Just Plain Dorothy: The Life of Dorothy Hunt Finley, Cowgirl, Teacher, Tycoon, Philanthropist

Dorothy H. Finley is an Arizona icon. As a child, she grew up in hard times on a cattle ranch in the wilderness without electricity, water, indoor plumbing or air conditioning. She lived through the troubles, a time when her father and uncles were indicted for killing a man during a real Old West shootout and feared they might have to flee to Brazil to evade the law.

From the age of four, she was on horseback herding cattle. At ten, she learned to drive a ranch truck, loaded 100-pound bales of hay in the back and fed the cows. She attended a one-room schoolhouse in the middle of a cow pasture. She became a schoolteacher and principal in the Tucson United School District (TUSD), started a beer distribution company with her husband and eventually became its CEO.

Today she is a major philanthropist, and has been on the boards of more than 50 nonprofit organizations such as the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, the Arizona Children's Home, the Arizona Historical Society, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, the Girl Scouts of America, the Greater Tucson Economic Council, the Pima Community College Foundation, the
Tucson Children's Museum, the Tucson Medical Center, and the Women's Studies Advisory Board.

Dorothy was the driving force in preventing the closure of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. As a board member for DM-50, she went to Washington, DC, and convinced the senators to keep D-M open, saving Tucson and the state of Arizona millions of dollars in revenue, as well as thousands of jobs.

She has received outstanding awards including 1987's Entrepreneur of the Year, the 1999 Jimmy Hart Award, the 1992 National Spirit of Life Award, the 2001 Ray Davies Humanitarian Award, the Mae Carvell Award, and the 2003 Zachary and Elizabeth Fisher Distinguished Citizen Humanitarian Award. Two organizations named their centers after Dorothy: the Dorothy H. Finley Child Development Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, and the Dorothy H. Finley Space Exploratorium & Challenger Learning Center of the Southwest.

Dorothy Finley has written a historical memoir of her life, Just Plain Dorothy, with the assistance of well-known writer Allen R. Kates, MFAW, author of CopShock and other books (listed on Amazon.com).

Starting around 1917, the book takes the reader on a voyage through the Old West, with gunfights and western justice. The story shows Dorothy on cattle roundups, how she nearly died from an Arizona Bark Scorpion sting, and how her family used outrageous folk medicine like turpentine and a petrified bee hive to cure their illnesses. The book takes the reader through the terrible times of the Great Depression, the first and second World Wars, shows Dorothy's years at the University of Arizona, and reveals her loves and disappointments including an engagement to a pilot who was severely wounded on a bombing run over Germany. We see Dorothy when she meets her husband Harold and watch them struggle to start a beer distribution company and make it grow.

This book is the story of an American legend.