More Foundation History by Ray Grant

     In continuing with the articles in last two newsletters and the goal of recording some of the Foundation's history, I would like to give some more details about the acquisition of the Woolery collection
which forms the backbone of the Foundation's collection.
     Fortunately the correspondence about the collection's purchase has been preserved in the Foundation archives. Many people were involved in the acquisition of the collection including the Mineralogical Society of Arizona members, who raised the first funds used as a down payment; Carl Stentz a mineral collector in Newport Beach, California, who heard the collection was for sale and alerted the people in Phoenix that it should stay in Arizona; Lee Hammons curator of the Department of Mines Museum, who did most of the correspondence with the Woolerys and made the arrangement for the Foundation to purchase the collection; and Floyd Getsinger first chairman of the Foundation Board of Trustees, who was responsible for raising the funds to purchase the collection.
     A down payment of $1,500 was made in January 1963 and the collection was moved to Phoenix. In the archives is a hand written list of the people from Phoenix who traveled on January 27, 1963 to Bisbee to pack up the collection and bring it to Phoenix: Fred Burr and his wife, Lee and Pat Hammons, Bob and Dorothy Woolard, Larry and Norma Birch, Perry and Shirley Stufflebeam, Bill and Sharon Panczner, Floyd and Alice Getsinger, Harold Lamb, Bill Reid, and John Canaday. Nineteen people in all and Bob Woolard was listed as the wagon master. More about some of these people in future newsletters if information can be found.

Loris P. Woolery
     Loris Woolery was born in Tombstone, Arizona in 1905, and lived most of his life in Bisbee. His parents met in Death Valley at the borax mines and moved to Tombstone in 1899. Loris went to grammar school in Glendale, Arizona, to Pomona College in California for a year, and to General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan. In 1963 he was presi

dent of the Pioneer Title and Trust Company in Bisbee, a firm founded by
his father.

Charles E. Goetz
    Charles Goetz was probably the one person most responsible for the Foundation obtaining the Woolery collection as he gave $12,000 for the collection and exhibit cases.
     He was born in Buffalo, New York in 1891 and moved to Arizona in 1909. His first job in Arizona was in the company store at the mining

community of Johnson in Cochise County.   
     Later he established a large mercantile store in Benson and this was the beginning of a variety of enterprises. During World War I he bought 3,000 stands of bees and became the west's largest
individual exporter of honey.
     In 1922 he opened the first uranium mine in Arizona in the Four Corners area. In 1926 he opened a wax- paper company in Benson. Later he moved the wax paper company to Salinas, California.
    He is credited with producing the first  Arizona feature length film in 1939 through his Golden West Pictures Corporation. The film was Gentlemen from Arizona.
     Other business interests included the Goetz Ice Company, where in 1954 he designed and developed the first jumbo vacuum cooler for shipping produce. The cooler lowered the temperature of two railroad cars at once. With Phoenix inventor G. A. Houseman he developed a device to convert seawater to drinking water for $34 an acre-foot.
     On April 16, 1963, Floyd Getsinger gave a presentation to Arizona Small Mine Operators Association. At the time Goetz was operating the 79 Mine for lead, copper, zinc, and gold. At the end of the presentation Goetz brought out his checkbook and wrote a check for $12,000. The Foundation's collection was exhibited in the Charles E. Goetz Hall in the Department of Mines building at the State
Fair Grounds until it was moved to the present lo

(Continued on page 5)

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