GABRIELLE GIFFORDS

Arizona’s oldest continuously published newspaper will hit Tucson newsstands and doorsteps for the last time on May 16.

As a longtime reader of the Tucson Citizen, I think I speak for many when I say the paper’s closure will be like saying goodbye to an old, trusted friend.

What a friend it has been. The Citizen already was 11 years old when it told us about Wyatt Earp’s shootout at the OK Corral in 1881. It had been around 42 years when Arizona became a state in 1912. And when the city of Tucson celebrated its bicentennial in 1975, the Citizen had a 105-year record of reporting behind it.

Tucson will be very different without the Citizen. Our community will have one fewer voice, one fewer watchdog, one fewer place to go for the news we need to understand our increasingly complex world.

Many believe that, as an afternoon newspaper, the Citizen’s days have long been numbered. Perhaps, but the loss of the Citizen is emblematic of a far more troubling trend. The entire newspaper industry is struggling as never before, thanks in part to a seismic shift in how we get our news.

Today the Internet, not the daily newspaper, serves as our window to the world.

For news junkies and avid newspaper readers, this is a truly sad turn of events. I count myself among this shrinking community.

Sure, going online is fast and handy. But old school types love newspapers – we love holding them, with a cup of coffee at hand, and learning about what has happened in our neighborhood, city, state and country.

Some of us – the real die-hards – even like comparing competing articles and editorials on the same subject among rival newspapers. Tucson was one of the few cities where this was possible; ours was one of the last two-newspaper towns left in America.

With the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver over the past month, Tucson is by no means alone in having to rely on one newspaper. That, however, is little comfort. Competition is a good thing for newspapers, as it is for any business.

Having two newspapers fostered a competitive spirit that allowed the Tucson Citizen and Arizona Daily Star to bring out the best in each another. Reporters, editors and photographers at each of our papers wanted to scoop the other guy. In that race, readers were the winners.

Since 1870, the Citizen has kept southern Arizonans informed. We didn’t always agree with an editorial position or like the angle of a news story, yet we kept reading.

We needed the Citizen. Sometimes we needed it to figure out a City Council decision. Sometimes we needed it to tell us how the Wildcats did. And sometimes we just needed it to tell us when movies began at The Loft.

The point is, the Citizen was there for us.

From the era of the Butterfield Overland Stage to the Phoenix Mars Mission, the Citizen helped chronicle Arizona’s amazing journey from a rough and tumble territory to the second-fastest growing state in the country.

It was an indispensable part of our community. It educated us, entertained us and inspired us. It will be missed.

Goodbye, dear friend.

Gabrielle Giffords is a member of the U.S. House representing Tucson and southern Arizona.

GERALD GARCIA

The Tucson Citizen: readable, likable, my friend, the intelligent choice. The Citizen was my first publisher’s position. It is where I got my feet wet – and my underwear and pants, too, the day the pressroom blew up.

It has been more than 20 years since I departed my beloved Citizen. It was a difficult decision: Stay at the Citizen and Tucson or return to College Station, Texas, to parents, grandparents, Texas A&M, Aggie football. To Texas we went.

I have missed the Citizen from that day.

I remember the heyday of great journalism at the Citizen, some of the best, if not the best, that I have been associated with.

A couple that stand out:

• From Guatemala to Madison, Wis., the so-called Underground Railroad, an undertaking of enormous proportions by dedicated Citizen staff members who chopped their way through the jungles of Guatemala, the jungle of streets in Mexico City, the treacherous mountains and jungle of back roads in northern Mexico, crossing the border undetected through a jungle of tunnels with guides and political refugees and reaching safe houses in Tucson, northern Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois and Wisconsin.

• The New Pueblo, a moving account of life in Tucson.

In describing The New Pueblo to our readers, I wrote, “It explains life as life itself rather than a metaphor of life. . . . The New Pueblo tells us about Tucson’s early years, how we progressed to the present and about our future.”

The New Pueblo was mountains of research. It was sending reporters to San Jose, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; and Phoenix. It was interviewing countless residents of Tucson, its leaders – elected or otherwise, discussing opportunities and formulating consensus about the future of our beloved “Old Pueblo.”

And, while the projects were important and something to behold and be proud of, it was the reporters, the people (the faces) of the Citizen that I ultimately remember.

Mark Kimble, Mr. Reliable; Chuck Bowden, he could make a subject and a predicate sing; Dale Walton, the managing editor for the ages; Judy Carlock, Miss Steady Hand; Carla McClain, if it was a medical issue, she had the cure.

Douglas Kreutz, a reporter’s reporter; Joel Rochon, he could take a drawing and bring it to life; P.K. Weis, the lens of his camera found the perfect image; Julie Szekely, she could dress you up and get it for you at the least cost.

Corky Simpson, who could take you from a screen pass to a bounce pass with a flick of the keyboard; Jeff Smith, talented, eccentric and way too out there for my taste; and the many other faces of the Citizen who made my job easier, my work pleasant and my life fulfilled.

Then, there is Tucson: majestic and magnificent. The memories: vivid, like yesterday.

The Tucson Mountains. The Valley. Some 320 days a year of crystal-clear, blue skies. The Dove of the Desert. Saguaros. The unrelenting heat of summer.

Skiing Mount Lemmon on a wintry Saturday morning and taking a swim in the backyard pool that afternoon. Brilliant sunsets, the most powerful anywhere. The desert, indescribable, fearful and fearless.

The Ball Busters, my Sunday morning golf group, which leads to the people – the faces – of Tucson:

Joel Valdez, a gentleman’s gentleman; Dick Moreno, fun-loving; Jim Click, wheel and deal, with a heart of gold; Warren Rustand, brilliant and savvy.

Mary Peachin, poised, glamorous and art to spare; Edith Auslander, compromising, negotiating, but always getting it right; and the many others who touched my life and influenced it forever.

I am saddened that the Citizen will be shuttered and a golden era of southern Arizona journalism will pass. I am saddened that Tucson is losing its friend, its intelligent choice.

To my friends in Tucson, I bid you a continued great adventure in the New Pueblo. To the Citizen, with tears in my eyes, I say “30.”

Gerald Garcia Jr. is president and CEO of AIMS Worldwide Inc., based in Fairfax, Va.

E-mail: ggarcia@aimsworldwide.com

Saddened that the Citizen will be shuttered and a golden era of southern Arizona journalism will pass.

Paper gave ‘plain old people’ a voice

I am very sad because I am losing a good friend, the Citizen. I have enjoyed your excellent paper since we came to Tucson in 1951.

Special thanks to my journalism hero Tony Tselentis, editorial page editor, who shared his valuable insights about community issues, printed our letters and sent our questions and concerns to the news side to cover.

Thanks also to the wonderful investigative reporters (Jon Kaman, etc.), who dug out the facts about many critical issues like the fraudulent Butterfield freeway public opinion survey and the GAC plan to convert Empire Ranch to a huge bedroom community.

The Citizen gave us plain old people a voice so we could be effective.

Time has moved on. Thanks to the new crew who continue quality news and editorial coverage – Mark (Kimble), Billie (Stanton) and the other good folk who carry on.

Soon we citizens will lose an important voice. I will miss you greatly.

Ruth Holzinger Stokes

Kudos to former Citizen journalists

The only way I have to express how much I’ll miss the paper is to tell my story. Most of all I’ll miss Billie Stanton. She is irreplaceable.

The summer of 1967 was the happiest time of my life. The Tucson Citizen gave me the chance to continue my newspaper career in a new town, in a new job.

The job was as city desk assistant, working with Tom Duddleston and Keith Carew.

The staff was great – so warm and friendly, like a big family, pre-computer with more time for each other.

I was able to continue my journalism career, which began in Columbus, Ohio, in 1942 as one of five war-time staff photographers on the Columbus Citizen newspaper.

In 1956, I had gone to New York and married Bruce Hopkins, a New York Mirror photographer. The paper folded.

John Hemmer, a former staffer there, offered Bruce a job here. So here we were.

I retired when I was 62.

At the Tucson Citizen, we made longtime personal friends, such as my 30-year-friend Allison Hock-Rose, who started as a teen intern.

She recently was in town, and we discussed old times.

From the old building, these staffers deserve to be remembered – and bosses, too:

William Small Jr., Paul McKalip, George Rosenberg, Clyde Lowery, Tony Tselentis, Mary Brown, Mary Moody, Micheline “Mike” Keating, Nicki Donahue, Ellen Crosby, Anne Ross, Corky Simpson, Bill Hopkins, John Winters, Dan Pavillard, Sue Giles, Mary Gerdan Hunt, Judy Terlizzi, Regis McAuly, Paul Allen and Jeannie Jett.

WILMA S. HOPKINS

Fine work of staff won’t be forgotten

How do you say “thank you” to so many people who have made a difference in your life, professionally and personally?

After being in the military more than 21 years, you would think I would know how to say goodbye to friends and comrades on the newspaper side of the house.

News that the Tucson Citizen will close came as a surprise to me, and soon it will be a reality.

I want to thank all those reporters, photographers, editors and the weekly Calendar magazine for working with me for the past seven years.

Working together to get the news to and about our nation’s heroes, veterans and their families has truly been the fruit of our combined labor.

What a joy it has been to have worked personally with Anne Denogean, Heidi Rowley, Sheryl Kornman, Billie Stanton, Val Cañez, Norman Jean Gargasz, Larry Copenhaver and so many others who made our news a focus of interest and personal reflection.

As the book is slowly closed on this historical newspaper, let us wish all those who shared our cheers and sometimes our tears the best of future hopes and dreams, as they will not be forgotten in my heart.

Let us remember not how the newspaper died, but how it lived! Thanks for the memories, Tucson Citizen!

PEPE MENDOZA

fellow journalist

Gaslight indebted to Chuck Graham

We at The Gaslight Theatre will be forever indebted to Mr. Chuck Graham.

Over the years, Chuck has faithfully reviewed all of our shows. A large part of our growth and success can be credited to the dedication and professionalism of Chuck Graham. He has been fair, honest and always helpful with his reviews.

As a small business, we rely on every type of public relations opportunity available. Losing the Tucson Citizen and Chuck’s reviews will leave a gap that will be hard to fill.

All of us in The Gaslight Family would like to thank you, Chuck, for all of your hard work and support of The Gaslight Theatre over the years. We wish you all the best and lots of continued success as you set out on the next phase of your career.

Tony Terry & The Gaslight Family

owner, The Gaslight Theatre

Bryan Lee was advocate for athletes

It is a shame that the Citizen is closing; good people will lose their jobs, and the community will lose your expertise.

A free press is the cornerstone of a healthy citizenry, and we will miss your varied voices.

Thanks to the entire staff for working so diligently to provide our community with news of the city.

I want to acknowledge one writer in particular: Bryan Lee. Bryan has written countless articles about the health and fitness community over the years, whether in the Sports pages, Outdoors, Body Plus or elsewhere.

He has been an advocate for local competitive athletes and a champion of healthy living.

Thank you, Bryan, for all that you’ve done for Tucson.

Randy Accetta

Southern Arizona Roadrunners

Stay in Tucson, employees; we need you

My family and I will miss the Tucson Citizen. We’ve especially appreciated the thoughtful editorial page in recent years.

Arizona media will be poorer with the Citizen gone.

Hopefully, Citizen journalists and employees will stay in Tucson and be involved in the community in other positive ways.

Daniel Patterson

state representative, LD 29

MICHAEL A. CHIHAK

We are as ill-prepared for newspapering’s demise as we were for economic meltdown. An odd comparison, perhaps, because we will recover from economic arrhythmia in relatively short time. Replacing the role of newspapers will take longer, and that threatens democracy.

Newspapers are democracy’s bulwark: constitutionally protected watchdogs. The Founding Fathers knew a free press would sustain democracy so included it among the Constitution’s foremost rights.

The Tucson Citizen’s death and the demise of other newspapers shake the frame upon which democracy sits. Without free-flowing information, the experiment Lincoln defined as “of . . . by . . . for the people” will not endure.

We inherited the right to self-govern, and keeping a check on those who presume to act for us is how we do so. Newspapers are the best at shining light on government.

The Citizen did it for nearly 139 years. Its death and the casting of its fine staff members into the economic diaspora are heartbreaking.

Saying newspapers brought it upon themselves is largely true, but not for the reason you think. Slant – perceived or real – isn’t a factor; newspapers of all political stripe are failing. Business avarice and arrogant resistance to change lead the blame list.

Retrospection hardly seems worthwhile, but please permit a bit of it. In the latter half of my more than three decades in newspapering, we emphasized business rather than news, boastful of being the only business mentioned in the Constitution.

That missed the point, because while newspaper owners made money, their primacy was to inform, watchdog, nurture democratic ideals and drive stakes into the hearts of faulty notions.

We changed for business. Now newspapering’s breathing is shallow and rattling.

New technologies turned newspapering into a piece of glass, dropping it to the ground to shatter. Newspaper bosses tried putting the pieces back together rather than recognizing each piece as a new opportunity. Now it’s too late.

Mass migration to millions of other information forums and the economic implosion are sending newspapers to death row. Don’t count on midnight pardons.

This threatens us because other forums are not yet able to support democracy – that is, self-government – the way newspapers have.

What Tucson TV newsroom, radio station or blogger will consistently watchdog local institutions? Even at its lowest level of staffing, the Citizen had Tucson’s second-largest number of reporters poking into the goings-on of public entities, more than the combined reporting staffs at local TV and radio stations, weekly publications and news blogs.

The Citizen has been part of the framework supporting democracy. Its demise threatens democratic balance, because other media entities don’t have the resources to pick up the slack, at least not yet.

Some say bloggers, tweeters and easy-to-dislike radio and cable talkers already have replaced newspapers. Don’t be deluded. The information frontier is still like the Wild West. Having the loudest opinion is de rigueur; possessing the facts is passé. Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly compete for narcissist of the week; Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann claim the market on fatuousness. They all have local counterparts, peddling exaggerations and distortions without checks or filters.

Millions buy in, affirming another Lincolnism: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time . . . ”

The contract we inherited as free Americans requires us to live up to the rest of his observation: ” . . . but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

The only way we can avoid being fooled is with unfettered, vibrant, believable sources of information. We must insist on them and help rebuild them sooner rather than later.

Michael A. Chihak was editor and publisher of the Tucson Citizen from 2000 to 2008. He now works in San Francisco as a communications consultant to nonprofits.

We changed for business. Now newspapering’s breathing is shallow and rattling.

DON HATFIELD

In 1986, the Gannett Co., owner of the Tucson Citizen, asked me to come to Tucson as editor and publisher. I was then editor and publisher of the Huntington (W.Va.) Herald-Dispatch, also a Gannett paper.

I was eager to make the move even though my wife, Sandy, and I would be leaving family and coming to a city we had never seen and where we knew no one. I promised her we would return East to family in four years max.

We stayed for more than 21.

Fourteen of those years were spent with the Citizen, until my retirement in June 2000. And they were very special years.

The Citizen was not a newspaper that needed to be “fixed” when I arrived. It was an excellent paper with a solid reputation and, as the oldest newspaper in Arizona, an outstanding history.

It had won prizes, produced top-notch investigative stories and harbored many outstanding writers. Its staff possessed, I thought, a rare feeling for the culture of the community it served. It showed in their work.

Newsrooms are a strange conglomeration of diverse individuals of different backgrounds and contrasting views, some with huge egos, some quite unassuming.

They’re made up of talented and creative people who enjoy their work, though most won’t admit it, and they tend to be an irreverent bunch. Despite their differences, they have one wonderful thing in common: They want to find out what’s going on and tell readers about it.

That’s the kind of news staff I found at the Citizen.

We thought of ourselves as the local-emphasis newspaper, the paper that cared most about Tucson. Our motto was, “The Citizen IS Tucson,” and one of our promotions remarked “If you care about Tucson, you have to read the Citizen.”

We covered the local scene like no one else. We expanded our coverage of the arts, sports, business and of what were then referred to as “minorities.”

We held neighborhood meetings to find out what people were thinking and town meetings for teenagers.

We revealed to readers the problems of a cracking Hoover Dam and the crowded unregulated skies over the Grand Canyon. We followed the Arizona Wildcats.

We interviewed the known and the unknown. We met with legends and heroes – think Mo Udall and John McCain.

I cannot tell you what it was like to look up from my desk one of my first days on the job to see Udall, who had come by to welcome me to Arizona. And I enjoyed getting to know McCain as more than a senator and future presidential hopeful.

And Sen. Dennis DeConcini, with whose family my wife and I became close friends.

It was special to know many of those who contributed so much to the community in so many ways – people like Roy Drachman and Jim Click as well as Ray Clarke, Fred Acosta and Lorraine Lee, to name just a few.

I like to think we put out some very good newspapers, that we were strong but fair, respected even when criticized, and that we were a valuable part of people’s lives.

I also like to think we had fun doing it. I know I did.

Serving as the Citizen’s editor and publisher was an honor. And living in Tucson was truly a blessing. It was and is a special place.

And we made special friends. Allen Beigel. Joan Kaye Cauthorn. Drs. John and Helen Schaefer. Stanley and Norma Feldman. So many others. We cannot imagine never having known them.

I have thought a lot about the Citizen since my retirement: the challenges that were faced, the stories that were published – some tough, some touching – the good days and the bad. Now the Citizen’s final chapter is being written. And there is great sadness in its passing. Nobody wants to see a newspaper die, especially this one. For it signals the end of an era, and it creates a void in the community that will not be filled.

But I can tell you that all those who have worn the Citizen’s colors can look back with great pride.

Gracias, Citizen staffers throughout the years. Gracias, Tucson.

Don Hatfield is retired and lives in Huntington, W.Va.

E-mail: cdhatfield@comcast.net

We thought of ourselves as the local-emphasis newspaper . . . that cared most about Tucson. Our motto was, ‘The Citizen IS Tucson.’

Jan. 21: In an inaugural address reminiscent of JFK’s, President Obama gives Americans hope and a dose of reality.

Jan. 22: Legislators should stop trying to ban photo radar cameras. They save lives.

Jan. 23: In her inaugural address, Gov. Jan Brewer offers no specifics. But there are hopeful signs for schools.

Jan. 24: Good for U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva in fighting to prevent mining on about 1 million acres near the Grand Canyon.

Jan. 26: Don’t call it No Child Left Behind. Nearly Every Child Left Behind is a more accurate title for this flawed federal program.

Jan. 27: A needed expansion and unified of the transit system will improve regional service.

Jan. 28: When the Citizen reported on hazing at some local fire stations, fire officials banned tape recorders in training sessions – the wrong way to address the situation.

Jan. 29: Tax credits have helped give schools needed programs, but if necessary, they should be cut to save basics.

Jan. 30: State secrecy on deficit-fix ideas is hurting TUSD’s ability to plan its next budget.

Jan. 31: The state must come up with guidelines to spend federal stimulus money as the feds intended.

Feb. 2: The state of the city is grim, but cheerleading Mayor Bob Walkup says, “We have what it takes.”

Feb. 3: A fix for the fiscal 2009 budget is shameful, unimaginative and harmful to education.

Feb. 4: Three TUSD officials are on leave for bid rigging and conflict-of-interest laws – the latest scandal to hit the district.

Feb. 5: UA cuts to the science center, museums and cooperative extension will hurt the community.

Feb. 6: The Tucson-based Morris K. Udall Foundation may be tripling its workload under the Obama administration.

Feb. 7: One partner in a three-way downtown development plan leaves. But the work must go on.

Feb. 9: The state must do more to inform people about food stamps. Qualified people are not being helped.

Feb. 10: Limitations on child care subsidies will hurt low-income families and keep them from working.

Feb. 11: Legislative Republicans are wrong to cut revenue, then blame the larger deficit on former Gov. Janet Napolitano.

Feb. 12: A City Council move to stimulate the economy turns into a finger-pointing farce and no answers.

Feb. 13: State schools chief Tom Horne says English Language Learning will cost substantially less. How? Show us the numbers.

Feb. 14: Legislative threats to yank millions of dollars in funding from Tucson’s downtown redevelopment are unfair and shortsighted.

Feb. 16: Proposals in the Legislature could reduce reproductive health choices for women – especially in rural areas.

Feb. 17: We support higher taxes, as considered by Gov. Jan Brewer – but only if they are temporary and targeted.

Feb. 18: The city again shoots itself in the foot on Rio Nuevo funding – paying UA invoices without the necessary scrutiny.

Feb. 19: In a misguided budget-butting move, Child Protective Services workers are ordered to take time off.

Feb. 20: A wide variety in state school standards undermines the goals of No Child Left Behind.

Feb. 21: Arizona, which has a sky-high teen pregnancy rate, needs more comprehensive sex education.

Feb. 23: Forget the naysayers. There are things happening downtown and delaying museum construction makes more money available.

Feb. 24: Kudos to Bishop Gerald Kicanas for leading a campaign for more affordable housing.

Feb. 25: Attorney General Terry Goddard should end doubts about the 206 RTA election and recount the ballots.

Feb. 26: The City Council is right to delay layoffs and consider every other possibility to cut expenses.

Feb. 27: The number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. declines – possibly because of increased border violence.

Feb. 28: Gov. Jan Brewer is right to accept federal stimulus money for roads and other projects.

March 2: A legislator is flat wrong when he says education does not create jobs.

March 3: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio turns law enforcement into a media circus.

March 4: The Legislature’s move to grab open-space funds violates the state Constitution.

March 5: Arizona must step up and join the climate-change fight.

March 6: Gov. Jan Brewer has bold ideas but few specifics in her budget-fix proposals.

March 7: We put walls on the border, but turn a blind eye to guns smuggled into Mexico.

March 9: Compared with other states, Arizona pays too little in unemployment insurance.

March 10: Gov. Jan Brewer should take federal stimulus funds for unemployment compensation.

March 11: The next Tucson police chief should not spend time chasing illegal immigrants.

March 12: The Child Protective Services caseworker staff has been slashed beyond recognition – as a child murder trial is underway in Tucson.

March 13: The botched hunt for the next police chief is costly and embarrassing.

March 14: There isn’t much money, but it’s good that TUSD schools get to set their own spending priorities.

March 16: Arizona teens have big plans for the future, but adults don’t give them the necessary tools.

March 17: Arizona has lots of public information online, but there are continuing fights for access to public documents.

March 18: It’s about time that the feds decide to look for guns and money being smuggled from the U.S. into Mexico.

March 19: It shouldn’t have taken Tucson officials so long to realize that city savings are almost depleted.

March 20: The Legislature should not force school districts to join in their budget-writing procrastination.

March 21: Battered by an unforgiving world economic crisis the likes of which hasn’t been seen for eight decades, Rio Nuevo goes back to its basics.

March 23: Legislators should outlaw “hog dogging” – a vicious and bloody “sport” in which a pit bull is sicced on a wild boar in an arena with no escape.

March 24: The United States has wrongly banned Mexican trucks from U.S. highways, leading to consumer-harming retaliatory tariffs imposed by Mexico.

March 25: Arizona and other states must eliminate the financial incentives for nursing homes to house the mentally ill. The populations must be separated.

March 26: Help for our violence-wracked border with Mexico finally is on the way, thanks to President Obama and, especially, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano.

March 27: Gov. Jan Brewer should not engage in a battle with the feds that could cost Arizona $1.6 billion in stimulus money.

March 28: A threat to cut federal stimulus money should persuade the Legislature to restore funding for community colleges and universities.

March 30: We long felt that voucher programs violate the Arizona Constitution – and the state Supreme Court agreed.

March 31: The city of Tucson is drifting toward its worst budget crisis ever, but all the City Council can do is to point fingers.

April 1: A hand count of votes from the 2006 RTA election will erase all doubts about whether the vote was flipped.

April 2: Local taxpayers – who already are enduring cuts in basic government services – should not shell out $125 million to build a third pro stadium for spring training.

April 3: With Christopher Payne sentenced to death for murdering his two young children, it is appropriate to recall the short lives of Ariana and Tyler Payne and remember lessons learned from their tragic deaths.

April 4: It’s the one-year anniversary of the free pass issued to ignore U.S. environmental laws to build a border fence.

April 6: U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva is to be commended for requesting a federal probe into the death of the last jaguar known to have lived within the United States.

April 7: School districts must write their budgets without knowing from Gov. Jan Brewer how federal money might be used.

April 8: Not content with botching the hiring of a police chief, the Tucson City Council made a far more grievous error by firing City Manager Mike Hein.

April 9: Republicans, who hold majorities in both houses of the Arizona Legislature, should invite Democrats into the budget-writing process.

April 10: With their unexpected and ill-conceived firing of City Manager Mike Hein, City Council members face a litany of critical issues.

April 11: The controversial work required for immigration reform has been foiled and put on the back burner again and again.

April 13: You’d think Arizona’s working-poor families had just scored big time, with the arrival of millions of federal child care dollars. You’d think wrong.

April 14: As Tucson leaders debate the future of downtown – and whether it has much of a future at all – a new study on job sprawl provides direction.

April 15: The city’s desperate attempts to fend off legislative tampering with Rio Nuevo are making the operation look even more haphazard.

April 16: The time has come for the Board of Regents to say “no” to another cost increase at the state’s universities.

April 17: One year ago, we were happy to see National Guard members leaving our border with Mexico. With new border violence breaking out, they are needed back.

April 18: Despite promises of an open process that would encourage public input, the state budget is being drawn up in secrecy.

April 20: With the Bush administration gone, the upcoming Earth Day is the first in eight years that engenders hope instead of despair.

April 21: State prison costs can be cut, but it will take time. It is unrealistic to expect quick savings.

April 22: It is embarrassing that the U.S. Supreme Court has been forced to intervene in an English-learning case that Arizonans should have resolved eons ago.

April 23: Pima County voters can breathe easier now that a hand recount has validated the outcome of the 2006 election on the Regional Transportation Plan.

April 24: Give me a campaign donation, and I’ll give you an earmark. That’s the kind of quid pro quo that U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seeks to block.

April 25: An automated external defibrillator saved the life of a high school student. Every campus must have aty least one AED.

April 27: In adopting a budget, the City Council should look to cut costs, not just generate new revenue.

April 28: Life has become a little better for unemployed Arizonans, but the state still is not doing all it should to help those without a job

April 29: The swine flu outbreak is a serious matter. Caution and concern are merited, full-bore hysteria is not.

April 30: Sheriff Clarence Dupnik’s idea that schools should be able to check citizenship status when students enroll is poppycock.

May 1: As the city examines new revenue sources to balance its budget, Pima County is on much more sound financial footing.

May 2: Gov. Jan Brewer eased a hit on the pocketbooks of university students – but her demand for an overhaul of the higher education system leaves a lot to be desired.

May 4: Where is Gov. Jan Brewer as the Legislature works on a budget that slashes education and other critical state services?

May 5: Pima County’s response to six confirmed cases of swine flu has been sensible, compared with reactions elsewhere.

May 6: In its rush to cut spending, the Legislature is ignoring a voter mandate requiring that funding for education be increased annually.

May 7: The Legislature must let Rio Nuevo live long enough to prove that it can be viable when the economy recovers.

May 8: Good for the the Board of Supervisors for voting to undo an earlier decisions to impose fees on after-school and summer programs and to close some community centers and parks.

May 9: A state budget that can only be described as disastrous is taking shape as Gov. Jan Brewer stands on the sidelines.

May 11: President Obama halts construction of the medieval fence on the Mexican border, bringing to an end a chapter of pointless environmental devastation.

May 12: A legislator threw unsubstantiated and inaccurate allegations at school officials, accusing them of “illegally and secretly stockpiling millions of dollars.”

May 13: Proposed state budget cuts would will deeply affect the lives of developmentally and mentally disabled people.

May 14: TUSD has found that when you ask for ideas on how to save money, people can be creative.

May 15: Several members of the Tucson City Council violated the spirit – and possibly the letter – of the state’s Open Meetings Law.

May 16: Goodbye.

CORKY SIMPSON

The parade’s gone by. No more trumpets. No more drums. No hoofbeats, no streamers.

And the hush of the street is overwhelming.

The death of a newspaper is very much the end of a living, breathing soul. And there’s never been one quite as unique as the Tucson Citizen.

Years from now when you tell young people what the Citizen was like, remember this: It had a heartbeat.

It was the harvest, the milling and the preparation of ideas by people of character, most of whom were characters. They gave the paper its heart, its spirit and its blemishes.

Some had swagger, and over the years many had stagger.

We’ve been peopled by saints and sinners, wise men and flim-flammers and in the old days, a few fall-down drunks who always got up in time to put the old gal to bed.

We’ve had Daniel Boone characters who talked like Jed Clampett and wrote like Stephen Vincent Benet.

We’ve had stutterers who sounded like Mortimer Snerd but had a mind like Carl Sagan.

And there were the legends.

Ted Craig was a gifted editor and writer, but his real talent was the telling of tall tales. Well, that and sizing down human monuments to arrogance.

Ted was a fine athlete, though he didn’t exactly look the part. He was an outstanding golfer because he hit the ball so straight, no matter what club he used.

He also played a good game of tennis and was known to pack the most potent “grapefruit juice” ever tasted in his Thermos bottle.

Phil Hamilton was an Okie. I mean, he dripped Okie. He lived in my part of town and gave me a ride one day after I’d left my old Ford with Bill the mechanic at Palo Verde Automotive out on East 22nd Street.

“Cain’t have a body out in this heat, footback a’ walkin,’ ” Hamilton drawled.

Phil did everything. Reported, edited, wrote a column, covered politics, read copy, wrote headlines. And he was superb.

Bob Campbell was one of the funniest men who ever lived. Our liaison with the back shop when we actually had a back shop, Bob occasionally came to work late – and always had a story to tell to start off the day.

Such as the time, around Halloween, when Campbell announced he knew exactly how many people had come to his house to trick or treat – even though Bob wasn’t at home.

“I went to the bank and got 20 shiny new silver dollars,” he said, “and I spread them out on a card table in my front yard. When I got home, every one of them was gone, so I know conclusively, that there were 20 trick-or-treaters.”

Stu Robertson was a copy editor who occasionally nodded off late in the day. One afternoon he had a cigarette between two fingers and he had that hand on his forehead as he drifted into dreamland – and set his hair on fire.

Micheline Keating wrote the most beautiful movie reviews you’ve ever read. Somebody told me “Mike” had been a friend of the famous writer-poet Dorothy Parker, known for her wit and wisecracks.

John Jennings may not have been the best storyteller on the old Citizen staff, but he could imitate storytellers in such a way that he outdid their talent. Just recently we laid our beloved “J.J.” to rest.

There were so many characters. Such as the guy on the copy desk way back when, who came to the Citizen out of rehab and who thought he was Humphrey Bogart. Had the lisp, the voice and the mannerisms. Unfortunately, he didn’t have Lauren Bacall.

For nearly 140 years the Citizen brought you news from around the community, the state, nation and world. Through war and peace, famine and times of plenty. From the frontier of territorial days through statehood.

Not just anyone can do this job and do it right. Not even trained journalists. Especially trained journalists!

It takes newspaper people, some of whose personal flaws over the years somehow enabled them to create professional refinement.

The awards, the prizes, the hardware from corporate honchos were just trinkets. The Citizen’s real honor was a decoration of the heart – hardworking professionals doing their best to give Tucson its best news coverage and presentation.

Now the little paper at Park and Irvington has been given its summons to join the innumerable once-upon-a-time caravan.

When you remember the time this city had two newspapers competing – and making each other better – don’t think of this one as the loser.

The loser is the community. Tucson has lost an essential voice, living, breathing, ink-stained history recorded by the finest, most competent and dedicated ding-a-lings on Earth.

Things happened, news broke and time passed away. So, now, has the Tucson Citizen.

The parade’s gone by.

Corky Simpson is a retired sportswriter who graced our pages regularly from Labor Day 1974 to Dec. 22, 2006.

JEFF SMITH

Once upon a town there was a time when folks around there had a pretty good idea what was up.

The town was Tucson and the time was the tail end of the 19th century through the better part of the 20th. Better indeed.

The folks knew up from sideways because – if they bestirred themselves to waddle onto the front lawn – they could pick up a hometown newspaper where they could read all about it.

The Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star had decidedly differing views. A grammar school dropout could tell which was which three grafs into their editorial pages – but they shared a fundamentalist approach to reporting those events:

You let the participants do the talking and the paper do the typing. The editorial page chewed the fat. News-side eschewed it.

The trick to maintaining incivility was for one paper to break a different story, or a different angle, when they could leave the competition looking asleep at the wheel.

What nobody did fiddle with was the facts, because then as now a small hometown like Tucson could tell when local coverage flunked the smell test.

You might run a story datelined Afghanistan and it might have a scent of barnyard here or there and you might get away with it, but a hometown paper better have the hometown news fair and square.

I am of the educated opinion, however, that even in these perilous times for print, an honest hometown paper that remembers its roots, and has the publisher to protect them, will survive.

The Citizen came first, in the last trimester of the 19th century, when all it had to fight was Apaches and politicians. Then the Arizona Daily Star hit the streets and the battle was joined.

As a mercenary whose checks have been signed by the publishers of both, from 1968 until the curtain came down on 2007, I’m here to tell you it was the kind of ride that keeps otherwise intelligent professionals working like short-handled hoers for money that would make a school teacher weep.

But we had the pride of knowing we were keeping the people up to date and armed with facts when the high and mighty were armed with sophistry.

My first encounter with hometown journalism was as an 8-year-old pal of Donald Thornton, son of Vic, managing editor of the Star. On weekends Donald and I would wander into the old Star/Citizen building on Stone Avenue and listen to the editors argue about whether Art Luppino was the best tailback in the country or just a fast frog in a slow pond. (For the record, Art was the greatest running back ever. You can read it spelled out in my scrapbook, in raw umber.)

In those days the Star was owned by the Ellinwoods and Matthews. The Citizen belonged to the Smalls. Those days were the ’50s. By the ’60s the feds had targeted Tucson newspapers in an antitrust action, which we were spared when the Failing Newspapers Act allowed the papers to keep publishing, leaving the housekeeping to a third party we still know as Tucson Newspapers Inc.

And they all lived happily ever after. Until the owners of the Star tried to sell but found no takers except a small-time outfit named Brush-Moore. So the Citizen’s owners, Bill and Bill Small, father and son, bought the Star, with the pledge to keep out of its internal affairs and find a decent buyer. Which it appeared it had – Pulitzer sounds like a decent newspaper name – until the wife of a Pulitzer made it a matter, for me at least, of quit or get fired.

Upon which my own purely personal opinion of selling a hometown newspaper to out-of-town interests experienced an epiphany. It blows.

So I began my career at the stupid end of a shovel.

A white knight rode to my rescue, in the person of William A. Small the younger. (Let me share this apology across the void to Bill: Scouts’ honor, Boss, when I referred to you as Bill Small the Lesser, it was an allusion to Homer’s Iliad, in which he identified Ajax the Lesser, thus to distinguish him as his father’s son. Not by any means to disparage you, or Ajax.)

Because in November 1976 I went to work for a hometown newspaper at the zenith of its powers. And circulation. The Citizen made money and spent money. It spent money to make money: I read somewhere that’s how smart money does it.

A veritable Ku Klux Klan of factors conspired to drive what was once a rabbit warren of glad-hearted hustle – curiosity inspiring phone calls, calls inspiring car keys, keys taking reporters all over Arizona, northern Mexico, to hell and gone and back again, in time to fill out our expense vouchers and then home for the weekend and gone again next Monday.

Bill Small did not bitch about the money spent to cover the on-beat and off-beat: He did the math and read the English, which sang of profitability.

There was money to be made in a hometown paper – one that made readers laugh and cuss and look forward to the next edition.

For Small it bought a newspaper sufficiently profitable that when he decided to spend his days pursuing the muse instead of news, his Citizen caught the eye of the biggest newspaper chain on the planet, the Gannett Co., of all the factors conspiring to stamp out hometown newspapers, the Mother Factor.

So after two blissful years working for an enlightened, penny- and pound-wise publisher, I thought, “Poop.”

And I was right. If Gannett allows this to see print it will be the most liberal editorial decision I have seen in three decades under the aegis of the people who brought us USA TODAY . . . and converted every hometown newspaper it could buy into one of its clones.

Old newspapermen joke that a good reporter could cover the Second Coming of Christ in 13 column inches. But a good feature writer could create a novella, and a good newspaper would dummy the room to run it.

My brother Dave wrote a feature on a kid from Mesa who walked into a beauty parlor, made five women lie face-down on the floor and then calmly shot each in the back of the head. The story ran roughly the length of a Louis L’Amour novel. It jumped from Page One of the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition all the way to the back, and then jumped from the back to the front again, turned around and ran until it ran out.

The Times got one of the best days of street sales in its history. The kid got life in Florence, and my brother got a VW vanload of Best of Whatever awards.

It was the kind of story Gannett never would even consider, not if every woman the kid murdered were every subscriber’s mother, daughter, sister or aunt; if the kid were every reader’s adopted son, and the town were home to the chief executive officer of Gannett. Maybe that’s a good thing, a savvy decision, but it is not the sort of policy that endears it to the antiquarian species that reads its paper on the porcelain pedestal of a morning.

Gannett ran an ad campaign for the Citizen a few years ago featuring a chorus of elevator-tenors chiming “. . . the Citizen is Tucson.” I had my doubts then, and as Gannett smothers Tucson’s oldest, once-hometown paper, like some bothersome bed-ridden uncle, I don’t think the Citizen is Tucson anymore.

Gannett sent one of its aparatchiki to announce the execution to the crew, lest they hear it first from the Star. There were people there – friends of mine, guys who have fired me three, maybe four times – who’ve put in 40 years or better at that newspaper. And this suit from east of the Potomac lacks the decency even to thank them for their toil.

He was here to announce a successful hit, by an assassin with a long string of successful hits. Hit men don’t fly across a continent to thank the family and friends of the departed; they come to put the stink-eye on anybody who looks like he might make trouble.

The emissary just didn’t get enough stink on everybody. Pray that you live long enough to see the hometown newspaper make its inevitable comeback.

Jeff Smith is only mostly dead. Much like his muse . . .

MARK KIMBLE

bstanton@tucsoncitizen.com

I can’t complain. It was a good run. There aren’t many people who have the opportunity to do what they truly love and to do it in one place for 34 years.

That’s how my career went at the Tucson Citizen – from Dec. 16, 1974, until May 15, 2009.

Some of you I will miss. Others, not so much.

At the top of the “miss” list are the people I work with. The job has been fun mostly because the people have been fun.

These pages wouldn’t be here without Billie Stanton. She’s to my right today, but in reality, she isn’t to the right of anyone. She’s impassioned and would right every wrong in the world if she had the time.

In the four months since we first were threatened with closure, we’ve know that there are a lot of people who care.

Bishop Gerald Kicanas was one of the first to call and say he was thinking of us. There also have been legislators and former legislators, City Council members and former council members and many others.

But what touched me most were the kind notes from those of you I have never met. Most offered words of support and said how much they will miss us.

Typical was a comment left online yesterday by a reader I know only as rubysky: “I hope the staffers are OK. These are our neighbors and fellow citizens.”

Others had different concerns.

I was slightly hurt when one caller was more concerned about Brenda Starr’s future than mine. How, the reader wondered, would she be able to keep up with the red-haired reporter?

I resisted telling her that Brenda was fictional and I was real and she should be a little more concerned about my future.

Oh, well. Good luck, Brenda.

I also won’t miss those people who have called or e-mailed almost every day over the past four months to point at something in the paper they didn’t like, saying, “This story is why you are closing.”

Some said it’s because we’re too liberal, some say it’s because we run too many conservative Cal Thomas screeds.

One even said we were gonna close because we ran a short story on Martha Stewart’s puppy being accidentally killed in a kennel.

I actually think the reasons were bigger than that, but who knows?

I also won’t miss the guy who called every Feb. 6 to castigate us for not running a front-page story reminding people it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday. And what would the second sentence of the story have been?

It’s been fun, this journalism business. Thanks for letting me be a part of it.

Contact Mark Kimble at mskimble@cox.net.

Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long bout with cancer? After all, we knew the end was coming for months.

But here’s a revelation: When death comes, even if it’s not supposed to be a shock . . . it’s still a shock.

So give us six months, or six years. Then we can provide some context.

Let’s stick, then, to the few points we can make with a sufficient degree of conviction:

• If there’s a way to spin the Citizen’s closure into a positive for Tucson, we’d love to hear it. But one doesn’t exist.

It would be bad enough if we were just any company. But a newspaper is the type of high-salary, knowledge industry, “smart” business that any of the city’s TREOish, economic-development types would love to recruit.

Those of us who have explored Tucson’s, uh, challenging employment environment know we won’t be making anywhere near the money we make now. Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.

But a newspaper isn’t just any company. It’s a repository of the city’s collective memory and of our aspirations and hopes.

Healthy journalism equates with a vibrant city. A dead paper is analogous to the city’s libraries closing – a chilling prospect.

• To all those bloggers and “citizen journalists” who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here’s your opportunity.

Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources – you have cultivated sources, right? – and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call “reporting.”

To do it right, you’ll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week.

If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don’t expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.

We’re rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.

• Finally, frankly, this paper’s closing dissolves a colorful, creative cast of characters the likes of whom you’ll never find in one place again. From sweet Mary Bustamante’s long-time devotion to schools to Dan Buckley’s vivid mariachi videos, from Ryn Gargulinski’s bizarre takes of the macabre to Alan Fischer’s scintillating science coverage, from Steve Rivera and Geoff Grammer’s mastery of Wildcats basketball and high school sports, respectively, to Anthony Gimino’s personal peeks at sports personas, we’ve had it all. And you had it, too.

But not now. With the loss of the Tucson Citizen, everybody in Tucson loses. And that’s a fact. Goodbye.

Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.