Terry Lee lost his best friend the day Larry Cox died. So he turned to his friend's father for solace.
And in Charlie Cox, Lee found a lifelong friend and surrogate father.
"Terry was always around. I looked at him eventually as the new brother," says Luana Turner, Cox's younger sister. "Having Terry around was good for dad. (For) Terry losing Larry, having dad was good."
"Charlie became Terry's dad and Terry became Charlie's son," adds Lee's wife, Lil. The couple married in 1968 and had son and a daughter.
The relationship would shape Lee's life.
Lee had been drafted into the military, but ultimately was released when doctors discovered a brain injury, possibly from the Yuma crash.
He was still involved in music, but it didn't take him long to realize that playing a guitar in a rock band was probably not going to be his career. He turned to Charlie Cox for advice.
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Cox was a longtime Tucson architect whose credits included designing the distinctive Catalina American Baptist Church, which was built in 1960 at 1900 N. Country Club Road (now called the Catalina Church of Midtown), along with a number of homes in the modernist style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
He encouraged Lee to get an architecture degree and helped him enroll in the University of Arizona. Lee graduated in 1975.
Among the properties Lee has designed are the Hilton Tucson hotel at 7600 E. Broadway and an apartment complex not far from there. He also designed the Foothills home that he shares with his wife.
The spacious house has towering ceilings and a wall of windows that frame a postcard-worthy view of the Catalina Mountains and bathe the room in sunlight. The windows are a nod to Cox, whose designs often included banks of windows for natural lighting.
Lee never left music entirely. He and his wife performed in bands throughout the 1970s and '80s including Pepper, which played mostly to corporate clients for nearly 20 years. They took a break in the 1990s to focus on their careers, then returned around 2004, reforming Dearly Beloved with drummer Rick Mellinger as a rock-cover and Christian-rock band. In 2010 they released a Christian pop album, "Walking In the Light," which is available at cdbaby.com/cd/DearlyBeloved
"It's all part of God's plan," Lee says. "Whatever it is, I just do what I'm supposed to do right now and that's it. And I have no regrets for the direction my life has taken."
Lee and Charlie Cox remained friends until Cox died in 1996.
Where to listen
Check out the new Dearly Beloved at www.dearlybelovednow.com, where you can hear audio clips from the band that includes original Dearly Beloved members Terry Lee and Rick Mellinger, and Lee's wife, Lil.
