Mariana Dale's best of 2014

The Tucson Mountains welcomed Alice Vail with precipitous, rocky roads, dark skies and crawly creatures.

In the summer of 1929, Vail spent her first night in the unfinished frame of a house that would become her home for the next 12 years.

“At the threshold of the monkey cage, I found a visitor, waiting to welcome me with his tail curled up over his back ready to strike,” Vail wrote in curly cursive prose. “The largest scorpion I have beheld.”

It’s one of the tales Vail recorded of life on a 40-acre homestead south of West Anklam Road, just east of where it intersects West Speedway.

The written account and the homestead site now belong to four great-nieces and nephews, who inherited the property after their mother, Vail’s niece, died two years ago.

Prickly pear and creosote have overtaken the road that winds up to the homestead. The house walls have been knocked down, but a fractured foundation of brick, concrete and chicken wire shows where the homely but hardy “monkey cage” stood.

Family finances and the property’s zoning prevented the family from building on the lot in recent decades.

Last week, siblings David Stowell, 66, and Gloria Stueland, 61, endured an hours-long Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting to hear their application for rezoning approved.

The family is one step closer to selling the historic property or building on it themselves.

“Well, it’s been in the family since 1935,” Stueland said. “So, there’s no big rush.”

Alice Vail

Alice Vail moved to Tucson in 1916 to head the English department at Tucson High School.

“I can lay no claim to the word fearless in the little I have used here,” Vail wrote of herself. “I love the bright lights of the city and the comforts of home. The Call of the Wild has never lured me into the wide, open spaces as a place of habitation.”

Vail’s family still can’t explain what possessed her to move to Tucson from Michigan, a trip that required travel by train and stagecoach.

Shortly after Vail’s migration, her sister, Ethel Vasey, and soon-to-be brother-in-law followed. The trio shared the same residence for much of their time in Tucson.

During the Great Depression, Vail and her family couldn’t afford to pay for their home in town, so they rented it out and decided to try their hand at homesteading. The location was Vasey’s choice.

“Just why anyone should want to own a mountain, I never could understand,” Vail wrote.

Vail described Vasey as the more adventurous of the two sisters, with a “pioneering spirit” in her veins.

But it was Vail who braved the first night sleeping on an army cot under a tarpaulin after she evaded the giant scorpion with a “standing broad jump.”

“I could hear the howling and yelping of the coyotes,” Vail wrote. “Surely Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, even Hannibal crossing the Alps, could not have had as many thrills and chills going up and down their celebrated spines as I had.”

In order to earn the deed, the family had to spend the majority of three years living on the land. They far exceeded the minimum and, with the addition of Vail’s niece, Emily, spent 12 years in the house Vail described as a “monkey cage.”

Vail used much of her 20- page account of the homestead to discuss the trials and tribulations of desert life, like a skunk in the closet or the intrusion of tarantulas and centipedes. But she also pointed out the beauty.

“There were glorious sunsets when not only was the sky a riot of unbelievable colors, but the near and the far mountains joined the pageant. The purple, violet and heliotrope of the majestic Catalinas quickly faded in kaleidoscopic succession to the distant, mysterious blue of the far, far mountains while the night came like a breath.”

Her eloquent sunset description is followed by a much more frank conclusion about desert life.

“It was a great experience and I wouldn’t take anything for it — but I would never want to do it again!”

The family left the homestead in the 1940s, and it has been unoccupied for many of the last 50 years. Vail never married and continued to live with her sister and brother-and law.

“(She) always maintained a separate residence in case she needed to occupy, to maintain her potential independence, should it become inconvenient,” Stowell said of his great aunt.

Though Vail was, in her own words, “a fraidy-cat,” when her sister Vasey was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she cared for her until a few months shy of her own death in 1967.

Just memories remain

The homestead was the beloved childhood home of Stowell and Stueland’s mother, Emily Stowell Stratton, the daughter of Ethel Vasey.

Stratton inherited the original 40 acres in 1967, but the family could not pay the estate taxes and auctioned the property to make up the difference. The new owners agreed to give Stratton the acre where the foundations of the homestead lie.

The property is accessible by foot from Anklam Road, and now several custom stucco homes are perched on the same hillside.

For Stueland and Stowell, the site brings back childhood memories of adventures to hidden caves and the constant discovery of artifacts from their relatives’ lives.

Stowell found the head of an old hatchet, repainted it and now uses it regularly. Stueland salvaged the fragments of one of her grandmother’s dishes in her favorite color, mint green.

“When I was a kid, we used to go up off and on and just sit up there at the lot and watch the sun go down,” Stueland said. “I just dreamt about building a new home up there.”

But the cost to zone the property and arrange utilities is a financial and time strain on the family.

“We may just end up selling it, and that would be kind of a sad thing,” Stueland said.

Vail and Vasey transformed a rocky hillside into a home. Alongside the spears of spiky ocotillo, they put up a swing set for little Emily Stratton Stowell. They banished snakes, bobcats and other crawlers from their home.

“My great aunt and my grandmother were like turbine engines,” Stowell said. “They had to be conquering something, solving some problem for someone, somewhere.”

The homestead, or what’s left of it, is a testament to the family’s intrepid spirit. For Stowell, the biggest losses are the ordinary tales of the day to day.

“People tell stories they think are either interesting to somebody else,” Stowell said. “But everyday life might be a greater accomplishment in actual fact.”

A former staffer in Pima County Supervisor Ally Miller’s office who accused another supervisor of bullying now says he filed the complaint only at the request of his boss.

Joseph Cuffari rescinded his bullying allegation against Ray Carroll, Miller’s fellow Republican on the board, in a letter to Human Resources Director Allyn Bulzomi.

“I was told to file the claim as a directive from my former employer and I now wish to fully excuse myself from my past employment,” Cuffari wrote.

Cuffari was given a pay raise shortly after initiating the complaint, but then was later terminated by Miller and is now employed with another county department.

When contacted by the Arizona Daily Star, Cuffari confirmed that he wrote the letter to human resources withdrawing the complaint and reaffirmed his written statement, but declined to comment further.

“Joe is being completely dishonest, I suspect in an effort to try and redeem himself with Ray Carroll,” Miller said. “I never directed him to make those statements. I fully deny that.”

Miller filed a complaint against Carroll with human resources in April after she said several staffers shared stories of mistreatment.

“On this particular day, Mr. Cuffari and Max came in and told me Ray cornered them in elevator and they both came in visibly shaken,” Miller said.

Max Daffron is another District 1 staffer who still works in the the office.

In her complaint to human resources, Miller said she witnessed Carroll yelling at two staff members on April 1, 2014.

The department interviewed several employees in Miller’s office, but ultimately found Carroll committed no wrongdoing.

In the report, Cuffari recounts an incident where he said Carroll berated him for making a comment about Carroll’s daughter’s foot tattoo.

Cuffari said Caroll’s behavior was “aggressive,” “dominating” and “forceful.”

Miller confirmed she increased Cuffari’s pay in April, a few days before he was interviewed by human resources about the complaint, but said the raise had nothing to do with the investigation.

“There were some issues in my office and he was dishonest on some items,” Miller said. “ I told him he needed to re-earn my trust. I felt he was a good employee and I was going to give him a raise.”

Cuffari was fired from Miller’s office on August 26. She declined to discuss his termination.

At the request of County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, Cuffari was placed on administrative leave with pay for six days before being hired by the Regional Flood Control District.

Huckelberry said that is standard practice for someone who was formerly an employee of a different county department.

“If it doesn’t work out, we will find a position and place them in that,” Huckelberry said.

Carroll said Cuffari’s decision to rescind his complaint is further proof that he committed no wrongdoing.

“I said from the beginning that I was innocent of any charge of bullying or intimidation,” Carroll said. “I continued to proclaim my innocence. Now I’m vindicated.”

In the five years since the Chicago White Sox started professional baseball’s stampede out of Kino Stadium, the south-side sports complex has reinvented itself, finding a way to bring in as much cash as it ever did in its baseball heyday.

On one recent morning, mowers buzzed over winter-rye-covered baseball fields, college soccer players in neon scrimmage jerseys shouted and sweated through practice, and workers took down a large white tent from a weekend charity event.

The lineup of weekday morning activities at Kino Sports Complex shows the diversity of events the county-owned venue hosts — events that brought in $1,168,292, last fiscal year, matching what the now-departed White Sox, Arizona Diamondbacks and Tucson Sidewinders brought in.

“When the place was built, it was all about spring training baseball,” Stadium District Director Chris Bartos said. “Now we have so much more flexibility as far as what we can do and when we can do it.”

More than 50 events were held there last fiscal year, including concerts, charity walks and food festivals, in addition to sporting events. In total, more than 400,000 people visited the complex, according to a Stadium District report.

Despite the new revenue streams, the county-owned Kino Sports Complex is still weighted by debt.

The county owes more than $10 million toward the original $38 million cost, which is expected to be paid off by December 2017. Those payments are primarily funded through taxes on lodging, RV rental space and car rental surcharges.

The stadium district also relies on $2 million from the county’s general fund to subsidize its operations, and that will continue for the foreseeable future, said County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry.

Turning a profit is still an aspiration.

“We’re not in the business of really making money,” Bartos said. “We’re just trying to offset the costs of having the event there.”

Kino Sports Complex needed a new approach to marketing and a new price list to fill the financial hole created when the White Sox left for metro Phoenix in 2009 and the Diamondbacks followed two years later.

When professional baseball teams used the fields, the complex seldom opened the facilities to outside or community groups. The grounds crew had to tailor their upkeep to specific standards, right down to the species of grass — Tifway Bermuda 419.

The county’s upkeep isn’t dictated as strictly anymore, but the complex still spends about $400,000 on annual landscape maintenance, which includes everything from fertilizer and clay to winter ryegrass.

“A lot of our business is driven by spring business and that’s when people want green beautiful grass, so that’s why we overseed,” Bartos said.

The complex has put a greater effort into marketing. They fill a Facebook page with pictures and posts about community events and partner with Visit Tucson to track their economic impact.

Sporting events, from youth and amateur to the professional level, are still the biggest moneymaker. They brought in $736,072 last year. That’s 63 percent of revenue.

Interest in soccer is increasing. It was the second-most-profitable sporting category and attracted $188,207 last year.

The county invested more than $3 million to upgrade the north soccer stadium in fall 2013. A termination payment from the Chicago White Sox bolstered the funding for the 3,000-seat lighted soccer field.

“The county did an excellent job of redeveloping the field and has created the best soccer pitches in Arizona,” said Greg Foster, one of the managing partners of FC Tucson.

The football club uses the complex to host preseason Major League Soccer games, as well as their own Premier Development League team.

Most of the year, Kino Sports Complex’s crown jewel, the Kino Veterans Memorial Stadium, still resembles a baseball diamond. The field can be converted, at a cost of about $20,000, to host football and soccer.

“We get a lot of soccer usage, but baseball still pays our bills,” Bartos said.

In the last fiscal year, 45 percent of revenue was attributed to baseball events, including college, high school and international professional teams.

The first consistent non-sporting customer was the gem show, which occupies the main parking area for a month each winter. Kino Sports Complex’s roster has expanded to include charity events such as the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk, which returned to the complex for the fifth year and attracted 8,000 participants earlier this October.

Nadine Hanson, community events specialist for the American Cancer Society, lists the benefits: multiple entrances, ample parking and space, helpful staff and modified pricing because of the group’s nonprofit status.

“It looks like we will talk with Kino about returning,” Hanson said.

This past June, the stadium hosted a more eccentric celebration, the Arizona Bacon Fest.

“We deal in bacon,” said festival founder Rob Betancourt. “It’s very rich; it’s very smoky. You don’t want to be in the middle of bacon smoke.”

Betancourt needed an outdoor venue that could host thousands of people and various vendors.

The location wasn’t without its problems. Betancourt said there’s less opportunity at the Kino Sports Complex to attract passers-by to events in the somewhat isolated south-side area.

The county hopes to build the area around the Kino Sports Complex into a larger entertainment destination.

In July, the Board of Supervisors agreed to put down a $1.75 million payment to purchase 167 acres south of Interstate 10 and expand the complex.

Despite the existing challenges, it was an opportunity the county couldn’t pass up, Huckelberry said.

“How often do you increase the size of an existing complex by almost double at the same location?” he said.

Funding for some improvements is likely to be a part of the 2015 bond election. Potential projects include commercial developments such as hotels and restaurants, but also more space for soccer.