Kroger-Albertsons merger could be good for prices and competition, supporter says

hi I'm Lauren gilger co-host of the show one of KJ zz's original Productions it's a program with news and features from across Phoenix and the state you can find much more at the show. kjzz.org here's today's episode good morning it's the show here on kjzz 91.5 in Phoenix I'm Mark Brody and I'm Lauren gilger coming up why supporters of the Kroger Alber son's merger Say it'll be good for Shoppers and we talk micro Trends and if we're talking so much about culture online maybe we're forgetting to actually live it but first local firefighters in Southern Arizona found themselves in a tough spot recently a man trying to climb the 30ft border wall had fallen on the Mexican side he was injured but Mexican authorities had not responded to help him hours ticked by as border authorities argued about who should help him finally after 24 4 hours the araka Fire Department chief ordered the wall cut firefighters used specialized circular saws used in rescues to cut through the metal ballards of the border wall and took the man to a hospital in Tucson border patrol officials told them they didn't have authorization to do it but our first Quest this morning reports the fire chief felt that the injury had become a threat to the man's life John Washington reported the story for the Arizona luminaria and he's on the line now to tell us more good morning John thanks for coming back back on the show Good Morning Good to be here all right so tell us first about this man you don't name him in your reporting but tell us you know why he was there right so uh I I was able to track him down and actually visit him in the hospital uh couple days after his fall and uh he was a migrant from Waka he told me that he was coming to look for work that there's little work in Waka and there's no legal or viable means of getting to the United States in any legal manner to try to find that work so he took uh the route that a lot of people are doing now and he climbed over the wall or tried to climb over the wall um when he was about at the top he fell off and that is all he remembers for a number of hours probably um he lost Consciousness and woke up and saw his ankle bone actually sticking out of his skin and his his foot and ankle just covered in blood um there's there's one important uh slight correction here is that he did fall on the south side of the wall but he was very likely still on US territory that is because the wall is built not directly on the international divide but depending usually a few feet or a little bit more north of of the actual International borderline so he was very likely on us soil right and that brings us to some of the jurisdictional issues here the things that came up you're right about how officials were sort of arguing about who should help this person person calling Mexican authorities they were not responding it was volunteers who found him right and tried to kind of help him through the wall what who is responsible though in a situation like this John well that's a question um and and and when I talked to the fire chief the Ariz the araka fire chief tanji Beckham about this um she lamented that there is no protocol in place to respond to these kinds of emergencies so you know previously even in in just the last couple years there were a lot of gaps in this span of border wall this is just east of Sasa Bay sort of West of noes and there was about 20 gaps that people could pass through um either to respond to some emergency call or uh for whatever reason and those gaps have been filled in by the bid Administration so right now there's no real way to get around the wall unless you go over it um there are uh doors in in parts of the wall they are like flood control doors but a lot of those have actually been um sealed over as well so even if you have a key which border of Patrol does the key won't actually work you actually still need to make the cut so tell us about her decision there to to cut through the wall border of Patrol had told them they didn't have the authority to do that right so uh there there's a number of steps that happened here she originally got the call from some humanitarian Aid volunteers late in the morning I think there was on uh August 28th and she headed she one of her Crews headed out towards the wall and they contacted border patrol because this is the standard protocol there border patrol said that she wouldn't have access to the person he was on the south side of the wall so they stopped her from from proceeding um and they told her that they were in contact with Mexican officials that were going to respond hours later at this point it had been over 12 hours and the man had been bleeding and suffering in pain on the south side of the wall no one had responded so they called the fire chief again and this time they decided that they had to go and and actually see what was going on they saw him and they actually treated him initially through the wall so the walls made up of these steel ballards with about a you know a few inch gap between each of them and they were able to give him an IV give him some pain meds and actually splint his foot or his ankle um through the wall they were still at this point waiting for Mexican officials to actually uh execute their rescue and when ours kept on dragging on when border patrol kept on saying that they couldn't authorize cutting through the wall she said that she had to make a decision he was losing uh a feeling and circulation in his extremity and she decided to actually make the cut which was at that point about 24 hours give or take after he had fallen right this is not the first time we've seen people get severely hurt trying to climb the border wall this has become more common it seems recently recently as we've seen more sections of wall be built and and it's 30 ft High tell us a little bit about how common this is how dangerous it is it's it's extremely dangerous so you know I used to be an EMT myself and and any fall that is three times your height is is a SE is potentially a very severe injury and should be treated as a traumatic injury so the wall used to be anywhere between about six and maybe 15 feet and then um in 2017 the Trump Administration just after taking office issued this executive decree saying that it's going to be replaced by a 30ft wall and then there actually going to be additional miles of wall built usually about 30 feet high so no either local or federal agency actually tracks wall Falls they will track deaths but a uh some researchers out of San Diego looked into this and they found a fivefold increase in traumatic injuries or deaths due to wall falls from the period before 2017 the period after the wall was actually built wow yeah what they explain is that it's it's more than just treating these individual issues that it's also a Public Health crisis because it's they're very complicated injuries it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of money to actually treat them yeah and they they detract from other other sorts of uh issues that they can be addressing all right we'll have to leave it there that is John Washington with the Arizona luminaria joining us John thank you for your reporting here appreciate it yep good to talk to you [Music] Lauren well it is September and that might not mean it's looking like fall here in the Valley of the Sun quite yet but it does mean that Arizona will begin to welcome back monarch butterflies as they make their yearly cross-country migration and our next guest is working to seed an all important plant to them milked but she's not doing it just anywhere she's working with Monarch conservationists to ensure a supply of milkweed along Arizona's miles and miles of State highways Alex Lopez Lera is a biologist for the Arizona Department of Transportation I spoke with her more about what their work looks like this time of year well our work has just started ad entered into the monar conservation agreement just this past April but we've mostly been doing a lot of pollinator friendly practices to help native vegetation along the roadsides Thrive we do that pretty much all year round so right now we are currently monitoring some areas to see what areas have best milked and nectar plants available that way we can make note of those to keep them healthy throughout the year also just revising our vegetation mowing schedules and um any other sort of roadside maintenance just to be aware of the Monarch coming up that way we can make it a safe journey for them so that's really interesting so there are areas along the highways where there is milkweed already or you know pollinator kind of plants right but you're also kind of want to plant more of those and want to preserve the ones that are there it sounds like yeah definitely you know one of the things that we've started doing at a few spots post construction is trying to get milk weed seeds in that native seed mix that we typically use so far I believe we've hit around 10 postc construction sites with milkweed seeds they're pretty hard to come by so that is one challenge that we do face I mean this is like this is so much roadside that's what strikes me about this like first of all that I had no idea this existed or that someone's job was out there to do this right but but I mean how do you even begin to survey all the roadside in the state to find out what's planted next to it yeah one chunk at a time that's how we do it um so yeah so with uh with ADOT in particular we have seven districts so we're doing it in chunks but so far it seems to be working there's a team of us that are going out has to start around the monsoon season right because milked perks up when the rains start you know we're kind of at the mercy of nature here so we tried to divide it up into sections of areas that would have high suitability for milked and other nectaring plants to keep everybody safe we're not going on like major interstates so we're going to State routes and US Highways and stuff that are easier to pull off on the side of the road yeah Le let's back up for a moment Alexa and just talk about why milkweed is so important for monarchs and and like the kind of role it plays in their you know miraculous migration that they do every year milkweed is super important for monarchs um they're one of the only butterfly species that actually use the plant in its entirety um so the monarchs will lay eggs on it and then once the caterpillars hatch they start to eat the milked as they grow and it also makes them unpalatable to Predators because milked produces a toxin that most animals can't talk toate and it helps them produce that bright orange and black coloring that says don't eat me I'm poisonous you know so it's honestly a really cool evolutionary trait that these critters have developed but that's why it's super important for milkweed to be in areas because they need it to actually survive yeah yeah and this is an important moment to do this right because monarchs are are threatened right now like we're seeing their numbers dramatically decline absolutely yeah this is best time as any especially with Arizona Arizona is pretty unique because um you know we actually have quite a wide range of habitat and uh elevation ranges so we actually have about 10 species of milkweed that we find along roadsides that we could definitely kind of capitalize for the Monarch and just kind of beef up our vegetation management practices to help them out yeah give us a broader picture before I let you go here Alexa of of sort of the efforts that are involved in this like it's surprising I think to to me and probably to other people as well that that ADOT has biologists on staff and cares about what's planted next to the roadways right like what other kinds of things are you doing in this role are you looking at other invasive species are you looking at preventing the spread of brush for wildfires like how does this crop up abolutely yeah yeah so that's primarily my job I kind of Zone in on vegetation management and that does include monitoring and and managing invasive plants that might be causing some of these wildfires that you see on the news and developing practices to minimize any sort of damage that it could have on our roadways because it causes things like soil erosion and also just trying to implement practices that will make our native vegetation thrive um it is a challenge especially right now we are seeing an influx of some non-native species that are kind of taking over where Native species used to thrive so there's a lot of trying to work as a team here for our beautiful desert to continue thriving yeah and a little help for the monarch butterfly along the way that is Alexa Lopez lra biologist for special projects at ADOT joining us to talk more about her work Alexa thank you so much for coming on this is fascina yeah thank you good morning it's the show on kjzz 91.5 I'm Mark Brody and I'm Lauren gilger coming up the Arizona Cardinals are the oldest established team in the NFL but before the NFL was even founded the team was made up of a group of teenagers in Chicago they played Without helmets and without pads and as I mentioned they were teenagers who just got together because they they love this fairly new sport of football and wanted to get involved with it we'll hear what brought the Cardinals to the valley but first a federal judge has been hearing arguments over whether the $25 billion merger between Kroger and Albertson's should be allowed to continue Kroger agreed in 2022 to buy Albertson's but the Federal Trade Commission sued to block that deal some Attorneys General including Arizona's Chris Mays joined that lawsuit arguing the merger quote presents a significant risk risk of reduced competition and higher food prices Nationwide end quote ma points out the two companies have 250 stores across the state and employ 35,000 arizonans but my next guest argues the grocery merger should be allowed to go through and that it would be good for consumers Pete sep is president of the national taxpayers Union I spoke with him earlier and asked why he thinks the deal should be allowed in so many cases the federal government doesn't appreciate the market market dynamics whenever it tries to intervene and enforce competition laws that's especially What's Happening Here in the grocery market by trying to block the merger between Kroger and Albertson's which in Arizona of course is known more uh colloquially as fries Food and Drug uh the problem is that the government may actually be hindering competition rather than encouraging competition that's because the market for grocery shopping is no longer what it was say in the 1980s or 1990s when customers went to one store to get everything they wanted now they go to shopping clubs or discount Outlets as well as traditional grocery stores to get the best combination of price and choice that suits their preferences and that means there are numerous types of stores like Walmart like Target like Amazon that also provide groceries in addition to places like fries or Albertson is that more applicable in some areas than others like I think about rural parts of Arizona for example where you know you might not be able to get you know within an hour a couple hours Amazon delivery you might not have a Costco or you know something like that or a Target to to get your groceries and you might rely on you know the fries or the Safeway in in your community rural areas certainly do have their concerns about access to numerous types of food shopping outlets but that's being addressed even as we speak in a number of ways there's more and more access as time goes by not only to physical Outlets but also online outlets in the end though Kroger and Albertson's are agreeing to keep a number of stores open keep a number of jobs on the front line going and committing to reducing prices not only for suburban and urban but also rural areas as part of their request to merge and the Federal Trade Commission as well as other anti-rust enforcers can can if they wish invalidate the deal as it goes on if the companies don't keep their promises we also have to remember that if Kroger and Albertson's are not allowed to combine not allowed to compete on a more efficient basis with the Walmarts of the world they may very well be in a position of having to close stores that are currently serving rural areas so again the government's action here could maybe backfire and cause more trouble more hardship for Rural customers what gives you the confidence that for example uh there will be more competition with this merger and and I guess that prices as you referenced will be lower in this new combined entity Kroger over the past 20 years for example has invested up upwards of5 billion companywide to try and reduce prices and when it has acquired places like Harris Teeter or roundies we have seen prices actually go down that's because Kroger has a pretty efficient supply chain that's something that it can bring as a benefit to the combined Kroger Albertson's company that Albertson's alone just doesn't have right now this is the other thing that's important to remember Kroger has been an industry leader in uh food retail uh in providing unionized jobs uh for those who consider uh unionized labor to be an important component in the retail sector um you can't do much better than what Kroger has done there and I point out too that many of the competitors in this space are non-unionized and so that's another factor to consider are there other industries that come to mind that are sort of a and please pardon the pun here because we're talking about groceries and Apples to Apples comparison in terms of a proposed merger where you know there are some that are concerned about losing competition and raising prices and you know as you say you actually think that there will be more competition and better price well certainly in the telecommunication space mergers have allowed competition to more effectively take place not only in terms of your cell phone service but also in services like streaming video or providing internet when we take a look at the way telecommunications Services were provided in the 199 90s and the 2000s we thought rather narrowly of our cell phones but now they're delivering all kinds of Internet they're delivering email they're delivering many many different telecommunication services that were not part of the traditional package you can also see that even among air carriers you now have very lowcost carriers Ultra lowcost carriers and traditional carriers all interacting and competing for certain business and as the airlines are allowed to pursue more routes and more fair options passengers are benefiting as a result what role do you think public input should play here and I ask because for example in attor in Arizona the attorney general has traveled to a number of communities and and taken input from people and a lot of that has been a lot of concern people don't seem all that enthusiastic about this merger I'm wondering in your mind what role that should play in the ultimate decision by the federal government whether or not to let this go through public input is important in these very large mergers it should be going both ways though not only should competition and regulation authorities be holding listening sessions where they draw their own conclusions but the businesses themselves should be given the chance to explain how they see the future going forward and how important it is that they be allowed to combine their strengths and compete with other types of companies all right that is Pete Sepp president with the national taxpayers Union Pete thanks for the conversation I appreciate it sure my pleasure take care [Music] are we spending so much time talking about culture online that we forget to actually participate in it that's the topic at hand in a recent piece by Drew Austin for his substack newsletter kneeling bus Austin is an urban planner and writer based in New York City and he's fascinated by the ways that digital culture permeates life in the real world in the piece which is called microt trends at the end of the world Austin Marvels at our obsession with giving everything we see online no matter how specific a hashtag as he recently told the show Sam Dingman it's easier it's easy to forget that the internet is an unreliable narrator like if I'm reading on the internet about how everybody is wearing Adidas sambas and then I go outside and I see two people wearing them then maybe that's a quote unquote micr Trend or maybe they're just really popular shoes in general and I I just saw something that that I pattern matched based on this narrative that was put in my head from Tik Tok right or or reading something on the Internet it's gone so far now I think no one even knows what everyone else knows you know you I don't know if you're seeing the same things than I that I am right and yet my particular internet onclave could be really the animating focus of my entire existence like let's say for example I was inclined towards fashion I'm I'm not personally but I think this is a good example our producer aena sent me this Pinterest page that I think you'll get a kick out of which is this one Pinterest user who's been assembling a bunch of different fashion phenomenons and we have uh just to name a few dark Academia light Academia frog core coconut girl Barbie core fairy core Cottage core uh yeaw core um It's amazing And this is not intended to make fun of this particular Pinterest user but it it is clear that we we're at the point where you can just kind of attach core to anything and attract a following online perhaps become a part of a a really vibrant or some might say seething community that gives you this potentially false sense of gathered energy in the culture when you might just actually be looking at the tiniest little pixel of the entire picture exactly people just really want to feel like something is a part of something bigger yes well that that was a big question that jumped out for me in reading your piece and I'm curious to know if you accept this this framing is have we moved past the era of digital culture where it was about chasing like or chasing Clicks in order to attain some version of Fame and in fact entered a new era of digital culture where it's about perhaps this just kind of desperate desire to participate in something that feels Collective because there are so few examples of that remaining in public outside life yes my thing that I think about and I'm old enough to have been in high school school before social media it was kind of you know like MTV era when MTV was still what it was in its Heyday and me and a lot of my friends there was more of a feeling of like whatever Trends were were visible felt kind of oppressive and we almost wanted to opt out of them or get away from them yeah the internet was actually a weird place where everything you you encounter on the internet was actually pretty strange and it was kind of refreshing to find something that was really different and unrelated to anything else and now I think the end result of that is like everyone is having their own unique experience that doesn't have anything to do with anything else so tell me about how for you all of this hops out of the realm of online life and into the built environment and and how you think about addressing this in your urban planning work you know like not to generalize and say that everybody is trying to ignore what's going on outside of their immediate surroundings but I think that this Enclave mentality like I see it a lot in Brooklyn or like New York you know there's um certain levels of affluence allow you to kind of close yourself off from the rest of the city in various ways I think Uber is a good example of that you know you can opt out of taking the public transit system and if you have the money you can only ride Ubers and that's a completely different experience of getting around you know obviously not even just that it's faster more comfortable a lot of the time but you can kind of just be on your phone and it's like you teleported from one place to another yeah whereas if you get on the subway you're going to have to be around other people whether you like it or not yeah yeah yeah it's almost like we're all we're all consumed by living our convenience core Liv and I actually think that um you know nework York despite all a lot of its problems it still has a lot of good public infrastructure um I would say that like the walkability and and public amenities that New York has they're not what they used to be but um I think New York is still a pretty good city in that in that way I mean it's interesting I'm it's just making me think about the fact that I I went to you know here in we're in Tempe the the radio station uh which is where ASU is um and obviously there's tremendous number of college students coming into town over the last couple of weeks um and I went to Target the other day and the entire store was college students and their parents getting stuff for their dorms getting clothes there was ASU gear for sale everywhere like the entire store was defined by this influx of ASU energy and I was standing there with a cast iron skillet which you know maybe there are some college students buying cast iron skillets but I haven't been to college in a while but I don't think you have a lot of use for one at a in a dorm kitchen that' be surprising um but I spend some time in New York because I have family back there um and I actually moved to Phoenix from New York and I was standing there thinking this is such a different experience than I remember having in New York City where if I'm on the subway New York City I might have my cast iron skillet somebody else might have like a a paint bucket that they're going to use as a drum somebody else might have a briefcase somebody else might have a telescope um and I wouldn't have thought of this until our conversation but it's almost like it's this Collective realization that we're all living in our own micro Trend yeah yeah it feels like a moment where it's less that we're realizing that all of our micro Trends are invalid but rather just an awareness that they all do exist and are of equal importance to all of us and that feels important to to sit with it's a beautiful thing I like we what you just described I mean in New York and and a lot of other places too like you it's kind of the best and the worst thing at the same time they're you're living elbow to Elbow with other people you see a lot of different things and you kind of learn to appreciate the tapestry of of differences that you observe in other people and you could call it microt Trends or just individuality also just sharing space with other people physically is its own kind of connection yeah it also is the source of a lot of annoyance um which is the other side of it but I think if you can really learn to appreciate it then there's a lot to celebrate there yeah well the only way to break out of convenience core is annoyance core annoyance core Reckoning with it yeah well Drew Austin is a freelance writer and an urban planner and the author of The subst stack kneeling bus uh author and wrote the post microt trends at the end of the world Drew thank you so much thank you good morning it's the show on kjzz 91.5 I'm Mark Brody and I'm Lauren gilger they work in factories making clothes for Brands we all wear they work as dishwashers in high-end restaurants or as Maids for the elite kids who came to the US without papers or parents in fact that's the name of the book our next guest wrote about a group of them who came of age in Los Angeles in the last decade Stephanie kalees is the author of the new book sinen Padres neles which traces the stories of undocumented unaccompanied migrants who came to the US just as President Obama's deferred action for childhood arrivals program was announced but they couldn't qualify for it and that's where our conversation began to be a DACA eligible young person there are various requirements most of which are sort of hinged around this idea that young people are growing up in parent-led households parents are working therefore kids can go to school and meet those eligibility markers of high school education or a college degree but these undocumented young people entered the US not having been apprehended uh their long settled relatives don't take them in they didn't have an adult figure that was really doing the work the sort of economic work so that they can sit back as these dependent young people they didn't have the opportunity to enroll in school they also didn't have anyone telling them you know maintaining documentation is important any sort of evidence that you've been in the US for the past five 10 15 years is important so they not only were unable to materially meet the requirements of being a a diploma holding or School enrolled young person but they didn't have the records to show that they had been in the US longer than the last five minutes you know yeah yeah talk a little bit about why they came here and why they came on their own like one of the things that DACA spells out is that you were brought here by your parents as a child right yeah the young people that I interviewed and I spent six years doing this research I met hundreds of unaccompanied undocumented Youth and Young adults and they all tended to tell us similar story and I do bring up in the book that violence and poverty are the driving structural forces for why people are displaced of all ages but particularly more and more children but when I ask people why they migrated they talked more about what I call the rupture or not being able to see an imagined future and that's really important because we're not only talking about immigrants who are displaced but we're talking about adolescent who are thinking about their transition to adulthood they're teenagers and they're trying to imagine who will I be when I grow up and these young people made decisions sometimes alongside their parents but often by themselves independently that they would have to migrate in order to achieve the imagined future whether that that is education or future employment or the future of their families and households if they no longer wanted to experience poverty and not that's not an if right like no one wants to experience poverty in the future but young people talked about not wanting their siblings to suffer their parents to suffer so it was a collective imagined future in a lot of cases so so what did they do when they came here I mean they were they're working as you say because they really have nothing else they could do but they're working under the table doing doing one yeah I interviewed young people who grew up as garment workers predominantly in the sort of hidden fast fashion industry in downtown Los Angeles I interviewed people who worked as florists in the Flower District uh dishwashers and restaurants as uh facilities workers in hotels and warehouses just across the Spectrum a lot of the work that you imagine undocumented adults do construction workers right um but these were young people as young as 11 12 13 years old occupying these very h hostile violent exploitative uh Industries and I'm interviewing them at the point at which they're 18 and older so by the time I'm talking to them they had been in these jobs for several years in some cases a decade so they would talk to me about chemical burns and pull up their sleeves and show me the scars and burns they would talk about the neck pains and the ear aches and all kinds of physical manifestations of the fact that they had started these jobs very early and that they' accumulated harms over the years of having occupied them so you talk about that these being kind of exploitative Industries and they're so young like they're just kids right like how bad did it get for them like what kinds of violence did they encounter yeah I heard stories of um sexual abuse at work among young women I heard stories of upwards of eight n10,000 of stolen wages um people were the factory workers are some of the most grueling stories that I heard um these young people would be working up to 16 hours a day doing repetitive work and in the Garment factories this is peace rate work which means you get paid for every sleeve you sew every button you so uh every denim seam so young people are working at fast rates right to make that $100 by the end of the day and they would talk to me about doing the math in their head like how many t-shirts do I have to put together today to make 60 or $70 by the end of my 12 13 hour shift so you were interviewing them a little later on right like after they've kind of or at least are trying to transition into adulthood what happened to a lot of these these young people what are they doing today yeah I I tell two stories in the book these participants they would talk about having developed Community having maybe not achieved material Mobility they they weren't making increasingly uh larger sums of money every year they weren't home owners or any you know by any stretch of the imagination but they felt that they had adapted to life in the US right they had their Community they had their sort of Rhythm of Life and then I tell another story in the book one of what young people called perion in English that translates to predition a a loss of self a loss of Hope in the future a loss of goals and the the momentum to achieve the the goals young people set when they originally migrate and this this ends looking something like um entering into abusive relationships right in order to escape the loneliness or uh drug addiction self harm suicidal ideation all of these things that that sort of manifest for young people across the immigration status or class Spectrum in that transition to adulthood but acutely so for young people that are experiencing such a violent coming of age as low-wage workers undocumented Young people and unaccompanied children yeah so you do this work for a personal reason right your parents were kind of in a similar situation yeah I didn't come to the work knowing about my parents uh having come of age as unaccompanied youth in Los Angeles I learned it along the way my parents are Salvadoran immigrants I was born and raised in LA and I knew of their immigrant backgrounds uh but it wasn't until I sort of started Shar sharing with them how shocked really I was that my participants had these experiences that my dad and and later my mom both said wait me too they also experienced unaccompanied undocumented migration my dad arrived in the US in Los Angeles specifically at the age of 17 and was a garment worker was a carpet uh installer you know did try to do his best my mom took buses across town on her own and enrolled herself in school and so it MO motivates now how I do my work and why I do it because I think uh we see young people in a in a sort of snapshot in this book I cover six years of their lives but it really is just a moment right um and if there can be interventions that make it so that their children can be PhD holding Berkeley professors right um not have this be the exception but maybe more of a rule I would love to be involved in any sort of telling of stories or intervention that would allow my Coming of Age experience to be the second generation of these young people that I met well they must be proud all right that is Stephanie kenaz ales author of the new book sin Padres neelis unaccompanied migrant youth coming of age in the United States she's an assistant professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Berkeley interdisciplinary migration initiative Stephanie thank you for coming on thanks for telling us about your work here I appreciate it thanks for having me good morning it is the show here on kjzz 91.5 I'm Lauren gilger and I'm Mark Brody the Arizona Cardinals kick off their new season on Sunday in Western New York against the Buffalo Bills they'll host their first game of the season the following week when the division rival LA Rams come to Glendale the Cardinals finished last in the NFC West last season with a 4 and13 record but with quarterback Kyler Murray healthy and first round pick Marvin Harrison Jr on the field there's more optimism for the team this year the Cardinals of course are not native to Arizona and with me to talk about the team's history is Jos Z emba the author of books on football history specifically the Cardinals and Joe let's go back to the beginning and what were the circumstances that led to the Cardinals being founded in Chicago the Cardinals team goes way back to 1899 when a group of neighborhood kids on the souths side of Chicago started something called the Morgan athletic association so they played Without helmets and without pads and as I mentioned they were teenagers who just got together because they they loved this fairly new sport of football and wanted to get involved with it and then the next year in 1900 they joined forces with a new club called the Morgan athletic club also on the south side of Chicago and from from those early years and a gentleman named Chris O'Brien who was involved with both of those early teams even though he was a teenager himself that's where we can trace the whole history of the Cardinals back to those early days over 125 years ago well so what then led the Cardinals to eventually leave Chicago for St Louis the Cardinals maintained a base on the south side of Chicago but in 1920 a new team called the decator Staley started playing games there Decor was from Central Illinois they had recruited a young engineer named George halis to play on the football team and serve as athletic director and then they got a little bit too big for decar in 1921 moved to Chicago on the North side and were called the Chicago Staley but it led to a little bit of a conflict in terms of fighting for fans and fighting for victories and over the years the Chicago Bears became a little more notorious a little more successful and certainly more well attended for their games which started prompting the Cardinals Management in the 1950s to perhaps start looking around for a move where they would get better attendance because this is before we had the internet and we had television Etc and huge sponsorship so the only way these teams could really make money was two ways selling programs which wasn't very good and also attendance at games and the Cardinals Drew so poorly the 1950s they were really was difficult for the club to even pay the guarantee to visiting teams from the National Football League and so it was sort of with the endorsement of the rest of the league that the Cardinals were looking around to move somewhere else and there were several cities mentioned over the years Buffalo uh Miami San Francisco but they settled on St Louis Missouri and they moved in March of 1960 hoping for two things better attendance and a new stadium well so did the move to St Louis ultimately prove financially successful for the Cardinals at least temporarily ultimately the move at first looked good the crowds were embracing the Cardinals they were sharing a stadium Bush Stadium with the St Louis Cardinals baseball team so the promise was there that the Cardinals were going to have their own stadium in St Louis eventually that never panned out the team was not very successful as we mentioned in the 1950s they had a few good years in St Louis but again attendance was a problem and here we're now seeing where television was becoming more important in fact with television becoming more prominent the Cardinals were looking for other revenue streams to help them out and the big factor though even in St Louis was the lack of a stadium for the team well so that being a problem they decided to leave St Louis they came to Arizona played in uh in Tempe at sundevil stadium was it was that the main reason for them to leave St Louis and come here in some ways the same reason they left Chicago financial reasons and and specifically in this case the stadium yes exactly poor attendance the search for a stadium the team could call its own for example the Bears and Chicago were playing in Wrigley Field which is a baseball field sharing it with the Cubs and the cardinal had been in kamsky park on the South Side sharing it with the Chicago White Socks and then they shared a stadium with St Louis but as more teams came into the league the football teams were looking for their own spot they where they can control not only the attendants but concessions parking Etc as the league matured television rights were so important but it looked pretty good on television if you had a a strong full crowd watching your games there does seem to be a certain irony in the sense that they left St Louis because they wanted their own stadium and were tired of sharing it with a baseball team when they came to to Arizona they shared it albeit with another football team but we're still sharing a stadium for several years before they got their own yes exactly and and at the University Stadium and I remember going to a game there and I believe I was on the east side of the stadium in the afternoon sun came up and little toasty uh being from Chicago that was uh a little toasty for me but yeah I think uh the fact that they were able now to to build a stadium and not share it with anyone unless they wanted to and of course there's a lot of events there but that roof and the air conditioning really makes it spectacular for the fan and even going back now this is where I'm going to stretch my memory to 191771 1918 the Cardinals played in a place called Dexter Pavilion for indoor games in Chicago during the winter again a way to make money but even then it almost seemed like the team was destined to have an indoor stadium in their future it just took a 100 years that's all so obviously the game of football does not look anything in 2024 like it did you know in the early part of the 20th century but I wonder if when you watch the Cardinals of today do you see any resemblance to any of the teams from back when they were in Chicago or even St Louis yeah the the game is is the same in terms of that elusive touchdown even that's changed when the cardinal first started a touchdown was Five Points as was a drop kick field goal worth Five Points so the strategy would change of course the players are bigger and faster uh the coaches at one time were not allowed to coach from the sideline and passing is the main thing until the 1930s when the rules were I guess relaxed a little bit you had to be five yards behind the line of skirm to throw a pass and that made it difficult and if pass was thrown into the end zone earlier in the game and dropped it was the same as a turnover so the rules have really helped the National Football League change as it moved away from having the same rules as the colleges in the 1930s but still that elusive touchdown is the objective as I mentioned the players are bigger the health concerns are a lot stronger I think we can still enjoy the game for what it is that that manto man I guess battle on the field try it's always difficult to explain it to someone who's not familiar familiar with football uh trying to score the touchdown all right that is Joe zemba an author and football historian Joe thanks for your time and enjoy the upcoming season thank you Mark I certainly will and and good luck to everyone in Phoenix area [Music] all right Mark you ready for football season coming up well I mean I'm a Giants fan so probably not probably not well good luck to the all that'll do it for our Thursday edition of the show Mark we'll be back with you again tomorrow morning with the Friday news camp and much more and thanks for joining us for Mark BR I'm Lauren gilger [Music]