http://www.kissjava.com Caffeinated Thoughts Tue, 24 May 2011 04:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.kissjava.com/2010/01/white-pyramid-phoenix/ http://www.kissjava.com/2010/01/white-pyramid-phoenix/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:48:57 +0000 Meghan http://www.kissjava.com/?p=91 Continue reading →]]> In Arizona, in Phoenix’s Papago Park, there is an odd object on a hillside, visible from the city’s zoo — a white pyramid, surrounded by a black fence.  When I first saw it, somewhere around the enclosure for an Arabian Oryx (an animal that was once mistaken for unicorns, because when its seen in profile the double horns appears to be one), I was unsure what to make of the pyramid, even more unsure when I learned it was the final resting place of the first governor of Arizona, George H.P. Hunt.  I can’t imagine what travelers and visitors might make of it, glimpsing it from Arizona’s luxury hotels a few miles away, yet it remains an icon on the Phoenix landscape, a monument to one of the more interesting people in Arizona’s political scene in the first third of the 20th Century.
 
Not only was Hunt the first governor of Arizona, but he remained the first governor for seven terms, and he co-wrote the constitution of Arizona.  Born in 1859, Hunt grew up in the Old West of movie lore, that iconic period of history that lasted for about twenty years from the 1880s to 1900.  During those years hunt would have been in his twenties and thirties.  He served in both houses of the Arizona Territorial Legislature and was even the U.S. Minister to Siam.  As time went on, Hunt weighed nearly three hundred pounds even though he was only five feet nine inches tall, and had one of those handlebar moustaches that drooped.  He was a populist of the progressive era, and in his time he supported such things as a woman’s right to vote, income tax, secret ballots and compulsory education.  He tended to be an enemy, on occasion, to mining and railroad concerns, to whom he referred to as skunks and coyotes.
 
The white pyramid was meant as a final resting place for his wife, who died three years before he did, and then himself.  If you hike up to the pyramid, you’ll find a plaque that tells you he descended from a Revolutionary War patriot, although the war patriot goes unnamed, that he let women vote in Arizona eight years before the rest of the nation, and that his election to the governor’s office seven times was a national record.  Closer, you’ll see that the pyramid gets its gleaming white color from white bathroom tiles.  Not only are he and his wife buried here, so are his in-laws, his daughter and his wife’s sister.  If you’ve been to Phoenix and haven’t seen Governor Hunt’s Pyramid,  if only from the zoo, then it’s time to go back.

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