June Caldwell Martin is leaving a literary legacy at the Arizona Daily Star.
She revived the newspaper’s books page and started the Star’s Book and Author Event, which lasted nearly 20 years as something of a prologue to the Tucson Festival of Books. Martin also founded Southwest Books of the Year, now a Pima County Public Library program that honors titles with Southwestern themes or settings.
And after more than 30 years of highlighting local authors in the newspaper, Sunday’s Southern Arizona Authors column is her last. Martin will put down her pen.
“I’m sad, but it’s time,” she says, after three decades of reading everything from real estate licensing manuals to memoirs to science fiction.
Martin started the Southern Arizona Authors column in 1980. The monthly feature has grown exponentially with the rise of self-publishing, and she estimates that she has read — or at least skimmed — more than 100 books each year. Authors have included those who just want to write one book — “their book,” Martin says — and those such as Barbara Kingsolver who go on to write for national audiences.
A bookworm as a kid, Martin hasn’t had much time for free reading in recent years, despite the dozens of titles that fill the book shelves in her home. Friend Mary Alice “Malice” Keller jokes that Martin has more books than the Library of Congress.
Keller started and maintained the Southern Arizona Authors’ website. “It’s kind of sad, in a way, because I just have to be hopeful that whoever takes it over has the dedication that June has had,” Keller says of the column. “There have been times when she has been ill, and she just slogs through it, and I don’t know a lot of people who would do that.”
Despite Martin’s love of books and her advocacy for the Southwestern author, Martin has no interest in joining their ranks. She never has.
“I really had never even thought I wanted to write a book, and 30 years with local authors has confirmed that decision,” Martin says, laughing.
She wrote a few short stories while studying English and Spanish at the University of Arizona, but when it came to penning anything professionally, Martin chose journalism.
She started in the Arizona Daily Star’s features section — then the women’s section — after divorcing author Erskine Caldwell, whom she met in college.
“I had a baby and lived the life of a housewife,” she says.
She began her career in the 1950s, writing the general interest column “Surprise Package” that would go on to win awards from the Arizona Press Club and one from the National Headliner Club. Her son — a fifth or sixth-grader at the time — named the column.
In those days, Martin says, the women’s pages operated out of an area separate from the main newsroom. “We were not to mix, and they were not to mix,” she says of the gender dynamics at that time.
That was her first brush with the Star. From 1959 to 1970, Martin edited the UA’s Arizona Alumnus magazine during a time when alumni magazines “prowled campuses” not for fluff but for hard-hitting stories. Martin’s coverage on what she saw as the inevitable demise of fraternities got her fired. Fraternities would stick around for a while.
“I didn’t have any hard feelings, she said. “It was time to go.”
She calls the magazine’s staff a “clubby little family.” It was there that Martin met Keller, bringing the younger woman, a UA art senior at the time, on staff as a designer and illustrator.
“I just thought she was the most sophisticated woman I had met,” Keller says, remembering her own college uniform of Levis and sweatshirts. “She was just very sharp and very funny and well-groomed. She was just the top.”
Martin returned to the Star in 1970, but the women remained friends, even venturing to the bottom of the Grand Canyon by mule about 30 years ago.
“Originally, June had wanted to ride the rapids, but I put the kibosh on that because I didn’t know how to swim,” Keller says. “I told them it would be their responsibility to go in the water and get me, so we decided on the mules. We would do trips like that and just do what friends do.”
Over the years, Martin has kept old friends and added new ones.
Maria Parham, the Star’s editorial page editor, worked closely with Martin in the newspaper’s features department during Martin’s second round at the paper. “She always asks you questions,” Parham says, describing Martin as someone who makes connections and then keeps them. “She never wants to just talk about herself.”
But that’s not to say Martin has no stories of her own.
As a reporter for the Star, she covered education, general assignments and eventually features beats, writing about everything from a “wreck on the highway to old ladies who tatted,” she says. Parham has always been impressed with Martin’s knowledge of Tucson lore.
And now, Martin is part of it.
For a while, she was the fashion editor and then took on the unofficial role as book editor, sharing books with Star staff to read and review on their own time, a practice that fizzled under labor laws.
Southwest Books of the Year grew out of a Christmas shopping special in the Star that Martin put together on books with a Southwestern theme in the late 1970s. From there, it grew.
“It was a really wonderful, lucky accident,” she says. “It was just in the shopping guide with the pots and pans and where to get good beauty products and the best candles.”
The library took over Martin’s coordinator duties in 2005 and later awarded her the Lawrence Clark Powell Lifetime Achievement Award. She also still serves as a judge for the Audio Publishers Association, this year judging audio dramas.
In 1980, Martin organized the Star’s Book and Author Event, enlisting help to greet and guide visiting national writers. Irving Stone, Shirley Temple Black, Elmore Leonard and Dave Barry are just a few of the celebrity authors who passed through Tucson for that event, shuttled to and from the airport by Star staff.
“It was really a community effort,” she says. “It was work, and it was fun.”
Martin retired from the Star in 1994, and the Book and Author Event ended two years later. Now another chapter closes for Martin — this one also a mix of labor and love.
“These amateur authors do crazy things,” she says, noting her desire to mostly keep author interaction to a minimum. She remembers one author who continued to send her content he wanted to add to the book, even though it had already been published.
For the most part, though, she has enjoyed it.
“It’s not my goal to be a hotshot literary critic,” she says. “It’s my goal to recognize local authors, give them some exposure and hope that it helps.”
