Mcnally Road Valley Center California

State to celebrate 100 years as Arizona City looks back on 50

This headline, from the Arizona City-Sun in July 1960, marks the birth of Arizona City as we know it today. This building, the Administration Building for the Arizona City Development Corporation, was the first building to be constructed in Arizona City back in April of 1960. It still exists today, as the clubhouse and Duffer’s Restaurant at the AC Golf Course. When Jack McRae, then president of the Arizona City Development Corporation decided to develop 2 1/2 acres of land in Arizona City in January of 1959, the driving force behind it was the water. Located in the Santa Cruz Valley, south of Casa Grande, and midway between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona City boasted one of the purest water sources in the state. Surveys had shown that in certain areas in the Santa Cruz Valley, close to the Sawtooth Mountains, southwest of Arizona City, there existed an abundance of deep water. “Our water is unusually pure and soft. It has very few minerals, just enough to give it a good taste. You’d be surprised at the number of people who remark about the quality of our water as soon as they stop for a drink. Compared with other municipal wells in the area, we are considered to have very sweet water, tasty and pure. Each 14 days we send samples to the state Health Department and their analysis reports come back consistently reading 100 percent pure.” (AZ City Daily Star July 1963). The first Post Office was established on April 1, 1962 with J. David Knudson as th first Postmaster General. Arizona City was first listed on an Arizona State Highway map in 1963 by Rand McNally. (On a side note, there was an Arizona City in Yavapai County near a mining town in the late 19th century. It is uncertain how the name Arizona City was chosen.) From 1970 until 1978, the Arizona City Development Corporation (ACDC) was owned by Fuqua Industries, which is credited for the second nine holes of the Arizona City Golf Course, Happy Days Park (now the sight of Toltec Elementary School), the Racquet Club (now the site of Quail Run RV Resort), Paradise Lake (now owned and maintained by the Paradise Lake Homeowners’ Association) and approximately 75 miles of Arizona City streets (along with all the water lines and utility lines for those streets). These amenities were maintained by the developer, with the intent that these properties would be part of Arizona City once the town became incorporated.

Names and True Names - Up the Road

Bird watcher, naturalist, and busily retired American Studies professor from the University of California, Davis, David Wilson has been a solid citizen of Chico and environs for more than two decades now. He is currently at work on a collection of essays, poems, maps, and sketches that chronicle his journey from Minnesota boyhood to a new life in California’s great valley. We excerpt part of that book here.—Editor

Any place is more than just material objects, landscapes, and homescapes. Things carry names as part of the history of a region. Names give meaning to the raw data of dirt, streams, weeds, and animals in a particular place, and especially to the integration of things. Layers of namescapes cover any landscape.

Common names like “blackbird” or “poison oak,” “sparrow“ or “weed” may suit a population of adults and children who participate in everyday interactions with nature more or less absentmindedly, uncritically. Similarly, “proper common names” for birds, like Brewers blackbird, Anna’s hummingbird, white-crowned sparrow, turkey vulture, and yellow-billed magpie, realize a web of names approved by the American Ornithological Union (AOU) that articulate a specialized taxonomy of place.

But names are not the things and cannot substitute for real birds or plants.

Even so, getting the names right may accomplish part of the mission of an immigrant making a home in the Valley.

Of course, common names taken for granted in one climate may also mislead nature lovers in a new setting. Our blue birds and blue jays, for example, do not look or act or sound much like blue birds and blue jays east of the Sierra. Our so-called scrub jay’s name is not meant to demean the species but to refer to its habitat.

Nevertheless, anyone trying to become at home in this valley might well adopt a bird species or plant species and then learn everything about it from books, from Google, from monographs and images, from poems and from folklore and even from extravagant yarns: consider the wonderfully funny “Baker’s Buejay Yarn” by Mark Twain:

Baker said that after long and careful observation, he had come to the conclusion that the bluejays were the best talker he had found among birds and beasts. Said he: “There’s more to a bluejay than any other creature. He has got more moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creatures; and, mind you, whatever a bluejay feels he can put into language. And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book talk—and bristling with metaphor, too—just bristling.