Just Be Safe   by Mark 'SKI' Kwiatkowski

Have you ever had someone tell you that as you were leaving the house? “Whatever you do, just be safe!

Back in 1980, a group of Mesa teens, 20 something’s, and a very special Pastor of a local church formed an organization in Mesa to get the current City Council to put the brakes on the ideas of closing Main Street to cruising. For well over 3 years, the Concerned Mesa Cruisers spent their own Saturday and Sunday mornings walking the street cleaning up trash, and walking up and down Main Street on cruise nights passing out flyers saying just that: Be Safe! Safe, sane, sober cruising was our message. It was what we and our Pastor advisor “preached”.

We met at First Evangelical Lutheran Church on Date St. every Monday night to discuss the past weekend’s cruising activities, the different problems brought to us by the City Council, the Mayor and the Mesa P.D. Our meetings were overseen and counseled by Pastor Howard Hahn, although our CMC meetings weren’t faith based, at least for us. Pastor Hahn not only helped preserve the peace in our heart and soul, he believed in the youth in Mesa and opened his church to the CMC group for our weekly meetings, as well as open meetings for the public, and the press. There were times his congregation weren’t impressed with us and he took some heat for us, but he stood his ground and supported us through thick and thin.

Sometime in the late 70’s, a different mentality about cruising was coming about. Some of the cruisers were being just plain pigs, leaving trash everywhere, urinating in some of the business’ doorways, using alleys for bathrooms, and driving like (they could only wish!!) a NASCAR driver or drag racer. At the same time, and in some respects rightly so, downtown merchants were complaining about the cruisers and how this ugly, unruly mob was ruining their business. At this time, there were only a handful of merchants that were open after 5 pm, and most of those were food joints. The one restaurant that was open at Center and Main always did a brisk business, and most of its customers were not cruisers, oddly enough.

The City Council, during one of their regular meetings, made a motion to ban cruising by imposing a parking ban and other assorted restrictions. I attended this meeting and pleaded with the City Council to give others and myself an opportunity to go down to the street and convince other cruisers that we need to be clean, quit urinating in doorways, and be safe! Pastor Hahn also spoke, and after that council meeting, Concerned Mesa Cruisers was born. We grew to about 50 members at one point.
Then came the arrests and the news reports of how the Mesa had to put all of its extra police and resources downtown on Friday and Saturday night. I think the record was 432 “arrests” in one weekend. Of course, these weren’t actual arrests; they were traffic tickets and tickets for things like “standing in the roadway”, disorderly conduct for shouting across the street to a friend, littering, and drinking in public. The city was bent on showing how big of a problem cruising really was to those important taxpayers that actually spent their Saturday and Sunday mornings reading the paper with their morning coffee. This was done to convince all those thinking of investing in downtown Mesa for things like a convention center and arts center that the City rules with an Iron Fist and they would “get rid of the rubbish” and convince those investors (taxpayers) that their money would be well spent. They accomplished their goal. The argument of how cruisers killed downtown Mesa never washed with any of the Concerned Cruisers crowd. We knew better. We were doing everything possible to keep cruising alive. The fast food places closed their bathrooms to everyone, so we had Port-a-Johns brought in and we cleaned up everyone else’s trash.

 

In reality, downtown Mesa was going through what almost every downtown goes through which was a cyclic change in business habits. Mesa was growing and expanding and the city limits were growing out, not in. And the unruly, nasty, filthy, lawbreaking cruisers paid for it. And so did the Mesa taxpayers. The cruisers were run off with the stroke of a pen that banned parking on Main Street after 7pm, and when the cruisers left, the city got what they wanted; the unintended consequence of killing off what was left of downtown.
They got their downtown, less cruisers, and proceeded to “revitalize” downtown, and the investing and building and remodeling began.

Now fast forward 20 plus years, and some private investing and millions of taxpayer’s dollars have been spent “revitalizing” downtown. Downtown Mesa is pretty, no doubt about it. It seems that there is a fair amount of traffic during the weekdays, but Mesa still rolls up the sidewalks by 6 pm and nobody is downtown in the evenings, with few exceptions. Ironically, talk is again about “revitalizing” downtown and bringing back business during the evenings, and using cruisers to do it.

In March, on the last “Cruise Night”, a bunch of our old Concerned Cruisers got together on the Northeast corner of Center and Main and reminisced and shared memories and talked about what we’ve done with our lives over the last 25 years. Some of us left Mesa and returned, and some of us have moved to Phoenix, Peoria, and some never left. The big difference is now most of us have the disposable income to spend downtown should we want. Most of the people that had some of the coolest cars were “older” people like us; 40 somethings.
We had a wonderful time and saw many very cool cars, many old friends, and yes, even some of the new generation of NASCAR drivers and drag racers. I made a comment about one driver who thought it was cool to wait for the green light and for traffic to clear and do a 0-80 mph burnout, then slam on his brakes when he caught up with traffic. I called the guy a “bleeping” idiot, and one of my fellow former CMC members said to me, “Boy, someone sure sounds old!” (I’m 47 now.) I simply replied, “No, not old. Just saying the same thing we used to preach back in the day, ‘Safe, sane, sober cruising”.
I’ve got no problem with a guy burning the Goodyears off the back of his hot rod at the stoplight, or doing a neutral drop and smoking his tires to show off, but I still believe in safe, sane cruising.
There are now dozens of trashcans on Main Street, and after the March Cruise Night, I drove downtown the next morning and it was very clean. The only evidence of the previous night’s activity were some large, long burnout tracks.



Cruising is a fun activity, and at the height of cruising in Mesa around the fall of 1981, Main Street and Mesa was named the Best Cruise in America by Car Craft magazine! Car Craft is bringing back their “Best Cruise” series, and for me, it brought back some fond memories, as well as the dismay that Mesa wouldn’t even be mentioned because we have no cruising, and haven’t for 25 years! But, being the resourceful type that I am, I called Car Craft and talked to their editor, Doug Glad about coming back to Mesa for the November Cruise Night, and he said he would strongly consider it.

I spoke with Mayor Scott Smith and he is in favor of cruising, even on a more regular basis if needed, believing that the crowd that would be attracted downtown now, would not be the same type that got us kicked out 25 years ago.

Mayor Smith is in favor of “whatever will help downtown”. I don’t think that the taxpayers of Mesa need to spend another $5-10 million on “studies” of what to do with 		downtown. I even joked with Scott Smith that I’d be happy to perform the next “study” of what downtown really needs, at a tenth of the cost. But I was serious.

I’m hoping these last comments aren’t blown out of proportion or taken the wrong way, or thought of as a threat, but let me just offer these few words: Main Street belongs to me. It belongs to you. It belongs to anyone who pays taxes in this city, and if we want to cruise EVERY Friday or Saturday night, we will. You see, after more than 3 tough years of fighting back in the 80's, we were just fed up trying to fight City Hall and the barrage of mistruths and biased statistics reported against us. We even said it back then; figures don't lie, but liars figure.

Now, those of us who still have some fight left in us might not mind the challenge again, and this time, we have a few more smarts, and a little more money to fight back with.

Oh, and votes too. You see, all those cruisers the city kicked to the curb and off the street 25 years ago now vote. And many have kids who are old enough to vote.

Most of us however, don’t want to fight a political machine again, so we’ll likely remain just a social group, and vote for candidates that favor our ideas.
I vote for safe, sane, sober cruising and having fun. I hope you do too. Just be safe.