AZArizona Famous People

Arizona has put two of its own on a presidential ballot and neither was born in a state. Barry Goldwater arrived in Phoenix in 1909, when Arizona was still a territory and would stay one until February 14, 1912. John McCain was born at a naval air station in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936. Both went to the US Senate from Arizona, both won a Republican nomination, and both lost, Goldwater to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and McCain to Barack Obama in 2008.

Two nominations, two defeats

Goldwater's loss was one of the widest in American history. He carried six states, his own plus Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, for 52 electoral votes. The Conscience of a Conservative, published under his name in 1960, is generally credited with assembling the movement that put Ronald Reagan in office sixteen years later. McCain, a navy pilot shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 and held for five and a half years, won 173 electoral votes in 2008 and kept his Senate seat until his death in 2018. Arizona casts eleven electoral votes.

Stewart and Morris Udall, brothers from the Mormon settlement of St. Johns, ran interior policy and congressional politics for a generation: Stewart as secretary of the interior under Kennedy and Johnson, Morris as a congressman who sought the Democratic nomination in 1976. Gabrielle Giffords was born in Tucson in 1970 and represented the city until she was shot at a constituent event in January 2011.

Two Arizonans on the Supreme Court

Sandra Day O'Connor was born in El Paso in 1930 only because that was where the nearest hospital was; she grew up on the Lazy B, a cattle ranch straddling the Arizona and New Mexico line that had no running water or electricity in her early childhood. She became majority leader of the Arizona state senate, the first woman anywhere in the country to lead a state senate chamber, and Reagan named her to the Supreme Court in 1981. She sat until 2006. William Rehnquist practised law in Phoenix for sixteen years before Nixon appointed him to the court in 1971; Reagan made him chief justice in 1986.

Apache country, Iwo Jima and a renamed peak

Cochise led the Chiricahua Apache out of the Dragoon Mountains through the 1860s, and the county in the state's southeast corner carries his name. Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles in Skeleton Canyon in September 1886, ending the last sustained Apache resistance.

Ira Hayes, a Pima marine from Sacaton on the Gila River reservation, was one of the six men in Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. He was 32 when he died in 1955. Lori Piestewa, Hopi, from Tuba City, was killed in the ambush at Nasiriyah in March 2003, the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving in the US military. Arizona renamed a Phoenix landmark Piestewa Peak for her later that year.

Tombstone, in the same corner of the territory, mostly imported its legends. Wyatt Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, and the gunfight near the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881 lasted roughly thirty seconds before Hollywood spent a century stretching it. A hundred years later Michael Carbajal came out of a Phoenix barrio to take Olympic silver at light flyweight in 1988 and hold world titles through the 1990s.

The sound out of Tucson and Phoenix

Linda Ronstadt was born in Tucson in 1946 into a family established there since her grandfather Federico Ronstadt, a Sonoran-born wagon maker, set up shop in the 1880s. Her 1987 mariachi record Canciones de Mi Padre went double platinum. Stevie Nicks was born in Phoenix in 1948. Alice Cooper, born Vincent Furnier in Detroit, moved to Phoenix as a child and started his first band at Cortez High School; he still lives in the valley. Marty Robbins was born in Glendale in 1925 and wrote "El Paso". Charles Mingus was born in 1922 on the army post at Nogales, where his father was stationed, and was taken to Watts before his first birthday. Jordin Sparks, born in Phoenix in 1989, won American Idol at 17, the youngest winner the show has had. Rex Allen, born in Willcox in 1920 and billed as the Arizona Cowboy, was the last of the singing cowboy stars and later narrated Disney nature films.

People who turn out to be Arizonan

• Cesar Chavez was born near Yuma in 1927 and only became a Californian because the Depression took the family farm.
• Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati but spent his boyhood in Scottsdale, where he shot 8mm films and premiered his first feature, Firelight, at a Phoenix cinema in 1964.
• Emma Stone grew up in Scottsdale doing community theatre and left for Los Angeles at 15.
• Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas farm boy with no university degree, found Pluto on photographic plates at Percival Lowell's observatory in Flagstaff on February 18, 1930.
• Kerri Strug of Tucson landed the vault on a damaged ankle at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
• Frank Lloyd Wright built Taliesin West in Scottsdale in 1937 and wintered there until he died in 1959.

Arizona people, asked and answered

More on Arizona and its neighbours