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Softball enthusiast, coach Leo Huerta
Leo Huerta, who devoted countless hours over nearly three decades to coaching girls softball teams in Tucson, died Tuesday of a heart attack. He was 56.
”Softball was his passion,” said daughter Arlene Zamora. ”His daughters and granddaughters all played softball with him. That was pretty much all he did – he was always at the ball field.”
He was returning from a ballgame with one of his granddaughters at the time of his heart attack, she said.
Mr. Huerta, a native Tucsonan, was born May 12, 1943. A Tucson High School graduate, he was a lineman for Tucson Electric Power Co., where he worked for 25 years.
He and Bertha Pacheco were married in Tucson on May 4, 1964.
Mark Rodriguez, Mr. Huerta’sassistant coach with their Amateur Softball Association team, Tucson Pure Lightning, said: ”He had a real commitment to softball, to the girls who played for him. He was a really committed family man and had a love of the game, the enjoyment he got out of it.
”Leo usually had teams of girls who did not play well enough to make other teams,” Rodriguez added, ”but he would find a way to win his fair share of tournaments with them.”
Gabriella Rico, whose daughter was a member of Mr. Huerta’s team, said, ”A lot of times, he’d take money out of his own pocket to get girls to tournaments if they couldn’t afford to go on their own. He was an extraordinary person and kept a lot of girls off the streets to play ball.”
”Leo was a little man in stature, but had the heart of a giant,” said Vern Godel, Mr. Huerta’s supervisor and a friend at TEP. ”He was dedicated to his family and his job. But most of all, he loved coaching young ladies in the game of softball. Our beloved buddy bro Leo will hold a place in our hearts forever.”
Visitation is scheduled from 4 to 10 p.m. tomorrow at Carrillo’s Tucson Mortuary South Chapel, 240 S. Stone Ave. Rosary will be recited at 7:30 p.m.
Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Saturday at Our Mother of Sorrows Catholic Church, 1800 N. Kolb Road, with burial at Holy Hope Cemetery.
Survivors include his wife, Bertha; daughters Eileen Doane of Richland, Wash., and Arlene Zamora and Sita Bracamonte of Tucson; sons Leo Huerta Jr. and Xavier Huerta, both of Tucson; a sister, Rosie Pickens of Tucson; a brother, Bobby Huerta of Tucson; and 18 grandchildren.
The family suggests memorials be made to Mr. Huerta’s softball team, Tucson Pure Lightning, c/o 7512 E. Fayette St., Tucson, Ariz. 85730.
(Dated Sep 02, 1999)
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Stahl friends invited to informal memorial
Friends of John J. ”Jack” Stahl, who died this week at age 85, are invited to share stories about the retired businessman Saturday at Tucson Country Club.
The informal remembrance will begin at 11 a.m. at 2950 N. Camino Principal.
Mr. Stahl retired to Tucson in 1973 after a long business career that included a stint as a vice president of A.O. Smith Corp. steel and later president of one of its subsidiaries.
Mr. Stahl graduated from Bethany College in Bethany, W. Va., before joining the Westinghouse Electric Co. and later U.S. Electrical Motors.
In 1936 he married Geraldine Sutton West.
Mr. Stahl served as a U.S. Navy lieutenant from 1942 to 1946.
Upon leaving active duty, he began work for A.O. Smith, were he had several assignments.
He was promoted after graduating from the Harvard Advanced Management program.
Mr. Stahl was born in Pittsburgh on Jan. 26, 1914.
He died Tuesday after a two-year battle with cancer.
He was preceded in death by his first wife, who died here in 1981.
Mr. Stahl is survived by his wife, Bonnie; his children, Meg Sutter of Pensacola, Fla., and Jeff Stahl of Tucson; and three grandchildren.
At his request, there will be no flowers or formal memorial service.
Donations in his memory, however, can be made to Tucson Medical Center Hospice Care, 5301 E. Grant Road, Tucson, Ariz. 85712.
(Dated Sep 09, 1999)
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City’s ‘Gen. Patton,’ Gene C. Reid, gone, but zoo and park will live on
A wheeler-dealer, an arm-twister, an end-runner, a cajoler, a penny-pincher, a visionary, a horse trader, a Gen. Patton. Pick any one or combination of those terms and you’ve got a pretty fair handle on Gene C. Reid, a former director of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department who died last week at the age of 86.
He was all those things and more, said friends and longtime acquaintances who admired – and were sometimes dismayed at – his free-wheeling style of public administration.
It was Mr. Reid who saw to it that Tucson had a zoo – even though elected officials were somewhat startled to learn of its existence after the fact. It had its beginnings when Tucsonans donated a couple of peacocks to Mr. Reid for placement at then-Randolph Park.
The menagerie was immediately popular, and soon grew to include other donated critters – baby chicks, Easter ducks, rescued javelina, goats, burros, hogs, sheep, a pair of tame deer and even a Texas longhorn.
When a local petting zoo offered its baby male elephant, Sabu, for sale, Mr. Reid launched a campaign for donations, going on the radio, presenting slide shows and arm-twisting ”every club in town.”
Soon, Sabu was a star attraction at the zoo.
However, because there was no ”official” zoo, there was no official zoo budget. Food for the animals was purchased through ”operating expenses.”
Because there was no zoo budget, Mr. Reid never had to explain how two kangaroos from Australia came to be part of the operation.
Though never officially acknowledged, word had it that the transportation was arranged by the Air Force in exchange for some palm trees, grown in the park’s nursery, that nicely improved the landscape at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
Lack of budget never thwarted Mr. Reid, said Michael Flint, the current general curator at Reid Park Zoo.
”I can remember when we were first getting started (with the zoo),” he said. ”It was the first time I’d used third-hand lumber to build barn stalls. He knew how to stretch a penny.
”I was always in awe of his ability to get things done. He was quite a man.”
Joel Valdez, University of Arizona senior vice president for business affairs, who served as Tucson city manager during part of Mr. Reid’s tenure, said, ”I called him the Gen. Patton of the city. He could get the job done.
”He was a public servant personified,” Valdez said. ”He always had a twinkle in his eye to do something for the good of the city. I never saw him do anything for his own aggrandizement.”
Mr. Reid was born Dec. 2, 1912, in Seattle, moving first to California with his family, and then to Tucson in 1924. He attended Miles, University Heights, Roskruge and Tucson High schools here before attending the University of Arizona from 1932 to 1936, where he studied horticulture.
He worked three years at the Pima County Recorder’s Office and for a year with the Tucson Police Department before joining the family business, Rancho Palos Verdes.
The business was founded by his father, Maurice, to grow dates, citrus and tropical plants on the Northwest Side.
Mr. Reid became city parks supervisor in 1947, when – he recalled in a 1988 interview – the department consisted of six or seven men, one lawn mower and a broken-down garbage truck.
There were eight city parks at the time, the largest of which was Randolph Park, bordered roughly by East Broadway and East 22nd Street to the north and south, and South Alvernon Way and South Country Club Road to the east and west.
A rudimentary golf course brought complaints from park neighbors, because a crew of about 30 men (more often than not, city prisoners) had to water it by hand each morning. The neighbors lamented to city officials that Mr. Reid’s watering crews caused water pressure to drop at their homes.
The innovative parks director solved that problem by creating first one, and then a second lake from which irrigation water could be pumped.
Former City Councilman Robert Royal said in a subsequent interview that Reid once boasted to him that had he not been forced to get council permission to extend a water line under a street, Royal and the other council members likely would not even have been aware of the lake.
Mr. Reid had the first park bandshell erected, creating the earthen amphitheater with loads of earth hauled from basement construction projects at the University of Arizona, and the shell itself from surplus pipe and canvas swapped to D-M for some unnamed consideration – probably more trees.
By the time Mr. Reid retired as parks director in 1978, the number of city parks had grown more than tenfold to 84, totaling about 2,500 acres, with 18 swimming pools and three golf courses, a zoo and an annual budget nearing $9 million.
After his retirement, the city voted to rename Randolph Park in his honor. Mayor Lewis C. Murphy told the council: ”Mr. Gene Reid has worked for the people of the city of Tucson in excess of 33 years . . . he took a barren piece of desert and he developed it physically into a garden flowerland of significant value to this community.”
Mr. Reid served on the boards of Beacon Foundation, Salvation Army, YMCA Camp and Metropolitan Youth.
He was a member of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, American Public Works Association, National Shade Tree Conference (which presented him with an award of merit), National Recreation & Parks Association, Arizona Parks and Recreation Association (which he served as president), Arizona Outdoor Recreation Coordinating Committee and the Pima County Fair Commission.
He married Shirley May Dawson on Sept. 8, 1951. His hobbies included experimental horticulture, fishing, photography and music.
A memorial service was scheduled at 11 a.m. today at East Lawn Palms Chapel, with Pastor Sharon Ragland officiating.
Survivors include his wife, Shirley; three daughters, Pam Whitehead, Debra Zenz and Lee Reid; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
The family suggests remembrances to the Salvation Army or Reid Park Zoo.
(Dated Sep 14, 1999)
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‘Talking plain’ put Aldridge in hot water
PHOENIX – Former Arizona Speaker of the House Don Aldridge, whose term as speaker was marked by controversy and poor health, died Sunday at the age of 62.
The cause of death was not released, but Mr. Aldridge, a Republican who was a House member from 1983 through 1998, had a history of diabetes.
Mr. Aldridge gave up his speaker’s post, which lasted one session, in October 1997 after suffering a stroke a month earlier.
A diabetic for 40 years, he received a kidney transplant in 1994 and had a foot amputated days before the 1997 session.
As speaker, Mr. Aldridge created a furor over his reference to ”a few Jews” supporting a hate crime bill and allegedly told a Democratic lawmaker that ”black people can be just as intelligent as the rest of us.” He denied making the remark.
He also reportedly told a gathering that Hispanic teenage boys compete with one another over who can impregnate the most females.
Mr. Aldridge, who maintained those remarks were misrepresented, said he was not accustomed to political correctness, and that it was a problem for him. ”I’m used to talking plain,” he said.
Rep. Dan Schottel, R-Tucson, who served nearly six years with Mr. Aldridge, recalled that when he first decided to run for office, Mr. Aldridge was among a group of Republican legislators who came to Tucson to interview candidates.
”He came down to meet with me and get to know me and to find out what my opinions were on political issues,” Schottel said.
After the meeting, Schottel said Mr. Aldridge called Tucson Republicans and asked them to support him.
”He was a real gentleman,” he said. But ”He had a propensity to say things the wrong way, and the press justenjoyed that.”
At one point, Mr. Aldridge banned Tribune Newspapers’ Mark Flatten from the House after the reporter wrote an unflattering story about him. The speaker relented and issued Flatten press credentials after the Tribune threatened him with a lawsuit.
Mr. Aldridge was involved in a bitter fight for the speaker’s post that involved a 23ballot, 18-hour meeting of House Republicans.
With four of the 38 Republicans running for speaker, no candidate could gain the necessary 31 votes.
Mr. Aldridge won the job with 23 votes after the 31-vote rule was changed to end the deadlock.
Current Speaker of the House Jeff Groscost, R-Mesa, called Mr. Aldridge a principled conservative and fighter of government excess.
”No one was more committed to honorable public service than Don Aldridge,” Groscost said. ”Despite his very difficult health ailments, he summoned the courage and the strength to complete his commitment to his constituents. His tenacity and determination were an inspiration to us all.”
Mr. Aldridge came to Arizona from Wisconsin in the late 1960s. He was a Lake Havasu City real estate investor and broker and also served as a Mohave County supervisor from 1973 to 1976.
He is survived by his wife, Mary, eight children and six grandchildren.
A visitation is scheduled from 7 to 9 p.m. tomorrow at the Lietz-Fraze Funeral Home, 21 Riviera Blvd., in Lake Havasu City. Funeral services will be Thursday at 3 p.m. at Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church, 1975 Daytona Drive in Lake Havasu City.
Donations in Mr. Aldridge’s memory can be made to the Arizona Kidney Foundation, 4203 E. Indian School Road, Suite 140, Phoenix, Ariz. 85018.
(Dated Sep 21, 1999)
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