EDITOR'S LETTER

editor's LETTER I was hoping this would happen.

I hope for it every time we publish an old photograph. With our February issue, it's happened a few times. The first letter came from Judy Wolkins, a longtime subscriber who lives in Payson, Arizona.

"While reading the new issue," she wrote, "I was delighted to see the old photographs of Phoenix in Every Picture Tells a Story.

"As an 80-year-old native of the city, I recognized so many places from my early years. I remember riding the trolley downtown with my mother when I was young. But the biggest thrill for me was when I spotted my father, Merton Daniel, on page 39. My dad played in orchestras and dance bands all over Arizona from the late 1930s until he passed away in 1993. He's the man in the fedora, holding the clarinet. Thank you for allowing me to see him again in the role in which I will always remember him."

I haven't yet had a chance to call Ms. Wolkins, but I intend to. I did, however, have a long conversation with Joyce Campbell Wing, a spirited matriarch who lives in Santa Ana, California. Talking to her was a delight for me as editor, something I'll always remember with a smile. I called Ms. Wing on a Thursday morning at 10:30 a.m. She said hello. I said hello. And then she started telling me her story, as if I'd put a quarter in a jukebox. It was a Q&A without many Q's.

Monroe School. Our church was right across the street from Monroe, and every day we'd go to church after school for seminary, which was a religious class where we'd learn about the Bible."

We talked about church, and then I asked her what it was like to be a freshman in Phoenix in the 1940s. "On Saturday mornings," she said, "my mother would drop us off for movies at the Orpheum Theatre. One day, she dropped us off and the price had gone up from 10 cents to 12 cents. We didn't have enough money to get in, so we wandered around downtown until we ended up at the Rialto Theatre, which was on Washington Street. The movies there were still 10 cents."

Later, after she learned to drive, she and her friends would go to the Cinema Park Drive-In on Missouri and Seventh Street. "I can remember it was so hot that we'd sit on the front of the car with a blanket we couldn't stay inside." Nevertheless, there were times when form would reign over function. "I remember my girlfriends and I would want to make everyone notice anything interesting about this photo?" And she says, 'Oh my gosh, Mom, is that you? It is you!' I've had the best time with it."

I could tell. She was giggling like the proverbial schoolgirl who'd just told her friends she'd kissed a boy. "It sounds like I'm boisterous and silly," she said, "but I'm not. It's just so hysterical that I would open up the magazine and see myself. I've been calling all of my friends and relatives, and they're trying to guess which one is me."

Turns out, she's the young woman with the dark hair, closest to the 7UP sign. "I'm in the back, with the light skirt," she said. "When we were freshmen, we had to wear either a dark skirt or a light skirt. And it looks like I'm wearing a blouse. And, of course, anybody who was anybody wore saddle shoes in those days."

When we were selecting images for that portfolio, we figured the girls had gone to the Nifty Nook on their lunch hour the lure of 10-cent malts and hamburgers with Vita-Buns must have been powerful. But we were wrong.

"That group of girls in the photograph... we all went to Phoenix Union High School," she said. "We were walking near the I think we were rich, so we'd drive around with the windows rolled up, as if we had air conditioning. It's a wonder we didn't fry our brains out."

I don't know about the other young women on page 28, but I can tell you that Joyce Campbell Wing did not fry her brain. Not a bit. Like a Ken Burns documentary, she recounted in vivid detail what it was like to be a high school student here in the 1940s: the complex set of dress codes at Phoenix Union, the teacher with the red hair who would sit cross-legged on her desk, the places she'd pass when walking to her home on Culver Street after studying the Old Testament at seminary ... thank you, Joyce, for sharing your wonderful story. I was hoping to hear from you.