The Fountain Hills Historical Society lost one of its members last Thursday, and I lost one of my good friends.

Bruce Hansen certainly left his mark on this com- munity in many ways. He was very active in the successful drive for incorporation. There were several years where he hung all the Christmas lights on the Avenue of the Fountains by himself.

Saturday night, the Historical Society held its annual Italian dinner fund-raiser. It was ironic the annual event would come on the week he died.

After dinner, I stood up, went to the podium and asked the full house crowd to have a moment of silence in memory of Bruce. I told them it was Bruce who started the annual tradition of the spaghetti dinner.

The Historical Society was given space in the Chamber‘s Visitors Center for a museum.

We began with one room. I hung some pictures I pulled from the files of The Times, and we got some photos from Fort McDowell. That was pretty much it. But it was a start.

A ceremony was held with then-Mayor John Cutillo and Arizona‘s Official Historian, Marshall Trimble, cutting the ribbon.

Seven years later, the Chamber moved out of the remainder of the building. The Historical Society worked out an arrangement with the Chamber to rent the building for a nominal fee.

The building required some work before we could use it as a museum. Bruce was the first person to volunteer his services. He said he would be happy to donate an old phone system he had in his garage.

All we had to do was call the phone company and make arrangements for a line to be installed. After the phone company came and installed the line, we were suddenly in business.

“We need some new paneling” he said.

I answered him by saying, “There’s just one problem . . . Money! Our treasury is pretty empty.”

Bruce said. “Would you help me put on a spaghetti dinner as a fund-raiser. I have this great recipe for sauce. I had seen what one of his spaghetti dinners had the potential of doing when a spaghetti dinner and auction were held for a young man from Fountain Hills who was going to race in his wheelchair in the Olympics version for the handicapped. We raised $18,000 for him in one evening.

Well, we made $10,000 in that first spaghetti dinner. We bought the paneling and paint for the exterior of the building. Bruce put up all the new panelling. (I tried helping him with the paneling but all I did was bend a lot of nails.) Ted Anderson and I painted the outside of the building.

We picked up a few professional displays from Salt River Project. A resident donated a collection of Native American items he had collected in his travels and a friend of Dr. Paul Kolwaite donated items from the Fort McDowell army post that he had found over the years. Along with the items we already had on display, we opened.

Then plans were announced that the adjacent complex known as the Village Bazaar would be torn down.

We had to speed up plans to relocate. We looked at all the options and decided we would build.

Again, money was the issue. Again, Bruce came through and we held three more spaghetti dinners and raised enough to hire Phoenix architect Don Ryden. He developed the name and concept of The River of Time Museum.

There’s the whole story of how we got together with the Library Association and got a $3.7 million bond issue placed on the ballot in May of 1997 (which passed by a two to one margin) and then the real fundraising started and the museum and library were built.

But it all began with Bruce’s idea for a spaghetti dinner that put us underway.