Category Archives: News

Fife Symington in Phoenix Magazine: “Comeback Kid”

Phoenix Magazine profiled Fife Symington in their September 2007 issue. Here’s a snippet:

    “‘So many wonderful things have happened to me since I left office… that I half-kiddingly say to friends that I was saved,’ he says. ‘There’s a pivotal thing that happens in a crisis like that. It either destroys you or changes you for the better, and I think – well, I know – the latter is the case with me.'”

Here is page 1 of the article and here is page 2. You can also find the article on pages 35 and 36 in the magazine.

Ex-Governor Pursues New Ventures

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

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

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.