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Herbert D. Rhodes left a legacy at UA
Retired University of Arizona dean Herbert D. Rhodes, who died of pneumonia Sunday at El Dorado Hospital, is described by friends as a gifted administrator and teacher.
The dean emeritus of the UA Graduate College was 87.
”He was a great administrator,” David Windsor, dean emeritus of admissions said. ”All the administrative deans respected him so much because he was so knowledgeable and fair. But before that,he was a master teacher, a wonderful teacher. I talked to two people just yesterday . . . who said he was the best teacher they’d ever had.
”He was the sort of person everyone had tremendous respect and admiration for. He was a remarkable guy.”
Mr. Rhodes’ tenure as dean spanned two decades of some of the most explosive growth in UA’s history. The number of graduate students grew from 600 during his first year as dean in 1957 to more than 6,500 when he retired in 1977.
His daughter, Mary Lindley, assistant dean of the UA Extended University, said her father considered the founding of a national astronomical observatory at Kitt Peak and the establishment of the College of Medicine as two of UA’s biggest achievements during his tenure.
Born in Webster Groves, Mo., Mr. Rhodes moved with his parents to Phoenix when he was 17.
He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry at UA and his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Illinois.
In 1939, Mr. Rhodes joined Standard Oil Co. as a research chemist, where he worked on the development of lubricants and submarine fuels. He held three U.S. patents from this work.
In 1943, he joined the UA chemistry department as an assistant professor after he convinced the War Manpower Commission that teaching chemistry to university students was a greater contribution to the war effort than was his research at Standard Oil.
In addition to his teaching and administrative duties, Mr. Rhodes also was active in a number of boards, commissions and academic organization over the years.
He is survived by his wife, Jean, of Tucson; two daughters, Mary Lindley of Tucson and Betsy Harding of Sandpoint, Idaho; a son, W. Stacy ”Bill” Rhodes, who lives in South Africa; his sister, Frances Perkins of Murphys, Calif.; and eight grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church, 3809 E. Third St.
Donations in Mr. Rhodes’ memory can be sent to the Christian Children’s Fund, 2821 Emerywood Parkway, P.O. Box 26511, Richmond, Va. 23261-6511.
They also can be sent to the Navajo Health Foundation, Sage Memorial Hospital, Ganado, Ariz. 86505.
(Dated Sep 22, 1999)
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Buchhauser services tomorrow
A memorial service for former University of Arizona music school director Andrew W. Buchhauser will be held tomorrow.
Mr. Buchhauser died Friday. He was 89.
Services will begin at 2 p.m. at St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church, 4440 N. Campbell Ave., where he was organist for 40 years.
Mr. Buchhauser was UA music school director for 18 years until 1975. After attending UA as an undergraduate and graduate student, he joined its faculty in 1938. He was acting dean for the UA College of Fine Arts in 1957-58.
He came to Tucson in 1934 after studying music theory and composition under Arthur Olaf Anderson at the Chicago Musical College.
He is survived by children David Buchhauser of Tucson, John Buchhauser of San Diego, Peter Buchhauser of San Diego, Ann Larson of Tucson and James Buchhauser of Tucson; and grandchildren.
Donations can be made in his name to: UA Foundation for Andrew Buchhauser Scholarship Fund School of Music and Dance, University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210004, Tucson, Ariz. 85721, c/o Rob Cutietta.
(Dated Sep 23, 1999)
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Tractor firm’s Jack Whiteman dies at age 85
PARADISE VALLEY – Jack William Whiteman, who founded a heavy equipment company, died Wednesday. He was 85.
Whiteman, a native of Yakima, Wash., was pursuing a law degree at the University of Washington when he took a summer job selling tractors and decided to go into the heavy equipment business instead of law.
He started an auto parts business in Oregon, which he sold later to form Empire Machinery, having acquired the Caterpillar and John Deere dealerships in eastern Oregon.
In 1959 he acquired the Caterpillar tractor dealership for Arizona and moved to Phoenix.
Empire Southwest, now run by Whiteman’s son, John, distributes in Arizona and California.
Whiteman established a cultural foundation named for his mother and helped establish or support a number of other cultural organizations. He also supported economic development in the eastern metro Phoenix area.
Survivors besides his son include his wife, Carol, and a daughter, Sheryl.
(Dated Sep 25, 1999)
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Norwegian immigrant, 107, dies
• Olav Tweit ate a meat-and-potatoes diet and drank only in moderation.
They say old age is not for sissies, and Olav Mikal Tweit certainly was no sissy.
He was born in the last decade of the 19th century into the hard life of a tenant farming family in Norway. As a teen-ager he saved money to pay for his education as he shoveled coal into the boilers on a merchant ship.
And though he spoke no English when he arrived in America in 1917, he worked his way up from a spot on an auto-manufacturing line to become a mechanical engineer.
Mr. Tweit had earned some rest when he died Sept. 27 of aspiration pneumonia at Devon Gables Health Care Center. At age 107, he was among Tucson’s oldest residents.
”He was a sturdy Norwegian,” said his daughter-in-law Joan Tweit, 68, a retired librarian.
He lived fairly independently until he was almost 100. He lived alone in an apartment and could drive himself to the grocery store. He was active and thoroughly enjoyed his 100th birthday.
”He had a ball. We had four parties,” Joan Tweit said.
But if there was a secret to his longevity, Mr. Tweit wasn’t in on it.
”He didn’t have the vaguest idea (why he lived so long),” said his son, Robert Tweit, 71, a retired chemist.
Mr. Tweit was born on Dec. 17, 1891, the middle child of Kristoffer and Ingeborg Tvedt (the Danish spelling of Tweit), who worked hard farming other people’s land but never had a farm of their own, Robert Tweit said.
”He helped on farms. And his parents managed old people homes at one point, so he helped there as well – everything to digging graves,” Robert Tweit said. ”He decided fairly early on that he didn’t want to be a farmer.”
When Mr. Tweit was in his late teens, he became a fireman on a coal-fired merchant ship. This consisted of shoveling coal out of big bunkers and into a wheelbarrow, pushing the wheelbarrow into the engine room and shoveling the coal into big boilers heated by fires underneath, Robert Tweit said.
It was ”good muscle-building work” that filled out Mr. Tweit’s 6-foot frame and remained evident in his wide, solid shoulders even in his later years.
Mr. Tweit saved enough money to work part time in a shipyard while he attended a school that trained men to be ship engineers.
After two years in the three-year program, he took a job as a third engineer on a freighter being built in Detroit. He and the other engineers sailed to New York and took the train to the Detroit shipyard.
The freighter had been ordered before World War I, but now the war was on, and the ship builder’s services were in demand. The builder could charge higher prices for lower quality work.
”The ship was (built) on a take-it-or-leave-it basis,” Robert Tweit said.
The attitude was ”if you don’t want these ships, you don’t have to take them,” he said. ”It was something like buying a used car from a lot with no guarantee.”
And, in fact, its rudder shaft broke in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on the way back to Europe. The engineers had to jury-rig it to make it home, Robert Tweit said.
Robert Tweit said his father loved telling stories about his seafaring days.
Once, Mr. Tweit was on a ship that went to Africa to pick up a load of peanuts. Basket-by-basket, the peanuts were poured into the hold and, once it was full, into the ventilator shafts from the hold.
The captain told the crew members they could eat all the peanuts they wanted. About a week out of port, none of them wanted to see another peanut again, said Robert Tweit as he smiled, recalling his father’s story.
Another favorite story of his father’s was of a wicked and wild storm in the North Sea that brought his ship to the top of a wave from where he watched another nearby ship completely disappear for a time in a trough between two waves.
When Mr. Tweit’s commitment on the freighter ended in 1917, he disembarked in Philadelphia, planning to see the country and visit his uncles in Iowa.
He saw the uncles, hen ended up in Detroit to see how cars were made. He landed a job taking freshly painted wooden wheels off the assembly line and setting them in a spot where someone else would put the tire tube on and pump it up.
He worked, learned English and eventually became a mechanical engineer working on the coke ovens’ machinery. Heating raw coal to drive volatile matter from it turns it into coke, which can then be used for such things as ron and steel production .
”Olav’s genius was his ability to simplify machinery,” Joan Tweit said of her father-in-law.
He figured out that one pipe, rather than the normal two, was enough to carry away the gases cooked out of the coal, Robert Tweit said. That may not seem like a big whoop-de-do, but it turned his company from the second-place player in the market to the leader.
Mr. Tweit retired in the late 1950s, but he and his wife, Christine, whom he married in Detroit in 1926, did anything but rest.
They visited all the states and took a trip around the world in the early 1960s, ”when it wasn’t so easy,” Joan Tweit said.
”At least part of it was in propeller planes,” Robert Tweit said.
Robert Tweit said his parents moved to Arizona in 1981 to be closer to him as they aged. Christine Tweit died in 1991.
Mr. Tweit stopped smoking at a young age on a doctor’s advice and he drank a little alcohol on social occasions. He didn’t eat a lot of junk food, but he did eat a typical American diet that included red meat, potatoes, fruits and vegetables, family members said.
He didn’t follow a regular exercise plan, but his jobs were physical, and his activities included gardening, traveling and taking trips on his fishing boats.
Robert Tweit said that after his father turned 100, his health went steadily downhill, and he lost most of his hearing and sight. His father didn’t complain much, but his question became not how had he lived so long, but ”why am I living so long?”
”He has been ready to go,” Robert Tweit said.
”We tried to get him interested in seeing a third century . . . but he had no interest whatsoever,” Joan Tweit said.
Besides his son and daughter-in-law, Mr. Tweit is survived by two grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, a great-great-grandchild and two nephews.
A memorial service is planned, but no date has been set.
(Dated Oct 05, 1999)
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Death of ex-Cat Akil Jackson, 27, is shock
• Former teammates and coach Tomey recall his commitment.
Akil Jackson, a key piece of the ”Desert Swarm” defenses at the University of Arizona in 1993 and 1994, died yesterday in his hometown of Auburn, Calif. He was 27.
The cause of his death was uncertain.
”It’s a tragic thing that you just don’t even believe when you hear it,” an emotional UA coach Dick Tomey said yesterday after putting his team through an afternoon practice. ”He was a marvelous guy. It’s one of those things that makes a lot of this stuff seem very insignificant.”
The outside linebacker was best known on the field for his nose for the football. He helped the Cats beat nationally-ranked Stanford 27-24 in 1993 by sacking quarterback Steve Stenstrom and knocking the ball loose for a touchdown.
Later that season, he made a one-handed interception against Miami’s Gino Torretta in the 29-0 rout of the Hurricanes in he Fiesta Bowl to cap a 10-2 season.
”He always found a way on the football field,” said UA teammate and boyhood friend Chris Lopez. ”He was a great competitor and, at the same time, he touched many, many lives. It’s such a loss.”
Lopez and Jackson grew up together in Auburn and starred on the gridiron at Placer High School. Jackson, a year older than Lopez, attended Sacramento City College before joining Lopez at Arizona in 1992.
”It was a rare opportunity to play college ball with a friend from high school,” Lopez said. ”This has been a long, draining day for me – for all of us.”
Members of that 1993 team have remained close over the years.
Former Wildcat teammate Warner Smith said yesterday’s news was shocking.
”It was like a family and it feels right now like we’ve lost a brother,” Smith said. ”Akil had that effect on people.
”He was one of those rare persons who was so laid back off the field, but was, once he stepped between the lines, he was one of the meanest, toughest guys. He was such a warrior.”
Jackson, 5 feet 11 and 233 pounds, redshirted at UA in 1992. In 1993, he had 23 tackles and a team-high five fumble recoveries. In 1994, he had 45 tackles and four sacks.
”There were a lot of things I admired about Akil. He had the biggest heart of anyone I ever met,” Smith added.
A memorial service is set for Friday at 11 a.m. in Auburn.
(Dated Oct 06, 1999)
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