The guy caught my eye because he looked like trouble.

I was driving through the parking lot of an East Grant Road shopping center with my freshly groomed dog in the back of my Jeep when I noticed him.

He was young, all baggy clothing and a do-rag beneath his off-kilter Yankees cap, and he was mumbling to no one there as he wrestled with a bicycle that I couldn’t help but think wasn’t rightfully his.

He returned the gaze I gave him as I rolled slowly past to join the wretched holiday shopping traffic and make my drive home.

His look did nothing to change my assessment.

“Trouble,” I said to myself, and perhaps to the dog breathing down my neck.

Many minutes later, I sat about seven cars back in a line waiting to pull a U-turn onto westbound Grant Road.

Behind the blur of speeding cars and trucks, I caught sight of a very old woman standing dangerously close to the unrelenting traffic.

She looked frail and scared.

And she stepped off the curb and onto the asphalt shoulder.

“Oh God, lady,” I said to no one there. “Stay back.”

Holiday motorists rushing about their business made traffic so thick that neither she nor I could move.

I cringed each time she appeared to begin moving forward, then thought better of it.

About the time I had moved into position to make my turn, I heard a voice call out from somewhere behind me.

“Ma’am!” the man shouted with a voice of authority. “Are you trying to cross that street?”

She nodded her head, then a man flashed across my rear-view mirror and bolted into traffic.

I turned to see the guy I’d pegged as dangerous taking up position in the middle of Grant Road, his feet straddling the white line and his arms outstretched.

As drivers saw him and pressed their brakes, they no doubt were thinking: “Uh-oh. This crazy guy looks like trouble.”

But they stopped.

And he stood there in his baggy clothes and cap askew, holding up aggressive holiday traffic until that frightened woman was safely across Grant Road and on her way.

As I made my U-turn and joined the renewed flow of traffic heading west, I felt shame for my rush to judgment.

I also felt the warmth of the holiday spirit.

I don’t know if that’s what moved him to take such risk to help a stranger, or if that’s just the nature of the man.

But his actions were certainly more charitable than my thoughts.

And I’d like to thank him for making me wrong.

C.T. Revere can be reached at (520) 573-4594 and at ctrevere@tucsoncitizen.com. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ 85726-6767. His columns run Mondays and Thursdays.

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José Ibarra is pining for a showdown on the future of Rio Nuevo.

The Ward 1 councilman sees voting on whether to spend $53.7 million on a handful of West Side projects as penny-ante poker in a high-stakes game that will decide how downtown Tucson is redeveloped.

He wants an all-in game at Tuesday’s City Council meeting that includes committing more than $200 million in Rio Nuevo funds and he’s betting a proposed University of Arizona Science Center in his ward will trump talk of a new downtown arena.

“I say, let’s put our cards on the table,” he said Wednesday. “Let’s make a decision on the arena. If there’s not four votes for the arena right now, why are we talking about it?”

Ibarra is talking about it because he believes wholeheartedly that a new arena won’t drive economic redevelopment like a science center will.

“It is much more of an economic development tool,” he said. “It is going to be an attraction and everybody knows that aspect of it. It also brings the UA to the West Side. We often talk to our kids about how one day they’ll go to the UA and now we actually have a UA building in our neighborhood. People keep looking at these buildings as bricks and cement. They are about building the future. Look at it as an educational center that is going to inspire kids in math and science.”

To do that, UA has proposed that $166 million generated by the Rio Nuevo tax-increment financing district be dedicated to building a $176 million science center.

That’s 83 percent of the $200 million City Manager Mike Hein has proposed as the West Side’s share of Rio Nuevo dollars, which is supposed to pay for numerous cultural and historical projects that voters said they wanted when Rio Nuevo was approved.

But Ibarra has the answer for that.

“I am realistic enough to know that we have a limited amount of funds,” he said. “I believe you have to give the West Side at least $275 million.”

If that leaves a new downtown arena and other projects with Plan B status, well, that’s the price of progress, right?

Except that new arenas have a track record for spurring economic development in cities across America.

Science centers?

Not so much.

Sean Smith, spokesman for the Association of Science-Technology Centers in Washington, D.C., cited two science centers that were early occupants in cities that have undergone a renaissance – Baltimore and Louisville, Ky.

The Maryland Science Center in Baltimore was built in the 1970s in the Inner Harbor district, where big league sports venues and harbor-related activities have surely played more significant roles in economic vitality.

The Louisville Science Center is touted as one of that city’s “Sweet 16″ attractions that include Churchill Downs, a floating casino and a river to float it on.

Tucson has not much to rival those nonscience attractions and precious little seed money to make downtown work.

Rich Singer, director of the outdated Tucson Convention Center, points out that 32 cities of the “minor league” or university ilk have built new downtown arenas in the past decade.

“When arenas are built in downtowns, they leverage a lot of private development. But what I’ve learned in doing downtown revitalization in other communities is that the more different kinds of voices you bring to downtown, the greater your chances for success,” said Singer, who has led arena efforts in Davenport, Iowa, and Modesto, Calif. and helped redevelop downtown San Diego.

The UA predicts a new science center would draw 434,000 people each year, many of them schoolchildren and most of them during the daylight hours.

Singer forecasts a new and improved arena would draw 700,000 people each year, mostly for evening events that would encourage wining and dining downtown.

The combination of the two sounds like a round-the-clock boon that would surely attract business to the city core.

But if an arena isn’t part of the plan for downtown redevelopment because the lion’s share of Rio Nuevo money goes elsewhere, chances are a new arena would, too.

Opportunity was squandered when Pima County put Tucson Electric Park where there’s no chance for an entertainment district to blossom around it.

The rest of the City Council can make sure that doesn’t happen twice by calling Ibarra’s bluff.

C.T. Revere can be reached at (520) 573-4594 and at ctrevere@tucsoncitizen.com. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ 85726-6767. His columns run Mondays and Thursdays.

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Robert Boumis is back on the job today.

The once-former supervisor in Tucson’s Environmental Services Division is supervising once again after a civil service panel gave back the job he lost in August for helping underlings get paid for hours they never worked.

Boumis is one of two city employees fired earlier this year for the improper practice known as “buddy punching.”

It’s a practice that has gone on with a wink and a nod in the city’s Environmental Services Division for quite some time and is estimated to have cost the city $100,000 a year in lost labor.

City officials figured they could end it by firing offenders who didn’t see the wrong in it, so Boumis and fellow supervisor Richard Garza were dismissed Aug. 31.

But a three-member Civil Service Commission panel decided last week that a 60-day suspension was appropriate penance for Boumis because his supervisors hadn’t provided a clear message that falsifying time cards is wrong.

Come on.

Those supervisors, with a clear grasp of the obvious, aren’t happy with the panel.

“They felt it was a long-standing practice and they could not find that there was clarity in the prohibition of this practice in the many years it was going on,” David Modeer, director of the city Utility Services Department said. “I disagree with the commission, but at least they made it clear they do not think this practice is right.”

Councilwoman Karin Uhlich said the city has tried to change the culture of acceptance for buddy punching that has existed in the Brush & Bulky unit, which Boumis supervised.

“Six or so months ago, the decision was made that this was no longer allowed,” she said. “The challenge to meeting that change is to not ignore it. If it’s been a 10-year standing rule, you’ve got to make clear that it’s no longer acceptable so employees know what the scoop is and they have clarity in their jobs and we can be fair across the board with employees.”

The panel’s chairman, Schuyler Lininger, very pleasantly declined to discuss the decision.

“That’s all on the record,” he said. “I have no comment at all.”

Let the record also show that Boumis, having already served his 60-day suspension for paying workers to do nothing, will be receiving two weeks back pay for time away from the office.

How’s that for a clear message to city workers?

Modeer, who made the decision to fire Boumis, noted that the commission also cut him slack because “he did not personally benefit from this action.”

But then, neither did Tucson taxpayers.

It was, after all, our money that Boumis handed over to workers who had already called it a day.

In fact, many days.

According to an investigation into the time-keeping practices in the Environmental Services Division, there was a “widely disproportionate use of manual time entries for the Brush & Bulky task force in comparison to other organizational units within ESD.”

In the first 5 1/2 months of 2006, almost 80 percent of time card punches was done by a supervisor rather than the employee.

Two-thirds of those – more than 600 of the so-called “add punches” for 18 workers – was done by Boumis, who will be reassigned to a different supervisory job with his reinstatement.

“I was surprised by the decision,” said Uhlich. “Even if folks get done within fewer hours, there’s always more work to be done.”

For my money, that’s true.

C.T. Revere can be reached at (520) 573-4594 and at ctrevere@tucsoncitizen.com. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ, 85726-6767. His columns run Mondays and Thursdays.

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Barton Simpson reached the deck of the USS Oglala 65 years ago this morning to find warplanes so close he could see the whites of the pilots’ eyes.

Minutes into the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor, the young sailor sprinted across the deck of the mine sweeper and crossed onto the USS Helena just before a Japanese torpedo blasted a hole in that ship’s hull that capsized the Oglala with its wake.

When the attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii was over, 2,390 servicemen and women were dead, more than 20 ships and 320 planes were destroyed and the United States was at war.

Simpson served the remainder of World War II as a radioman aboard Navy vessels, then spent a lifetime maintaining the bonds between those who survived the military sucker-punch that drew America into the global war.

Today, as many of the declining numbers of Pearl Harbor survivors are making what may be their last pilgrimage to Honolulu to mark that fateful day in 1941, others will be at East Lawn Palm Cemetery in Tucson to remember the man who founded the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association in southern Arizona.

Simpson died Nov. 13 at age 87, joining legions of his extraordinary generation of Americans who we lose every day.

Irene Simpson, 85, said her husband started the local Pearl Harbor group a few years after they arrived in Tucson in 1972.

“It was just to accommodate the survivors and let them talk and get to know each other and let off steam,” she said. “A lot of people didn’t know how they felt and the Pearl Harbor association is the one place where they all had that in common.”

The local group has had as many as 40 active members over the years, but now has only about a dozen who attend regular meetings and fewer still who are able to make the long trip back to Hawaii.

“Our numbers are dwindling,” said Hervey Spencer, 83. “It’s hard to keep membership up.”

Spencer, an Army MP who was in Schofield Barracks at the time of the attack, said Simpson did more than simply start the local chapter.

“He did everything he could to help it year after year,” Spencer said. “I’ve known him for 19 years and they don’t come any finer than he is, or any more dedicated.”

As many as 15 others who lived though the attack on Pearl Harbor are expected to be on hand today for the 2 p.m. service that will include a Marine Corps 21-gun salute and a Navy color guard.

“It’s quite nice,” Simpson’s wife of 65 years said. “He was just a serviceman all the way through.”

Barton Simpson left his home state of Iowa in 1939 to join the Navy during the Great Depression.

“He was an electrician and it was wintertime and they couldn’t do outside electrical work, so he didn’t have a job,” Irene Simpson said.

After drilling at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois and training in San Diego, Simpson was sent to Pearl Harbor.

He returned to the mainland in November 1941 to marry, then returned to Hawaii.

On that morning 65 years ago, he was below deck just minutes before 8 a.m. with other crew of the Oglala.

“He heard the noise and went above deck,” his widow said. “They had just unloaded their mines and were riding high in the water and a torpedo went underneath and hit the Helena.”

While Simpson managed to avoid harm, it was three weeks before news of his welfare reached home.

“It was terrible. We were pinned to the news all the time to hear what was going on,” Irene Simpson said. “When word came, oh man, I was floating.”

Simpson worked on cargo ships through most of the remainder of the war years, including treacherous convoys through heavily mined Atlantic waters.

Warren Simpson, 52, said he didn’t fully understand the toll Pearl Harbor took on his father until after he was gone.

“He never really talked all that much about the actual day. He probably never felt like he had done anything special,” said his son. “He survived when there were a lot of people who were lost. Just to survive was a good feat.”

Today, precious few remaining survivors will relive the events of that day in their thoughts and conversations.

Some will be thinking of Barton Simpson, who helped to bring together old sailors and soldiers who share an intimate piece of history.

C.T. Revere can be reached at (520) 573-4594 and at ctrevere@tucsoncitizen.com. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ 85726-6767. His columns run Mondays and Thursdays.

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Related stories:

• USS Arizona fundraising at critical point

• Pearl Harbor survivor touches history

• Kimble: Local tied to USS Arizona ignored

• Audio slideshow on the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack

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