For nearly a decade, an image of actress Marilyn Monroe has been catching the eyes of those who pass the northeast corner of 20th Street and Indian School Road in Phoenix. The mural-sized rendition of the late sex symbol languishes for more than 30 feet on a black background on the west side of a building currently occupied by Truckmasters, and although many are familiar with it, nobody seems to know why it’s there or who put it there.
PRESCOTT — The John W. Kalusa Miniature Aircraft Collection is a wonderful assortment of 5,829 model aircraft, all done to an exact scale of one-eighteenth of an inch to one foot. Each model is delicately painted, right down to the detailed markings characteristic of the actual aircraft. This required a steady hand because many of the planes have wingspans of less than two inches.
John Kalusa started building the models in 1936 when he was a mere 14 years old. Eventually, he created all sorts of flying devices, from biplanes to jets, from bombers to hot air balloons. After his death in 2003, his family donated the collection to the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Seven new residents have moved (or been moved) into Wickenburg and they’re permanent in the strictest sense of the word. They stand along the main thoroughfares as reminders of the city’s heritage as one of the last vestiges of the Old West. They never move, never blink, never mind posing for tourist cameras. They can’t because they’re bronze sculptures, strategically installed in front of business places and tourist attractions.
Under normal circumstances, I can readily find the origins of weird things in Arizona, but there’s one north of Flagstaff that puzzles me. No one seems to know anything about what it is, why it’s there and who put it there. It is three weathered tree trunks (they look like junipers) standing next to each other, and someone painted strange faces on them. The images on the two smaller trunks are badly faded, but the face on the tallest one is still in relatively good shape. It resembles “The Scream,” the famous expressionist painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893.
Two huge Celtic crosses keep silent watch over the landscape of Cochise County. One graces the Holy Trinity Monastery, a Benedictine community just south of St. David. The second is on a hillside overlooking Our Lady of the Sierras Shrine near Hereford. Both tower more than 75 feet over their surroundings, and both are the result of a journey Pat and Gerry Chouinard made to a shrine in Medjugorje, in what was then Yugoslavia. When they retired in 1995, the couple decided to build a similar shrine on their property near Hereford.
