Roy Elson

ELSON ROY ELSON October 1, 1930 - February 25, 2010 The Pleasure of His Company by Charles Bowden I first met him in 1964 on the cafeteria floor at the University of Arizona when I was a fourteen-year old busboy. His face was staring up from a discarded newspaper as the man running for the US senate -- one the Arizona Republic seemed to paint as an inside the beltway monster threatening all that was good and true. He lost that race by a whisker (51.4 to 48.6), tried again in ''68 and then left politics. The next time I ran into Roy Elson was in the late 1980s. He entered the Tucson bar with two grocery bags -- one held a sawed off shotgun, the other a 9mm with untraceable barrel. We''ll get to the reason why in a moment, but first a little background. He came from an Arizona now destroyed by the post World War II migration and lived in a political age where politicians became the hand puppets of corporations. His father, who died when he was quite young, worked with Eugene Debs organizing American railway workers. His mother was ravaged by tuberculosis and Roy was in good part raised by his brothers and sisters, an extraordinary brood who made their mark in the labor movement, the FBI, American nursing and the religious life of the nation -- his older brother baptized President Dwight D. Eisenhower. All this by way of saying, he was raised to a standard of public service and believed that in a world of greedy financiers and unloving corporations, government had a function in helping working people. What this meant in his Arizona was life as a moderate Democrat -- fiscally conservative, socially liberal. He thought all men were created equal but that we should also keep an eye on the till. He began as an aide to Senator Carl Hayden and soon rose to being his right hand man. Like the Senator, Roy''s major legacy is the Central Arizona Project. I always thought he revered Hayden as the father he never had as a boy. I never heard him speak of him save as The Senator. He mingled with the powerful -- shared a secret Capitol suite with LBJ, found a private meeting house in Phoenix for JFK -- don''t ask why. He had an extremely retentive memory and could recall the smallest detail of his years in Washington. His oral history put out by the Senate is an eye opener about the uses and abuses of power. He was easy to know. Like most people with talent for politics, he liked people. He left his service on Capitol Hill with little money, was paid well as a lobbyist for the broadcast industry -- a job he hated -- and lost his fortune to a financial scam. And never seemed to care about the money. That''s how I came to meet him. He had taken all his loot from lobbying work, and put it into what turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Well, you can''t take Arizona out of a boy, so with a friend who was an off-duty cop acting as his bodyguard, he visited numerous members of Mafia families in an attempt to track down the money he and his friends had lost. He took the initiative and wore a wire, taping ninety 60 minute tapes, which he took to the FBI. His testimony put away fifteen organized crime figures that had run the Ponzi scheme. Roy was given the option of the Protected Witness Program, but he always said that he would probably end up in a slaughterhouse in Iowa and would never see his children again and so it was no option at all. That''s how he came to enter the bar armed to the teeth. Eventually, things settled down and he landed in Arivaca and then Sonoita. In both places, he seemed to function as an unofficial mayor making those calls to government bureaucrats to straighten things out for local people. Maybe being a Senator is not really what life is about. Well, what else? He could drink anyone under the table, he always smiled and could get you laughing in a minute. He was a veteran who came to lose faith in our endless wars. He was intrigued by every new person and object. I can''t recall a bad moment with him. And don''t think you are going to find many people who can. Our state has lost something. Not simply a piece of the past. But a love of life and a gumption that we are going to really need if we hope to have a future. He is survived by his wife, Mary Jo Lee; his children, Lane and Jeannie Elson; his brother, Dean Elson, and three grandchildren, as well as two stepsons and four step-grandchildren. Services are private.He is survived by his wife, Mary Jo Lee; his children, Lane and Jeannie Elson; his brother, Dean Elson, and three grandchildren, as well as two stepsons and four step-grandchildren. Services are private.