The Chandler Museum has a new exhibit called “Being Eddie Basha.”
It’s a retrospective of the hometown-turned-statewide grocer who died in 2013. This 3,800-square-foot installation is all about unpacking the man behind the grocery king persona.
Chandler Museum’s storytelling coordinator, Sarah Biggerstaff, literally leaned on Basha’s own words for one interactive display.
“This is our telephone,” said Biggerstaff. “There’s about 20 clips, and they range from, like, 20 seconds to a minute. You can pick it up – give it a couple seconds – but then you hear him actually speaking. And at our opening, it was really moving.”
Those recordings came from a 2001 interview he did while being honored by the Arizona Historical League. Basha shared that he hoped his epithets would simply remember him as “a good man, but a bad boy.”
Another one of his principles was putting people over profits.
Basha regularly took his business on the road. He frequented Piipaash, O’odham and Yaqui residents living in and the around Valley who couldn’t travel to his brick-and-mortar — even setting up lines of credit to buy fresh produce.
He also traded with them.
The great-grandson of Lebanese immigrants eventually brought his family brand to tribal lands — beginning in 1981 with his first Diné Supermarket in Chinle. Basha even committed 25 cents of every dollar to the Navajo Nation.
When the then-Navajo Nation Division of Economic Development penned a letter asking him to bring his business to the largest landbase reservation in the U.S., Biggerstaff explained that Basha felt convinced it was the “right thing to do.”
“It immediately brought back memories for him of his family having relationships with their Indigenous neighbors,” she added. “And of course, the relationship with the Navajo became extremely powerful and fruitful and still exists today.”
From Tuba City to Window Rock, stores kept popping up across Navajoland. More locations would follow elsewhere, like Peridot and Whiteriver to help feed San Carlos and White Mountain Apache families.
The one-time Democratic gubernatorial candidate was not only a philanthropist but also an avid admirer of Western and American Indian art, owning one of the world’s largest private collections.
With help from his Aunt Zelma, Basha amassed more than 3,000 pieces — most of which have since been donated to Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West and the Heard Museum in Phoenix.
Even some of Basha's most prized handmade tribal baskets will be borrowed as a loan from the Heard Museum and on display in Chandler sometime around the start of next year to cap off the 16-month exhibit.
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