being blasted out of bed late at night a few times by a F-104 heading to Phoenix as the lights also showed on radar and set off a alert which was very serious during the cold war. Those F-104's where breaking the sound barrier back then and probably fully armed as well . Those alerts seem to be forgotten by everyone ?

Maybe staying in Michigan was not so bad we are losing people so I should be in the stick for years to come!