At 99, Mining Alum Remembers the UA in the 1920s. Robert Lennon may be the College of Engineering's oldest living graduate. Lennon's story begins below.
At 99, Mining Alum Remembers the UA in the 1920s
By Ed Stiles, College of Engineering
Robert Lenon, who graduated from The University of Arizona in 1930, came to Arizona just as it became a state and eventually roamed the desert, making a living by mining, surveying, buying and transporting ore and doing just about anything else that was mining or survey related.
His career began just months before the Great Depression and continued for many decades, including consulting work until just a few years ago.
Lenon went to France and Okinawa with the Army Engineers during World War II, moved to Patagonia, Ariz., after the war, and turned 99 on Nov. 1 – making him possibly the oldest living UA engineering alum.
Lenon and his wife, Naomi, still live in Patagonia, just 12 miles north of the Mowry Mine, where he took a surveying course that earned him the last three units he needed for his degree in 1929.
Since degrees were granted only once a year, he had to wait until May 1930 to get the piece of paper. But that didn’t stop him from securing an engineering job at the Calumet and Arizona Mine in Bisbee, Ariz.
Unfortunately that was just a few months before the stock market crash of October 1929, which brought on the Great Depression. It was not an opportune time to graduate or to be looking for work, and he was laid off in 1930.
Before that, however, Lenon spent four years – from 1925 to 1929 – studying mining engineering at the UA.
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