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Mountain Men founder Ralph Baker dies
Ralph K.W. Baker, founder of the Tucson Mountain Men, has died at age 81.
Mr. Baker, who worked for decades here to perpetuate the image of that pioneering era in American history by appearances and outings, died Wednesday. Cause of death was not given.
A native of Troy, N.Y., he trapped small game in the Adirondacks as a boy, but in later years realized that wild game was diminishing, developed an interest in ecology and gave up hunting.
In fact, he and other members of the Mountain Men made it a point to use only furs and pelts recovered from animals killed by automobiles to make their costumes.
Mr. Baker served two tours in the Navy, from 1935 to 1938, and from 1942 to 1944. He was wounded during World War II.
After discharge and recovery, he went to work for General Electric Co., participating in the Manhattan Project.
He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at St. Bernardine of Siena College at Loudonville, N.Y., and did graduate work at New York State College for Teachers at Albany, Arizona State University and the University of Arizona.
While attending school, he worked at a variety of jobs, including baker, parole officer, service station owner/operator, process engineer and school attendance supervisor.
He married Doris Cashdollar on Oct. 31, 1944.
Mr. Baker worked as a teacher in Picacho from 1956 to 1959 and moved to Tucson in 1959. He worked as a history and government teacher before returning to earn a second master’s degree in biology to teach science at Spring and Townsend junior high schools. He retired as a teacher in 1982.
After founding the Mountain Men here in 1964, he and fellow members helped with various charities and Special Olympics, and regularly participated in the Fiesta de Los Vaqueros rodeo parade. The group also has participated in regional and national events, including the Rose Parade and the National Bicentennial celebration in 1976.
Mr. Baker and the Mountain Men were featured in a 1979 article in Arizona Highways.
In 1975, he and other family members bought the MacArthur Hotel at 345 E. Toole Ave. downtown, across from the Southern Pacific Railroad Depot. Built in 1908 to cater to railroad passengers, the hotel had deteriorated and developed an unsavory reputation.
Mr. Baker renovated the business and renamed it the Iron Horse Hotel and Saloon.
As part of his Mountain Men background, Mr. Baker became an expert in frontier cookery, using century-and-a-half-old sourdough starter that allegedly had been handed down from the California ”gold rush” days.
He was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Kiwanis, the Arizona Education Association, the National Education Association, the Tucson Vigilantes and the Appaloosa Club. Mr. Baker also belonged to the Republican Task Force, the Retired Teachers Association, The Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
Mass was to have been celebrated at 9 a.m. today at St. Odilia Church, 7570 N. Paseo Del Norte, with burial to follow at Evergreen Mortuary and Cemetery, 3015 N. Oracle Road.
Survivors include two daughters, Darlene F. Douglas of Tucson and Linda Hughes of Tennessee; four sons, Ralph K.W. Baker II, Theodore R. Baker and Richard L. Baker, all of Tucson, and David M. Baker of Kingman; a sister, Doris Spearance of New York; a brother, Robert Baker, of Tucson; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
He was preceded in death by a son, Edward, and his wife, Doris.
(Dated May 11, 1999)
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Mr. Allen longtime link between city and UA
A lawyer, military man, educator and journalist, James Dean Allen used to say he had only two goals in life: to be a good father and a good husband.
In the wake of his death Monday, one month before his 90th birthday, Mr. Allen’s 10 children, 20 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren can attest that he fulfilled his lifelong ambition with grace, dignity and humility.
”He was somebody who clearly could have done more professionally,” said his daughter, Kathy Allen, assistant features editor at the Tucson Citizen. ”But he never counted anything he did outside of the family as worth much. His greatest accomplishments were his children and their happiness.”
But Tucson will remember him for much more, she said.
In 1950, Mr. Allen, equipped with a law degree and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, packed his wife, Eileen, and their children into a rickety, wood-paneled Chrysler station wagon and drove to Tucson in search of a more-hospitable climate for their asthmatic eldest son, Bill.
Two years later, he was the second employee in the University of Arizona’s News Service Bureau. He later became assistant to UA Presidents Richard Harvill and John P. Schaefer.
”Dad had lots of contact with people out in the community – he was their base touch with the campus,” Kathy Allen said. ”He always saw himself as a facilitator to help people get what they needed, from dorm rooms to what teachers to get to where to go see a movie.
”He didn’t limit that to his 10 kids. He opened himself up.”
Mr. Allen, born in Harlem on June 11, 1909, practiced law in New York City, served as assistant dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and worked in advertising and public relations in New York and Chicago before moving to Tucson. He joined the U.S. Army in 1942, serving at the Pentagon and reaching the rank of major.
He is survived by his children William Ackerman Allen (Kathy Sexton) of Santa Ana, Calif.; Betsy Potts (Chuck) of Thousand Oaks, Calif.; James Dean Allen Jr. (Sharon) of Dana Point, Calif.; Nancy Wolter (Ted) of Gilbert; Peter Allen of San Francisco; Margaret Allen of Flagstaff; Patricia Allen LaFleur (Steve of Chino Valley); and Kathleen Allen (Roberto Guajardo), Michael Allen (Kathy), and Barbara Allen (David Henderson), all of Tucson.
A memorial service will be held at 7 p.m. tomorrow at Valley Funeral Home, 2545 N. Tucson Blvd. A memorial Mass is scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday at Holy Family Catholic Church, 338 W. University Blvd., with a gathering at the family home after Mass.
The family asked that remembrances be made in the form of donations in Mr. Allen’s name to Casa Maria, 401 E. 26th St., 85713, or to the Benedictine sisters at the Benedictine Convent of Perpetual Adoration, 800 N. Country Club Road, 85716.
(Dated May 12, 1999)
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Bill Mueller, 55, Tucson architect
Tucson architect Bill Mueller, who helped preserve and renovate several historic structures downtown, has died at age 55.
Mr. Mueller died Wednesday of heart failure in Sequim, Wash.
”A lot of people talk about how downtown can be a great place, but Bill was one of the people who went out to make it a better place,” said John Laswick, who directs the Sustainable Communities Program in the Tucson city manager’s office. ”He would not only figure out how to identify a project and what to do with it, but also how to get it financed, how to get it constructed at a reasonable price, and how to make it look good.
Mr. Mueller was co-owner of Sonoran Studios with his wife, Tucson landscape architect Joanne Gallaher.
As project manager for Tucson Local Development Corp. (now Business Development Finance Corp.) from 1989 to 1992, he served a key role in the renovation of several historic downtown structures.
Among the most prominent was the Temple of Music and Art. The work earned a 1990 award of distinction from the International Downtown Association.
”Bill managed to maintain the character and soul of that building while incorporating all the requirements of a modern theater, and he accomplished it without compromising its superior acoustics,” said Gary Molenda, president of the Business Development Finance Corp., which is a non-profit organization that develops projects in the public interest. ”He repositioned the building for another 150 years of use.”
After Mr. Mueller left the corporation seven years ago, he continued a close association on a freelance basis.
Tucson projects in which he served as architect or project manager included the renovation of the City Court Building; renovation of the Julian Drew Building; expansion and renovation of the Rockwell House; and development of the courtyard and cantina at the Stillwell-Twiggs House.
He was among the primary strategists and project managers in the ongoing development of the Tucson Arts District, which began in the late 1980s.
Arts district sites that reflect his work include the Toole Shed Studios, the Shane House Artist Apartments and the C.W. Brown Building. The last, now the home of El Centro Cultural de Las Americas, is thought to be the oldest adobe structure in the city.
”His architecture was sensitive to historic tradition and the surrounding environmental features,” Laswick said. ”His buildings significantly contributed to a ‘sense of place.’ ”
An accomplished craftsman himself, Mr. Mueller designed and built a home in the Barrio Viejo, where he and his wife lived in the mid-1990s; the house was featured in the neighborhood’s 1994 home tour.
His most recent work was as project manager of RN Ranch, a private development south of Tucson, and as project manager of Lost Mountain Management Co. near Sequim, Wash., where he was when he died.
Mr. Mueller was born on April 16, 1944, in Waterville, Kan., and he was reared on a farm in nearby Hanover. A graduate of Kansas State University in Manhattan, he also spent part of his 32-year career in Phoenix and Minneapolis. A 15-year resident of Tucson, he was a registered architect in Arizona, Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Besides his wife, he is survived by son and daughter-in-law Jon and Pat Mueller of Tucson; daughter and son-in-law Jennifer and Randy Snider of Everson, Wash.; daughter-in-law Rhoda Mueller of Tucson; three sisters, and six grandchildren. He was preceded in death by son Alex Mueller.
A memorial service will be held Friday at 4 p.m. at the Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave.
(Dated May 15, 1999)
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Services today for ad exec George Duncan
A memorial service was to be held this morning for George C. Duncan, one of Tucson’s first advertising executives.
Mr. Duncan died Wednesday after a long illness. He was 86.
The service was to be held at 10a.m. at Casas Adobes Congregational Church, 6801 N. Oracle Road, with a reception to follow at the church.
”George was an amazing man,” said Jim Click, owner of the Jim Click automotive company. ”He was more than just our advertising agency – he was a real friend and he gave us guidance.”
In 1953, Mr. Duncan and his wife, June, established the George Duncan Advertising agency.
Over the years, Mr. Duncan created advertising programs for most of Tucson’s top businesses.
Among his clients were the old Southern Arizona Bank, the original Bank of Tucson, Tucson Title Insurance, at one time or another most of the Tucson metro areas’s home builders and Jim Click automotive company from its founding in the early 1970s until Mr. Duncan closed the agency in 1982.
After the end of World War II in 1945, Mr. Duncan worked for Tucson Newspapers Inc. as an advertising account executive, guiding the advertising programs of many Tucson businesses, including John Hardy’s El Rancho Market, Tucson’s first supermarket, on East Speedway Boulevard near North Country Club Road – an area that then was on the eastern fringe of the city.
His son, Neale Duncan, said, ”As I saw him, his work was his life. He ate, breathed, bled advertising.”
”He was a brilliant man.”
Mr. Duncan was born May 7, 1913, in Phoenix.
He spent most of his early life in El Paso, Texas, where he completed 12 years of school in just eight years. After graduating from El Paso High School, he was offered scholarships to 21 Texas colleges and universities, but could take advantage of none of them because of financial constraints.
During the early 1930s, Mr. Duncan worked in the sign painting trade in Flagstaff, where he met his wife. The couple later moved to El Paso and then to Tucson in 1938.
During World War II, Mr. Duncan worked at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, modifying B-24 heavy bombers.
He is survived by his wife, June, to whom he was married for 63 years; his son, Neale of Tucson; a brother, Wayne E. Duncan of Honolulu; two grandchildren; two stepgrandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
(Dated May 15, 1999)
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John Masterman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
A memorial service will be held tomorrow for journalist John Shelby Masterman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who went on to a distinguished career in television news that took him from Capitol Hill to the world’s hot spots and back to America’s heartland.
Mr. Masterman, who moved to Tucson in 1995 after retiring from a Kansas City public television station, died Thursday of congestive heart failure at University Medical Center. He was 71.
The New York native and Cornell University graduate started his career with his hometown paper, the Ithaca Journal, before helping the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-Times win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service by heading up an anti-corruption project.
After leaving the news business for four years in the mid-1960s to work for U.S. Rep. Walter Rogers, D-Texas, Mr. Masterman turned his focus to television news, landing a job with NBC’s Washington, D.C., affiliate, said his widow, Lucy Masterman.
”He thought to himself, TV’s kind of a big deal, so he went into the news studio, and they liked him and hired him immediately,” she said.
Mr. Masterman worked as a news anchor for the station before taking a job as a field correspondent for NBC’s national news program, first in Washington and then in New York. That job allowed him to cover presidential elections in 1968 and 1972 and to report on wars in Israel and India.
After anchoring NBC’s Kansas City affiliate for two years, he became disenchanted with network television news and turned to documentary filmmaking, his wife said, which made him a well-respected figure on public television.
”His favorite time was being on the Plains, doing documentaries for public television,” Lucy Masterman said. ”He absolutely loved being with the farmers and being with his film crews. He was the writer, and he was the producer, and when you’re working personally with so few people, you’re it.”
Mr. Masterman’s documentaries for KCPT television in Kansas City included studies of the economic conditions facing Great Plains farmers, a piece on the efforts of the Northern Cheyenne Indian tribe to become financially self-sufficient, and a look at the lives of custom combine wheat harvesters working their way from Texas to Canada during the course of a summer.
”He’d already been covering wars in Israel, but that to him was the most creative work and the most pure fun in his career,” Lucy Masterman said.
Mr. Masterman also served as host and executive producer of several public affairs programs on KCPT, including ”Kansas City Illustrated” and ”Kansas City Week in Review.”
He retired from KCPT in 1993 because of a worsening heart condition, but continued to work part time until moving to Tucson in 1995, his wife said.
During his time here, Mr. Masterman served on the University of Arizona journalism department’s Advisory Board, helping shape the future of that department, said Jim Patten, the department’s head.
Lucy Masterman said her husband was an unpredictable man who ”did march to a different keyboard.”
”He was a wonderful raconteur,” she said. ”He was engaging, and he was an amazing history buff who could keep facts in his head for a lifetime.”
Following his diagnosis of congestive heart disease, Mr. Masterman wrote a novel and began work on a second one, Lucy Masterman said.
”How many people can say they’ve done that in a lifetime?” she said. ”That’s what he did for himself to try to stay sane and as healthy as he could.”
He was seeking an agent for his novel, a mystery romance tale, at the time of his death, she said.
Mr. Masterman is survived by his wife of 30 years, daughters Carrie and Shelby, both of New York City, and sons David of Virginia and Thomas of Stockholm, Sweden.
A memorial service in his honor will be held tomorrow at 11 a.m. at Grace St. Paul Episcopal Church, 2331 E. Adams St. in Tucson.
Remembrances may be made to the John Masterman Memorial Fund, in care of the UMC Development Office, P.O. Box 245082, Tucson, AZ 85724-5082.
(Dated May 18, 1999)
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