William Robert Quimby (September 30, 1936 â June 20, 2018) was an American author, columnist, editor and publisher who specialized in subjects related to big game hunting for more than four decades.
William Robert Quimby was born on 30 September 1936 in Tucson, Arizona as the first child of Isaac William Quimby and Helen Dixon Quimby. Quimby attended public schools in Yuma, Arizona, and obtained a degree in Marketing from the University of Arizona. He worked in the advertising and public relations fields for eleven years before pursuing a second career in journalism and publishing. He was married to Jean Potts until his death, with whom he had a daughter, Stephanie, and two grandchildren Natalie and Logan.
Bill and Jean Quimby divided their year between their home in Tucson and a cabin near the New Mexico border in eastern Arizona's high country.
After closing the Arizona Outdoor News, the monthly hunting and fishing newspaper he founded four years earlier, Quimby joined the Tucson Daily Citizen (a Gannett Company newspaper) as its outdoor editor in 1967. The hundreds of feature articles and nearly 3,000 twice-weekly columns he wrote over the next 27 years for the Citizen, as well as his articles in Safari magazine and various hunting and shooting magazines, made him one of the southwest's best-known outdoor writers. His series on overgrazing by cattle in Arizona's Kofa and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuges resulted in his being named Arizona Conservation Communicator of the Year by then-Governor Jack Williams in 1973. Other award-winning investigative series included his exposés of the increasing loss of access to Arizona's public lands and the looting of ancient southwestern Indian burial sites by commercial pothunters. He retired from the Citizen in 1994. The Citizen, Arizona's oldest newspaper at the time, ceased publication in 2009.
Beginning in 1983, Quimby was also director of publications for Safari Club International (SCI), a worldwide organization of big game hunters with headquarters in Tucson. With a staff of editors and artists, he edited and published Safari magazine and the SCI Record Books of Trophy Animals, and conceived and launched Safari Times and Safari Times Africa newspapers. For three years after he retired in 1999, Bill and Jean Quimby co-edited âÂÂSafari Cub,â a bimonthly magazine for the club's young members. He moderated SCI's longest-running seminar, âÂÂYour First African Safari,â at the club's annual conventions in Nevada from 1989 to 2012.
Quimby successfully hunted more than 60 types of big game animals in twelve countries on six continents, including all ten species indigenous to Arizona. He edited, wrote or co-authored more than two dozen published books (including the memoirs he ghostwrote in 2007 and 2011 for two well-known international hunters).