Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Monday, December 18, 2017
Report by Karl Eberhard, Historic Preservation Officer, Flagstaff, Arizona
The El Pueblo Motor Inn
3120 E. Route 66, Flagstaff, Arizona
RECOGNITIONS
The property itself is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a national landmark. Most properties meet one eligibility criteria. This property is notable because is it one the oldest remaining motels in Flagstaff, it exemplifies the motor court building type, it is an example of an architectural style not normally found in Flagstaff, and it is associated with and individual that made significant contributions to American (an world) history.
Route 66 spans from Chicago to Los Angeles and has its own ties to American history and the history of the automobile. As a part of a broader recognition of Route 66 heritage resources, the National Park Service has nominated certain Flagstaff Route 66 Motels as a multiple property National Historic District. The El Pueblo Motor Inn is one of twenty-seven remaining motels that contribute to that district – a district that contained fifty motels in 1960.
BENEFITS of PRESERVATION
Were this property to be preserved, the use adapted to meet modern commercial needs, numerous incentives are available to assist this effort.
At the Federal level, besides the honor of recognition, inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places brings advertising value by inclusion itself and by the various publications at the Federal, State, and local levels. The property will be protected from all actions of the Federal government and anyone using Federal funds. And, grant monies from two programs (Preservation grants and Route 66 grants) are available to assist with preservation work.
Importantly, owners of properties listed in the National Register may be eligible for a 20% investment tax credit. This credit can be combined with a straight-line depreciation period of 31.5 years for rehabilitated building. Federal tax deductions are also available for charitable contributions of partial interests, such as conservation easements, in historically important land areas or structures.
At the State and County level, programs offer a substantial reduction in property taxes. The property owner enters into a 15 year agreement during which the property is rehabilitated and maintained according to The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation. And during this period, the modifications intended to restore or rehabilitate the property have a tax basis at 1% of full cash value rather than 25%.
At the City level, the City has (some limited) matching funds available under the Historic Facades and Signs Program. Additionally, if it is preserved, the City, in cooperation with the State will be responsible for the nomination to the National Register.
The City would be willing to provide conceptual design services to demonstrate that the modern programmatic needs can be met and still preserve the property. Permit processing will be expedited. To the extent allowed and reasonable, the City will reduce the project fees for the rehabilitated buildings and will consider waiving some or all of the development requirements that are problematic as a result of rehabilitation efforts. Finally, the existing non-conforming sign could remain if its essential historic features are preserved as it is modified for modern needs.
Sunday, December 17, 2017
Philip Johnston was an amateur photographer
As an amateur photographer, I find it especially interesting that Philip Johnston, instigator of the Navajo Code Talkers, regarded himself as an amateur photographer. (An amateur does it for love, not for money.) His photos are in Special Collections, Cline Library, NAU.
I will post some of his relevant photos later.
Navajo Code Talkers / Northern Arizona University
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of World War II, Northern Arizona University commissioned sculptor and alumnus R.C. Gorman to design and build the Navajo Code Talkers Monument. Unveiled on Veterans Day, 1995, the monument stands as a dedication to the 400 Navajo marines who used their native language as a code to transmit messages in the Pacific Theater. Despite determined efforts, the Japanese military could not decipher the Navajo Code.
Gorman modeled the monument after his father Carl Gorman, a noted Navajo painter and teacher and one of the original Code Talkers. Describing his work, Gorman said, "I chose to model a bust after my father because he has such a strong face. It's intended to be a tribute to Navajos."
At the dedication ceremony a crowd of nearly 700 people, including thirty Navajo Code Talkers and their families, witnessed the statue’s unveiling. The Navajo Code Talkers Monument is located on the North side of the Blome Building.
Kayenta Burger King Honors Navajo Code Talkers
NAVAJO CODE TALKERS
KAYENTA BURGER KING
Restaurant hosts Code Talker museum
by Sam Lowe - Dec. 5, 2008
Special For The Republic
KAYENTA - As most travelers know, it's not uncommon to discover little treasures in the most unusual places. A classic example is the Navajo Code Talkers exhibit in the Burger King in Kayenta.
This display shares space with booths, burgers and fries in the restaurant on U.S. 160 near where U.S. 163 branches north toward Monument Valley.
Most of the artifacts on display were the possessions of King Mike, one of the Navajo servicemen who transmitted secret messages during World War II. He was a private first class in the Marines and served on the front lines during the Pacific campaign. But, like most Code Talkers, he never discussed it.
"I found out about it one day when a picture postcard fell from some of his stuff while I was doing some rearranging," said Richard Mike, King Mike's son, who owns the Burger King and is the founder and curator of the exhibit. "I asked my father about the photo, and he got very upset and didn't want to say anything about it."
The photo showed Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa, where King Mike had served with the Marine Corps Sixth Division. Speaking Navajo, he directed naval gunfire, ground artillery and aerial bombing against the hill. Later, he wrote on the back of the postcard " . . . the bloodiest and dirtiest fight in the South Pacific was fought on this hill - the Marines had taken the hill ten times and all ten times the Japanese took it back. The Marines finally took it after it was bombed and naval gunfire flattened it out."
More than 7,500 servicemen died on Okinawa, which is why King Mike refused to discuss the matter, even after the Code Talkers' role in the war effort was declassified in 1968. Little by little, however, Richard persuaded his father to let him display some of his belongings in the restaurant as a tribute.
"He wasn't resentful," Richard said, while conducting a tour. "He just didn't like to talk about it. But he was pleased with the exhibit. He liked it."
King died on Christmas Day 1996.
The exhibit contains fewer than a third of the artifacts King brought home from the war, Richard said. It features helmets, flags, documents and photographs. There's also a brief history of the Code Talkers, who were organized in the early 1940s. Beginning with the battle for Guadalcanal, the Navajos used their language to relay messages and, because there were no written texts in Navajo, the Japanese couldn't decipher the dispatches. Code Talkers participated in some of the fiercest battles of the war, including at Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, Kwajalein Island, Saipan, Guam and Iwo Jima.
Visitors fortunate enough to stop at the Burger King when Richard is there will find him a gracious host, eager to discuss the heroics of his father and his father's comrades. He will, for example, recount that his father's commanding officers would never loan any Code Talker to other units because "they knew they'd never get them back; that's how valuable these men were."
But Mike also owns a nearby hotel, is involved in local politics and is building a heritage park next to his Burger King, so he's rarely available. He plans to build a larger museum dedicated to his father in the heritage park so he can display the rest of his Code Talker collection.
"We have here in Kayenta more Code Talker memorabilia than the Pentagon does," Mike said.
A Good Overview of Philip Johnston, the role of El Pueblo Motor Inn, and Navajo Code Talkers
(From Oregon News, June 15, 2011)
Archives show birth of Code Talkers
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) -
You can tell a lot about a person by the papers they leave behind.
Case in point: The papers in the Philip Johnston Collection in the Special Collections & Archives at NAU's Cline Library.
Johnston is best known as the man who pushed successfully for the adoption of the Navajo language for secure military communications in the hands of the Navajo Code Talkers during World War II.
The three acid-free, cardboard boxes in the library hold a variety of paper materials, including tissue-thin, hand-typed letters from the 1920s, '30s and '40s, yellowing copies of magazine articles, colorful maps, tickets and brochures from Mexico, transcripts of oral histories, Code Talker reunion programs and thick manuscripts of Johnston's writings, including various articles on the Southwest.
A gap in correspondence from 1942 through '45 may reflect the top-secret nature of the Navajo Code Talkers and their work.
However, some of the more yellowing letters, sent from Los Angeles, are from just after the war and deal with Johnston's efforts to help the Navajo people.
“If you have been on the Navajo reservation you will realize how terribly unprovided for the area is in terms of roads and public services generally,” Johnston wrote in a Nov. 4, 1946, letter to William Brophy, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior.
The Johnston Collection provides a fascinating view into the mind of a man whose brilliant code concept undoubtedly aided the Allied victory in the war.
“Here is someone with obvious regional and local interest,” commented Sean Evans, an archivist at Cline. “When you think historically about anything, there is so much stuff that people just throw away because they don't think it's important.”
Online through Cline Library, there are also more than 2,000 black and white photographs that Johnston took, many of them with Native American themes, including scouting trips on the reservation.
There is also a 1940 photo of the old El Pueblo Motor Inn in Flagstaff, whichJohnston built in 1937, working with contractor R.E. Goble.
Described in a 1936 Coconino Sun article as an “auto court,” the court was described as having “a five-room caretaker's home and three double camp cottages. They will be of Spanish design, stuccoed outside and plastered inside.”
Johnston had moved back to northern Arizona with his wife Bernice, and they had decided to make this location their permanent home.
They purchased a site 3 miles east of downtown Flagstaff for the motel.
They also built a private residence behind the motel.
Today, the facility, now called the El Pueblo Motel, still stands on east Route 66 and is the oldest motel remaining along Route 66 outside of the downtown area.
It was from the motel that Johnston engineered the recruitment of Navajos to serve in the Marines as Code Talkers.
The property itself is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a national landmark because it exemplifies the motor court building type and it is associated with an individual who made significant contributions to American and world history.
“The preservation of heritage resources is how we connect to and learn from the past, and importantly, it’s how we implement the Regional Plan and preserve the character of our community,” said Karl Eberhard, historic preservation officer for the city of Flagstaff.
The El Pueblo Motor Inn is one of 27 remaining motels, out of 50 in 1960, from Chicago to Los Angeles that contribute to the National Historic District of Route 66.
Johnston was born on Sept. 17, 1892, in Topeka, Kan., and died on Sept. 11, 1978, in San Diego, Calif.
His love of things Native American began in his childhood.
The son of a missionary, Johnston came in 1896 with his family to Flagstaff, from where his father, William Johnston, was to serve Navajos residing on the western part of the Navajo Reservation.
On the reservation, young Philip learned to speak Navajo while playing with Navajo children and was one of perhaps 30 non-natives who understood the complex and subtle Navajo expressions.
In 1902 he traveled with his father to Washington, D.C., with his father and local Navajo leaders when they spoke to the President Theodore Roosevelt to persuade him to add more land to the Navajo Reservation via an Executive Order.
In fact, the youth was translator between the local Navajo leaders and the president.
In the early 1900s, Johnston attended and graduated from the Northern Arizona Normal School, which is now NAU.
In March 1918, he enlisted in the U.S. Army 319th Engineers, where he received a reserve commission, before shipping to France to participate in the Great War.
It was here that he may have learned about Comanches being used as code talkers by U.S. Army units.
As a veteran, Johnston attended the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he earned his graduate civil engineering degree in 1925.
Afterward, he took a job with the city of Los Angeles water department before returning to Flagstaff a dozen years later.
Johnston never forgot the usefulness of Native American languages for secure communications during World War I.
After Pearl Harbor was attacked and America entered the war, Johnston wrote a “Proposed Plan for Recruiting Indian Signal Corps Personnel,” which he submitted in February 1942 to Major General Clayton B. Vogel and his staff to convince them of the value of the Navajo language as code.
“Because of the fact that a complete understanding of words and terms comprising the various Indian languages could be had only by those whose ears had been highly trained in them, these dialects would be ideally suited to communication in various branches of our armed forces,” he wrote.
Johnston recommended recruitment from the Navajo tribe, because at 49,338 member, it was the largest tribe in the U.S., according to his research in 1942.
In an article in the Cline Library archives by A.E. Mortensen, “A Typical Arizonian at War,” Johnston is described as a “human dynamo” and a true patriot. “Philip Johnston was flying the true colors of a real American,” Mortensen wrote. “On October 2nd, 1942, Philip Johnston now 50 years of age, voluntarily gave up all civilian ties and entered the Marine Corps with rank of Staff Sergeant.”
The first assignment for Johnston was a recruiting tour through Arizona and New Mexico, based out of the motel, and “then back to Camp Elliott to take over the actual schooling of the Navajos,” Mortensen continued.
Not much is known of Johnston after World War II, although letters in the archives show that he remained very active in his work to help Native Americans, including creating a nonprofit organization to raise money to send them to college during the 1950s.
Initial Visit
My initial visit to El Pueblo Motel, the site of the inception of the Navajo Code Talkers, was actually quite sad. In my optimistic enthusiasm, I expected some Code Talker brochures, a placard on the wall proudly announcing the site's importance, perhaps even some photos of the key folk who helped create the Code Talker Warriors. Was I mistaken. The manager/caretaker (who spoke little English) knew nothing of the Code Talkers at all, much less of their connection with the motel. The motel itself is deteriorating. If folk want to make it a historic site, it needs to be done sooner than later.
Who in Flagstaff is invested in making this a designated historic site honoring the Navajo Code talkers? City council? Historic society? Or shall we just let it fade away to nothingness? It deserves at least a plaque.
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