First Street & Perry Lane
(near McClintock & University)
On the Salt River
Tempe, Arizona
When I was in college I lived in two sets of Quonset huts. Both were in Tempe. The first ones were over by Minder Binders near Perry Lane and First Street on the Salt River. The second ones were by Woolco on College and Curry Road.
The ones by Minder Binders were torn down to build a mall. The City of Tempe stole the land for a developer to build a mall. The City of Tempe told all the people that owned land in this industrial area that if they let the City of Tempe annex their land and became part of the City of Tempe, that Tempe would help the people who owned the land clean up the land.
Once the City of Tempe annexed the land they could now seize the land using emminent domain. And that's what they did. Then the City of Tempe gave the stolen land to a developer at a sweatheart deal price. And the developer plans to build a mall which will bring in lots of sales tax revenue for the City of Tempe.
Back when we lived there the land was a Maricopa County Island and not part of the City of Tempe. And back in those days prostition was still LEGAL in Arizona. Well it was legal in Arizona but most of the cities had laws making prostition illegal. So we had lots of whore houses as our neighbors because as a county island prostitution was legal.
I think Glen Boyer and Gary Alexander lived in the hut on the Salt River. (No the Salt River does NOT have water in it. This is ARIZONA our rivers don't have water in them!) I lived in the hut south of that. A godess lived in the hut attached to my hut. I probably lived in this hut during one summer. Maybe the summer after I had graduated from SCC and before I started attending ASU. Or I may have lived in it the summer before my last semester at SCC. I know I had my SR-51 caculator. I don't remember if I knew how to program computers at that time. It wasn't till my last semester at SCC that I learned FORTRAN.
We used to give huge keg parties to make money. We would buy a few kegs of beer and charge people a couple of bucks for all the beer they could drink. The cops would come but they never busted us, nor did they steal our beer. We kept the kegs in the house and only let people in the house that paid us.
There were not any stores nearby so the only place people had to go buy cigarettes were the nearby whore houses. So when we had our keg parties we had a stead stream of people leaving the party to go to the whore houses to use the cigarette machines there.
When I lived at this place I got a job with the phone company over on the other side of the valley on 51th Avenue and Olive (Peoria Ave). It was a pain in the ass because of the long drives. But I got a super good price on my telephone service.
Back then I had my first VW van. I used it to steal a real nice ladder from the owners that ran this place.
This is a quonset hut if you have never seen one. They are the half round buildings that the military loves to build. They come in all different sizes. The quonset huts we lived in had windows on the sides. They were one or two bedrooms in the back with a kitchen and bath room in the front. Ours also had porches. The one in the picture doesn't have a porch or windows on the sides. We rented them for something like $80 or $100 a month.
