'Bear Down, Arizona' 70th Anniversary

 Jack K. Lee wrote “Bear Down, Arizona,” the university’s rousing fight song, while on a flight from Tucson — where he’d interviewed for the position of Wildcat marching band director — to his home state of Ohio. Lee got the job, and in 2022 his song completed its seventh decade of near round-the-clock play. As we remember Lee, we also pay homage to John Byrd “Button” Salmon, a star student-athlete in the 1920s who provided the song’s signal phrase. In the hospital after an auto wreck outside Florence in 1926, quarterback Salmon sent a message to his teammates through then-football coach J.F. “Pop” McKale: “Tell them to bear down.” Salmon passed soon after, and Lee’s song enshrines both leaders in campus memory.