Raymond Faker

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Dolores "Del" Faker enjoyed prospecting for gold, but she didn't need to do a lot of digging and panning to find treasure.

She let other prospectors do the heavy labor.

Faker acquired her nuggets through raffles at the monthly Desert Gold Diggers meetings.

"Oh gosh, did she ever win! I never saw someone so lucky in all my life," said her neighbor of almost 40 years, Norma Crobbe.

Del's husband, Raymond Faker, took home his own share of raffled nuggets, too.

"Those two people are the two luckiest people I've ever seen," said Harold Stevenson, who got the Fakers involved in the Desert Gold Diggers and the Gold Prospectors Association of Tucson. "They'd raffle off 20 gold nuggets (a meeting) and I remember one night she won nine of them!

"They liked animals and they liked the outdoors and stuff, so I took them to a couple of meetings and it stuck," he said.

For the Fakers, the friendship and camaraderie they found with their fellow prospectors was even more valuable than gold.

"They used to go out with the club all the time," said Donna Hackett, another member of the Desert Gold Diggers. "They never prospected. They just loved to sit down and talk to everybody.

"When they first started in the club, Ray used to prospect a little bit. He used to pan and that, but as they got older they would go just for the enjoyment and for the socializing."

The couple never missed a club meeting, prospectors' picnic or Gold Diggers social gathering, their friends said. That's why their absence is especially conspicuous now. Del and Ray Faker died just over a week apart last month. Del died Jan. 21 from an infection. She was 78. Ray died Jan. 29 of cancer. He was 82.

"I kind of had the feeling all along that if one went, the other would go," said their daughter, Robin Gibson.

"Since retiring, they did everything together and my mother relied on my father a lot. I feel like they lived for each other. I really kind of felt they were not going to be able to be separated."

The Fakers were born in Rochester, N.Y. Del was a homemaker and Ray was a carpenter. They moved to Tucson in 1959 with their two older children, Rodney and Robin. Their son Rory was born in Arizona.

"I envision us as a typical family," Gibson said. "My father was a very hard worker. He spent long hours just working. My mother, she took care of us. I had dance lessons and Rod had guitar lessons, and it was busy keeping us going. My father would be gone from 7 in the morning and wouldn't come home until 5. He was pretty much worn out by the time he got home.

"But the times that we were together, we did things. We would go on picnics as a family. We had lots of board games," she said. "We had a swimming pool. So we were always together."

Back in New York, Ray, who served in the Navy during World War II, and Del enjoyed sailing. In landlocked Arizona, they turned their attention to square dancing, an activity they pursued two or three times a week when their children were young, Gibson said.

In retirement, the Fakers, who were married for 60 years, never missed an opportunity to socialize. They ate lunch every day at an East Side senior center near their home. Fridays were spent visiting residents of a nursing home. They'd originally gone to the facility to visit an ailing friend, but when she died, they continued going to see the other friends they'd made among residents and staff.

"When my father had retired, they really wanted to be more social, get out and be with people, and I think that was their main motivation" for joining the gold prospecting groups, Gibson said. "They met the people there and they liked socializing with them, and my father always went to his carpenter union meetings every month. It kept them busy. This past year they really haven't been feeling that well, but they forced themselves to keep going.

"They were very patient and easygoing people. All my life they never fought and never had harsh words. They always wanted to please people and do what was expected of them," Gibson said.

Though physical limitations prevented the Fakers from doing much of the actual digging, they set up camp chairs and visited with fellow club members during monthly prospecting outings.

"We always went with them, and we'd set up our little table and chairs by the creek and pan," said Hilda Stevenson, Harold's wife. "It was something to get us out of the city for the day.

"We'd all just laugh and joke and cut up with each other. We'd ask, 'Have you found anything today?' and they'd say, 'Nope, we didn't find a thing.' But they wouldn't tell you if they did," she said.

"Ray, he was a little shy," said Harold Stevenson, "but Del, she never met a stranger. She would talk to anybody. She's the person who'd make you talk to her."