Rusty Bowers has been the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives for the last four years of his 17 years of elected legislative service. Arizona has been in the blood of Rusty Bowers for generations. His great-grandparents settled in the White Mountains, where they buried three of their children before moving to the less hostile and fertile lands in the central deserts of the territory. Bowers later spent his most memorable years on a small farming and sheep operation near Prescott where his father taught and coached at the local high school and his mother tried keeping her children from killing themselves playing on haystacks, farming machinery, and among all types of wild and domestic animals “Old Yeller” style. Bowers attended Arizona State University and Brigham Young University and secured a fine arts degree. He has been active in construction, teaching, and the legislative arena. As a professional artist, he has pursued the artistic motifs of life among the Tarahumara tribal culture in the rugged and dangerous mountains of northern Mexico.