How the Old Pueblo parties on America’s milestone birthdays

Maybe Prohibition was to blame for what happened on America’s 150th birthday. The run-up to the big day in Tucson began with a public scolding from the Arizona Daily Star.

“The spectacle of a constantly decreasing interest in the proper celebration of Independence Day is again before us,” the newspaper observed in a June 21, 1926, editorial titled “What about July 4?”

Apparently, the Chamber of Commerce was struggling to find volunteers willing to help organize that year’s festivities. The editorial blamed the lack of enthusiasm on the growing ease of out-of-town holiday travel and general post-World War I resentment for what it called the “undue ‘flag waving’ … of self-appointed patriots.”

But the Star was in no mood for excuses. “Tucson must observe the day and must observe it fittingly, even if it means sacrifice,” the editorial concluded.

It’s unclear to what extent the community rallied to that cause.

Though the city’s population was approaching 30,000, its first traffic light was still a year away, and its daily newspapers offered little in the way of local news, opting instead for wire service reports from around the nation and the world, with an emphasis on murder and mayhem.

The Star and the Tucson Citizen reported little information about the local July 4 festivities, beyond a gathering of civic groups at the Masonic Temple for an Independence Day address by University of Arizona law school dean Samuel Fegtly.

The papers also printed short wire dispatches on the holiday plans in Ajo, Douglas, Globe, Patagonia and Flagstaff, where snow was brought down from nearby peaks for a summertime snowball fight in the streets. Nogales, meanwhile, was bracing for its biggest Fourth of July crowd ever, thanks to the holiday north of the border and a prize fight south of the border on the same day.