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Ex-Governor Pursues New Ventures

Arizona Republic, News

Marking the 10th anniversary since leaving office, Fife Symington recently gave an interview with the Arizona Republic that discusses his activities over the past several years. Here’s an excerpt:

Symington never went far from the Esplanade, often using the Ritz dining room for meetings with visiting dignitaries, friends and business associates. Franco’s opened on the ground floor of the growing Esplanade in 2003, with Symington as pastry chef. Attired in a white chef’s smock, he knocked out tiramisus and his signature chocolate Governor’s Cake in the location where he had headquartered his real-estate empire years earlier.

Today, Symington maintains offices there with his four partners in the Symington Private Equity Group. Ventures include the Symington Group, a political consultancy that consists of himself and partner Camilla Strongin; various early forays into solar projects, a technology he finds promising despite initial reservations; and venture-capital investments. He has what he calls a “tag-along interest” in the Ruth’s Chris and Macaroni Grill franchises in Hawaii, and a hospital payment program operates out of a small room in the suite of Symington offices.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Fife Symington Elected Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden

News, Santa Barbara News-Press

clippingFife Symington has been elected chairman of the board of trustees of the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden. A garden trustee since 2004, he previously served as vice chairman.

Elected governor of Arizona in 1991, and re-elected in 1994, Mr. Symington signed criminal justice measures into law, including a truth-in-sentencing provision that eliminates parole and mandates that convicts serve no less than 85 percent of their sentence.

Click on the above picture to read more.

Former Arizona Governor Now Admits Seeing UFO

Anderson Cooper, CNN, News

On the tenth anniversary of the Arizona UFO incident, known as the “Phoenix Lights,” former Arizona Republican Governor Fife Symington, III, now says that he himself was a witness to one of the strange unidentified flying objects, even though he originally did not say so publicly.

“It was enormous and inexplicable,” he said in an exclusive interview from his home in Phoenix. “Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too.”

On March 13, 1997, during Symington’s second term as Governor, thousands saw multiple triangular and V-shaped craft, gliding slowly and silently across the sky for half an hour beginning at approximately 8:15 pm. Awestruck witnesses, throughout the state, estimated that the eerie, lighted vehicles were bigger than many football fields, up to a mile long.

For the rest of the article, click here.

You may also watch a CNN Anderson Cooper 360 interview with Fife about the lights.

Symington’s speech to the Arizona Historical Society honoring Barry Goldwater

Arizona Historical Society

Fife Symington recently delivered an address to the Arizona Hisorical Society honoring Barry Goldwater.

Here’s an excerpt:

“I have been looking forward to this day, and I am delighted to be here to remember and honor Barry Goldwater.

He’s a big and consequential figure, and a hard man to capture in words. There has been no one else like him in American politics. But trying to give the man his due is a worthy assignment – and a fun one, too. And you know, that’s one thing to remember about Barry – he was always a lot of fun.

In one way or another, I’ve been drawn and connected to Barry from the early years of my life. Maryland may be a long way from Arizona, but Barry Goldwater carried something of this state everywhere he went. And it was there, when I was 12 or so, that I got my first glimpse of him.

One morning in 1958, there he was, rolling up the steep driveway of our farm thirty miles outside of Baltimore. He had come to stay for the weekend, and his ride was not the black sedan that a young boy expected of a United States Senator. He climbed out of a Corvette Stingray, wearing boots and cowboy hat – and to an eastern boy it looked like Marshall Dillon stepping right out of Gunsmoke.”

For the rest of his speech, click here.