Remembering L. Alan Cruikshank, founder of the Fountain Hills Times
L. Alan Cruikshank stepped out of a four-wheel-drive Jeep in 1972 and into what would become his life’s work. The land that would become Fountain Hills was still raw desert, roads roughly graded, the famous fountain not yet installed. At the old ranch house serving as a temporary office, four dead rattlesnakes greeted him at the doorway.
“That’s how many we found today,” said one of the grader drivers.
“Welcome to Fountain Hills,” Alan thought.
It was an inauspicious beginning for someone who would spend the next five decades building the written record of a community, one story at a time.
Alan was born in Oklahoma on July 18, 1947, to Leslie and Joyce Cruikshank, but Arizona became his true home. After graduating from West High School in Phoenix in 1965—where he earned ribbons as a relay runner—and later from Arizona State University, he launched Arizona Sports Digest, a statewide sports magazine. That venture led to work at an advertising agency, where McCulloch Properties became his assignment.
McCulloch was developing something unprecedented in the desert: a master-planned community built around the world’s tallest fountain. Alan’s job was to help tell that story.
After traveling to other McCulloch communities—Lake Havasu City, Pueblo West in Colorado—Alan noticed something. Each place had newspapers chronicling the life of these new communities. Why not Fountain Hills?
In 1974, Alan and Arthur Hewitt, a veteran newspaper editor turned advertising executive, left the agency and launched The Times of Fountain Hills. The first edition rolled off the presses on June 27, 1974.
But Alan had a different vision for community journalism. He called it “refrigerator journalism”—stories worth clipping and hanging on kitchen refrigerators, like pages in a large family scrapbook. Local sports achievements, club announcements, activity calendars, and especially photographs of children and families, which Alan loved featuring prominently on the front page.
This wasn’t journalism chasing clicks or optimizing for algorithms. This was writing that served the human need to see ourselves reflected back, to know our small triumphs mattered, to feel connected to something larger than ourselves.
Under Alan’s leadership, The Times didn’t just cover community events—it helped create them. When residents suggested an art show in Fountain Park, Alan’s coverage helped transform that simple idea into what became two annual Fountain Festivals of Fine Arts and Crafts, now drawing hundreds of artists from across the country and hundreds of thousands of visitors.
For the community’s tenth anniversary, someone proposed White Castle Day—a celebration of the Midwestern fast-food chain beloved by many transplants to Arizona. The result? The world’s largest takeout order of hamburgers delivered to the world’s tallest fountain, complete with Clayton Moore, television’s Lone Ranger, escorting the shipment into town.
Alan understood that a newspaper could be more than a passive recorder of events. It could be the place where community dreams took shape and found their voice.
The park hosted performances by Count Basie, Arthur Fiedler, and Walter Cronkite, who gave a Lincoln reading to patriotic music performed by the Phoenix Symphony. Alan himself later had the chance to conduct that same symphony in the park—a moment that perfectly captured his role as both chronicler and participant in his community’s cultural life.
“There are all the good things you accomplish with a newspaper,” Alan once reflected, “like finding lost pets for people or running a story about a family in need of help and watching the outpouring of generosity by the town’s people.”
But Alan never shied away from difficult stories either. The crumbling of the Road Districts, the town’s takeover of the Fire District, the gaming standoff at Fort McDowell—these contentious issues kept him awake at night as he wrestled with how to cover them fairly and completely.
“It really bothers me when people get personal with their negative comments over some public issue,” he wrote. Alan understood that in a small community, how you tell a story matters as much as what story you tell.
Violence troubled him most. When a young woman was convicted of murdering her boyfriend, when vivacious civic leader Julie Patterson was killed in her home just doors from where Alan lived—these stories weighed heavily on him. Patterson’s murder, over thirty years ago, was never solved.
“I’m still sick that the investigations have turned up virtually nothing in the case,” Alan wrote decades later.
In 1986, residents approached Alan about running for Congress. After a long weekend of consideration, he declined. The time required to do the job properly would take too much away from his family—a decision that revealed his understanding of what mattered most.
Instead, Alan poured his energy into the community in countless other ways. For years, he performed as Elvis Presley at local fundraisers, complete with scarf-tossing to swooning fans. For eight years, he dressed as Santa Claus, arriving by helicopter at the Village Bazaar the day after Thanksgiving to greet children and listen to their Christmas wishes.
He helped establish what became the L. Alan Cruikshank River of Time Museum & Exploration Center, served three terms as Chamber of Commerce president, and led the committee to establish Fountain Hills Sister Cities. The honors accumulated: Citizen of the Year, Businessperson of the Year, Humanitarian Award, Champions Award. He was inducted into the Lower Verde Valley Hall of Fame with the inaugural class in 2004.
Alan’s commitment to craft extended beyond Fountain Hills. He served on the boards of both the Arizona Newspaper Association and the National Newspaper Association, becoming president of the state organization. In 2003, he was inducted into the Arizona Newspaper Hall of Fame. The National Newspaper Association established the Cruikshank Scholars program at the University of Missouri School of Mass Communications in 2004.
In 2013, Alan received the James O. Amos Award from the NNA—the association’s highest honor for community newspaper publishers who demonstrate distinguished service and leadership.
In 1995, Alan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It never slowed him down. Instead, he shared his journey with the disease through his writing, finding common ground with readers walking the same difficult path.
He willingly underwent deep brain stimulation, a relatively new treatment at the time, and wrote about that experience too. The procedure improved his quality of life and allowed him to continue his work right up until his death on October 30, 2022, in Las Vegas.
“Sharing his own health journey so that readers could learn more, and fear less, was generous and helpful,” remembered Mayor Ginny Dickey, herself a longtime resident. “I wish for peace and comfort to Alan’s family, with gratitude from The Town of Fountain Hills.”
Cassie Hansen, Fountain Hills’ original Town Clerk and former Council member, remembered Alan’s willingness to help wherever needed: “It soon became clear that there was a common denominator between Alan and Bruce [her husband], commitment to the community, finding solutions to challenges and the apparent inability to say no.”
She recalled Alan and her husband working together to prepare holiday dinners for homeless children from the Thomas Pappas School—Alan securing the Men’s Club facility and kitchen, both men creating “epicurean magic for a group of very appreciative kids and a bond that lasted through the years.”
Cherie Koss, executive director of the museum that bears Alan’s name, said it best: “We know that he will be an angel on our shoulder continuing to guide us.”
Alan Cruikshank understood something that seems almost radical in our current media landscape: that journalism exists to serve the human need for connection, memory, and meaning. That stories should be worth saving. That a community’s daily life—its celebrations, struggles, and small triumphs—deserves to be recorded with care and preserved with love.
He proved that “refrigerator journalism” wasn’t small or insignificant. It was essential. In a world increasingly filled with content designed to be consumed and forgotten, Alan spent fifty years creating stories meant to last.
This story, like all of Alan’s work, deserves a place on the refrigerator of our collective memory—a reminder of what journalism can be when it serves the human heart rather than the digital algorithm.