Spoils from the Citizen's final edition sit in a recycling cart in the press room.

This is it. After 138 years, seven months and one day, this may be the last Tucson Citizen to be published.¶ At press time, our ultimate deadline, this was our last gasp – our final edition.¶ Efforts still

are underway to keep the Citizen alive. We’ll let you know if they succeed.

I think I speak for us all and those who came before us – when I say it has been an honor to be a part of the community, invited daily into your homes and given the opportunity to tell the news of Tucson.

It was a sad moment to learn the Citizen was worth more to its parent, Gannett Co. Inc., dead than alive.

Ouch.

Monetarily, I suppose that’s so. It costs more to produce, print and distribute this paper than we are contributing in revenue.

However, the Citizen does have worth that is being erased.

There’s the loss of the stories we covered that other news media did not. Also our very existence made our competitors work harder – and be better.

Newspapers don’t just close, they die.

And death is personal.

It is touching how many readers wrote about their attachment to the paper. More than one questioned, “What will I do without my Tucson Citizen?” Whether it was not knowing who Brenda Starr will date next, to the loss of Cal Thomas, to thanking our local columnists for making them think, to appreciating the reporters who dig for stories about our readers, their neighbors and their elected and unelected officials.

Many expressed profound worry about the staff and what we will do – a worry that is warranted.

The industry lost 12,000 jobs last year and this year is looking worse. We are the third major daily paper to shut down this year.

About 65 talented Citizen staffers are being shot into an economy that is losing rather than creating jobs. The newspaper industry is so distressed that few of us will be reporters, newspaper designers, editors or news photographers again.

It is a tragic loss of talent and enthusiasm.

Some people have expressed unalloyed glee that we are closing. Many of our critics didn’t want us to pursue one of our greatest responsibilities. Editors have repeated the mantra over the 138 years: Make sure you get the other side.

A newspaper will never be perfect – we are a work in progress all day every day. The paper is just the culmination of what we have done at a certain point in time.

Journalism is history written in a hurry. We were created to reflect the news of the day.

Consequently, every paper has errors – a factual error, flawed grammar, a name spelled incorrectly, a wrong phone number. We try, and I think succeed, in minimizing these mistakes. But in the rush of putting out what is essentially a book every day (for 50 cents, not $24.99) they happen.

We correct them and move on to the next book.

Our hard work exists for a day. The previous day’s work becomes cage liner and fish wrap and packing paper.

But the Internet has changed our business.

Stories exist in the ether, to be read days, months, years after they are published.

The Internet opened up a whole new world and a whole new set of readers – far beyond the boundaries of Pima County. Interactivity was quick and conversations about stories flourished online. Sometimes it was ugly.

We and our advertisers didn’t really know how to deal with the medium. Some day someone will figure it out, creating another revolution within the industry.

I’ve had fun. I’ve made mistakes – which were very public. I have done stories and tasks I didn’t want to do – closing the paper I’ve loved is one. I’ve talked with many people and let the world know their tales. I’ve had bosses who helped me along the way – harshly and gently. And I’ve met and worked with many terrific, weird and talented people.

I will never regret being part of this institution, being a part of the news we reported and working with the people here.

The Citizen helped shape Tucson’s past and future.

We’ve dedicated this edition – our final one – to us and those who have worked here before us by celebrating our work.

It’s been a great run. So long and thanks for the memories.

Ben Ellis Jr., who died this month, was still trimming trees at age 81 - something he did for more than a half century as a local landscaper.

Ben Ellis Jr. is the kind of person whose death usually isn’t noted in a newspaper obituary.

He lived, he worked hard for many, many years, and he died on July 11 at age 87.

But ever so often, a person who simply did a job and did it well deserves his story told.

I met Mr. Ellis and wrote about him seven years ago, when he was celebrating 50 years of being in business in Tucson. He impressed me then and I wanted people to see the man I got to know.

When Mr. Ellis arrived in Tucson nearly 50 years ago, he was weak from pneumonia, drained by a lifetime of asthma and exhausted by the five-day bus ride from Cleveland.

Two days later, he mowed the lawn and trimmed hedges for a local doctor – and was busy from then on.

He had a variety of businesses, including one doing landscaping and selling fertilizer, but essentially he’s been doing yardwork here since that first Saturday morning in October 1949.

“When I got here, you could hold Tucson in your hand,” he told me in a 1999 interview. “I like to say that then Tucson was a wren bird’s nest. Now it’s an eagle’s nest.”

He augmented the income from yardwork by tackling various odd jobs around town – often two or three at a time.

He picked cotton in Marana for a farmer named John Anderson. While 300 pounds of picked cotton were a good total for him when he worked in Mississippi, in Arizona, with the dry air and his suddenly clear lungs, Ben picked 1,100 pounds of cotton in a day. He weighed 129 pounds but was carrying sacks weighing 160 pounds.

“I’m the kind of person (who’s) determined to beat everybody – and most the time I did, whatever it was,” he said, calmly stating a fact, not boasting.

During his early years in Tucson, besides doing yardwork and picking cotton, he was a ranch foreman, washed cars, sold fertilizer, did landscaping and was a night watchman.

Even when he landed a full-time job at Desert Sanatorium, which later became Tucson Medical Center, Ben did just about any job that came along, often substituting work for sleep.

He quit his “day” job at TMC in 1957, when his business, Ben’s Landscaping, began landing lucrative and time-consuming jobs. For years, Ben’s Landscaping worked for home builders such as PAT Homes, Beauty Built Homes and Chastain Builders Inc.

Ben still remembered his first landscaping job, which was to dig four holes 7 feet deep and 7 feet wide.

“I didn’t know too much about caliche – then,” he said with the understatement of someone who had attacked with pick and shovel the desert’s unforgiving layer of concrete-hard calcium carbonate.

Ben, with the help of friends, put in the lawns for Catalina and Rincon high schools. He also put in the landscaping for several local churches.

At its peak in 1972, Ben’s landscaping and yard maintenance business employed 42.

A fire in ’82 wiped out some of his business, and Ben, who was approaching 65, decided to scale back to strictly landscape maintenance .

Over the years, he developed a core of customers as faithful to him as he was to them.

Ben “is as honest as the day is long,” John Neis told me seven years ago.

Neis recollected one of his first encounters with Ben: “About 23 or 24 years ago, he came out and cleaned up the whole place for what I thought was a reasonable price. I asked if he did regular yard maintenance, he said he did. He quoted me a price that was unbelievably low. Four months later, there was a tap on my door. ‘John,’ Ben said, ‘this is too much. I can’t take that amount of money.’ He cut the price in half, and it stayed that price for 23 years.”

I talked with Mr. Ellis right before he turned 81 – and, even at that age, he didn’t plan to stop.

“I’m determined to not quit, to work as long as I can as long as I’ve got my health.”

And he did. He was on the job until June 8, after which his health prevented him from overseeing his crew.

His motto in life was simple: “Get it the way I did – work for it.”

A memorial service for Mr. Ellis will be held from 6-8 p.m. Sunday at Mount Sinai Baptist Church, 1724 W. San Marcos Blvd, and the funeral is at 10:30 a.m. Monday both at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church, 210 E. Lester St.

Jennifer Boice is senior editor for news at the Tucson Citizen and has worked at the paper in a variety of jobs for 23 years.

The new missile passed its first test late last year, the company announced yesterday.

The Multi-Purpose Loitering Missile will give troops on the ground instant access to missile-sized firepower, said Bruce DeWitt, director of precision engagement at Raytheon.

The missile can be fired from a ship and programmed to loiter over ground troops, much “like being in a holding pattern over the Dallas airport,” he said. It then can be redirected from the ground to hit a target much more quickly than a missile fired at that point from miles away.

While the concept of a “loitering” missile is interesting, the most unusual aspect of the new program at Raytheon is the use of existing parts and technologies to create a new weapon, DeWitt said. That kind of weapon development dramatically cuts the cost of a new system, he added.

The first test, in December, simply checked how well the missile could be launched and whether it could maintain its stability.

Next: Making sure the system is integrated into the weaponry and communications systems already in place, which should take the rest of this year, DeWitt estimated.

Long term: This kind of program could dramatically cut the cost of developing new weapon systems, DeWitt said. The weapon system also could provide longer term employment opportunities for current Raytheon employees here, said spokeswoman Sara Hammond.

The new missile passed it first test late last year, the company announced Monday.

The Multi-Purpose Loitering Missile will give troops on the ground, instant access to missile-sized firepower, said Bruce DeWitt, director of precision engagement at Raytheon.

The missile can be fired from a ship and programmed to loiter over ground troops, much “like being in a holding pattern over the Dallas airport,” he explained. It then can be redirected from the ground to hit a precision target much more quickly than a missile fired at that point from miles away.

While the concept of a “loitering” missile is interesting, the most unique aspect of the new program at Raytheon is the use of existing parts and technologies to create a new weapon, DeWitt said. That kind of weapon development dramatically cuts the cost of development of a new weapon system, he added.

The first test in December simply checked how well the missile could be launched and whether it could maintain its stability in the air.

Next: To make sure the system is integrated into the weaponry and communications systems already place, which should take the rest of this year, DeWitt estimated.

Long term: This kind of program could dramatically cut the cost of developing new weapon systems, DeWitt said. The weapon system also could provide longer term employment opportunities for current Raytheon employees here, said spokeswoman Sara Hammond.