Private services have been held in Arizona for Pauline Platt Cable, founder of Nambé Mills, who died at her home north of Tucson two days before her 94th birthday.

Cable came to Northern New Mexico in 1941, about a decade before starting a company now widely known for its tableware. She lived for the last 16 years in a retirement community called SaddleBrooke, where she died Oct. 17.

Her son, Peter Cable of Santa Fe, said Monday that his mother had been in good health just prior to her death. "There was no indication there was anything wrong," he said.

She was a young society reporter for the Dayton Herald in Ohio when she met her husband, Peter Cable, a fellow journalist at the newspaper, family members told The New Mexican at the time of his death in 2003. The couple married in 1938 and moved to Santa Fe the following year.

They built La Mesita restaurant in Pojoaque in 1948 and operated the business for two years.

Between 1950 and 1951 she worked as a secretary in the office of Winkler Mills Craftsmen, a small, part-time foundry near Nambé Pueblo that cast bronze and copper cookware and gifts. After the Texas owner abandoned the business, her son said, she took over the operation.

In 1953, with help from her husband, she established Nambé Ware with Martin Eden, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory metallurgist who had developed an eight-metal alloy that retains hot and cold temperatures for long periods of time, according to a history on the company's website.

She began designing bowls and other items that were cast in the foundry at Pojoaque, said her son, who also was involved in the business. As the company grew, she hired a designer, though the family says some of her original designs are still part of the products now sold around the world.

After the company's Pojoaque foundry was destroyed by a fire in 1976, the foundry was relocated to Santa Fe, on Agua Fría Street near Siler Road. The company was bought in 1981 by the Hillenbrand family from Indiana, who continued to expand the business, which at one time employed hundreds of people in Northern New Mexico. Many of its metal products are now cast in India or China.

Pauline Cable's son Peter said her remains were cremated and family members held a small ceremony at "a little lake where she loved to go and fish and watch ducks come and go."

She also is survived by her son Tony, who works at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, daughter Anne Ortiz of Phoenix and daughter Lisa Bailey of Denver.