Bonnie Henry
: The 'd' word: drunk
Asa "Ace" Bushnell: "I didn't think I would ever be a drunk."
Bonnie Henry
He has no trouble saying the word. "I didn't think I would ever be a drunk," says Asa "Ace" Bushnell, 80, who for most of two decades was just that.
Sober since a five-day drinking bout in Watts back in 1969, this former FBI agent and newsman would become a pillar of the community here in Tucson.
Last year, the Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce gave him its 2004 Founders Award for his years of community service — particularly in crime prevention and alcohol recovery.
Today is Bushnell's last day as community relations manager with the Pima County Sheriff's Department, a job he's held since 1983.
Renal failure — and subsequent dialysis treatments — have taken their toll, he says.
"He's going to leave a huge vacancy in this organization," says Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who's known Bushnell since he was a cop with the Tucson Police Department and Bushnell was working the police beat for the Tucson Citizen.
Back then, says Bushnell, "I phoned in a lot of my stories from a bar on Scott."
A former Marine and a Princeton grad, Bushnell hitchhiked West in 1946 to marry a girl he'd met at Princeton who was working at a dude ranch in Oracle.
Two years later he joined the Citizen for the first of four stints at that paper, covering sports in the Amphitheater School District.
In 1951 he became a G-man, training out of Washington, D.C. That's where he learned to drink.
"I was getting roaring drunk with a bunch of older guys," says Bushnell, who left the FBI a year later to return to Tucson — and the Citizen.
By this time he had a new wife. "She drank with me," says Bushnell.
On the road again by 1955, he took a job as managing editor of the Town Topics in Princeton, N.J. Then came a stint as public relations director for the attorney general of New Jersey.
"That job was ready-made for an alcoholic because the attorney general did not want any publicity," says Bushnell.
In 1962, the Citizen "took a chance" on him again, this time as police reporter. After sticking around "long enough to vote for Barry Goldwater" in November of '64, Bushnell headed for a managing editor's slot at a weekly in Upland, Calif.
A job as editor of a paper in a logging town in Washington followed. "It was the journalistic outpost of the world," says Bushnell. And with its absentee owners, "a beautiful job for a drunk."
Even so, he soon drank himself out of that job, moving on in 1969 to the Palisadian-Post in Pacific Palisades, Calif.
"I drove up in this old beat-up convertible with a couple of bottles under the front seat."
But there he would make friends with the paper's advertising manager — a six-year veteran of Alcoholics Anonymous. When Bushnell turned up after his drinking spree in Watts, the man led him to an AA meeting. He's been going ever since.
In 1972 he bounced back at the Citizen for the last time — but only after the paper sent associate editor and longtime cohort Tony Tselentis to California to see if Bushnell had really stopped drinking.
"I spent the night with Ace and went to an AA meeting with him," says Tselentis, now an Arizona Daily Star copy editor.
At the Citizen, Bushnell cranked out columns on the editorial page. He also met writer Cheri Cross. They married in 1986.
Once retired, he vows to remain active in the community, particularly with 88-CRIME and Compass Health Care Inc., a drug treatment organization.
"I've got things to keep me busy," says Bushnell. That includes, of course, attending those AA meetings.
'Ace' Bushnell's long, winding road
● Bonnie Henry's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach her at 434-4074 or at bhenry@azstarnet.com or write to 3295 W. Ina Road, Suite 125, Tucson, AZ 85741.
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