Non-rhetorical question: How much time needs to pass before a given era can credibly pass into “history”?
I’m asking mainly as an editor and thinking mostly of the coverage implications. PHOENIX magazine – and her readers, I like to believe – have always placed a high import on Arizona history coverage. For many years, before my time, the editors devoted an entire cover package every December to a specific decade or era of our desert community’s collective past. The Roaring ’20s. The Go-Go ’60s. The Tuberculotic ’10s. We did them all.
Other city magazines didn’t have as much success with history covers, an industry consultant once told me. He was impressed by the traction we got. My theory: In a still-young state with limited collective memory, anything older than a midcentury strip mall tends to elicit oohs and aahs.
But how old does an event or thing need to be before we tag it as “history”? I’m going to say: 25 years. That was the threshold my predecessors observed when they published The ’70s: A Look Back When Phoenix Was Far Out in 2005, and it’s not-coincidentally the following distance we’re using for the Phoenix in the ’90s issue you’re reading right now.
Let that sink in, fellow aging Gen Xer – or Boomer, or Millennial, or the one Gen Zer on our subscriber list. It’s been a quarter century since we collectively spat out the big nothing-burger that was Y2K. (No worldwide computer collapse, I mean.) The world has changed so much, folded into itself so many times in the interim, it beggars comprehension. But the Nickelodeon-style caption splotches and D-backs-teal color palettes deployed by art director Mirelle Inglefield? And the snappy, look-back history briefs penned by associate editor Maddie Rutherford? And the parade of cheesy ’90s restaurants and watering holes? That stuff beggars nothing. For us longtime Phoenicians, it’s nostalgic and centering. For you newbies, hopefully the feature will be edifying in some way – offer you a fresh glimpse of your adoptive city, bring you closer to it. Baby pictures.
Conceiving and editing this cover story has been rewarding for me (Arizona incept date: February 1998) as well. I haven’t thought this much about Axis-Radius and Club Rio since I was a bachelor. I’m still amazed we didn’t adopt MLK Day until 1993. And I wasn’t even aware Fife Symington accosted an E.T. in public until seeing the photo on page 154.
They say those who forget the past are destined to repeat it, and that’s another reason we’re lavishing attention on the decade of Friends, flared shoulder pads and savings-and-loan collapse. As much as we like the ’90s, we don’t want to repeat them. A cover every 25 years will do.
“As much as we like the ’90s, we don’t want to repeat them. A cover [story] every 25 years will do.”
