The late Senator Barry Goldwater, from Tucson Citizen archive

Published in today’s Arizona Republic is an opinion piece with the late Senator Barry Goldwater’s 2/14/62 predictions in the Tucson Daily Citizen (predecessor to our Tucson Citizen newspaper) as to Arizona at age 100.

Here’s the online article
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2012/03/06/20120306goldwaters-crystal-ball.html

but the newsprint article has photos (on pages B12 and B13) of the actual 1962 article itself. Good to see our Tucson Citizen newspaper still being remembered, since its demise on May 16, 2009.

Senator Goldwater had 10 predictions, but the most interesting one for us in Southern Arizona is when he stated in prediction #8 (prediction # 7 online version which is lacking one prediction of the 10 printed in the newspaper):

Our ties with Mexico will be much more firmly established in 2012 because, sometime within the next 50 years, the Mexican border will become as the Canadian border, a free one, with the formalities and red tape of ingress and egress cut to a minimum so that the residents of both countries can travel back and forth across the line as if it were not there.

Under Senator Goldwater’s predictions are comments by legal scholar Jack August Jr. who is also the Executive Director of the Barry Goldwater Center for the Southwest.

But the Senator was mostly correct in prediction # 2 since Phoenix is now the 6th largest U.S. city:

The forests will still be protected, as well as our parks and monuments. But even they will have as neighbors the people who today enjoy hardships to visit them.

But it will be the deserts that will support the majority of the new homes. Phoenix will have a population of about 3 million, and Tucson will grow to about 1.5 million.

Phoenix and Tucson will remain the two largest cities in the state, with Phoenix being either the fourth- or sixth-largest city in the United States.

At least Tucson is not at the 1.5 million mark yet…

More information on Senator Goldwater (click here), who represented Arizona in U.S. Senate from 1953 to 1965, 1969 to 1987, and was the Republican Presidential nominee for U.S. President in 1964. He died at age 89 in 1998.