Robert Lenon
Robert Lenon, who graduated from The University of Arizona in 1930, came to Arizona just as it became a state and eventually roamed the desert, making a living by mining, surveying, buying and transporting ore and doing just about anything else that was mining or survey related.
His career began just months before the Great Depression and continued for many decades, including consulting work until just a few years ago.
Lenon went to France and Okinawa with the Army Engineers during World War II, moved to Patagonia, Ariz., after the war, and turned 99 on Nov. 1 – making him possibly the oldest living UA engineering alum.
Lenon and his wife, Naomi, still live in Patagonia, just 12 miles north of the Mowry Mine, where he took a surveying course that earned him the last three units he needed for his degree in 1929.
Since degrees were granted only once a year, he had to wait until May 1930 to get the piece of paper. But that didn’t stop him from securing an engineering job at the Calumet and Arizona Mine in Bisbee, Ariz.
Unfortunately that was just a few months before the stock market crash of October 1929, which brought on the Great Depression. It was not an opportune time to graduate or to be looking for work, and he was laid off in 1930.
Before that, however, Lenon spent four years – from 1925 to 1929 – studying mining engineering at the UA.
1920s Campus Life
Lenon remembers that the UA was at the end of the streetcar line in those days and the desert started on the eastern edge of campus.
He turned 17 during the fall semester of 1925 and lived at the Square and Compass House on the northeast corner of Park Avenue and East Second Street. The house had formerly been home to William P. Blake, who directed the UA School of Mines from 1895 to 1905.
Lenon’s grades weren’t stellar the first two years, and his dad – a no-nonsense railroader, painter, contractor, carpenter and sometimes gas station owner – finally told him, “You’d better go the regular route and not be playing around in that fraternity house.” So Lenon moved to Cochise Hall for his last two years.
To take a break from studying, “we would take the streetcar downtown for a nickel,” Lenon said. “But it was just as easy to walk.” He and his classmates would sometimes make the trip to see a silent movie.
At other times, he and his friends would camp out in Sabino and Bear canyons, which were not as developed or heavily administrated as they are today. “I’d go with other people because I didn’t have a car on campus,” he said.
Lenon also remembers that he put in long hours at the books despite the raccoon-coat-and-flapper image of campus life popularized by books and movies of the time. There were students like that on campus, he said, “but a lot of them flunked out.”
Still, Lenon didn’t spend all his time studying. His class took field trips to mines in Arizona and Sonora and he enjoyed ROTC horse cavalry training and those hiking trips to the Catalinas.
Engineering was almost exclusively a male domain in those days, but “there was one girl taking geology – a pretty nice gal,” Lenon said. “I forget where she was from. Someplace back East, a big college, I think.”
Lenon came to the UA with $2,100 to pay for his education – money he earned by working for the Yuma Daily Sun delivering and mailing papers, pumping gas at a service station and doing other jobs.
Summer Jobs
After his freshman year, he got a summer job with a movie company in the California sand dunes west of Yuma. The silent movie was “The Desired Woman,” directed by Michael Curtiz and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures. During summers after his sophomore and junior years, he worked in a Yuma service station, putting in 84 hours a week for $25.
As a result, he had $700 in the bank when he graduated, but that was soon gone as the Depression took hold.
After losing his mining job in 1930, Lenon returned home to Yuma and picked up mining and engineering work wherever he could find it. He assayed ore, worked with surveyors, wrote mine reports, mapped mines and prospects, worked in mills and did professional engineering work for 50 cents a day. “Jobs lasted only a month or two because people had so little money then,” he said. Sometimes he worked just for room and board.
Eventually, he was hired by the All-American Canal Co., where he guided contractors and others along its proposed route, headed the drafting section, led the survey crew and was sixth from the top on the payroll by 1935. The canal diverts water from the Colorado River to California’s Imperial Valley and San Diego.
In 1935, he left the All-American Canal Co. when he was rehired by Phelps Dodge in Bisbee and also worked at the Morenci Mine. But he was never a company man, and a few years later he struck out on his own to operate a Tungsten mine in the Huachuca Mountains, supervise a gold mine near San Diego and to work on other small-mine projects.
As World War II loomed, he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1941 and spent the next six years working for Uncle Sam. “I was in for the duration,” he said. “Initially, they were supposed to let us out after a certain amount of time, but they didn’t do it.”
Back to Patagonia
Back in Patagonia after the war, he was surprised to find that most of the small mines in the area had closed. But he was determined to stay in Patagonia and to make a living in mining. He set up a business in buying and shipping ore for small mines and took on surveying work that included mapping claims, surveying property lines and similar work.
His future wife, Naomi Wagner, was a friend of the family who came out to Phoenix from Nebraska to teach school in 1946. They were married in 1951 and raised two daughters and a son in Patagonia.
Lenon retired in 1975, but sometimes wished that he had continued his mining business. Until a few years ago, he still took on mine-related consulting jobs.
Today, he thinks back on how much things have changed from the days when only a dirt road linked Patagonia to Tucson and he could use a dependent’s rail pass for weekend trips back to Yuma when he was in college.
It seems like only yesterday, he said.
And that is, in fact, the title of two volumes he recently wrote about his life in Arizona. “It Seems Like Only Yesterday: Mining and Mapping in Arizona’s First Century” was co-authored with Robert and Judith Whitcomb. Volume 1 covers the "Yuma Years" and Volume 2 is about Bisbee and Patagonia. The books are available from iuniverse.com and Mariposa Books & Gifts in Patagonia, Ariz.
Ed Stiles
520-621-3754
stiles@u.arizona.edu