(funky music) - For over the past 60 years, Arizona PBS has told incredible stories of Arizona's distinctive people, beautiful landscapes, and treasured history.

Now re-live those memories we've pulled from the vault.

Hello, I'm Alberto Rios.

It was a decade of explosive growth from developers carving new towns out of the desert, to director Alfred Hitchcock setting his sights on Phoenix for a horror classic.

Walk back in time to when Arizona began to make its mark on the map in... Arizona Memories From The 60s.

(dramatic music) - [Pat] In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock sent a film crew to Phoenix to shoot the opening scenes of Psycho, which immortalized the city skyline in all its low profile splendor.

In the movie, Janet Lee works where the money was in 1960's Phoenix, a real estate office.

- Hey, you girls oughta get your boss to air condition you up.

He can afford it today.

- There's money, all right.

And she's tempted to steal it.

Of course, this is fiction.

A real Arizonan would've gotten richer by investing in Paradise Valley.

Janet Lee's character drives through the intersection of Central and Washington, then, as now, the center of Phoenix, where anything can happen.

And just like Alfred Hitchcock, hey, I'm in my own show.

Hi, I'm Pat McMahon.

And welcome to Arizona Memories From The 1960s.

(groovy music) ♪ Come on, baby ♪ Let's do the twist - [Pat] In the Valley of the Sun, it was a time of change and a time of contrast.

♪ Let's do the twist - [Pat] Big money crossed paths with youthful innocence, and what people remember most fondly was the innocence.

- And really, it was just kind of a big, green irrigated valley, full of groves.

Olive groves, orange groves.

You know, we used to pick oranges off of trees on our way to school every day, and tangerines.

And I mean, we had more vitamin C than anybody else in the country, I think.

- We'd hunt rabbits out and around the Wrigley Mansion at the Biltmore.

That was a big thing to do.

We'd go out, first when we were little kids, we'd hunt 'em with bows and arrows, and never get close.

- [Presenter] There's a couple of riders, really decked out, real Western.

- We lived for the parade, and the fair.

It was Western Week, you got to wear Western clothes all week long.

That was exciting, you know?

I got to wear pants.

But if you were downtown and you were caught in regular work clothes, not in Western attire, they'd put you in a little jail, a makeshift jail, and then your friends would have to bail you out.

- When we had relatives visit here when we were kids, they'd say they were coming to a hick town.

- It was definitely a slower pace of a lifestyle.

And most definitely a smaller town feeling, if you will.

- We choose to go to the moon!

- [Pat] The '60s began with a new president, and a new spirit.

The youthful, sun-tanned John F. Kennedy was a perfect fit with America's optimistic outlook.

- We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

- [Pat] America had emerged from World War II with surging prosperity.

People felt free to search for a better life.

Veterans who had been stationed at the Sun Belt now moved their young families to these sunny climates.

And no other part of the Sun Belt could quite compete with the mystique of the West.

(lighthearted music) (horse whinnies) Old West, new West.

It all blended in the public imagination as a land of possibility, where a person was free to be who he wanted to be.

The rising star of the West was Phoenix.

No longer a quiet farming community, the city reached half a million residents by the early '60s.

Families migrated from California, Texas, and the Midwest, and not just for the climate.

- Get away from the steel mills.

You know?

I mean, life was hectic back there, and people never left home.

Generation after generations stayed right there, son, father, grandfather, everyone worked at the same job.

And this was, you know, again... "Go West, young man."

- Time Magazine, Newsweek, business magazines, everything said this was the place where a guy could go and make it.

- And one of the reasons why people moved here was to get away.

It was not only to find jobs and opportunity, but to get away from the crowded, hustling bustling nature of urban areas on the east coast, and in urban areas in the south.

And when they moved to Phoenix, they erected walls, and they wanted to sort of have some time alone under this big western sky.

- What benefits Arizona benefits Phoenix.

And what benefits Phoenix benefits Arizona.

- Growth.

It was all about growth.

That had been defined years earlier, frankly, by the city fathers.

Anything they could do to help further growth, to fuel growth, was really a matter of city policy.

- I think we were trying to build a great community.

We wanted a good economic base, want a good government, wanted a clean place to live, and basically believe in the free enterprise system.

If you don't grow, you sometimes die, and a lot of cities have gone through that.

(upbeat music) - [Pat] Phoenix used every legal loophole to annex huge tracks of land.

In 1960 alone, the city swallowed 75 square miles in one bite.

- And they gave great breaks.

I mean, tremendous breaks.

Especially the industry.

To get a Honeywell to come into town, or Motorola to expand and so forth, they would annex these large areas of open space.

And they say, "Okay, we'll put in the large sewer piping and other such things, and we'll give you tax breaks if you'll develop in these areas."

Well, as soon as it was known that a Honeywell or a Motorola was gonna go in there, then the housing developers would say, "Great place to build housing!"

- [Pat] Annexation benefited Phoenix by keeping money in the city, and broadening the tax base.

But the annexation tactics outraged communities like Scottsdale, which took the city to court, only to face the Phoenix special council, Dow Ben Roush.

- He had a string during that period of time, of over 20 cases, he won 'em all.

And the city won them all, frankly.

And so he was very proud of that for many years.

- [Pat] The city annexed another 35 square miles by the end of the decade.

- Really, it seems like, the only way that we could have fueled all of this growth was with more growth.

And how does this all work?

I don't understand.

It seems like it's all built on error, but it's never stopped.

Phoenix has had some down times.

The S&L crisis in the '80s and so forth, but it has been one sustained boom since the mid '50s to the present.

And the '60s were absolutely the biggest boom of all.

- [Pat] Leapfrogging from one annexation to the next left residents living in a bewildering mix of houses, farms, and desert.

- And I was always amazed with how the country and the city just was intertwined.

You were in a cotton field one minute, and in a department store the next.

- [Pat] The city was dominated by a handful of powerful individuals, like attorney Frank Snell, and banker Walter Bimson.

Men who could make things happen with handshake deals.

Carl Eller was just a 30 year old newcomer when he decided to go into business for himself, with an outdoor advertising company.

All he needed was $5 million.

- And I remember going to the Valley Bank, and going to see Walter Bimson, who was the chairman of the bank.

And I remember showing him my projections and my business plan and everything, and he looked at me and he said, "You know, I think you're gonna go a long way, son."

And shook my hand, and that was the deal.

- [Pat] In the age before blow dryers were invented, big hair had additional challenges.

- Okay, so we'd wash our hair and put our hair in these gigantic rollers, and go out for the day on a Saturday.

We'd usually go to Christown and hang out, waiting for our hair to dry so we could go out that night.

I thought, oh, brother.

We must've looked like, you know, total idiots, and the big, huge rollers, like tin cans, you know?

And then these scarves around our head.

(intense band music) - [Pat] For thousands of Valley residents, Saturday night meant just one thing.

Football.

- ASU is the place to be on a Saturday.

- Yeah.

Sun Devil football.

What else is there?

That was just awesome.

- [Pat] Arizona State played its first season as a university in 1959.

And the team leaped to prominence in the '60s under coach Frank Kush.

- The fans here, to me, were fantastic.

You know, we came up from old Goodwin Stadium, came up to Sun Devil Stadium, and it was about 30,000.

They were all sellouts.

And the great thing about it, we were the only act in town.

- And when you played one of Frank Kush's teams, you knew you were in a game, you know?

They left nothing off the field.

They took it there, they brought the whole thing.

And they were exciting games to watch.

(people cheering) - And of course, just like anything else, you gotta win.

- [Pat] The growing university provided culture in the desert, both in the classroom and on television.

- [Presenter] This is Channel 8.

Arizona's newest educational television station.

(man speaks in Spanish) - [Pat] KAET went on the air in 1961.

- For instance, you can see on the board.

- [Pat] Serving up educational programming in glorious black and white.

- [Man] A patient at the present time costs $5 per day per patient.

- Now Mr. Longstraff, could you tell us, basically, what is the difference between stocks and bonds?

- Until tomorrow evening then, goodnight from sociology.

(lighthearted music) - [Pat] ASU also connected with America's most esteemed and controversial architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who had established his Taliesin West studios north of Scottsdale in the 1930s.

The personal relationship between Wright and ASU president Grady Gammage led to the design of a performing arts auditorium that bears the Gammage name.

- You know, people talk about Gammage as being acoustically excellent and so forth and so on, but, well, like anything that he touched, it has a magnetism which is quite special, and it translates across international boundaries.

- [Pat] In fact, the design was truly international.

It was based on Wright's earlier design for an opera house in Baghdad, Iraq.

- And how bizarre it had seemed to everybody.

There was a lot of concern, that was pretty extreme.

(dramatic piano music) There was a lot of comment in the paper about this very strange building, and why did it have to be so weird, and it didn't fit anything else on the campus.

- [Pat] But as the premier music auditorium in the Valley, it stood out as a landmark commitment to the arts.

- [Jean] Can you imagine the campus without it?

You can't.

- [Vernon] He was a magician, you know.

I mean, he managed to make things happen that aren't exactly explainable by methods and materials.

- [Pat] Local developer Del Webb was among Arizona's foremost builders, with a resume that included office towers, the Pink Flamingo Motel in Las Vegas, and Minuteman Missile silos.

But his real fame in the '60s came from turning a 10,000 acre cotton field into Sun City.

No other developer had exploited the housing market for retirees with a development as large as this.

And no one was sure it would work.

- One of the the problems that we knew we were gonna run into was to try to get an elderly person to leave a city where they had lived for all their lives.

But we thought if we could develop it on such a scale that when they came out, saw what they were going to get, the weather, everything else, why they would make that move.

- [Pat] So the company conceived of an affordable community segregated by age.

It was orderly and spotless.

Near a city yet insulated from urban problems, with ample opportunities for recreation and socializing.

People didn't just buy a house, they bought a way of life.

Then the company took the modern tactic of sending a marketing researcher to Florida to survey retirees.

- And when he came back, he said one of the biggest problems that he ran into was that the people were unhappy because the developer either didn't do what he said he was gonna do, or he did it on a much smaller basis.

So we decided if we were gonna get into a Sun City or a retirement community, the best thing for us to do was to put all of the amenities in ahead of time.

- [Pat] The company poured money into building a golf course, shopping center, rec center and restaurant.

And spent even more on national publicity.

A film produced in the early '60s reveals the marketing strategy, which portrayed retirement as a dull, lonely existence, with senior citizens plagued by rowdy neighborhood kids.

- [Kid] It broke!

(unnerving music) - [Ben] So this is retirement.

Time on your hands, with no place to go.

There must be something else.

- Ben, let's go West.

I know!

Let's go to Arizona.

- [Ben] I wondered if she felt all right.

Arizona of all places, why not Timbuktu?

- [Pat] But he has a change of heart, and heads out to Phoenix.

Not surprisingly, the characters discover that Sun City is a haven from winter, boredom, and urban problems.

- [Ben] This was one of the fullest, most rewarding days I've had in months.

And for the first time in months, I was looking forward to tomorrow.

- [Pat] But back on opening day, January 1st, 1960, no one really knew how fast those lots would sell.

- We wondered whether anybody was gonna come, and we got out there early, and then we heard that there was a traffic jam from a 107th Avenue almost all the way back to Peoria.

So, I called secretaries as best I could in the Webb company, and also executives, and I got receipt books from Safeway, and I passed them out to the executives and secretaries.

And I said, "Just get a lot number and $500, and the people's name and address, and we'll call 'em later."

So that's how we did.

- [Pat] Sun City became an immediate success.

And most residents loved living there.

- Del Webb put a new twist on it, made it almost sexy to be elderly, white, and segregated.

But I think in terms of the growth of the Northwest Valley, and the growth of an idea as Arizona as a retirement center rivaling California and Florida, it was the work of pure genius.

(grand music) - [Pat] Scottsdale entered the '60s by way of the 1880s, polishing its fictional image as the West's most Western town.

Horse loving residents enjoyed the motif almost as much as the tourists.

The arts and crafts galleries helped bring about the rebirth of cowboy art.

But the city fathers had a larger vision of Scottsdale as an upscale resort community.

They made the West look hip.

It was a winning formula, and Scottsdale became Phoenix's biggest competitor for growth.

Arizonans began to make the national scene.

In 1965, Vonda Kay Van Dyke was crowned Miss America, proving that Arizonans could look good in a tiara.

- I'm competing for Miss America.

What are you gonna do for talent?

(crowd laughs) - Vonda Kay Van Dyke was a big deal.

We used to drive by and say, "That's Vonda Kay Van Dyke's house."

You know, that's where she has her hair done, that's where her dog is groomed.

I mean, it was like she was this role model, that look, you know, we can compete, we can be on that level.

- [Pat] Arizonan Frank Borman was named to the elite group of Gemini astronauts.

Stewart Udall, the son of a prominent Mormon family, joined the Kennedy administration as Secretary of the Interior.

And the national spotlight burned brightest when Senator Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964.

Although he lost to Lyndon Johnson, his campaign magnified Arizona's image.

- It put us on the map.

I've got friends that are from Texas and they always say, "You know, back when Barry ran for president, that's when they realized that Arizona was what Texas wanted to be."

There was this independence here, there was this Wild West kind of legacy, but there was also civilization and a calmness, I think, to people who were in this state.

(film reel clicks) - [Pat] There seemed to be only one limit to growth.

And that was water.

Without water, the future was frightening.

- [Presenter] No cotton, no citrus or cattle.

No Phoenix.

No miracle in the desert if it weren't for water.

- [Pat] So the Central Arizona Project, or CAP, was conceived to provide an endless supply of water.

- The dream of putting water in Central Arizona goes back to the territorial period.

Water is life.

That's a cliche, it could be hacky, but if we don't have Central Arizona Project water, or the very idea of Central Arizona Project water coming into Arizona, what companies are gonna relocate here?

What semiconductor plants would relocate here if you don't have water, and cheap federal water.

- [Pat] The Central Arizona Project was an engineering marvel with a hefty price tag.

$6 billion.

It was a project so big, it was the culmination of Arizona senator Carl Hayden's 50 years in Congress.

- And it's bipartisan.

It really is a bipartisan issue.

Water isn't Republican, it isn't Democrat, it's green.

It's money, and it's jobs.

- [Pat] The irony was that Arizonans with their tradition of rugged individualism were traditionally opposed to accepting federal handouts.

- Well, this state wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the federal government.

It started out as a territorial, and when it developed, you know, between the Army and everything else.

It always used to amuse me to hear them say, "Don't send that money back to Washington, it's wrong.

Rugged individualism, we did it all by themselves."

But there isn't a damn thing in the state of Arizona that hadn't been helped by the federal government.

I don't care whether it's highways, you know, water power, you name it, the federal government's been a part of it.

- [Pat] However you slice the pie, Phoenix in the mid '60s was bursting with success.

- I can remember when the signs were changed from 500,000 to 800,000, and we were all just appalled.

"Where is it going to end?

How much bigger could it possibly get?"

(woman laughs) - [Astronaut] Ignition.

- [Pat] In 1965, Frank Borman was hurled into space.

- [Man] We're on our way, Frank.

(calming music) - [Pat] Borman looked down at Arizona, the place he called home.

Easy to spot because of the Colorado River, the state looked big and full of opportunity.

Back on Earth, Valley boosters were thinking big was never big enough.

The Valley was due for greater changes.

(upbeat music) By the mid '60s, Phoenix could rightly call itself a major city.

It had the population, it had the wealth, and it had a Playboy Club.

(groovy music) - The Playboy Club, when it opened, was a really big event in town.

This was big city stuff coming to Phoenix, and we were really quite impressed that we were grown up enough to have this in our city.

I remember seeing the girls with their bunny suits, and their little tails, and, you know, it was kind of showbiz.

- Most of 'em were from Phoenix.

Remember one specifically was a graduate of Arizona State.

Had others who were students here at ASU.

It was pretty good as a single guy managing the Phoenix Playboy Club.

You know, it was a lot of fun.

I had a lot of fun with that.

- And so everybody was kind of enamored of it for a while.

Didn't stay very long, but...

It had quite an impact when it arrived.

- [Pat] Kids on the other hand had a limited choice of entertainment in the '60s.

- We played outside a lot.

That was it.

I mean, we didn't do a lot in the house.

There wasn't really anything on TV.

We just played outside.

- [Annette] Airport, that was the other thing to do.

Go and watch planes land and take off.

We did that a lot.

- [Pat] But life perked up when Legend City opened across the street from Papago Park.

- It was like taking a very long drive from Tent Street in Camelback to Legend City.

It was like going to California.

Truly, we took water.

I mean, it was... (Annette laughs) It was a long drive, but it was a great place to go.

It was a lot of fun.

It was like our Disneyland.

Didn't last, unfortunately.

It went away.

- [Pat] Legend City's neighbor was the new Phoenix Zoo.

True to the independent spirit of Arizonans, it was one of the few major zoos in the country funded without federal dollars.

The idea came from local philanthropist, Bob Maytag.

To bring in donations, he and his supporters in Phoenix society would go anywhere to publicize the zoo.

- It would be a disaster in terms of federal regulations today, but they took animals from the zoo all over the Valley.

- [Pat] Donations flowed in.

And in its opening week in November 1962, the zoo hosted 35,000 visitors.

(playful music) (animal screeches) The gorillas were a favorite attraction, and became a national news story when Hazel's mate Mongo died of Valley fever in 1969.

- The assumption was that she was in grief and pining away for her boyfriend.

- [Pat] National press coverage helped find a mate in Baltimore, but the zoo didn't have the money to transport the gorilla, now called Baltimore Jack, to Phoenix.

- In Chicago, Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner heard about it, and came forward with an offer to allow us to use his bunny plane to do the deed.

The bunny plane arrives at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport with an appropriate number of bunnies, and one very carefully sedated Baltimore Jack.

- It was deemed appropriate that I go out there and take some of the bunnies out in their promotional costumes and greet the animal when he got off the plane.

But to greet a gorilla just really wasn't something that I had the lifelong ambition to do.

It didn't fit my image.

You know, I didn't think it fit my image at all.

- [Pat] Hazel and Baltimore Jack settled into their home together, but romance never blossomed.

(monkey screeches) - For one thing, Hazel didn't much care for Baltimore Jack.

When Baltimore Jack himself died a few years later, we learned from the autopsy that there really was no chance of reproduction in the first place.

We found out he was sterile.

(upbeat country music) - [Pat] The Old West lived on in one respect.

Rodeos were big events in the '60s, with a rodeo circuit just for teens.

- Arizona's Junior Rodeo Association, I started in like '67 or '68.

I was about 14.

I started riding bulls.

Started falling off of bulls.

It's real bumpy and blurry, and then all of a sudden, the wind's knocked out of you, and you've got dirt in your mouth.

And you stand up and you go, "Hey, did I do it?"

I mean, we did it for girls.

The only reason we ever crawled on bulls was because the girls would be impressed by that.

- [Pat] With cheap land under development in every direction, where were the freeways?

After the first was completed in 1960, all seven miles of it, Phoenix became the city of missing freeways for the remainder of the decade.

Yet there was no hiding the fact that this was a car culture, and the classic cars of the '60s could be found roaring up South Mountain on the weekend hill climbs.

♪ Round, round, get around, I get around ♪ ♪ Yeah, get around, round, round, I get around ♪ ♪ I get around ♪ Get around, round, round, I get around ♪ ♪ Get around, round, round, I get around ♪ ♪ Get around, round, round - [Pat] But on weekend nights, if you were a teenager, you knew the place to be.

- Cruising was probably the number one activity of anybody, especially if you had a nice vehicle.

And Central Avenue was the closest place to cruise.

- This was a big deal.

I mean, everybody, whether you were from the east side high schools like Arcadia or Camelback, or the west side high schools, where you met on Friday night was cruising Central.

- Started at Camelback, and you turned around at McDowell at the library.

- Told my mother we were going to the library, and well, we turned around there and came back to North and Central.

- And then you would go just north of Camelback Road, and make a U-turn at the next street.

- You can show off your car, and then turn around and drive back down.

- And then go south to McDowell, turn around in the library parking lot, go back north, just back and forth.

- And that was it.

I mean, you didn't deviate.

You didn't go any farther south than McDowell, you didn't go any farther north than Bethany Home.

- And you could do that for three or four hours.

- I think it was more parking than cruising.

- And you'd just sit there and you'd park, and you'd watch people go back and forth and back and forth.

And I don't think you're putting more than three miles on your car that night.

- We finally got cars when we were on our senior year.

So we all had '60s muscle cars, and we would drive down cruising Central.

- [Host] If you're out there cruising Central on the program then can I get a howdy!

- [Woman] KRUX.

- [Presenter] Yes, Tuesday, November 7th is Pepsi's Family Day At The Pier.

- KRIZ and KRUX.

That was it.

It was the top 40 on KRIZ, the top 40 on KRUX.

And you were either a KRIZ guy or a KRUX guy.

You couldn't be both.

- If you listen to KRUX, there was something genetically wrong with you.

You know, KRIZ was the only station.

And then six months later, all of a sudden, KRUX was the only station.

You could tell if a kid was your friend or not by, you know, not what political party do you belong to, it was did you listen to KRIZ or KRUX?

Which is it?

Are you a KRIZ guy or a KRUX guy?

- And you would also get in the car with other people.

Boys you didn't even know.

But if they had a great car, you know, and you'd been seeing that car for three or four weeks, yeah, and it was just very safe.

- I still take my kids on Central, but it's not the same.

(Annette laughs) They go, "Mommy, I don't understand why you did this."

(Annette laughs) - [Pat] With the economy booming, people went looking for new places to shop, and developers were happy to oblige.

- And then they built the first outdoor mall, which was Park Central Mall.

And then after that Christown Mall with air conditioning came in, and we were there.

We never left Christown after they were built.

We had evap coolers in our house, and when we were hot, we'd go hang out at the mall.

It was a lot cooler.

- [Pat] Christown was the biggest air conditioned mall in the nation.

A risky development that, once again, paid off for Del Webb.

It was only one of many malls that circled the city, spelling doom for Downtown Phoenix.

(lighthearted music) In the early '60s, downtown had still been the place to go.

- A lot of your businesses and everything were centrally located right in that area, because there were no suburbs.

Everybody went downtown.

- [Pat] Armando Chavez witnessed the changes in Downtown Phoenix from his father's barber shop on Washington Street.

- A barbershop was a place where everybody in town would show up.

Everybody knew everybody.

And so you might be talking to the guy who's gonna be the next governor of the state, or the mayor of the town, or one of the councilmen, or the chief of police.

But yet it's on a first name basis.

And they know you, they know your family, they know the whole neighborhood.

- [Pat] The social fabric began to unravel as larger businesses moved to the suburbs.

- And that's when you started to see a turn to the blight, and to all the problems that they had, and all the drugs and all the bad stuff.

That publicity was given to downtown in the late '60s, early '70s.

- Downtown died in the '60s.

I mean, it just went poof.

It was sometime in the mid '60s when these guys turned around, woke up, looked at it and said... "We don't have a city here any longer.

We've got a huge metropolitan area, but we don't have a city core."

(film reel clicks) - [Pat] Although whites looked on Phoenix as a Western city, the more than 20,000 Black residents viewed it as a Southern city.

The discrepancy should not have been surprising, given the very separate lives of black and white residents.

Kay Butler worked as a ticket seller at the Palms Theater.

- That was the first theater that was built without a balcony, because desegregation had changed things, and Black people were no longer required to sit in the balcony.

And so the Palms Theater had just one floor, some loge seats.

The first time I had some Black people ask me about that at the box office, they said, "Do you have a balcony?"

And I said, "No, but we have very nice loge seats."

And they were disheartened because they thought they couldn't come to the movie.

"You don't have the balcony?

Where can we sit?"

- [Pat] Black residents all too often faced high unemployment, poor housing and poor education.

Civil rights demonstrations were one tool for change.

Another strategy was used by local activists Lincoln Ragsdale and George Brooks, who targeted business leaders with private meetings.

- So they went to these individuals, leaders of what is now Bank One of Arizona.

Leaders of Motorola, Sperry Rand, General Electric.

And they said, "Listen, you need to open up your companies, or this is gonna happen.

We have these protests ready."

And the last thing you want are hordes of angry Blacks marching through the streets of this desert or oasis, demonstrating to people that in actuality, the Valley of the Sun isn't so bright for everybody that lives here.

And the leader of the bank capitulated eventually, because he didn't want this sort of attention.

But the inside joke between Ragsdale and Brooks is, "Where are we gonna get 500 African Americans to come march on this bank?"

- [Pat] Change was happening, but at a glacial pace.

People in the poorest part of South Phoenix felt no improvement.

- The issue is economics.

And the issue of police brutality was a very powerful issue within the African American communities.

So the cauldron of all these sort of feelings was about to bubble over, and it did bubble over on the 25th of July, 1967.

(siren blares) - [Pat] Rioting broke out, with fires and looting.

The mayor imposed a curfew, and hundreds were arrested.

- In most instances, those who pled guilty were fined $300 or were given 30 days in jail.

The men all were given 30 days in jail.

These may be rather stiff sentences, but these are rather extreme times.

We're going to have law and order, that's all there is to it.

- [Pat] The riots were minor compared to what had taken place in other cities that summer, but they shocked Phoenix, The local news media groped for a way to explain it.

- [Man] Now, what does the Burt Society feel is necessary to be done to solve this program?

- The first thing is to get the communist out of the so-called civil rights movement.

We're not going to solve our problems destroying lives and property.

Then the American people both Black and white can sit down together, isolate these problems, analyze them, and begin to solve them.

- [Pat] The mayor promised more job training and jobs, and better relations between police and minorities.

City leaders faced the need to deal with the racial divide, and quickly repaired the city's national image.

(lighthearted music) All those newcomers began to have an effect on the political landscape.

Although a Democratic stronghold since territorial days, Arizona was ready for a sharp turn to the right.

- Arizona's always had a very special place in my heart.

- [Pat] The change was signaled by the 1962 election year.

Democratic senator Carl Hayden had spent 50 years in Washington representing the state, and he seemed to have little to fear for reelection.

- And in those days for Arizona, the big issues were not philosophical.

The big issues were development, and the Central Arizona Project was the big issue.

And Carl Hayden was the father of the Central Arizona Project, and he had the seniority and the clout in the U.S. Senate to get it done.

- [Pat] But he wasn't well known to new voters.

Hayden needed a jolt of publicity, so his campaign manager, Roy Elson, wrangled a rare presidential visit to Phoenix.

The crowning event was a bipartisan dinner in honor of Hayden.

- And it was just incredible.

The coverage that it got him overnight, everyone in the state of Arizona knew who Carl Hayden was.

- There watching all of this, this bipartisan event, is a young, maverick state senator named Evan Mecham, who has just been elected.

And he doesn't go along with the rest of his colleagues.

He says, "What Republicans are supporting, the tax and spend Liberal Carl Hayden.

He's for big government.

He's for taking away our individual rights.

Someone has to do something about this."

- [Pat] Mecham decided he was the man.

Running on an ultra conservative platform, he played on the voter's fears of high taxes, one world government, and communist takeover.

- He is a soldier.

He is an anti-communist soldier, and that's a big part of his '62 campaign.

And it really hits home.

- I took it seriously, though a lot of people didn't, they thought he was a sort of a flake in a way.

- [Pat] The Hayden campaign played on the fear that if Senator Hayden wasn't reelected, Arizona would dry up and blow away from lack of water.

And in the end, Hayden won reelection.

But with 45% of the vote, Evan Mecham's strong showing anticipated what was to come.

- The 1962 anti communist, get government out of my pocket, all of that hits home, and you soon see a Republican governor, Jack Williams.

And more Republicans.

And pretty soon, from the 1970s, people think of Arizona as a Republican state.

(mysterious music) - [Pat] Strange things were happening out in the desert.

No less fantastic was the vision of developing towns as theme parks.

The McCulloch Corporation built Fountain Hills, which outdid Lake Geneva in Switzerland with the world's highest fountain.

To guarantee that it would always remain the world's highest, the company installed an extra pump, just in case.

Then came Lake Havasu City, with a fabricated English theme, but a very real London Bridge.

The developer, Bob McCulloch soon made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, as owner of both the world's tallest fountain and the world's biggest antique, the London Bridge.

Closer to Phoenix, Paradise Valley was incorporated as the area's most exclusive community.

Developers had finally achieved the epitome of suburban living.

The desert offered a very different opportunity to the space program.

NASA decided that Meteor Crater was the best place on earth to train for the moon landings.

So, Frank Borman returned to Arizona with the Apollo astronauts.

It was a time of anticipation.

The '60s were reaching a climax, and the people of the Valley would experience it all.

(twangy guitar music) That twangy guitar sound, so much a part of rock music in the '60s, a sound that became a worldwide phenomenon and inspired thousands of teenagers to pick up the guitar, that sound was created here in Phoenix, in a little recording studio at 7th Street and Weldon.

The young guitarist was Duane Eddy.

- By combining echoes of the tape recorders, they got a special water tank that they hooked up as also a source of echo, recombined the sound together on the tape recorder, it was the twang heard around the world.

And you realized that this was something new.

These guys weren't copying anything, they were creating something.

- [Pat] Duane Eddy soon became an international star influencing countless performers like George Harrison of the Beatles.

(groovy music) There were other national hits coming out of Phoenix.

Funky Broadway was recorded in 1967 by Dyke & The Blazers.

♪ Name of the street ♪ Funky, Funky Broadway - In fact, there's a line in the song, "Every town I go in, there's a street, name of the street, Funky Broadway."

And of course, there was a Broadway out here in Phoenix, which inspired him to write the song, which was written out here.

As it turns out, Dyke met a very untimely, violent end.

He was shot and killed in the parking lot of a bar, very near Broadway right here in Phoenix.

- [Pat] A happier twist of the story of local rock music came from The Wallace and Ladmo Show.

Long before Spinal Tap, this TV show created a parody rock group called... Hubb Kapp and The Wheels.

They became a surprise hit.

- Ladies and gentlemen, you may have heard of them.

You think the Beatles are exciting?

These fellas run over the Beatles.

Here they are, Hubb Kapp and The Wheels!

(audience cheers) ♪ Bama, lama, bama (groovy rock music) - Hey, just a second guys.

Excuse me.

That's me.

Pat McMahon.

35 years and 30 pounds ago, as Hubb Kapp.

You know, we never expected a comedy act to turn into a real band, much less get on national TV.

But the audience was in on the joke, and everybody had fun.

Hit it, guys.

♪ There's a bama, lama lou ♪ Bama lama, bama lou ♪ Bama lama, bama lou ♪ Well, I like her style ♪ Yes, it drives me wild with bama lama ♪ ♪ Bama lou - When you turn on Steve Allen, and all of a sudden Hubb Kapp and The Wheels were on Steve Allen... Well, we were cheering.

That was our guys on Steve Allen.

You know, one of our team made it.

- [Man] There were tons of bands around, and more venues to play.

You'd play the high school show, you play for your church, you play for the club, there were a lot of places to play.

And a lot of these bands would change, would quit, would break up, reform, and that sort of thing.

The Earwigs became The Spiders who became The Nazz, who became Alice Cooper over the years.

- Well, The Earwigs, of course, got our start on The Wallace and Ladmo Show.

When my mom made us yellow corduroy jackets, and, you know, then Pat McMahon interviewed us, it was a big deal, 'cause we were on The Wallace and Ladmo Show.

- Young Vincent Furnier, later to become rockstar Alice Cooper, was just one of the many local talents to find opportunity in the busy local music scene.

- But of course, that's what the '60s was all about, was becoming your own self, and the ability for you as a local band here in Arizona or Phoenix, wherever you were, to write your own music, to make your own record, and if you were lucky, you might get to hear that record on the radio.

- Now the cool thing is to be driving along with your girl, trying to impress her, your record comes on, and you go, and you'd switch it off.

That's the ultimate in cool.

You know, Saturday night, the Beatles play, the Stones play, and here's that new one, Don't Blow Your Mind by The Spiders.

And I go, "Yeah, I heard that before."

I turn it off.

Wow.

I mean, you couldn't get any cooler than that.

(Alice Coopers laughs) (upbeat guitar music) ♪ Start walkin' - [Pat] How woman viewed themselves at the beginning of the '60s was very different from how they viewed their roles at the end of the decade.

- Everyone's mom stayed home in the '60s.

Everyone I knew, even my own mom.

Even though my mom did volunteer work with everything, she was a stay at home mom.

She's always there.

- I don't know if kids from public school did this, but our office practice class, we were supposed to be wearing hats and gloves to apply for jobs.

And the nuns just didn't know how things were.

We knew enough that as soon as we left class, we would rip off the hat, but we still wore our little white gloves.

I have boys that are 33 and 35, and they still find it hard to believe that there would be classified ads, help wanted female, help wanted male.

and you'd better not cross that.

You know, even if I... Maybe my father had taught me to be an electrician, I need not apply, you know.

That job is a man's job.

- Right outta high school, I went into data processing.

Because computers were the thing back then.

So I went to Mesa Community College to learn that, and before I even got through school, my advisor said, "You probably won't be able to get a job."

And I said, "Why?"

And they said, "Well, for one thing, you're not a man."

- [Pat] What changed in the '60s?

Was it change in attitudes?

Women felt more freedom in pursuing individual lifestyles and careers, but true job equality would have to wait for a later decade.

♪ One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you ♪ - [Pat] Hispanic women on the other hand, had a different set of concerns.

- The feminist movement or the women's movement was usually a white women's movement.

And whereas the Chicano movement was a movement that included the family, men, women, children, to overcome issues that related to classism and racism, and not so much feminism.

- [Pat] Despite some progress resulting from the civil rights movement, the Hispanic population continued to wrestle with low paying jobs and poor education.

Dissatisfied with the slow progress of mainstream politics, a new generation of college educated Hispanic activists took a more radical approach.

- Confrontational politics, not being afraid to challenge anyone or make statements.

You had the young students who were now from a different generation, maybe becoming educated and becoming a little bit more articulate, making demands on the older generation of politicians who had been in office for quite some time, maybe a little bit complacent about their responsibilities to help the poor, and now being challenged by these young leaders and young students.

- [Pat] The late '60s were a proving ground for leaders like Alfredo Gutierrez, one of the founders of Chicanos Por La Causa, who would initiate new community programs and legislation in coming years.

Many of Arizona's youth felt a call to duty.

In the mining town of Morenci, nine high school buddies enlisted in the Marines on Independence Day, 1966.

They expected to serve in Vietnam, and they were right.

What they didn't expect was that six of the nine would return in coffins.

There were many tragedies in that war, but this one sent shock waves across Arizona.

The problems of the outside world were intruding on the age of optimism.

(groovy music) The rest of the '60s was a rush of social and political change.

The conviction of local resident Ernesto Miranda was overturned by Phoenix attorneys pleading before the U.S. Supreme Court.

It resulted in the famous Miranda Warning.

Meanwhile, the youth culture flowered with the rise of the counterculture.

- You'd see kids, you know, at the end of this one school year, you'd leave and you'd come back in September, and all of a sudden this kid's like a freak, and he's got leather fringe and he's beads and flowers.

And wow, this guy got hip over the summer.

- [Pat] Hippies took up residence on Mill Avenue in Downtown Tempe, where marijuana was said to be sold on street corners.

The one thing shared by hippies, the police, and the newspapers, was an obsession with dope.

Inevitably, the live and let live attitude of Tempe made it ground zero for the counterculture.

- The students were the source of the counterculture in those days.

And you know, you had the anti-war movement going on in the late '60s, you had the Chicanos Por La Causa was pretty active out at ASU.

You could hang with people who were like you and so forth, and it became quite the little counterculture hub.

- [Pat] In a decade of growing pains, it was refreshing to find something that united everyone.

The Phoenix Suns.

Typical of the times, the momentous deal was launched by a few individuals making a few phone calls.

- I mean, it came in a very fast timetable.

I remember the guy that really brought the Suns was a guy named Dick Block.

I remember Dick saying, "You know, I think we got a shot at getting an NBA franchise, do you want to be in on it?"

And I said, "Sure."

So we got going on it.

- [Pat] Jerry Colangelo flew in from snowy Chicago to lead the franchise, which wasn't an overnight success.

- We had a name the team contest, we had quite honestly, I'll admit to you, we had picked the name we wanted, Suns, and fortunately there were a number of entries that had the word Suns in it, but we only sold 800 season tickets that first year, and I remember how frustrated I was.

But the following summer, we doubled our season ticket sales to 1,600, we signed Connie Hawkins from the ABA, we drafted Neil Walk, we made a couple of trades, one for Paul Silas.

And we went from 16 wins to 39 wins in the biggest turnaround in the history of the NBA and we made the playoffs.

- The arrival of the Suns probably would've earmarked the time at that era that we'd finally arrived, that we were finally starting to get some consideration as being a major metropolis, a city that was on the rise.

- [Pat] During the '60s, Phoenix more than doubled in size to 250 square miles.

And when development reached Camelback Mountain, it went right up the slopes.

That disturbed people who loved the sight of the landmark mountain, and public indignation led to a ban on construction above 1800 feet.

- Phoenix had a plan and they wanted to grow, but they realized that at some point, that they had to preserve certain aspects, certain landmarks, certain things, because this was a city without a soul.

This was a city with mercantilism in its heart.

- [Pat] One of the most remarkable development plans had no profit motive.

Architecture students at ASU led by Dean James Elmore offered a solution for the great scar left by the dry riverbed called Rio Salado.

- And I think that this exciting plan will be adopted eventually by the community.

When, I don't know, but I'm excited about it now.

- [Pat] Although finally built as Tempe Town Lake, the project was held up for decades while commercial projects marched across the Valley.

(film reel clicks) - I think the character of Phoenix has changed a lot.

It's such a sprawl without any true identifying characteristics that I can really pick up on.

They don't seem to have that identifying Central Phoenix feeling you would wish for.

I'm not sure that it existed back then either, but I think we've almost missed our chance with it.

- [Pat] Did city leaders miss an opportunity to control growth?

Or did the massive migration of the '60s make sprawl inevitable?

- I think the state attracts a personality, a kind of an independent, a free thinking personality.

I think that person comes here, and they've got their hopes and their dreams all wrapped up in this place.

There was this, you know, sense of community here, but in a way, kind of a wildcat community.

It was just a lot of individuals that probably weren't the best at building a community.

They all had their own objectives, their own agendas, and they kinda would build those, and where those overlapped, something came out of that.

But I think a lot of it was just by happenstance, the way it worked out.

- [Pat] The Phoenix that grew out of the '60s is still a young city, with its share of growing pains.

- I think Phoenix and I grew so gradually, and you know, like developed a certain level of sophistication.

I think Phoenix and I grew at the same time.

And you know, now we both need a little work.

(woman laughs) No, I've grown a little too much, and probably Phoenix has.

- [Pat] According to some experts, the ultimate legacy of the '60s may not be sprawl, but the beginnings of a truly modern city.

- I've attended lectures where the speaker is telling us all how horrible we must feel living here.

And everybody in the room kind of looks at each other to say, "I've never had it so good!'

The most optimistic view that I can give of the Valley is that something new is happening here.

It's a place of great experimentation.

I like to think of it as like an adolescent.

You know, what it's about to become is not yet known.

It's not yet manifested at that age.

That's how I think of the Valley.

(rocket rumbles) - [Pat] Frank Borman returned to space in 1968.

This time, he commanded the first manned spacecraft to circle the moon.

- [Frank] Hey, you're looking pretty small down there now, Houston.

- [Pat] When it was his turn to gaze out the window, Borman's attention left the moon.

He grabbed a camera to capture one of the most enduring images of the 1960s.

(calming music) ♪ Good day sunshine ♪ Good day sunshine ♪ Good day sunshine ♪ I need to laugh ♪ And when the sun is out ♪ I've got something I can laugh about ♪ ♪ I feel good in a special way ♪ I'm in love and it's a sunny day ♪ ♪ Good day, sunshine ♪ Good day, sunshine ♪ Good day, sunshine ♪ Good day, sunshine ♪ Good day, sunshine ♪ Good day, sunshine