Phoenix, Az. State Capitol

We spent a few days visiting my Dad's sister-in-law and my cousins in Glendale, which is a suburb of Phoenix, and also saw a friend and my Mom's cousin in Mesa. They gave us lots of oranges and grapefruit from their yards, which was great. On Wednesday we dropped Mom off at the airport in Mesa for her flight home to the frozen tundra.

Wed - February 16, 2011


Today we visited the Capitol. The entire building is now a museum. There are two new buildings on each side, one for the senate and one for the house and lots of other office buildings in the surrounding area for all the state business.


There were several rooms filled with artifacts from the French people to say thank you for the boxcars of food the American people donated and sent to them and the Italians after WWII. Harry Truman had hoped that we could get 80 boxcars of food to send and donations filled 700 boxcars. As a thank you the French people sent one boxcar for each state filled with mostly handcrafted items, such as dolls, wedding dresses, needle work, school children's art projects, etc.

Two rooms are filled with artifacts from the USS Arizona which was sunk at Pearl Harbor. One room has all the silver service.

Outdoors there are many monuments. This one is for Desert Storm. There are monuments for the police, firemen, canine law and rescue dogs, a couple of missionaires, all the branches of the service and the different wars.

There is also a walkway with quotes from everyday people about how the G.I. Bill changed the lives of so many men and women and their families from it's inception to present day. In the back of this picture you can see the Signal Mast from the USS Arizona. In the next picture below you can see the anchor. All the fountains in the courtyard were shut off to conserve water and, as you can tell, the grass has not been watered for a very long time.

This is the 911 Memorial made of scrap metal from the Twin Towers. The circular design is supposed to represent the arc of the sun. There are inscriptions cut into the flat ring. The sun shines thru and projects the inscriptions onto the concrete base.

Tarra