Friend proposes highway name

and divorced after a decade.

“If you lived in Arizona, Rose thought you belonged to her,” Scates said, whether you were a high-ranking official or homeless.

The feeling was most often mutual. It seems like everyone had a story about Mofford. The time they ran into her at a Denny’s. Or how she donated clothes and shoes to a rummage sale.

Ron Freeman, a longtime friend, told how at her favorite restaurant, the Sierra Bonita Grill in central Phoenix, people would recognize her when she came in, and she’d stop at their tables to talk.

“Well, we all know where to get the good food,” she’d exclaim. She asked for names and their stories, and then she would remember them the next time she saw them.

Honesty, integrity, a sense of humor

Lois Sauer was 17, a junior in high school, when she met Mofford, seven years her senior.

Sauer was playing for the A-1 Queens, an all-female softball team that had originally been called the Arizona Cantaloupe Queens.

Mofford had been 17 in 1939, when she was picked to play first base for the team in an exhibition game at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Mofford still came to all the games. “We’d say, ‘Here comes Rosie!’ She’d come bouncing down the stairs from the Capitol,” Sauer said. “She was a great supporter.”

The women remained friends for more than 70 years. They spoke on the phone every night at 9 for a half-hour, sometimes an hour.

“She always told me what to do,” Sauer said, and then with a laugh added, “She was usually right!”

She was with Mofford the night before she died and kissed her goodbye.

“She was like a big sister to me,” she said. “I miss her.”

Roberto Reveles, a civil-rights activist and Mofford’s longtime friend, said he has filed a petition with the Arizona State Board on Geographic and Historic Names to name a portion of U.S. Highway 60 between Mofford’s hometown of Globe and Phoenix as the Gov. Rose Mofford Memorial Highway.

“It seems to me that there is no one more connected to the U.S. 60 than Rose Mofford,” Reveles said.

It is the highway she traveled back and forth between her hometown of Globe and the state Capitol, where she worked. “It just makes so much sense.” He said a hearing is scheduled for later this month.