Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

frustrated her that I didn’t really need or want very much advice about things.
The influence was more subtle.
Q. What was Temple like as you were growing up here
A. Well, when my dad died in ’59, in December of 1959, he and Frank Lloyd Wright
died within a few months of each other in ‘59. We moved to Broadway and
Rural. Broadway and Rural were pretty much the edge of Tempe in those days.
There had been a little subdivision down there that my parents were investors in.
My father was always intrigued by real estate in Arizona and he was always
getting together with a bunch of other college professors and buying a little bit of
land here or there. He always sold it too early. He never made very much
money on it but he thought it was fun. He had been, with some other people,
been an investor in this subdivision. So when we left campus, we lived in the
Presidents Home on campus, which is now the Virginia Galvin Piper Writer’s
House. I am the last living person to have lived in that house. We moved into
one of these little subdivision houses that my parents had been investors in. It
was a classic 50’s ranch house with the white rocks on the roof and painted
concrete block. It was the ubiquitous building block of Phoenix, those ranch
houses with carports. They didn’t have garages, they had carports, low pitched
roofs, steel casement windows and it was right on the edge of town. You could
walk a quarter of mile maybe and there were open irrigation ditches you could
swim in and float around in and places where you could catch crawdads. There
Interview with Grady Gammage
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