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Youth worker ‘Pete’ Bell, 52
For 25 years, he worked with juvenile offenders in southern Arizona.
Stephen ”Pete” Patterson Bell was a ”kind and gentle” juvenile parole supervisor who spent 25 years working with southern Arizona youths, his wife said.
He also was a mean pingpong player, Dixxi Bell said.
Mr. Bell, who died Monday at age 52, had a ”standing challenge” for the youths he helped counsel: Anyone who could beat him at pingpong would be allowed to leave, his wife said.
”It never happened,” she said. ”For at least 10 years . . . he won every single match.”
A wake will be held tomorrow at 3 p.m. at the Bells’ home, 3040 N. Los Altos Ave.
After working as a juvenile corrections officer and in other positions, Mr. Bell settled in during the early 1980s as supervisor of the Juvenile Parole Office in Tucson.
It was a job he would hold until his death.
”He was very much into kids and family,” said Jill LaBrie, acting supervisor of the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections parole office in Tucson. ”He was very motivated and dedicated to working with kids to help them – and ultimately help society.”
In 1971, Mr. Bell took a job as a correctional officer at the Arizona Youth Center, now known as Catalina Mountain School.
He continued to work at Arizona Youth Center until 1980, when he became supervisor at Columbus House, a state-run Tucson group home.
About a year later, he moved into a job at the Tucson parole office.
Mr. Bell participated in several multiagency committees that dealt with issues affecting at-risk teens.
”He was a kind and gentle man,” his wife said. ”He’s just not the type of guy who would get upset about anything. He took care of business. He was down to earth.”
Mr. Bell was born in New York City on July 6, 1944, and raised in Connecticut. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in economics.
He is survived by his wife, Dixxi of Tucson; a sister, Wendy Caldwell of Massachusetts; and a brother, Toby of Connecticut.
Family members request that donations be made in Mr. Bell’s name to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, 645 E. Speedway Blvd., Tucson, Ariz. 85705.
(Dated Jan 11, 1997)
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Burton Barr, longtime state leader
PHOENIX – Burton Barr, state House majority leader for two decades and one of Arizona’s most influential politicians, died yesterday after a prolonged illness. He was 78.
Barr left office in 1986, after running unsuccessfully for governor after 22 years in the House. Often given to witticisms, one helped lead to his loss when, asked why a tax that was to have been temporary was being continued, he responded tongue in cheek, ”I lied.” Voters took him seriously.
Secretary of State Jane Hull, who served with Barr in the 1980s, said few politicians have left as indelible a mark on Arizona politics.
”I don’t think there was a bill that passed the Legislature in 20 years that didn’t have Burt’s stamp on it,” she said, describing him as ”autocratic but friendly.”
Barr began his political career in 1964. After taking office, he fought to bring order to the state’s budgeting process through creation of the post of budget director.
In 1966, after Republicans gained majority status, lawmakers elected Barr their leader.
Barr controlled a huge pot of campaign contributions, mostly from special-interest groups, which he doled out every two years to Republican lawmakers who cooperated with his agenda.
Besides helping to create the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state alternative to Medicaid, Barr engineered a historic special session to equalize disparities in school funding and led a legislative reworking of the tax code.
He also championed freeway funding and prison reform.
Considered a GOP favorite for governor in 1986, he lost in the primary to GOP maverick Evan Mecham, who later won the office but was impeached and removed.
Barr also helped bring the St. Louis Cardinals football team to Arizona and played a role in helping Arizona gain a major league baseball franchise, the Diamondbacks, who begin play in 1998.
In 1993, Gov. Fife Symington appointed him a special envoy on Indian gaming. Barr helped to thaw relations between Symington and the state’s tribes.
(Dated Jan 14, 1997)
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With Yndia Moore’s death at 94, a piece of history also fades
Yndia Smalley Moore celebrated Arizona’s statehood with a glass of champagne – her first – when she was just 9.
At Tucson’s 1974 bicentennial celebration, she was named La Doña del Día – the lady of the day.
Mrs. Moore died yesterday of natural causes at St. Joseph’s Hospital. She was 94.
Funeral services were to be held today.
”I call her ‘Tucson’s first lady,’ ” said author and retired University of Arizona library head Lawrence Clark Powell, who knew Mrs. Moore for more than 40 years.
”She was stronger than most men, morally and physically. She took the lead; she never followed,” he recalled.
In her early 20s, the native Tucsonan opened a Mexican tea room. There she served such luminaries as authors Sinclair Lewis and John Galsworthy.
‘Walking encyclopedia’
Mrs. Moore also helped launch the Tucson Museum of Art, steered the Arizona Historical Society to success, edited a book of her journalist father’s writings, and received numerous honors for her community work.
She was a ”walking encyclopedia of Tucson – not just from reading about it, but from living it,” said author, retired UA anthropologist and historian Bernard Fontana.
Yet it is for her love of people that family and friends will best remember Mrs. Moore.
”She always said she had no hobbies,” recalled Tucsonan Dianne Moore Bret Harte, Mrs. Moore’s only child. ”But her hobby was people. She adored them.”
Mrs. Moore was known for her generous heart and friendliness.
”I often think of when she lived on Main Street (Avenue),” recalled her daughter. ”One day she was walking her dachshund and said hello to some people, as she often did. As she passed, she heard the man say in Spanish to his companion, ‘You must know her.’
” ‘I don’t,’ replied the woman, ‘but she is la que saluda,’ the woman who greets you. That’s the epitome of who she was.”
Mrs. Moore was born in Tucson on June 28, 1902.
Her father was George Smalley, editor of the Tucson Citizen at the turn of the century. Her mother was Tucson native Lydia Roca Smalley.
Mrs. Moore grew up downtown and attended Tucson High School. She was slated to graduate in 1918, but a Spanish flu epidemic swept through the city and closed schools. At 16, she dispensed with high school and entered UA.
Launched Mexican tea room
In the 1920s she opted to put college on hold, said Bret Harte. She and her friend, Malcolm Cummings, the son of UA Professor Byron Cummings, decided a Mexican tea room was what Tucson needed.
The two took a trip to Nogales to buy dishes, chairs and tables, rented a space on South Sixth Avenue, sprinkled sawdust on the floors, put the waitresses in traditional Mexican costumes and opened the doors to La Cazuela -”the cooking pot.”
Mrs. Moore’s mother lent her cook, Rosa White, for the venture. After a year, the tea room moved to the Fish house, on North Main Street.
White’s cooking, and Mrs. Moore’s hospitality, drew customers. White became well-known for her Mexican food, especially for Mrs. Smalley’s favorite dessert, a version of snow pudding. Called almendrado, it was tinted pink, white and green and flavored with almonds.
But after a few years, the customers thinned out. The cause: the bootlegger down the street was drawing folks away. Even almendrado couldn’t compete with bathtub gin. La Cazuela closed, but not without a lasting legacy.
White took her talents, and the recipe for Mrs. Smalley’s almendrado, to El Charro, which still stands today.
”It’s now called a traditional Mexican dessert,” Bret Harte said with a laugh. ”It’s not. It’s just Grandmama’s snow pudding.”
The former Miss Smalley married Army officer James Patrick Moore in 1930, and the family traveled around the country. After his death in 1946, she and her daughter returned to Tucson, where they lived with Mrs. Moore’s father.
Promoted local culture
”She had no education to prepare her to work, no idea of anything,” recalled Bret Harte. ”And there she was with a child and an aging father. She needed to work for her own salvation, so she simply began. That was the beginning of a whole new life for her.”
Mrs. Moore was the first paid employee of the Tucson Fine Arts Association, which later became the Tucson Museum of Art.
In 1955, she became the curator at the Arizona Historical Society Museum. Five years later, the museum was in dire straits and she was named its director.
Jim Griffith, director for the Southwest Folklore Center, was an undergraduate at UA when he met Mrs. Moore.
”She was one of the first people who gave a very young, out-of-state student a sense of the continuity of Tucson,” said Griffith.
”She provided one of the first glimpses I had into a Tucson beyond the university undergraduate scene. She had a great passion and love for this area.”
Fontana, who met Mrs. Moore when he moved here in the mid1950s, agreed.
”She spent her whole life connecting the past to the present,” said Fontana. ”She was exemplary of the fact that Tucson, in spite of its size, is still a village. She had a wonderful sense of place, and continuity of past and present.”
Wrote popular Citizen column
After resigning from the Historical Society in 1964, Mrs. Moore became historical editor of the Citizen. Her column on the Old Pueblo’s history appeared on the editorial pages.
”That column was widely read in the community,” said Fontana. ”She had an enormous impact.”
In 1974, at Tucson’s bicentennial celebration, she was named La Doña del Día . Nominated by her granddaughter, Elizabeth, she received the honor because of her contributions to the community and her family.
Her lifetime of work for Tucson, women and her family was behind her winning the Lifetime Achievement Award from the YWCA in 1991.
”She was commanding, and had a lot of dignity and native intelligence, and lots of compassion and love,” said Powell. ”That love lit her up. It overflowed. She got people to do things because they loved her. And she loved them. Death doesn’t change my relationship with her. I will always love her.”
Mrs. Moore is survived by her daughter; four grandchildren, James Patrick Bret Harte of San José, Costa Rica; Kittredge Bret Harte of Milwaukee, Wis., Geoffrey Moore Bret Harte of Prescott; Elizabeth Lyon of Phoenix and four great-grandchildren.
Services will be at 4 p.m. today at Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 2331 E. Adams St.
The family asks that donations be sent to the Tucson Museum of Art, 140 N. Main St., Tucson 85701; the Arizona Historical Society, 949 E. Second St., Tucson 85719; or the Southwestern Foundation for Education and Historical Preservation, 7925-A N. Oracle Road, Box 360, Tucson 85704.
(Dated Jan 14, 1997)
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