Local (Mesa) History

The day after the Memorial Plaza, still wanting to take it easy, we went to the Mesa Historical Museum. It’s not very far away, isn’t very big, and isn’t very expensive. All these are good things.

It seems that all of the little towns around here have their own history museum. It’s hard to remember that this valley used to have lots of little farming communities. Phoenix has spread out to consume them all and the urban area is contiguous now. But it didn’t used to be that way and these museums keep alive the memory of the days when Mesa was Mesa, Tempe was Tempe, Phoenix was Phoenix and they were all hours apart by carriage.

Mesa was first settled by a few dozen Mormon families sent to the area by Brigham Young himself. The name of the town was originally Lehi. The farming families refurbished on the old canals and set up an agricultural community. It was interesting to see pictures of the people who left their names on the streets we know well. The Salt River used to run all year. There used to be a ferry. We saw the pictures of all this. The building itself used to be the Lehi School. The school was closed in the 1970s but the cost to demolish the building was more than the value of the land so they just left it empty. Eventually the museum came to inhabit it.

The main export of Mesa’s big agriculture days was citrus. There was a whole room in the museum devoted to all the citrus industry stuff. Lots of tools and changing over-all styles. Machines for aerating, separating, boxing… There was also a sign from some kind of machine shop that demanded, “No Loafing!” We found this particularly amusing in light of certain e-mails Strong Bad has responded to.
The last room we visited was a changing exhibit room. The current exhibit was about the Wallace and Ladmo Show, also known as (this is for real) It’s Wallace? This was ridiculously long-running local children’s show. It was on every weekday for 35 years! That’s a lot of yuk, yuk, yuk! Watching it is described as “synonymous with growing up in Arizona.” These two guys did crazy skits and told jokes, then cut to a cartoon short, then were back for more hilarity. They also played games and winners went home with a “Ladmo Bag” full of prizes. As watchers of The Simpsons, we can recognize this Wallace and Ladmo show is the kind of thing that Krusty the Clown is a parody of. There was a tonne of memorabilia on display plus lots of informational panels about the history of the show and the vast cast of characters that appeared on the show. They also had a TV set up with a few excerpts of the show showing. They were funny bits. Real zany stuff. They had a DVD of episodes on sale and we were mildly tempted to get it although we never watched the show, and aren’t kids anymore. We resisted, but only just.