SENATE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION 1001

A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

ON THE DEATH OF THE HONORABLE WILLIAM R. BOURDON

The Honorable William Ralph Bourdon, a former member of the Arizona Senate and House of Representatives and a former candidate for governor, passed away on the fifteenth of August, 1973, in a hospital in Lakeside, Arizona, at the age of seventy-seven.

A prominent White Mountains rancher, who at one time owned one hundred fifty thousand acres of rangeland known as the Silver Creek Ranch near Snowflake, Arizona, he was first elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in 1936. He was the only Republican in the House during that session. He was reelected in 1938. From 1954 to 1958 he served in the Arizona Senate. He ran for governor in 1948.

Mr. Bourdon was born November 14, 1895, in Red Lake Falls, Minnesota. He served as an Army sergeant in the 1916 Pancho Villa campaign along the Mexican border. He was an Army captain in World War I and recuperated in Prescott, Arizona, from wounds suffered during that war. He received the Distinguished Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre.

He attended the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California before becoming manager of the Silver Creek Ranch in 1927, which he later bought and expanded. He was president of the Navajo County Cattle Growers Association seven years.

During the Thirteenth Legislature, he was chairman of the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments and Referendum and during the Fourteenth Legislature he was chairman of the Public Lands Committee. Other House Committees he served on with distinction were: Livestock, Reconstruction and Unemployment, State and National Defense, Public Health, Rules, and Military Affairs. During the Twenty-second and Twenty-third Legislatures he was vice-chairman of the Senate Committee on Military and Veterans' Affairs. He also served on Senate Committees on Agriculture and Irrigation, Enrolling and Engrossing, Insurance, Livestock, Mines and Mining, Public Lands, Suffrage and Elections, Administration, Finance and Revenue, and Fish and Game.

In 1962 he was appointed by the Legislature to the Veterans Service Commission Board and in 1968 was an Arizona presidential elector. He was elected national vice commander of the American Legion in 1952, was past master of Holbrook Chalcedony Masonic Lodge and past grand master of Arizona.

Therefore

Be it resolved by the Senate of the State of Arizona, the House of Representatives concurring:

That the Legislature of the State of Arizona wishes to express its sincere regret and profound sorrow over the passing of the Honorable William Ralph Bourdon and does extend its sympathies and condolences to the surviving members of his family.

Unanimously adopted by the Senate-October 25, 1973

Unanimously adopted by the House-October 26, 1973

Approved by the Governor-October 26, 1973

Filed in the Office of Secretary of State-October 26, 1973