Huge Marriages Search Engine!
Pierce Insurance owner loses battle with cancer
Michael D. Pierce, owner of Mike Pierce Insurance Agency, died Saturday of cancer. He was 51.
Mr. Pierce was born in Los Angeles and spent his early years in St. Louis before moving to Tucson as a teen-ager. He graduated from Rincon High School and attended the University of Arizona.
Mr. Pierce played semiprofessional baseball with the Cleveland Indians farm team before settling into the insurance business.
Lee Johnson, a friend for 13 years, said Mr. Pierce in recent years had competed in bodybuilding competitions and at the time of his death held the title ”1998 Over-40 Mr. Arizona.”
”It was a hobby with him, you know, instead of bowling,” Johnson said.
”His family meant everything to him. If someone messed with his boys, with his wife he was there in their face. There is no question in my mind that he would have given his life for anyone in his family. I was most proud of him for the way that he loved his family.”
Visitation is scheduled for 5 to 8 p.m. today at East Lawn Palms Mortuary, 5801 E. Grant Road. Funeral services are scheduled at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Pantano Christian Church, 10355 E. 29th St. Interment will follow at East Lawn Palms Cemetery.
Survivors include his wife of 30 years, Georgia; three sons, Stephen Pierce, Ben Pierce and Josh Pierce; his mother, Mary Ruth Williams; and a sister, Mary Casper.
(Dated Dec 04, 1998)
=======
Teen remembered for dancing, humor
• A service will be held Friday for the 16-year-old killed in a crash Monday.
Sixteen-year-old Chelsea Bouchee always seemed to make the right decisions.
Although she loved to dance, Chelsea declined an offer to join the Academy of Ballet’s highest class this year to concentrate on her studies at Salpointe Catholic High School.
But Chelsea made a fatal mistake Monday when she tried to pass a car along a bumpy stretch of North Dodge Boulevard.
”She was an inexperienced driver driving a powerful Jeep,” said Chelsea’s father, Paul Bouchee. ”She was passing in a place where she probably shouldn’t have been passing and now she’s dead.”
Chelsea was driving about 50 mph when she lost control of her Jeep Cherokee while merging back into the northbound lane.
She collided with a parked Ford Bronco and a mesquite tree in front of an auto body shop just south of the Rillito bridge, said Tucson Police traffic Detective Marty Fuentes.
Contrary to initial reports, Chelsea and her passenger, fellow Salpointe student Tiffany Orenduff, 16, were wearing seat belts, Fuentes said. Orenduff was treated for minor injuries at Tucson Medical Center and released.
The seat belt may have saved Orenduff’s life, but the impact to the driver’s side of the Jeep was too much for a belt to have helped Chelsea.
”It was just a flash thing by the looks of it,” said Paul Bouchee, who drove by the crash site. ”She was dead when (paramedics) got there. And it couldn’t have taken them three minutes to get there.”
Salpointe held a memorial service for Chelsea yesterday. Her father said it was a spontaneous event, announced over the school intercom during classes.
”About 400 people attended, and about 20 people got up to talk about their friend Chelsea. It was very touching,” he said.
Chelsea, a junior, was a straight-A student, Paul Bouchee said. The day of the crash, she had turned in a 100-page report and given an oral report on the family’s genealogy.
”She worked really hard on that for two or three weeks,” he said.
Janice Bouchee, Chelsea’s mother, described her daughter as someone who always was giving, and with a great sense of humor.
”She was so compassionate, especially to those less fortunate,” Janice Bouchee said. ”There aren’t that many children who understand that.”
Chelsea performed in ”The Nutcracker” with the Academy of Ballet last year and hoped to participate again during her senior year.
She was taking two college preparatory courses and planned to stay in Tucson to attend the University of Arizona, her father said.
”She was a beautiful person and a talented dancer,” said Desiree Meyskens, 16, a lifelong friend of Chelsea who came to Tucson from southern California when she heard of the crash.
”She always was there for me when I had a problem. No matter what it was, she always had a way of telling a joke or making it all right for me somehow,” Meyskens said.
Janice Bouchee said the family has been able to ”maintain some semblance of sanity through the love and compassion of our family and friends.
”It’s perfectly horrible. You expect to bury your parents, not to bury your child.”
Services for Chelsea will be held Friday at 11 a.m. at St. Michael’s & All Angels church, 602 N. Wilmot Road.
(Dated Dec 09, 1998)
=======
Western Music founder Keith Schooler
Keith G. Schooler, longtime co-manager of Cowtown Boots and a founding member of the Western Music Association, died suddenly Sunday while on an errand for a relative.
The cause of death is not known. He was 64.
”Let’s put it this way,” said his widow, Wilma. ”He died trying to help somebody. A young friend of ours said to me, ‘Remember this: His last act on this Earth was to help someone.’ ”
Mr. Schooler was born May 16, 1934, in La Grande, Ore. Wilma Schooler, a Kentucky native, met him there, and they were married July 12, 1977.
Soon after, they vacationed in Tucson – where Wilma Schooler once lived – and decided to move here. Together, they managed the Western wear shop Cowtown Boots, 5190 N. Casa Grande Highway.
”He accomplished so much in this world, it would be hard to list them all,” Wilma Schooler said.
Mr. Schooler was a veteran of the Navy and served in the Korean War, where he was a gunner’s mate.
”He was in training when the Korean War broke out,” his widow said. ”One of his duties was delivering bodies home. He hated that.”
In 1952, he appeared as an extra in the John Wayne-James Arness spy film ”Big Jim McLain.” He is a sailor standing at attention at the bow of a boat in one scene with Wayne.
The Schoolers both enjoyed Western music. They joined Bill Wiley in 1989 along with Tom Chambers and Hal Spencer to form the Tucson-based Western Music Association and organize its first festival. The yearly Western Music Festival, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this fall, draws thousands of visitors from around the world.
Some of the Western music memorabilia the Schoolers collected is displayed at Cowtown Boots. Over the years, the Schoolers have befriended many Western music legends, such as Rex Allen, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
Wilma Schooler said a sister-in-law gave her a poem, ”The Road of Life,” that she hopes will comfort Mr. Schooler’s friends:
”I expect to pass through this world but once/Any good, therefore, that I can do/Or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature/Let me do it now/For I shall not pass this way again.”
A private memorial service will begin at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 10188, 345 E. Roger Road. A public memorial service with military honors will follow there at 6:30 p.m.
Mr. Schooler’s ashes will be scattered at sea.
Besides his widow, Mr. Schooler is survived by several daughters, sons and their spouses; numerous brothers and sisters in Oregon; and many nieces, nephews, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
The family requests donations be made to the American Diabetes Association, Arizona Affiliate, Tucson Chapter, 40 N. Swan Road, Tucson, Ariz. 85711.
(Dated Dec 11, 1998)
=======
Epitaph’s Wallace Clayton dies at 77
Wallace Edward Clayton, publisher of the national edition of The Tombstone Epitaph and active in the town’s affairs for more than three decades, is dead at age 77.
Mr. Clayton died Wednesday at Tucson Medical Center of complications of a 2 1/2-year respiratory condition.
”It’s going to be hard to imagine the Tombstone Epitaph, or a Tombstone, without Wally Clayton,” said Ben T. Traywick, Tombstone author, resident historian and longtime acquaintance.
Mr. Clayton, who had lived in Tucson in recent years, was the guiding force in turning the Tombstone weekly newspaper into a monthly ”national newspaper of the Old West” – with subscribers throughout the nation and in 34 foreign countries.
He also helped the University of Arizona Journalism Department acquire and use the weekly Epitaph’s name and format for training journalism students to cover small-town affairs and produce a newspaper.
”Wally Clayton loved the students,” said William F. Greer, adviser for the UA/local Tombstone Epitaph.
”In fact, he was so close, he would visit the Department of Journalism each semester as a guest speaker to deliver lectures on the history of the newspapers in southern Arizona,” Greer said. ”And he would relate the biography of frontier publisher John P. Clum, Apache Indian agent and founder of The Tombstone Epitaph in 1880.”
Dean Pritchard, editor of the national Tombstone Epitaph who worked with Mr. Clayton at J. Walter Thompson Co. in the 1950s, said, ”The achievement Wally was most proud of was the honoring in 1996 of the Epitaph as a National Historic Site in Journalism by the Society for Professional Journalists.”
Mr. Clayton, a native of Ohio, served in the Navy during World War II. He later majored in journalism at Washington and Lee University at Lexington, Va. and did graduate work at Wayne State University in Detroit.
After graduation, he went to work for the Washington (D.C.) Evening Star, and in 1949 received a citation from President Harry S. Truman as a representative of the nation’s capital’s younger generation of newspaper reporters, on the event of the National Press Club’s 50th anniversary.
During his five-year stint at the newspaper, he wrote obituaries, covered police and courts, served as drama critic and eventually was made medical editor.
He joined the J. Walter Thompson Co., an advertising agency in Washington, D.C., in 1952, managing a congressional campaign and acting as adviser on three gubernatorial and two senatorial campaigns. He did much of the writing of radio and TV scripts and wrote much of the campaign literature.
Mr. Clayton served as public relations director for the advertising agency, which also had offices in Detroit and New York.
His involvement with Arizona began in 1963 when he and three partners purchased several historic properties in Tombstone, including Schieffelin Hall, the O.K. Corral, the Crystal Palace and The Tombstone Epitaph.
He took an eight-month leave of absence from the advertising firm to oversee restoration of the properties and do research on the notorious mining town. With the death of the former owner and editor of the Epitaph, Clayton Smith, Clayton served as the de facto editor of the newspaper.
He served as an associate trustee of the Detroit Institute of Arts, chairman of the advertising and public relations committee of Michigan Republican State Central Committee, chairman of the public relations committee of the Michigan United Fund, a member of the Wayne County Republican Finance Committee, and chairman of the information and education committee of Detroit Economic Club.
He also was a member of Western Writers of America, Westerners International, Tucson’s Skyline Country Club and a member of the National Press Club of Washington, D.C., for more than a half-century.
Survivors include his wife, Muriel Gillette Clayton; and two sons, Timothy Clayton of Minneapolis and Christopher Clayton of Whitmore Lake, Mich.
Services are pending.
The family suggests sending donations to Rural/Metro Fire Department, 490 W. Magee Road, Tucson, Ariz., 85705.
(Dated Dec 12, 1998)
=======
Noted photographer Josef Muench dies at 94
• The German native was best known for his images of the Southwest.
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Josef Muench, a photographer noted for his images of desert landscapes, canyons along the Colorado River and Monument Valley in Utah, has died.
Muench died Saturday at age 94.
The father of nature photographer David Muench, the elder Muench was born Feb. 8, 1904, in Bavaria, Germany, and was given his first camera at the age of 11.
Muench moved to Detroit at age 22 and soon began traveling across Canada and the West, visiting national parks and photographing nature scenes. When he headed his Model-T Ford into the wilds of the Southwest, Muench said he had found the place he wanted to photograph for the rest of his life.
Muench eventually settled in Santa Barbara, where he met and married Joyce Rockwood. Over the years, Muench kept returning to the desert Southwest, his son David said.
In the mid-1930s, he began a long association with Arizona Highways magazine, David Muench said.
Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, Muench excelled at capturing unique color and black-and-white images of the West, his son said.
He made more than 200 trips to the Grand Canyon and 160 to Monument Valley, traveling up to 200 days in a year.
Although he stopped taking photographs a few years ago, he continued to sort through the thousands of images he created over the years, filling orders and requests for reprints.
One of his pictures, a photograph of a snow-capped sequoia redwood taken in Kings Canyon National Park, was one of 117 pictures of Earth’s landscape sent up on the unmanned Voyager space craft. The tree is considered the nation’s Christmas tree, said his grandniece Christine Elliot.
Muench is survived by his son, grandniece, grandson, granddaughter and three great-grandchildren.
(Dated Dec 23, 1998)
=======
