Ann-Eve Pedersen, former Tucson journalist and education advocate, dies at 55

Ann-Eve Pedersen found the baby woodpecker beneath her neighbor’s palm tree and rushed into her Sam Hughes Neighborhood home to tell her husband.

Peter Eckerstom called someone from the Tucson Wildlife Center who said the only way to save the bird was to return it to its nest.

Given that the nest was on top of the 30-foot palm tree, Eckerstrom considered the matter more of an act of God than a situation he and his wife could remedy.

But Pedersen had other plans.

She called a friend who had an extension ladder. She climbed up that ladder and onto her tippy toes to put the bird back in its nest.

“That was Ann-Eve,” Eckerstrom said this week, days after Pedersen died on Friday, May 28. She was 55.

“I think she had a powerful sense of right and wrong, a moral core to her,” said Bobbie Jo Buel, the former executive editor of the Arizona Daily Star, where Pedersen had worked as a reporter and city editor through the 1990s.

Whether it was saving a wayward bird or holding elected officials’ feet to the fire when they crossed the line of public trust, Pedersen was a fierce defender of the underdog, her friends and former colleagues recalled.

“She was just outraged if somebody who was using taxpayer money wasn’t spending it well,” said Buel, recalling how Pedersen was quick to have the Star sue public agencies when they refused to share public records with her reporters and readers. “People who were liars and cheats and general scofflaws, she would give them no quarter.”

Ann-Eve Pedersen — Pedersen
Submitted photo, 2016

‘Head and shoulders the best’

Pedersen, who was born in Tucson and graduated from Salpointe Catholic High School before attending prestigious Brown University in Rhode Island, started her journalism career as a news assistant at the Tucson Citizen in the late 1980s. A month or two in, the editors gave her a shot at writing a story.

“When she did one, they asked her to do more,” said Eckerstrom, who met Pedersen when she was covering courts and he was a young lawyer. He is now chief judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals Division II covering Tucson and Southern Arizona.

Pedersen also reported on Tucson city government, facing the formidable challenge of keeping up with the Star’s longtime City Hall reporter, Joe Burchell.

“I competed against quite a number of Citizen reporters covering local government ... and she was head and shoulders the best,” recalled Burchell, who retired in 2015.

By the early 1990s, Pedersen was scooping her competition across the hall — the Star and Citizen for decades had newsrooms on opposite sides of a sprawling plant on South Park Avenue.

“She was an amazing reporter, so we stole her from the Citizen,” said former Star reporter and assistant city editor Mary K. Reinhart.

After a couple years of reporting, Pedersen joined Reinhart on the city desk alongside Diane Luber and, later, Maureen O’Connell. In 1997 she was promoted to city editor.

“She did a great job of walking that line of being a very demanding boss — she would push and push people — and at the same time she was so kind and so encouraging to people,” said Buel. “It’s kind of hard to find that combination: She could be a total softie and she could be as hard as they come.”

As hard as she worked in the newsroom, Pedersen always made time for friends. She, O’Connell and former Star designer Gawain Douglas would run in Sabino Canyon. Reinhart remembers her throwing baby showers.

Luber recalled a time when her house was broken into and she called Pedersen. “She showed up immediately with plywood and tools to cover the broken window,” Luber said. “I was in shock; Ann-Eve took charge.”

Pedersen left the Star in 1999 and, after son Lars was born, focused on her family. She returned to journalism briefly, taking a managing editor position at the Tucson Citizen in early 2003, but she left after 10 months.

Traveled state in ‘war wagon’

Around 2009, Pedersen started focusing her attention on a shortage of state funding for education. She spoke up at Tucson Unified School District meetings when district officials began talking about school closings and staff reductions as a result of state budget cuts.

Jen Darland was at one of those meetings at Tucson Magnet High School and after speaking out about her concerns, Pedersen approached her. “And the next thing you know, we were starting” the Arizona Education Network, Darland said.

The two women and a couple of other parents began lobbying for change and launched a petition drive to get Proposition 204 — which would have established a permanent 1% sales tax to fund public education — on the 2012 statewide ballot.

Darland recalled how Pedersen would drive her Volvo — she called it the “war wagon,” Darland said — around the state, sometimes hitting more than one county in a day, to promote the measure.

“Any time I was with her in public, people would swarm around her. She was like this flame, this light,” she said.

State lawmakers and future governor Doug Ducey, then the state treasurer, lobbied hard to defeat the measure. Then-Secretary of State Ken Bennett unsuccessfully sued Pedersen and the Quality Education and Jobs Campaign, which backed the proposition, claiming the petitions were flawed due to a technicality. Ducey and Pedersen debated the issue on public television.

“I know I’m pretty biased, but I thought she wiped the floor with our governor both times,” Eckerstrom said. “Ann-Eve was charismatically passionate.”

Voters ended up rejecting Proposition 204 after an 11th-hour opposition campaign that Eckerstrom and Darland said was coordinated by non-Arizonans.

Ducey praises her ‘passion, intellect’

“The unexpected passing of Tucson journalist and education advocate Ann-Eve Pedersen is devastating,” Ducey said, The Associated Press reported. “She was a committed community leader and talented journalist — and she cared deeply about the people of Tucson and the entire state.”

“Her passion for a cause she believed in was clear when we debated Prop. 204 in 2012. Although we disagreed, I always respected her passion, intellect and dedication to the state of Arizona. My deepest condolences go out to Ann-Eve’s family and loved ones,” the governor added.

Pedersen continued advocating for education funding and social justice as the executive director of the Southwestern Foundation for Education and Historical Preservation.

“What she did after she left (journalism) was pretty remarkable. It showed how much she cared about the community,” said Reinhart, who kept in touch with Pedersen including throughout the pandemic when she, Pedersen, Luber and O’Connell would hold regular Zoom calls to talk about their kids, politics, current events and how they were coping with the pandemic. Their last Zoom was in April.

Darland said she hadn’t seen Pedersen since the pandemic began in March 2020 after she landed a county job working with the homeless — a job she says was inspired by her social justice work with Pedersen.

“I drive by her street every day to work and I have been for the last year and a half. And every day it’s like I can’t wait to share what I’ve been doing,” she said. “You take for granted that this timeless human is going to be forever and that you have time. Never take for granted that you have time.”

“It’s a huge loss in terms of public education advocacy, which was central to her work,” said former U.S. Rep. Ron Barber, who knew Pedersen through his daughter, Jenny Douglas, and son-in-law Gawain.

Not long after Barber was injured, along with then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson’s Jan. 8, 2011, mass shooting, Pedersen surprised him with a luminarias display. She had recruited dozens of Sam Hughes Neighborhood kids to help create more than 400 luminarias — something she organized with neighbors every December before the holidays — that filled his backyard.

“I turned the corner to my backyard and I looked out and I lost it,” Barber said. “Every one of the luminarias had a message of love.”

“It’s a huge loss on so many levels. And I know that my daughter is not alone in feeling like the bottom dropped out of her world,” Barber added.

“It’s not just a loss for Tucson, it’s a loss for Arizona,” said Burchell of her passing. “Who else is going to do it? Who else is doing it? There are some people out there, but who else is devoting the level of energy in the community as a citizen?”

In addition to her husband and son, Pedersen is survived by three brothers, Alexander, Hans and Christian; brother-in-law Paul Eckerstrom; two nieces, Aven Pedersen and Kayla Eckerstrom; and two nephews, Dash Pedersen and Kyle Eckerstrom.

She was preceded in death by her father, Lars Pedersen, a former Pima County prosecutor; and by her mother, Gwynne Barthels Pedersen, who died in a car crash when Pedersen was 3. Her brother Erik also died in that crash.

Memorial services will be held at 10 a.m. on June 12 at the Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St. in downtown.

A cause of death was not disclosed. Eckerstrom asks that memorial donations be made to the TUSD Educational Enrichment Fund.