Who’s the most influential Arizonan? For these voters, the choice was easy

Who is the most influential person in Arizona history?

Is it groundbreaking architect Frank Lloyd Wright? Or Del Webb, founder of Sun City? Or someone more on the artistic side, like hard rocker Alice Cooper or Tucson daughter Linda Ronstadt?

Jeremy Duda is a native Arizonan, self-proclaimed history nerd and reporter for Axios Phoenix. And he created the ultimate bracket to find out.

He joined The Show to reveal the big winner.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so you had quite a list of notable Arizonans here, but it all came down to two really big ones. Of course, longtime Arizona Sen. John McCain made the final two, and so did Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. So to tell us who took home the title.

JEREMY DUDA: That was Sandra Day O’Connor. And it was not close. She got about 65% of the vote. I was kind of surprised. I started out from the beginning thinking that John McCain would probably win just for being the more recent figure and still very beloved by a lot of folks here in Arizona. But it was O’Connor.

GILGER: Yeah, I’m surprised by that, too. I would have thought John McCain right off the bat. OK, but tell us more about Sandra Day O’Connor. Obviously the first woman on the Supreme Court. Everyone knows that. But she also had a long and very influential history here in Arizona.

DUDA: Sure. Yeah. Before she was on the Supreme Court, she was very involved in political and civic life here in Arizona. She was on the State Personnel Board in the late ’60s. She resigned that for an appointment to the state Senate. Became Senate majority leader — I believe was the first woman to have a leadership position in the legislative chamber here in Arizona.

Was pretty influential as a legislator. Had some important legislation on mental health that her son tells me was inspired by her time working out of the state hospital. Worked for the Attorney General’s Office, she went kind of line by line, statute by statute through the Arizona Revised Statutes, repealing laws that had discriminatory language against women.

Then after about five years or so in the Legislature, she ran for a spot on Maricopa County Superior Court, was elected as a judge — I believe she was part of the last class of elected judges in Arizona or in Maricopa County before voters passed the merit selection system, which she had a big role in as well. And then the Court of Appeals and, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court.

GILGER: Wow. OK. Quite a history. OK, so there’s our winner. But I think my favorite thing about this, Jeremy — and I know this is something you’ve been wanting to do for a long time, so I’m sure you enjoyed this — was was this long list you put together of names of great Arizonans people lots of us maybe have heard the name of, but didn’t actually know who they were.

So let’s talk about a few of those. I was interested in Jack Swilling. Tell us about him.

DUDA: Jack Swilling is kind of a wild character. He was, I believe, a Confederate veteran who, after the Civil War, ended up just traveling through Arizona, he and his party were here. He noticed kind of the agricultural potential of the soil here. And he began excavating some of the old Hohokam canals and built the first kind of modern irrigation system.

And I believe that formed kind of the basis of the irrigation system we still have today in the Valley. He was kind of the modern founder of Phoenix.

GILGER: Yeah, definitely. OK, tell us about Francis Willard Munds. I’ve heard of Munds Park. I did not know it was named after someone. Tell us about that.

DUDA: Yeah. She’s, unfortunately kind of an unsung figure — the less unsung than she used to be, there’s now a statue of her at Bolin Plaza over by the Capitol. And she was an early suffrage leader and was a big part of the push to put women’s suffrage on the ballot in 1912, the year we got statehood.

And, she went on to get elected to the Legislature, I believe the Senate, for a number of years after that.

GILGER: OK, so that goes pretty far back in Arizona history. But you’ve got people also like Jerry Colangelo on this list, right?

DUDA: Oh, sure. I mean, Colangelo obviously is still around today, still out here. And his, influence on the Valley, it’s hard to overstate it. I mean, nothing says big city like having major professional sports teams. When Phoenix was growing up, he was the one who brought the first professional sports team here to the Valley with the Phoenix Suns in the late ’60s.

And for many years, for 20 years, that was all we had. That was our claim to fame sportswise until the Cardinals moved here in the ’80s and then, of course, the Coyotes. And then Colangelo brought the Diamondbacks here as well in the late ’90s.

GILGER: Yeah. My goodness. Wow. OK, we can’t do the segment without talking about Wallace and Ladmo, everybody’s favorite sort of duo from back in the day. Tell us about them.

DUDA: Oh, I mean, anyone who grew up in Phoenix, up through the 1980s, Wallace and Ladmo was just a part of growing up, was a part of your life. You hear the words Ladmo bag, and that brings back a lot of memories about either how much you wish you had gotten one or how happy you were.

And, speaking as the probably the last generation of Arizonans who grew up watching Wallace and Ladmo — I think it went off the air in 1989 — it still brings back a lot of memories for me and was just such an integral part of childhood and growing up if you’re from here in the Valley.

And of course, this is a state of transplants, lots of folks aren’t from here, but that I think is sort of a point of pride for those of us who did grow up here, that we grew up watching that incredible show.

GILGER: Yeah. OK. Last question for you, Jeremy, in the last minute or so here, you said you would not have chosen Sandra Day O’Connor as the most influential Arizonan, and you picked someone else that probably not many other people did. Who did you pick?

DUDA: I would have picked Carl Hayden, who was in the Senate for 42 years. And you have to remember at the time, seniority counted for everything over there. Arizona was a very small state. Would not normally have gotten a lot out of the federal government.

But because of Carl Hayden’s decades of seniority, he directed a lot of federal funding and whatnot to the state, ending his career, capping it off with the passage of the Central Arizona Project, the irrigation project that brought water from the Colorado River to the interior of the state, which is still of paramount importance and led to a lot of explosive growth, which we’re still seeing the benefits of today.

GILGER: That’s really interesting. So you walk by those canals, you can thank Carl Hayden.