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Hall of Fame broadcaster, ex-UA announcer Ray Scott
Legend, friend, ultimate pro and all-around good guy – this is how Hall of Fame broadcaster Ray Scott is remembered by his friends in Tucson.
Mr. Scott died Monday in a Minneapolis hospital after a lengthy illness. He was 78.
Voice of the Green Bay Packers in the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Scott moved to Tucson and announced University of Arizona football and basketball games in the mid-’80s.
”Ray was one of the early sportscasting legends,” said NCAA executive director Cedric W. Dempsey, who was athletic director at the University of Arizona during the 2 1/2 years Mr. Scott was with KNST radio station, which holds the broadcast rights to Wildcat games.
”We were fortunate when I was at UA to have Ray available to us and to serve as ‘voice of the Wildcats’ for those years,” Dempsey said.
”Personally, I respected and enjoyed Ray and found him to be the consummate professional.
”He will be missed in the sports world.”
Brian Jeffries, who in 1987 replaced Mr. Scott in broadcasting Wildcat games, said ”he was the greatest influence on my career.”
”I learned more in two years with Ray than I did in four years of college.
”He taught me that you should just be upfront and positive, that you don’t have to be funny or have some kind of shtick in order to succeed.”
Mr. Scott became Arizona’s play-by-play announcer in 1984 after a remarkable 46-year career during which he was best known as the television voice of the Packers, including the glory years under coach Vince Lombardi.
He and his wife, Bonnie, lived at Pinnacle Peak in Scottsdale before moving to Tucson.
They left in 1987 when he accepted a position with a television station in Phoenix.
After his association with the Packers, Mr. Scott announced Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings games for WCCO radio in Minneapolis.
He was close friend of Packer great Ray Nitschke, who died March 8 of a heart attack at age 61.
”That upset Ray a lot,” said Hal Scott, 74, of Edina, Minn., Ray’s brother and a longtime television and radio sportscaster.
Ray Scott was paired with a young Pat Summerall as CBS’ No. 1 National Football League team after the NFL merged with the American Football League.
Released by CBS in 1974, Mr. Scott did play-by-play for numerous teams, including the Twins, Vikings, Penn State, the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
He also anchored major college bowl games, golf championships, NCAA and NIT basketball championship finals and the World Series.
Mr. Scott was twice voted by his peers as the National Sportscaster of the Year, in 1968 and 1971. He was elected to the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame in 1982, and named sportscaster of the year 12 times in Minnesota, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In recent years, Scott had triplebypass surgery, numerous kidney failures, a kidney transplant, knee surgery, two hip replacements and prostate cancer, according to his daughter-in-law, Minnesota political consultant Sarah Janacek.
He is survived by his wife, Bonnie, of Edina; four sons and one daughter.
Services are scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at Trinity First Lutheran Church in Minneapolis.
”The last time I talked to Ray was last fall,” Jeffries said. ”He had gone through a couple of operations – a laundry list of things – and was obviously in bad shape. But he had not lost that voice.”
(Dated Mar 25, 1998)
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Winnifred Wallace, women’s advocate, dies at 91
On the night she died, Winnifred Cushing Wallace, 91, struggled to sit up in bed. An aide at the nursing home helped her up.
Mrs. Wallace, a former Broadway actress who worked on behalf of Tucson’s women, elderly and disabled, asked her close friend and ”adopted” daughter, Alison Hughes, ”Do you have 3 dollars? Give that man one of them.”
”He had tears in his eyes,” Hughes said. ”She’s dying and she wanted to give the young man a dollar for turning her comfortably. That’s an incredible woman.”
Mrs. Wallace, who died Monday, spent much of her time helping other people.
At age 85, the year before she retired, she urged women lawyers and financial consultants to donate time to the YWCA’s ”Women helping Women” program.
From 1980 to 1990, she greeted people at the ”Historic Y” building.
”Finally, I think she just couldn’t do it anymore. The Y had to tell her, gently, Winnie, you just can’t do it anymore,” said Hughes, a Democratic candidate for City Council who lost to Republican Fred Ronstadt last year.
Mrs. Wallace, born in Colfax, Iowa, in 1906, was a Broadway actress in the 1940s.
She had a major role in Arthur Miller’s ”Death of a Salesman” and worked with Mae West in a production of ”Diamond Lil.”
Her acting career ended in 1956, at age 50, when a car accident left her a paraplegic and in a wheelchair.
She moved to Tucson in the early 1970s and edited two newsletters: ”Never Too Late,” published by the Pima Council on Aging, and ”The Clarion,” published by the Tucson Women’s Commission.
Mrs. Wallace was given a Jefferson Award in the 1970s for her contributions to the community.
”She was an amazing model for differently abled people, for women and for our elders, in particular, because she worked so long and kept such an active interest in society,” Hughes said.
”She always told me she wanted to live to see the new century.”
Mrs. Wallace is survived by five grandchildren: Douglas Van Sant of Reno, Nev., and Joseph Rollins, Steven Van Sant, Linda Van Sant and David Osborne of Tucson.
Memorial services will begin at 4:30 p.m. tomorrow at the YWCA building, 738 N. Fifth Ave.
Donations may be made to the Winnifred Wallace Memorial Fund in the YWCA Endowment.
(Dated Mar 26, 1998)
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Walter Helm, UA sports star in ’38
Walter Max Helm, captain of the University of Arizona basketball team in 1938 and a 1939 graduate of UA’s College of Engineering and Mines, died Tuesday at his Carmel, Calif. home. He was 78.
Mr. Helm was born in Carlsbad, N.M., on March 29, 1919. He grew up in Bisbee and graduated from Douglas High School.
After graduating from UA, he worked as a mining engineer in Bisbee until he enlisted during World War II.
After the war, he began a long career as a custom home builder in northern California. During the last few years of his life, Mr. Helm suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Helm never missed the annual lettermen’s basketball reunion at UA. In 1988, he was chairman of the golden anniversary reunion of the 1938 team.
He is survived by his children: Betsy Hansen and Molly Lunch of Corcoran, Calif.; Walter Helm Jr. of Sacramento; Susan Lauber of Turlock, Calif.; Terry Remund of Seattle; and Anthony Helm, who is serving in the military in Germany. He is also survived by 16 grandchildren.
Services will be at Carmel Mission, Calif., Monday, with burial at Fort Ord military cemetery. The family requests remembrances be made in the form of donations to the UA athletic scholarship fund or the UA College of Medicine’s Parkinson’s disease research project.
(Dated Mar 28, 1998)
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Weinzapfel drove steam locomotives
A Tucson icon and an era – that of the steam locomotive – were laid to rest simultaneously here this week with the funeral service of Constant F. ”Connie” Weinzapfel.
Mr. Weinzapfel, who worked a half-century as a locomotive engineer for Southern Pacific Railway, died March 19. He was entombed at Holy Hope Mausoleum on Thursday. He was 85.
He operated steam locomotives in southern Arizona and New Mexico for a decade before the advent of diesel engines in this area, and had a special place in his heart for them.
”(A steam locomotive) is a living thing,” he told a Citizen reporter in a 1992 interview. ”It talks to you and everything.”
Diesel engines, he opined, ”are dead.”
Mr. Weinzapfel claimed the distinction of being the first child born in St. Mary’s Hospital, on May 11, 1912. He was one of several children, son of a Kentucky-born father who spent 40 years as a Southern Pacific engineer.
The younger Weinzapfel attended Tucson High School, where he made his mark as an athlete, excelling in football and track and making the all-state basketball team.
After graduation, he worked for about three years at the Fox Theater, then managed by another Tucson icon, Roy P. Drachman.
”He was a good employee, a damned good one,” said Drachman, also a lifelong Tucsonan.
Mr. Weinzapfel got married soon after high school. He and Rilla Mae had been married 53 years at the time of her death in 1987. He retired the same year.
He followed his father into railroading in 1937, starting as a fireman and getting promoted to engineer during World War II. His entire railroading career was spent working between Yuma and El Paso, Texas, with 25 years devoted to the Tucson-to-Lordsburg, N.M., run.
He spent the last eight years assembling trains and moving cars in the Tucson switch yards in order to stay near his ailing wife.
The biggest thrill of his career, he said, was having pulled a three-mile-long, diesel-powered train from Lordsburg to Tucson, a 160-mile-long stretch, in only 4 1/2 hours – a major task with a train of that length.
Mr. Weinzapfel became his union’s legislative lobbyist and in that capacity was on a first-name basis with prominent politicians, including Carl Hayden, Barry Goldwater, Dennis DeConcini and Morris Udall.
Since engineers who could run steam locomotives were a scarce commodity, Mr. Weinzapfel was called upon by movie producers to run them for films, including ”How the West Was Won.”
After his retirement, he was actively involved in working to restore steam locomotive #1673, which had been given to the city of Tucson by Southern Pacific in 1955. Mr. Weinzapfel had operated that locomotive during its half-century-plus career in southern Arizona.
”I’d give anything to restore that old locomotive and get the kids to come see it and sit on it,” he said in a 1992 Citizen interview.
The locomotive has been on display in Himmel Park since the early 1960s. A task force now is working to have it relocated to a spot near the old Southern Pacific depot downtown.
Reminiscing about his career in a 1987 Citizen interview, Mr. Weinzapfel summed up his situation succinctly:
”I love running an engine. I’m a crazy guy ’cause I love my job.”
Mr. Weinzapfel is survived by two daughters, Jean Bennert of Arlington, Texas, and Judy W. Jones of Tucson; a son, Ron Weinzapfel of Garland, Texas; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
PHOTO CAPTION: Tucson Citizen file photo
Mr. Weinzapfel, in a 1994 photo, holds the pocket watch he used to keep No. 1673 running on time.
(Dated Mar 28, 1998)
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