Great Garages JIM BRIDGEWATER: ‘I AM BLESSED’
For Jim Bridgewater, 1937 was and is a very good year.
Born in downtown Phoenix in 1937, he now lives in uptown Paradise Valley near landmark Camelback and Mummy mountains. In his three garages, Bridgewater, 84, works on and displays his five birth-year Resto-Mods. He also has a 1934 Ford built in Detroit three years before even he was on the drawing boards in Arizona. Each car has a great story ––the ’34 a particularly poignant one.
His birth home was at 14th Street and Sheridan, both dirt roads at the time; young Phoenix had perhaps 50,000 residents who stoically lived in the Southwest desert without air-conditioning. He attended North High School because it was north of McDowell Road. A mile south, students were assigned to Phoenix Union High School. And, nearby, appropriately named Carver High School was designated for nonwhites, wherever they lived.
His father, Ross, was a mechanic and a trucker; early on, Jim learned the challenges and joys of repairing moving things from him. One of his work
