Mount Lemmon pie lady Pam Rinella dies; fate of cafe unknown
by Tom Stauffer on Sep. 23, 2008, under Local, Special, Taste
Many Tucsonans who escaped the summer heat or flocked to Mount Lemmon to ski in the winter were rewarded with pies made by Pam Rinella at the Mount Lemmon Cafe. Ms. Rinella died Sunday.
Pamela Rinella, whose Mount Lemmon Cafe has been a fixture on the mountain for decades, died Sunday. She was 65.
The cause of death was not released.
Marty Mollo woke to find his wife had died in her bed early Sunday, said longtime acquaintance Robert Zimmerman.
“Her health had been up and down recently, but this was totally unexpected,” said Debbie Fagan, owner of the Living Rainbow Gift Shop on Mount Lemmon and a friend of Ms. Rinella for 29 years. “She was strong and worked all the time, and she loved her work and loved this mountain.”
Zimmerman said the fate of the cafe is not known.
Ms. Rinella, who was known for her homemade pies, was born and raised in Pennsylvania. She moved to Mount Lemmon in the early 1970s and worked for Trico Electric as a meter reader, said Zimmerman, owner of Mount Lemmon Realty.
Ms. Rinella was a cook at Zimmerman’s Mount Lemmon Inn and later cooked at the lodge at Mount Lemmon Ski Valley before opening the Mount Lemmon Cafe in the mid-1980s.
“She was such a fixture in this community that no one up here really knows how to deal with her passing right now,” he said. “It’s funny, because she was such a low-key person, who didn’t join any clubs or organizations. She was just always doing what she wanted to do, which was cook, but she was such a fixture up here. Now, she’s gone and a good part of Mount Lemmon has left with her.”
Among other valuable lessons, Ms. Rinella taught Fagan how to chop wood during Fagan’s first winter on the mountain in 1979.
“I had just moved here from the city and I was freezing to death in my cabin and she came in and said, ‘Come on, get up. I’m going to show you how to chop wood,’ ” Fagan recalled. “She was an incredible woman, and she and her cafe were such a part of this community for so many years. A piece of us is missing now and to actually fill that void is going to be painful and long.”
For a short time, Ms. Rinella went “down the mountain” to Tucson to learn some cooking methods from a chef, but she quickly returned to Mount Lemmon, Zimmerman said.
“If there is any comfort in this,” said Fagan, “I guess it would be that Pam had the privilege of passing quickly in her own bed, in her own house on the mountain she loved so much.”
Ms. Rinella is survived by her husband and a son, Ken Rinella, of Santa Rosa, Calif.
