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Virginia Hash

University of Arizona Law,
class of 1949

State Bar of Arizona
member since 1949

Featured Case:
McClinton v. Rice
76 Ariz. 358 (1953) 265 P. 2d 425

Virginia Hash was born in 1913, in Flagstaff, Arizona. Her father, Edgar Hash, was a merchant in Phoenix until his death when Virginia was ten years old. Her mother then supported herself and her two children as a school teacher in schools throughout Arizona until she remarried and moved her family to Texas. Virginia Hash graduated from El Paso High School and then from Texas Tech University  in 1934.

Since childhood, Hash had been interested in airplanes. During World War II she worked as an airplane mechanic at Ryan Field in Tucson and joined the WASPs to become a pilot. She continued to fly in the years following the war as a private pilot and was elected the first female president of the Lawyer Pilots' Bar Association from 1966-1970.

After the war, Hash attended law school at the University of Arizona, graduating in 1949. Her first job upon passing the Bar exam was as a law clerk for State Supreme Court Justice Evo DeConcini. After clerking for DeConcini, Hash went into practice with her uncle, V.L. Hash, in Phoenix. In 1953, Virginia Hash started her own law firm , which she maintained until her retirement in 1980.

Oral History Audio

Interviewed by Adelaide Elm in 1987.

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