Sally Boyle
from Los Angeles to Phoenix and the fruit growers from there are very much pleased with this valley and the prospects of raising fruit here.”
In another he wrote, “The people here are like they were in Ohio 30 years ago ... they’re a little more tolerant of drinking and gambling; that seems to be the only difference.” When Francis died in his 40s in1896, son Lawrence was just12 and had to quit school to work the family dairy.
Frances married Robert Painter, a second-generation Tempe dairyman who was born in1924 and died in1981. Frances taught home economics, and from1975 to 1980 gave early Arizona home-crafts demonstrations at the Pioneer Arizona Living History Museum. Although she hasn’t lived around livestock since the freeway displaced her late husband’s farm in 1967, Painter talks of the days of little money but plenty of food. “We milked 35 or so cows, we had our own pigs, a few sheep and chickens. We always had our own milk, meat and eggs. All the money went to taking care of the farm, feeding the cattle and paying the help.”
A passion for adventure and military battles brought Sally Boyle’s grandfather to Arizona about 130 years ago. George Wilcox was born in New York but came to the state from Colorado with the cavalry in the mid-1880s, when members set out to capture Apache leader Geronimo. After Geronimo surrendered in1886, Wilcox was one of the soldiers assigned to guard him, Boyle said. After that he fought in Cuba during the Spanish-amer- ican War with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and went back into the military during World War I as a major in a training camp, said Boyle, 90. “He tried to reenlist during World War II when he was in his 80s “but they told him he was too old.”
Following his Rough Rider days, Wilcox was offered the Arizona Territorial governorship but turned it down, Boyle said. “At the time, he was clerk of the U.S. Court in Tombstone and the pay was better. He said he couldn’t afford to be governor.”
The family lived from 1910 to 1919 in Phoenix, where Wilcox owned a pharmacy in the downtown Adams Hotel before he took his family back to southern Arizona. They lived in several locations in southern Arizona until his death in 1949. Wilcox spoke his mind during a 1948 interview that was recorded for a KOY radio broadcast but never aired, Boyle said, because he named Phoenix politicians who were allegedly buying and selling votes.
Her mother, Georgia Wilcox Kohlberg, graduated from Tempe Normal School, now Arizona State University, in 1910 and taught in the one-room Wilson School. Boyle briefly followed her mother’s career path and was a teacher at Liberty School in Buckeye during the 1940s. One of her eighth-grade students was the late Jacque Mercer, who became the first Miss America from Arizona in 1950. Boyle has lived in Phoenix most of her life and was in the same modest house on East Willetta Street for 60 years before she moved to the northwest part of town in 2006.
She held a variety of other jobs, including a two-year stint in the 1940s as a proofreader for
before she retired at 84.