EDITOR'S LETTER

— IN MEMORIAM —

DONALD EVERETT DEDERA

1929 — 2020

The mold was definitely broken when Don Dedera sat down in the editor's chair. Those words aren't my words. They're the words of someone who knew him well. Someone who called him friend. I didn't know him well. Our last conversation took place after we'd done a story about old train depots. I'd only been editor for a few months, and Mr. Dedera was among the fellowship of emeriti looking over my shoulder. He wasn't impressed with our story. And he told me so, in so many words. In the same way Pete Townsend might educate a new drummer.

The outspoken editor wasn't one to mince words.

"I'll never forget the first time I met him," says Jeff Kida, our photo editor. "Gary Avey was getting ready to hand off the editor's baton. Gary walks Dedera out of his office and introduces me as one of the contributing photographers. Dedera raises his eyebrow and says: 'Just what we need. Another 30-year-old photographer with three Nikons hanging around his neck.' "

Donald Everett Dedera was born March 16, 1929, in Arlington, Virginia. After serving in the Marines, he enrolled at Arizona State College — now Arizona State University. He graduated in 1951 with a degree in journalism, and immediately went to work for The Arizona Republic , where he became a feature columnist. Jo Baeza, one of the master writers in our hall of fame, told me that Mr. Dedera "was the best columnist the Republic ever had."

In July 1983, the well-lauded wordsmith became the editor in chief of Arizona Highways.

"Once there was a boy, about 13 years of age, who aspired to contribute to his favorite magazine," Mr. Dedera wrote in his first column for us. He went on to tell a story about being rejected by Editor Bert Campbell as both a writer and a photographer. He finally broke through in September 1960, with a piece about a wildfire in the Tonto National Forest. "For all of the hell it raised, you'd have thought the Pranty Fire was an eruption of the earth, instead of a jetsam of the heavens."

He'd write many other features for us. He even sent us a letter to the editor from Vietnam, where he was embedded during the war. "The other day," he wrote, "while hitching a hop and passing the inevitable extra hour in the quonset hut terminal of the Cam Ranh Bay airfield, I came upon the following scene: The room was filled with 101st Airborne vets, all reading paperback novels bearing bosomy blondes on their slick covers, and over to one end of the wooden benches, a dozen Korean marines in camouflage fatigues sat chattering and perspiring. Everyone was miserable in the close, humid airless tropical heat. All — save one. He was Capt. Yong Il Shin, a medical doctor. Dr. Shin was cool and preoccupied, lost in a land 8,000 miles away, where pyracantha berries glisten in the tinseled night, and snow flocks the firs of the peaceful days. Dr. Shin was reading your Christmas edition, the only thing in history to make the Vietnam climate bearable!"

He could write, all right. Like Raymond Carlson, the editor against whom we're all measured, Mr. Dedera did with vowels and consonants what Mozart did with G minor.

"Today a burnished brass sun radiates from zenith," he wrote in a piece about Petrified Forest National Park. "All around repose the oddest of hills; blue-gray, bleached, barren as moonscape; textured and spongy underfoot as shag carpet. A lonesome zephyr whispers down a dune, rustling bunch grass and dry shrub. On scimitar wings a raven surveys a fractured ridge. Distant horizons darkly rumble with summer squalls."

"The magazine came of age as a literary journal under his direction," says Peter Ensenberger, our former director of photography. "He recognized talent and put a high priority on working with the best writers of the time."

He brought a bit of whimsy, too."

"Don was interested in the plight of the monarch butterfly," says J. Peter Mortimer, who was our photo editor when Mr. Dedera began his 32-month tenure. "At the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, he'd seen a 19th century wood chair covered with 280 life-size monarch butterfly facsimiles. Don called me into his office and explained how unusual, creative and provocative it was. Then he said, 'Let's photograph it for the cover!'"

In his January 1984 column, Mr. Dedera wrote: "It is not the first time Arizona Highways has displayed butterflies on its front cover. Just the first time we provided them a chair to sit upon."

Turns out, the whimsy of Don Dedera extended beyond the pages of the magazine.

"For the office halloween party one year," Pete Ensenberger says, "Don surprised everybody by dressing in costume. He walked into the editorial department that morning wearing a wetsuit with scuba-diving flippers on his hands and feet, and a beach ball on his head. He got a lot of awkward looks from the staff. Finally, he said, 'I'm the Great Seal of Arizona!'"

He broke the mold.

On behalf of everyone at Arizona Highways, we offer our deepest condolences to Mrs. Dedera, and the friends and family of our former editor, whose words will forever rank among the best we've ever published.