TEMPE HISTORICAL MUSEUM ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

INTERVIEW #: OH-248 NARRATORS: Mary Lou Pyle Myers and Virginia Pyle Erhardt INTERVIEWER: Pamela Rector DATE: May 4, 2006

MLM = Mary Lou Pyle Myers VE = Virginia Pyle Erhardt INT = Interviewer ______= Unintelligible (Italics) = Transcriber’s notes

Tape 1, Side A INT: Today is Thursday, May 4, 2006. My name is Pamela Rector. I’m an historian, working with the Tempe Historical Museum, conducting oral history interviews with persons instrumental in a variety of ways to the development of the growth of the city of Tempe.

Today I have the privilege of interviewing the daughters and only children of former Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle and his wife Lucile. They are Mary Lou Pyle Myers and Virginia Pyle Erhardt. We are conducting the interview at Virginia’s home in Tempe, Arizona. I’ve broken down the questions into some categories, and the first ones I’d like are specific to the home you grew up in on Ash Avenue.

First, Mary Lou, when and where were you born?

MLM: I say I was born in Tempe; actually, I suppose, I was born in the hospital in Phoenix, it would have been St. Joseph’s Hospital, in 1937, April 6.

INT: And you, Virginia?

VE: Same place, St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, June 6, 1941.

INT: As you both know, your family home at 1120 South Ash Avenue is in the process of being added to the City of Tempe’s Historic Property Register. And, Mary Lou, you were born in 1938 . . .

MLM: 1937.

OH-248

INT: Oh, I’m sorry, 1937—I have ’38 in my records, and I didn’t change that, excuse me— which is the year we show your parents had built their home on Ash.

MLM: No, that’s incorrect.

INT: And when was that?

MLM: Well, I don’t know the exact year, but I think I was two years old; in 1939, probably.

INT: 1939? All right. And that’s something we wanted to correct, because we weren’t quite sure, in the record, when it was built and when they moved, etc. So 1939 is the year it was built, and you were born in 1937.

(to Virginia) And you were born in 1940, correct?

VE: 1941.

INT: 1941, okay. I’m off by a year.

So it was completed after your birth, Mary Lou. Now, when your mom was interviewed, she said that she and your father owned the home for 27 years. Now, if I’m doing my math correctly, that would be 1966 when they sold, is that correct?

MLM: That’s close.

VE: I would say so.

INT: Okay. And Mary Lou, what is your first memory of living in that house?

MLM: Oh, my goodness. That’s really hard to say. We had horses in the back, and I suppose just being in the back yard and around the horses. My dad and mother had a little bulldog named Snooks, and I remember it was housed in a kennel in the back, and that may be some of the first recollection that I have of being there.

INT: Do you know how old you might have been when you had that dog?

MLM: I’m sure that they probably had it when they moved there, so two, I guess. And I don’t even remember how long . . . (to Virginia) I don’t know that that dog was there when you were around at all.

VE: I don’t remember the dog at all.

MLM: But it was a little bull terrier, Boston terrier.

INT: And Virginia, your first memories?

2

OH-248

VE: Mainly the same thing. We had lots of animals and whatnot in the back yard. And I don’t really have recollections so much of things that happened inside the house, because we spent an awful lot of time, as little kids, playing outside in the yard. And without any TV to watch, you know, people either sat and listened to the radio or you went outside and played. So we did have a wonderful front yard as well, but the back yard was full of activity, as we had all kinds of chickens and the horses and rabbits and turkeys and whatever, ducks. So, yes, it was a very nice neighborhood to grow up in, because there were lots of things going on.

INT: What fun, all those animals; I like that. Now, do you remember, Mary Lou, Ash Avenue being completely built up as a child? In other words, were all the lots built on?

MLM: Most of them were, but there was one vacant lot across the street from us, on a corner, that we used to play ball on and play catch over that way, and we always cut through that way to go to school. But for the most part, the rest of the houses that were right within our vicinity were built. I don’t remember when they were built; obviously, after or about the same time our house was built.

VE: I think our house was one of the newer ones, though, actually.

MLM: Could have been.

VE: But we did have that big lot on the corner of 11th and Ash there, on the southeast corner, that was vacant until I was in elementary school, or maybe junior high, when they finally built on that.

MLM: And the one thing I noted that you said that it was 1120 South Ash; we never referred to it as South Ash, it was only 1120 Ash Avenue. So if you really want to be authentic, you might want to take the South out.

INT: Okay.

MLM: We would like that.

VE: I don’t know if there’s a North Ash Avenue.

INT: Well, and I’m sure that when the city was smaller, you didn’t need to refer to South or North. It’s like, I remember when we referred to “the freeway,” and there was only one freeway in town, really, I-17. And so it probably goes back to that time.

VE: There may be a North Ash, but it would be in the middle of all of that commercial stuff on the other side of the river.

INT: Well, for historical accuracy at that time, it is noted on the tape, so thank you for that, we appreciate it.

3

OH-248

Now, could you tell us, Virginia, about some of your neighbors, who they were?

VE: My first recollection of a neighbor next door were Mr. and Mrs. Fireman, Bert Fireman, who was with the Arizona Historical Society, I think, but he wrote a column for the newspaper in Phoenix. And he and his wife lived next door, to the south of us, and they had two daughters who were a little bit younger than us, but certainly we played with them, they were about our age.

And then we had Mrs. Mills, who lived just south of them. I mean, I could tell you everybody that lived in every house. (laughter) But I don’t think you’re particularly wanting that.

INT: No, that’s fine.

VE: Mrs. Mills babysat for us a lot when we were young, because she was not a married woman; I don’t know if her husband was dead or if she was divorced. But she had one daughter who was grown, so she was alone there most of the time, and she did watch us when our parents had to be gone, so we were very friendly with her.

South of her was Mrs. Ward, for whom Ward School is named. And across the street, we had Mr. Bullock, who was a professor at ASU, who played the piano, and you could hear him playing all over the whole neighborhood, because there was no air conditioning in those days, so people left their doors and windows open, and when he played, you could definitely hear him all over.

INT: Well, I assume he played well?

VE: Oh, yes, he definitely did.

INT: So that was good.

VE: And we had the Plummers, he was a doctor, who lived next to them. And the Colsons, directly across the street. So we had lots of good neighbors. Everybody was very friendly on the street.

INT: Now, as far as girlfriends or friends that you played with?

VE: Well, the Bullocks, who lived across the street, and the Plummers, each had a daughter who was about my age, so they were friends of mine. The Zieglers, Alma and Kenneth Ziegler, had two children, and they lived a little further south, a few houses, and they had a daughter who was just younger than Mary Lou, just older than me, who was a friend of ours, and a son who was the same age as myself. Then Mary Lou’s friends lived a little further down the street.

INT: And who were those friends, Mary Lou?

4

OH-248

MLM: Verlene Bosworth was one. And Patsy Waggoner was another, and Waggoner Elementary School in the Kyrene district was named after her father, C. I. Waggoner, who had been superintendent of the Kyrene Schools. And we were close friends all the way from first grade to when we graduated from high school. In fact, our birthdays were, Patsy’s was the 2nd of April, mine was the 6th, and Verlene’s was the 7th, and for all those years of elementary school at least, we all shared, we had our birthday parties together. Those were my best friends, at that particular point in time.

Mickey Ziegler was also a good friend that we did a lot of things with. And then, just to the north of us, the Colliers lived, and they had been there forever, and we called them Grandma and Grandpa Collier. And they had a—let’s see, how do we say it today?— mentally retarded daughter who was there all the time, that we used to go and visit with or talk with her, her name was Johnnie, if I remember correctly.

And then just to the north of them were the Barnes’, and Mrs. Barnes was Mrs. Ziegler’s sister, and we had just known them for forever, and they were good friends. Mr. Barnes, we called Bappy, because that’s what the rest of them called him, and he was an entomologist and used to work with bugs and things like that. I don’t recall if he was at ASU, or with the State, I believe. So it was a very neat neighborhood.

INT: It sounds like it. Virginia, do you have a story or two just about the neighborhood, a particular neighborhood event that occurred, or an annual get-together, anything like that?

VE: No, I don’t recall annual get-togethers, or even block parties or any of that kind of thing. It was mostly the children in the neighborhood that played. And we did play—we skated, and we dressed up, and we did just about everything. We played ball in the lot on the corner. We had lots of children that lived in the neighborhood that were about our age, so it was a busy area for young kids. I don’t recall any of the families getting together at that particular time.

INT: And you don’t have anything to add on that, Mary Lou, or do you?

MLM: I remember every summer, the people came through with the DDT stuff that they sprayed through the neighborhood to cut down on mosquitoes, that was kind of an annual event.

VE: Yeah, fogging the neighborhood with the spray.

MLM: That’s kind of a silly thing, but they did do that at that time.

INT: There were a lot of mosquitoes back then?

MLM: Yes, and some of it came because we got irrigation, and so we would sometimes get to play in the irrigation, but most of the time we weren’t allowed to do that. But in the summertime, that was something that did occur.

5

OH-248

And we would see—this is kind of off that subject—but we would see the cropdusters come flying over a lot, too, because they were dusting the crops. So those were some of the things that we saw.

VE: We also had another set of neighbors who moved to the house just south of us that came, oh, I don’t know, I was in middle grades, I think. The Firemens moved to Phoenix, I think, and Mary Lou and Bob Skoke moved next door to us. And they had two daughters, one who was Mary Lou’s age and one who was just older than me, and we were very good friends of theirs. And they played ball and sports and all, like we did, and Mr. Skoke was very good about going in the back yard and hitting fly balls to us. And they had a swimming pool, they built a swimming pool on the house. Mrs. Skoke had been in the Olympics in 1936 or something and was a swimmer, and they built the first swimming pool, that I knew of, in Tempe. And unfortunately, I never learned how to use it very well.

MLM: Neither one of us did.

VE: We weren’t swimmers. We went to a lot of Red Cross swimming lessons at Tempe Beach, but it never took with me; I can’t speak for Mary Lou. I never learned how to swim.

MLM: And one day my mother took Virginia down to take her swimming lesson, and Mother came home, but Virginia ran all the way home. And that was quite a ways, because that was down at Tempe Beach, from First Street down to Eleventh, and she just came on home.

VE: And most of it was dirt road, and I didn’t have any shoes on, and it was a long trek, but I wasn’t gonna go swimming.

INT: So it’s fair to say you were not a swimming aficionado?

VE: No, and I’m still not. I have a pool in my back yard that I’ve maybe been in half a dozen times in twenty years.

MLM: Neither one of us; I wasn’t either, I don’t care for the water, and I don’t know why.

INT: That’s interesting. You’re true desert dwellers, I suspect.

MLM: We were too much into softball, I think.

VE: Yes, we played softball in the summer, on the local softball team, I guess. Mostly it was teenage girls that played. And Mr. Cushing, who lived on the corner of 10th and Ash, was the coach, and he was the coach for years. And Pop Holdeman, who was the principal at the Tempe Grammar School, was kind of the assistant coach, and we played every summer. We were called the Tempe Debs, and we played teams around the Valley, over at Phoenix Municipal ballpark or whatever, over on 19th Avenue. And the Phoenix

6

OH-248

Ramblers had a stadium on Washington, and we played some of our games there. But most of them were played at Tempe Beach, and it was very exciting. Our poor mother sat out there in that heat and watched us play ball on that bunch of rocks for many a day.

INT: As all good mothers do. So who organized this team, was it a city?

MLM: It had been going on long before we started playing.

VE: I don’t think it was a city team.

MLM: It wasn’t; it was just a team. We didn’t have those kinds of organized sports things in the community at that time, and this was a team that . . .

Well, how we really got interested in it was the babysitter that we had, whose name was Thelma Kitts, her family lived next door to my mother’s parents on Van Ness, and there were a number of children in that family, and Thelma happened to be our babysitter when Daddy was Govenor about that same time, and she played on that team, along with Dottie Hennis and I don’t remember who else was on that team, but we idolized that. And we played catch constantly in the front yard or the back yard.

So once Thelma kind of introduced us to that, well, Bob finally asked me if I could probably come and play. Now, Virginia was four years younger, so she got to just kind of be around for a while, but then she came out and played. And our neighbors, the Skokes, Helen and Bobby, both played also. So it was every year for, well, I think I was a senior in high school before I finished, so I started when I was about in seventh grade, I think. It was a big event for us.

VE: Just as an aside, they’ve been doing some stories on PBS Arizona Stories, and I watched one of them, and they were talking about the women’s baseball teams, and they mentioned the 19th Avenue stadium.

MLM: And we called them softball teams; it wasn’t baseball, it was softball.

VE: Well, the A-1 Brewing Company had the A-1 Queens, they were like, you know, big-time. We were like the ones that played like the pregame for the A-1 Queens.

INT: You were the warm-up?

VE: Yeah, right.

MLM: And we just idolized them. I still remember all the names of those players—Margie Law, whose family lived here in Tempe, down on Eighth Street and Rural; they were big players, her brother played men’s softball, too. So it was an event.

VE: There wasn’t any TV; we didn’t have a lot to do, so we played softball. But it is true, we did play ball a lot. I mean, we were playing catch, if nothing else, just playing catch if

7

OH-248

we didn’t have enough people to play a game. And being younger, I always had to be the catcher, so I think I