Bob Booth
Imagine the Illinois River has been drained, leaving just a riverbed dotted by the occasional shrub—except for a month or so in late summer, when violent electrical storms suddenly strike, featuring thunder claps and swollen rivers, all of which disappear in barely an hour.
Welcome to Tucson!
Over the next few days, we will be rolling out our cactus carpet for many curious Caterpillar employees planning to move here as part of the company’s recently announced relocation of its Surface Mining and Technology Division.
Here’s what you will find in Tucson, a peculiar place which will grow on you as it has on this Midwesterner since I arrived 10 years ago:
If you are greeted by a band, it will more likely be mariachi than brass.
Soon after leaving the airport, you will discover a mammoth, 2,600-acre “Boneyard” of over 4,000 retired airplanes (at home among the many retirees here). Benefiting from our dry climate, they have arrived from all branches of our military to be used for either parts or reclamation and sale to a (hopefully) friendly foreign government. It’s the largest facility of its type in the world and quite a sight.
Now hosting the northernmost baseball franchise in the Mexican League and with the arrival next winter of the top minor league team for the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes, Tucson could claim to be The Most North American City, attractive to its many visitors from both north and south of the border.
The hottest sports ticket in town for many years has been Arizona Wildcat basketball, the elite program on the West Coast and one of the best in the country. Get to know the players, so when someone asks you if you think ____ will be “coming out early,” you’ll realize that’s not a reference to a debutante ball.
But many residents here in the Old Pueblo are not content to merely watch the action; they need to be part of it.
That includes bicycling, hiking in the canyons surrounding the city and enjoying many excellent golf courses in the area.
Visitors are often surprised to learn we are just four hours away from the beaches at the northern tip of the Gulf of California and only an hour south of the southernmost ski valley in the U.S. at Mount Lemmon.
And then there’s our heat. While it is, indeed, dry, it can also be in the triple digits for much of the summer. This will shock the new arrival at first, but you soon discover that sunscreen, swimming and swilling lots of water can make you quite comfortable, which helps you notice the many summer desert blooms missed by the snowbirds. And the traffic is reduced after they are gone.
The cost of living is low — including gasoline regularly the cheapest in the U.S. — and the joy of living here can be quite high.
The Caterpillar announcement has electrified our business community like a summer storm, and we are eager to get to know you better.
