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Journalist had energy, compassion
Former Tucson Citizen staff writer Kathryn A. Governal, who died this week, is being remembered as a journalist who was not ashamed to show a caring side.
Miss Governal, 33, died Wednesday after battling a long illness.
She was a full-time summer intern at the Citizen in 1993.
”I knew her as a journalism student at the University of Arizona, as editor of El Independiente and as a Citizen reporter, and she always impressed me with her energy and compassion,” said Citizen City Editor Joseph Garcia, a former UA adjunct professor.
Coping with numerous disabilities, Miss Governal still managed to obtain her master’s degree in journalism last year.
”It’s a real tragedy,” said Jim Patten, head of UA’s journalism department. ”She was a very valuable and very popular student. Everybody loved and respected her.”
Getting her master’s degree was among Miss Governal’s proudest accomplishments, said her mother, Roberta Governal.
Her work included articles published in the Aztec Press at Pima Community College, the Tombstone Epitaph, the Citizen, The Arizona Daily Star, the Desert Leaf and Good News magazine.
In 1996, she was editor of El Independiente, a bilingual, student-produced newspaper published by UA for South Tucson.
”Her life brought great joy, and her death brought profound sorrow to those who knew her,” her mother said.
Miss Governal is survived by her parents, Dr. George and Roberta Governal; and her brother, Robert A. Governal of Manhattan, Kan.
A celebration of her life will be held at a later date.
Contributions in her memory may be made to the Department of Journalism, University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210080, Tucson, AZ 85721.
(Dated Aug 06, 1999)
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Kennedy served city and county
• The former councilman and recorder didn’t seek publicity.
Friends of former City Councilman and Pima County Recorder Richard John ”Dick” Kennedy say he did not fit the profile of the typical politician.
Mr. Kennedy, who died of cancer Tuesday at age 71, ”wasn’t the type that seeks the headlines or to take credit for things,” recalled former City Councilman and County Supervisor James J. Murphy Jr.
”He did not toot his own horn. He was not pretentious,” said Murphy, who met Kennedy when Kennedy, a Democrat, ran for the City Council in 1967. ”He was a no-nonsense kind of guy.”
Friends said Mr. Kennedy found his greatest pleasure in helping others and playing golf.
”In terms of public service he was very dedicated. He was very interested in rights issues,” Murphy said.
Mr. Kennedy was first elected to the City Council in 1967 and served two fouryear terms. He lost a bid for a third consecutive term but in 1980 he was elected to the first of his two four-year terms as county recorder.
Mr. Kennedy was born Jan. 4, 1928, in Greenwich, Conn., where he attended St. Mary’s parochial school.
His family moved to Tucson in December 1944, and Mr. Kennedy graduated from Tucson High School in 1947.
He then attended the University of Arizona, but after two years he became a salesman for the American Tobacco Co. He later was a supervisor for Sunset Dairy.
In 1957, Mr. Kennedy opened his own business, Bargain Cottage Resale, which he continued to run for more than 30 years.
Mr. Kennedy served on numerous political committees. In 1961 he was elected chairman of the 7E Democratic Club and in 1966 was elected chairman of the Tucson Wants Industry committee.
He was appointed to the Development Authority for Tucson’s Expansion in 1966, the Committee for Economic Opportunity in 1967 and the Health Planning Council in 1969.
Mr. Kennedy is survived by his wife, Bobbie Allen Kennedy; former wife Mildred Roberts Kennedy; and their children Kathy Tribolet, Karel Kennedy, Patricia Kennedy-Weber, Ellen Nelson and Richard F. Kennedy.
Mr. Kennedy also is survived by two sisters, eight grandchildren and one great-grandson.
Friends and family members gathered to honor Mr. Kennedy’s life at 9 this morning at St. Odilia Catholic Church, 7570 N. Paseo del Norte.
Family members asked that remembrances be made in the form of donations to the Tucson Medical Center Hospice or a charity of the donor’s choice.
(Dated Aug 13, 1999)
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Artist Bruce McGrew was teacher, mentor
A public memorial service is pending for Oracle resident Bruce E. McGrew, whose watercolor paintings won him praise and awards from around the world.
Mr. McGrew, 61, died Tuesday morning of pancreatic cancer.
For 33 years, he was an art professor at the University of Arizona and in 1968 co-founded Rancho Linda Vista, an artists’ colony in Oracle.
Mr. McGrew, along with fellow artists Jim Davis, Andrew Rush and the late Charles Littler, helped establish Tucson’s reputation as a community rich with artists.
Mr. McGrew’s paintings have been exhibited around the world and are in several museums, including the Tucson Museum of Art, and private collections.
He was born in Wichita, Kan., where he started painting when he was just 11.
After he graduated from Wichita State University in 1961 and ran an art gallery in that city, he headed to Tucson to study at UA, where he earned his master’s in fine arts in 1964.
”He was a great painter,” said retired UA Professor Douglas Denniston, recalling those days in the 1960s when he taught Mr. McGrew while he was a student.
What makes Mr. McGrew’s work so compelling, said Denniston, is his loyalty to his art.
”He wasn’t part of the commercial culture,” he said. ”He didn’t pick up on all the gimmicky clichés in art. His work was authentic and came out of his individual experience with the places and people here.”
James Davis went to school with Mr. McGrew in Kansas, was a colleague of his at UA, his neighbor at Rancho Linda Vista, and has long worked beside and exhibited with him.
”Light was transcendent in both his watercolors and his oil paintings,” said Davis, speaking from Nova Scotia, where he is spending the summer. ”I think his paintings will be fully realized; they are a rich legacy of an important and special artist.”
The desert stirred a passion in Mr. McGrew, who often packed his watercolors and easel and headed to a solitary spot to paint landscapes.
”I go out of my house every day and look at the desert,” he once told a reporter. ”And every day it is new and exciting.”
Said Rush, ”He was a painter rather than an artist. He wasn’t a conceptual guy, like (Andy) Warhol. . . . He thought working from the natural world teaches and freshens the artist.”
That’s a lesson he passed on to the many UA students who took his classes and caught his contagious passion for painting.
”He taught his students to look directly at the world,” said Rush, ”and he left 33 years of students who can do that. That’s an important contribution to the art world.”
”He was a very, very special teacher,” said artist Nadia Hlibka, who studied under Mr. McGrew while she worked toward a masters in fine arts in the mid-’80s.
”He was a mentor, and a very caring kind of person. He had a gentle style. He didn’t push, but he opened up vistas. He didn’t believe in destructive critiques. He would point you in a direction and allow you to discover it yourself. We are really, really going to miss him.”
Mr. McGrew was a tall, hefty man, and his generosity of spirit was bigger than he was, said Rush.
”For such a big man, he was remarkably self-effacing,” he said. ”The level of love people had for him was very unique.”
Mr. McGrew’s life, said Davis, ”was like his paintings – graceful and poignant – and it all seemed like it had a purpose.”
His devotion to the arts included music – it wasn’t unusual to hear Mozart or Bach wafting out of his studio at Rancho Linda Vista as he covered canvases with paints – and poetry.
”All of the arts – his painting, poetry, music – was Bruce’s soul,” said Davis. ”It was his religion and resurrection.”
His love for poetry was especially profound, said Rush, pointing out that Mr. McGrew named his daughter, Shelley, and his son, Blake Eliot, after poets.
”He loved poetry beyond belief,” he said. ”Every time there was a reading, he would go. If he liked the reading, he would bring the poet back to the ranch.”
One of those he brought back was the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin. Mr. McGrew first heard him read in 1969 at UA, said Merwin, speaking from his home in Hawaii.
”It was one of those strange things,” said Merwin about his first meeting with the artist. ”We were instant friends . . . I always thought of him as one of those brothers you discover you have.
”He was a very large man, physically and in spirit,” continued Merwin. ”When I first met him he had a huge red beard and red hair and a radiant amiability, which wasn’t sappy at all. And he had a very wonderful sensibility and a great love of all arts.”
One time, as Merwin sat in Mr. McGrew’s Oracle studio watching him paint, Mr. McGrew began to recite one of Merwin’s poems. It startled, and moved, the internationally known poet who has published more than 15 volumes of poems.
A few weeks ago, Merwin went to Oracle to say good-bye to Mr. McGrew.
”I reminded him of that time,” said Merwin. ”He was so weak and could barely talk, but he started quoting my poem again. He had a wonderful generosity and gentleness. I love Bruce.”
Mr. McGrew is survived by his wife, Joy Fox McGrew; and daughter Shelley McGrew, both of Oracle; son Blake McGrew, who lives in Bucharest, Romania; granddaughter Cezanne McGrew Rahner of Oracle; brother Kenneth A. McGrew of Wichita; and sister Barbara L. Peterson of Tucson.
The UA art department is planning a public service for autumn. No date has been set.
The family asks that contributions be made to the Bruce McGrew Visiting Artist Fund of the UA Foundation, c/o the College of Fine Arts, P.O. Box 210004, Tucson 85721.
(Dated Aug 13, 1999)
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Early N.M. aviator dead at 93
ALBUQUERQUE – Former Air Force Col. C.B. Cosgrove, one of New Mexico’s early aviators, is dead at age 93.
Cosgrove died here last Saturday of pneumonia, said his son, former state District Judge Burt Cosgrove.
A memorial service is set for 10 a.m. Tuesday at Kirtland Air Force Base Chapel.
Cosgrove – whose ancestors were New Mexico pioneers in the mid-1800s – helped recruit scientists and military officers for Los Alamos’ top-secret atomic bomb project in the mid-1940s.
But Burt Cosgrove said his father was most noted for his friendliness.
”He just made acquaintances with everybody, from a shoeshine boy to the president of a corporation,” he said. ”He just loved asking people questions, and he’d remember people’s names 50 years later.”
Cosgrove was born in Atchison, Kan., but was only a year old when his father moved the family to Silver City.
When Cosgrove was 15, he wanted an airplane, but his parents ”didn’t think it was safe,” his son said.
However, Cosgrove’s grandmother bought him a Curtiss Jenny, a World War I surplus plane, for $500. While he was testing it on the ground, a gust of wind took it airborne, and Cosgrove suddenly found himself making a safe landing without ever taking a flying lesson, his son said.
Cosgrove attended high school at New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, then earned an archaeology degree at the University of Arizona in 1925.
He supervised excavations and restorations at the Petrified Forest and Casa Grande National Monument in Arizona. He left that career behind when he had the chance to become Tucson Municipal Airport manager in 1929.
”He enjoyed flying a whole bunch,” said his son, adding that one benefit of being airport manager was getting to give owners’ aircraft ”exercise” in the air.
He joined the Army Air Corps in the mid-1930s and later was one of the pilots to fly the then-experimental B-17 bomber. He earned a Silver Star during World War II.
After the war, Cosgrove went to work in the Pentagon’s personnel office in Washington, D.C., in 1943. Burt Cosgrove said recruiting people for Los Alamos’ Manhattan Project ”became a favorite concern of his.”
Cosgrove retired in 1956, and he and his wife, Mildred, returned to Albuquerque. She died in 1972.
(Dated Aug 14, 1999)
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