Land developer Don Diamond, who has died at 91, owned many Tucson businesses

The business interests of prominent Tucson developer Donald R. Diamond, who died Monday at 91, went beyond land into other arenas — literally.

“He loved the art of the deal, was open to investing in and acquiring a broad array of assets, and learning about an industry in order to make an informed business decision,” said Priscilla Storm, a vice president at Diamond Ventures.

He was “confident in himself and had a tolerance for risk,” said daughter Helaine Levy.

One of those risks came in the late 1960s, when critics considered Phoenix “too hot” and “too small” to be a successful NBA market. Diamond was one of a group of original franchise owners of the Phoenix Suns, an expansion team that joined the NBA at the start of the 1968-69 season.

In the early days, the Suns, who played to sparse crowds in the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, were a small, family-centered operation with Diamonds’ daughters and the daughters of business partner Donald Pitt working as runners.

Several seasons later, in the mid-1970s, the Suns showed their basketball prowess and made it to the playoffs. Diamond had a pair of madras pants with matching jacket, which he proclaimed his “lucky pants” and wore to all seven games, said Levy.

Diamond was a team owner until 1987, when Jerry Colangelo, the first general manager of the team, led a group to purchase the Suns for $44.5 million.

The team’s current managing partner, Robert Sarver, son of the Diamonds’ close friends Irene and Jack Sarver, went to his first Suns game at age 8 after receiving tickets as a birthday gift from Diamond.

On June 30, 2004, Robert Sarver headed a group of investors and purchased the Suns for $401 million, according to NBA.com.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Some of Diamond’s other business ventures included:

• TV station: Diamond was an owner and president of KVOA-TV Channel 4 from 1971 to 1982. Diamond, along with Pitt and Jack Gumbin, bought struggling NBC affiliate KVOA-TV for $2.7 million in 1972 from the Pulitzer Publishing Co., which was forced to sell because it had purchased the Arizona Daily Star.

The owners imported Jon Ruby, a TV sales executive from Chicago, to be the general manager. Within a few years, KVOA won the local ratings war and the trio sold the station a decade later for $30 million, according to Tucson Citizen archives.

• Mail-order catalog: Diamond teamed up with Paul and Alice Baker in the 1970s and bought Old Pueblo Traders, a direct-mail retailer established in 1946 that sold Southwestern fashions. It had fewer than 20 employees and a small store on South Country Club Road. They expanded the business into Arizona Mail Order and sold women’s ready-to-wear fashions and shoes via print catalogs.

They moved operations to a large space on East 34th Street and the company had more than 1,000 employees at one time. Diamond and Baker sold Arizona Mail Order to Fingerhut Co. in 1998 for about $120 million, according to Tucson Citizen archives.

• Theme park and movie studio: Diamond, Pitt and Richard L. Bloch bought the lease for Pima County-owned Old Tucson Studios, paying about $3.5 million in 1984 for about 100 buildings, the theme park and the movie set. It had been built for the 1940 movie “Arizona” and was restored, developed and reopened in 1960 by movie-industry advocate Robert Shelton, who died in 2016.

Many of the original buildings, costumes and memorabilia were destroyed in a 1995 fire, and movie-quality sets have been built to re-create the set. Levy now owns Old Tucson.