Huge Marriages Search Engine!
Ex-coach Ralph Bailey loved game of football
As line coach at Tucson High Magnet School, Ralph Bailey helped build four state championship football teams. He was also a former naturalist for the National Park Service, an avid swimmer, hiker, canoeist and fisherman.
He died Saturday in Yuma, on his way home from a trip to San Diego.
Mr. Bailey was 72. Survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, Lois Glor Bailey, and their sons, Pat, 45, an assistant football coach at Canyon del Oro High School, and Mike, 42, a middle school teacher in Sierra Vista.
Mr. Bailey was a charter member of the Southern Arizona Retired Coaches Association.
He and his wife spent summers at Estes Park, Colo., where for years he was a seasonal naturalist (June, July and August) with the Park Service. He later drove a shuttle bus in the park.
”We were really outdoors people,” Lois Bailey said this morning. ”But Ralph’s first love was football. He coached some great kids at Tucson High, including Mike Dawson (who became an all-American at Arizona and played professionally with the St. Louis Cardinals).”
Mr. Bailey graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. in 1950. He was a star football player and four-year letterman at St. Olaf.
The Baileys moved to Tucson in 1956 when he became line coach for Tucson High, a job he held until his retirement in 1980.
He coached Badger teams under Ollie Mayfield, John Mallamo and Bill Dawson. Both Bailey sons played for their father.
Mayfield called Bailey ”my right arm . . . we didn’t have one head coach at Tucson High, we had two.”
”Ralph was a great coach,” Mayfield said. ”We were going into the playoffs one year and one of our players said to me, ‘Do you know why Coach Bailey is like Santa Claus?’ I had no idea. ‘Because he likes to ride that sled.”’
He referred to the blocking sled on the practice field.
”Our linemen always had strong legs. Ralph kept them in tiptop condition,” Mayfield said.
Lois Bailey said her husband had battled cancer for about four years and also had a heart condition.
”He wanted to see the ocean again,” Mayfield said, ”and that’s why they had been to San Diego.”The Baileys were accompanied on the trip by son Pat and his wife, Sherry.
On the return trip Mr. Bailey weakened suddenly and they stopped at a hospital in Yuma, where he died.
No formal service is planned. ”We’re just going to have a gathering of friends Saturday, from 2 to 4, at the home,” Lois Bailey said.
(Dated Feb 03, 1997)
=======
Ambitious David Young made his mark here
David L. Young, whose Tucson enterprises included managing a grocery store and founding a candy company in the 1930s, and operating a Navajo rug business from the 1960s to the early part of this decade, has been laid to rest at East Lawn Cemetery.
Mr. Young, 96, died Sunday.
He was born Nov. 24, 1900, in Prescott, Ark., and later moved to Morenci, where he worked in the Phelps Dodge company store. He came to Tucson in 1928, enrolling for one semester at the University of Arizona.
He then went to work for Steinfeld’s Grocery Store, progressing from delivery duties to manager by 1933.
A year later, he founded Young Wholesale Candy Co., supplying small stores from Bowie to Gila Bend, and from Bisbee to Casa Grande.
In 1941, he married Helen McLeen, whom he called ”Honey.” She established a lunch counter at Tucson Airport, which was soon overflowing with customers as the war effort here increased dramatically. There, she earned another nickname: ”The Duchess.”
The couple retired in 1946, devoting the next five years to travel around the United States, Mexico and Canada.
In 1952, they opened an Indian trading post in California, coming back each year to ”winter”in Tucson. In 1966, the couple returned to Tucson full time and opened a wholesale business in Navajo rugs.
Helen Young died 11 years ago.
Graveside services for Mr. Young were held yesterday at East Lawn Cemetery.
Survivors include several greatnieces and great-nephews.
(Dated Feb 12, 1997)
=======
Newsman Garvin Tankersley, 85
The former managing editor who raised Arabian horses in Tucson is remembered as a ‘lovely man.’
Services for Garvin E. Tankersley, a local businessman and former managing editor of the Washington Times Herald, will be held tomorrow.
Mr. Tankersley, 85, died today of pneumonia at his Tucson home, family members said.
Mr. Tankersley, known to friends as ”Tank,” started as a photographer at the Times Herald in Washington, D.C., in the mid1930s. He rose to become managing editor before leaving the paper in 1952.
During World War II he served as a civilian in the armed forces.
He was a director of the Tribune Co. of Chicago from 1973 to 1981 and was a founding member of Potomac Valley Bank in Maryland.
Mr. Tankersley and his wife, the former Ruth ”Bazy” McCormick Miller, moved to Tucson in 1971.
The couple raised Arabian horses here.
Mr. Tankersley was a member of the Tucson Medical Center board.
”I’ll remember most his gentlemanly manners, good sense of humor and charming wit,” said Jeff Townshend, a friend for 25 years.
Mary Margaret Lynch, who also has known the family for a quarter of a century, said Mr. Tankersley was ”a lovely, lovely, lovely man.”
”He was so bright, so knowledgeable about world affairs. He was a newspaperman, and he stayed very conversant with what was going on worldwide,” she said.
Friends admired Mr. Tankersley’s constant encouragement for his wife, who founded St. Gregory College Preparatory School.
”I knew him as a very supportive and interested gentleman who was Bazy’s great counselor and was always in the background to help out,” said longtime friend Hermann Bleibtreu, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
George Rosenberg, a former managing editor of the Tucson Citizen, said the fact that they both had been managing editors caused them to ”talk a lot of newspaper talk.”
Daughter Tiffany Tankersley Wolfe said her father was the most kindhearted person she knew and the ”most devoted father, husband and grandfather imaginable.”
”He will be terribly missed by everyone in the family. It will take a long time before I get used to him not being here,” she said.
Survivors include his wife; son Garvin E. Tankersley Jr. of Maryland; daughters Tiffany Tankersley Wolfe of Tucson and Anne Sturm of Maryland; stepchildren Mark Miller and Kristie Miller; 10 grandchildren; four sisters and three brothers.
Services will be held tomorrow at 10 a.m. at Al-Marah Arabians farm, 4101 N. Bear Canyon Road.
The family requests contributions be made to Casa de los Nie±os, 1101 N. Fourth Ave., Tucson, Ariz. 85705, or to the scholarship fund of St. Gregory School, 3231 N. Craycroft Road, Tucson, Ariz. 85712.
(Dated Feb 18, 1997)
=======
Oscar-winning costumer Mary Wills
SEDONA – Mary Lillian Wills, who won an Academy Award in 1962 for her color costumes in ”The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm,” has died. She was 82.
Ms. Wills died Feb. 13 in Sedona after battling renal failure for about a year. She was buried in Wickenberg. She had retired in Sedona in 1983.
Ms. Wills worked on more than 50 major films during her career, said Tony Trust, her companion for nearly 25 years.
Because ”The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” was an independent production, ”it was really a great honor from her peers that they voted for that film,” Trust said.
Ms. Wills’ family moved to Albuquerque, N.M., in the 1930s and she began her career creating sets and costumes at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, Trust said Thursday.
Ms. Wills, who earlier had attended the University of Arizona, completed her bachelor of arts degree at UNM and was accepted to Yale University’s art and drama graduate school, Trust said.
She received her first sketch artist job working on the movie ”Gone With the Wind,” he said.
She went on to create costumes for such films as ”Song of the South,” ”Hans Christian Andersen,” ”The Diary of Anne Frank,” ”A Certain Smile,” ”Cape Fear” and ”Carousel.”
Ms. Wills also did most of the costume design for ”Camelot,” but her name was left off the film credits, Trust said. The film won Oscars for costume and set design in 1967.
”They told her at the last minute that she wouldn’t receive screen credit, which really upset her a lot,” Trust said.
Ms. Wills also worked for many years as a costume designer for Shipstead & Johnson’s ”Ice Follies.”
She created the outfits worn by ice skater Dorothy Hamill in the live show ”Nutcracker on Ice,” said Paul Cooper, who worked for the ice-skating show.
”She (Ms. Wills) was a very bright lady who was really incredible with colors,” Cooper said
(Dated Feb 22, 1997)
=======
