ARIZONA: THRIVING OASIS Energy Fills the Open Spaces

The region is altogether valueless. After entering it, there is nothing to do but leave. --Report to Congress, 1858

HEADING eastward over the Arizona desert, high-flying transport pilots can pick up the urban glow of Phoenix from 70 miles out, as the city lies like a blue-white solitaire upon limitless black velvet. Though Phoenix expanded its limits from 17.1 square miles in 1950 to its present 110-square-mile area to make room for a tripled population (373,000), it remains no more than a brightly lit patch upon a landscape characterized by vastness.

Today Phoenix is leading Arizona into a boom which, if measured by statistics, skyline and traffic, seems much like the growth pattern that created such major cities as Detroit and sprawling Los Angeles. In fact the boom takes on a difference in quality and character from the backdrop of open land, air and sky that once made up the wildest Old West.

Guns & Water. From the Grand Canyon in the north, where the Colorado River cuts the most spectacular incision anywhere in earth's surface, the Arizona landscape sweeps eastward to the gaudy Painted Desert, takes in the stone trees of Petrified Forest, the cinder mountains piled up by a geological era of active volcanoes. Southward lie the butte-strewn sands where Apache Chief Geronimo waged the last Indian Wars upon whites, the rich, old copper mines producing one-half of U.S. needs, such legendary towns as Tombstone, where Gunslingers Wyatt Earp & Co. built the legends that feed to day's TV. Along the Mexican border, the rambling ranches still raise cattle, which for the first time in 1953 outnumbered the state's people population.

As Phoenix and Tucson (pop. 182,500) reach out into the open spaces with acres of factories, airports, suburbs, housing developments and tourist havens, the open spaces give back an atmosphere that makes this a boom with a difference. Uniquely, the movers and shakers share a sense of self-sufficiency (though they live at the mercy of transcontinental railroads and highways), of well-being (though summer temperatures rise to 120DEG in the shade), of boundless confidence that if the desert can be turned into a thriving oasis nothing in the world is impossible (though they are still pressed by the desert's ancient problem: water).

Cool Monument. It was mastery of the water problem that first made Arizona a place to live instead of a place to leave. In 1867 an Indian fighter named Jack Swilling began to investigate the ruins of some ancient canals (believed to have been built in the loth century by the Hohokam people). Swilling decided to set up an irrigation company, succeeded in starting a new town. One literate resident proposed that they call their town Phoenix because, he said, they would raise there a new civilization upon the ruins of the old. The new civilization did not win a real chance of success until after President Theodore Roosevelt pushed through his Reclamation Act of 1902. His first major project: Roosevelt Dam, northeast of Phoenix, which backed up enough water to support a citrus and truck-garden industry in Phoenix' sundrenched Salt River Valley.

Phoenix cherishes another unique monument to desert progress: the downtown Fox Theater, in 1931 the first building in town to install an air-conditioning system. As mechanical air conditioners became cheaper, they eventually became a necessity for every business, standard equipment in homes. This simple piece of technology, now installed in automobiles, made the desert endurable year round, made the vast reaches of Arizona a promising center for easy living.

Rich & Many. Hungry men tend to start most migrations, but the new westward stream, especially to the resort area just east of Phoenix, was started in the '30s by rich men. Among them: Cleveland Inventor John C. Lincoln, who built the now-famous Camelback Inn on the lower slopes of Camelback Mountain; Chicago Chewing Gum Magnate William Wrigley, who founded the fabulous Arizona Biltmore and started a golf course colony nearby; International Harvester Heir Fowler McCormick, who went a little farther east into Paradise Valley to start what is now the richest winter residential area in the state.

It took World War II, with its influx of dispersed war plants and military bases, to give thousands of non-millionaires an incurable taste for desert living. By some estimates, half of the Army Air Corps pilots trained at Williams and Luke air-bases worked their way back to the Phoenix area after the war. Companies, too, returned. Goodyear Aircraft Corp., which modified patrol bombers there during the war, migrated back to produce missile components. Hughes Aircraft Co. set up Falcon missile production at Tucson. Word of the easy life spread through family and community grapevines. Chicago's Paul V. Galvin, then president of Motorola Inc., cagily realized that Phoenix would be a good place for luring the scientists and engineers needed to pioneer the electronic age's transistor production, founded an industry that is still doubling and redoubling production and employment.

Today, 16 major firms, engaged mainly in electronics, have built plants in the Phoenix area; the state's total manufacturing income rose 12% last year to $550 million. Attracting still more industry is a basic fact of the labor market: the cheaper, easier living lures some 2,500 migrants into Phoenix each month, keeps pay scales 10% to 25% below the average of older industrial areas.

Boom & Build. The tourist trade grew faster than factories. At least 6,000,000 people now tour Arizona each year, inspire gaudier and gaudier strips of motels and roadside restaurants on roads leading out of Tucson and Phoenix. The unchallenged center of tourist trade has risen just across the irrigation ditch from the Paradise Valley area, where the early-bird millionaires first set the style for desert life and leisure. Its name: Scottsdale, which as recently as 1949 was a sleepy farm town of 1,700. It has now become the shopping center for a population of about 50,000. Desperately hanging on to its best tourist lure, Scottsdale bills itself as "The West's Most Western Town," last week held its annual Parada del Sol rodeo. But money has turned Scottsdale into a form of effete West, a place of fabulously expensive watering spots (suites up to $120 a day) and chichi stores such as a custom perfume shop, which composes a unique aroma for each lady customer.

The influx of money and people put new strains on Arizona's business and political leadership. First to rise to the challenge were the bankers. In the late '403, Walter Bimson, then president of Valley National Bank, bet more heavily than any other man upon the state's future, extended credit to a handful of ex-carpenters who proposed to build new homes, motels and office buildings for the new Phoenix. One result: Valley National, which had only 15,000 depositors and $8,000,000 in deposits when Bimson took over in 1933, today has 350,000 depositors (total population: 1.3 million) and $567 million in deposits.

Another result of the openhanded type of leadership was a new crop of young millionaires. Samples: P:David Murdock, 36, ex-riveter who arrived from Michigan in a house trailer in 1947, has since built $30 million worth of commercial buildings. P:John Long, 39, who teamed with Wife Mary to build their first home in 1947, developed methods of year-round construction and prefabrication into the best housing buy (say U.S. building experts) in the U.S. Example: a three-bedroom house with swimming pool for $11,600. Long's Maryvale development in northwest Phoenix now holds 11,000 new homes, a bigger population than Yuma, plus a shopping "city," will soon include a hospital and golf course. P:Lee Ackerman, 39, Missouri-born ex-pilot, who got a cub reporter's job on the Arizona Republic in 1946, started an advertising agency, then an investment company to take advantage of the fantastic boom in land values across the state, now also owns a savings and loan association. Democrat Ackerman intends to run for Governor this year.

The new Arizonans set a dizzy pace in Phoenix' business life. At a cocktail party 14 months ago, Builder Murdock told friends about the 20-story office building he wanted to put up, said idly, "I wish I had a bank in my building." The idea struck, some listener's fancy,, started serious talk, and 30 minutes later the cocktail-party group had pledged $960,000 toward the new bank. Today, the handsome, blue porcelain Guaranty Bank building is just about complete, and the new bank, actually capitalized at an unusually high, $2,750,000, will open with the building next month.

Votes & Hopes. The yeasty growth penetrated Arizona politics, once 3 to 1 registered Democratic (because Arizona's first settlers mostly came from the South). U.S. Senator Carl Hayden, 82, has been in Congress since Arizona became a state in 1912.'Tucson's Stewart Udall, 40, an able liberal Democrat, who benefits from a well-respected political name, preserves his party's label in the part-Mormon Second Congressional District, which encompasses all the state outside Phoenix. But the Democratic grip began to slip in Phoenix in 1949.

Ideological leader of the new Republican group was popular Department Store Owner Barry Goldwater, a 40-year-old in 1949 when he led a Good Government reform slate to take over a rickety Phoenix city government. Three years later he upset Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland in a Senate race, beat him again in 1958. Kansas-born John Rhodes, who learned about Phoenix as a World War II pilot, became in 1952 the first Republican to win an Arizona seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. By 1958, Republican Paul Fannin, backed by such businesslike young Republicans as Dave Murdock, took over the governorship.

The hard-driving young leaders have rushed Phoenix and Arizona into a glittering new era, but they well know that they have not licked all its serious problems. For one thing, the sense of unlim ited expansion space is deceptive: the U.S. and the state government own an amazing 86% of it. In the limited area left, fast and loose land speculators have driven up prices; some desolate North Arizona acres shot up from $150 to $1,000 in the last year.

Such prices might make sense if the state had water enough to turn its acres of desert into residential lots of sunshine. But the Phoenix area alone is already using more water than its reservoirs collect, has to "mine" 1,300,000 acre feet of water annually out of its lowered underground water table. Though the new residential areas use only one-third as much water as the crops they replace, the further spread of homes into the desert will leave a water problem that can be solved only by wresting more of the Colorado River away from California (which also has a water problem) or by man's long-term dream of making fresh water out of the sea.

Making no little plans, Phoenix' movers and shakers count on atomic energy to provide some day the vast power needed to bring salty Pacific seawater fresh into the desert.

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