Being able to go to the State of the State address with Mark Kimble has always been one of my favorite memories of working at the Citizen. I sat with legislators, mayors and the governor just a few feet away from me. I will always remember seeing the mayor of Phoenix stick his cell phone in his sock. I felt like a kid in a candy store. This was the culmination of my government classes in public education.

Later, on that same trip, I found out how knowledgeable Mark was not just about news but our state and its history in general. Upon buying lunch at McDonald’s (Mark is also a health nut), we discussed Fife Symington’s new career path in the food industry. Mark then revealed to me that during his childhood, Mr. Symington saved some kid from drowning. Later, when Fife got indicted and convicted, this kid came back into his life and rescued him by granting him a presidential pardon. The kid’s name was William Jefferson Clinton. So if it wasn’t for Symington, Clinton would be dead by now.

That day was one of the days that I learned the most in any job and one more thing that will be with me for the rest of my life, thanks to the Citizen and thanks to Mark.

ARNIE BERMUDEZ

Artist/designer

In this world of celebrity overload, we in the journalism business in Tucson don’t get that many opportunities to interview celebs, let alone have them admit to something publicly that had previously remained buried in their past.

But when I interviewed ABC sportscaster Al Michaels in 1977, that’s exactly what happened.

Some background: Michaels was sports editor of The State Press, the student paper at Arizona State University, in 1965. While there, he perpetrated a hoax on The Arizona Republic’s sports staff by inventing a fictitious athlete from Fredonia High School in northern Arizona. Michaels and his school buddy, George Allen, concocted baseball star Clint Romas, then kept embellishing a legendary career for him through calls to the Republic sports desk. As long as the Republic kept printing the stats and linescores, they would keep calling in with ever-more outrageous feats.

The hoax fell apart when the Republic finally decided to call Fredonia to do a story on Romas and found out he didn’t exist. Just who had conned the Republic remained a mystery, though – at least until Michaels admitted it to me and I published his account.

How did I know about the hoax and to ask Michaels about it? Let’s just say a reporter never reveals his sources.

BRUCE JOHNSTON

News editor

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 . . .

Citizen Staff Report

Arizona Citizen is born

Oct. 15, 1870

The first edition of the Arizona Citizen, then a weekly, rolls off the press. The first issue notes that a pair of valuable mules and a horse had been stolen from a ranch within sight of the city, and that sweet potatoes were selling here for 20 cents a pound.

When the paper debuts, the Civil War has been over for just five years and Arizona won’t become a state for another 42 years.

Camp Grant Massacre

April 30, 1871

Just before dawn, a group from Tucson shoot, stab and bludgeon to death more than 100 Apache men, women and children camped near Winkelman about 65 miles northeast of Tucson. The Citizen’s report notes the raid was in ‘self-defence’ because four settlers had been slain and stock stolen in the San Pedro Valley. But the killings provoke outrage across the United States. At a murder trial, all of the participants are acquitted.

The railroad arrives

March 20, 1880

“There was rejoicing in Arizona last night,” the Citizen reports on the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which would bring a wider variety of goods to Tucson – and at far cheaper prices – than by stagecoach.

“The iron horse panted into Tucson and with its neigh gave notice that a new order of things was about to be established.”

Shootout at the OK Corral

Oct. 26, 1881

The Citizen says the shootout between the Earps and the Clantons “will always be remembered as one of the crimson days in the annals of Tombstone . . . the bloodiest and deadliest street fight that has ever occurred in the Territory.’

Wyatt Earp kills Stillwell

March 1882

Earp suspected Frank Stillwell of killing his brother Morgan in Tombstone a few days earlier. He and “Doc” Holliday track Stillwell down near the downtown train depot and shoot him.

Ground broken for UA

Oct. 27, 1887

The Territorial Legislature appropriates $25,000 to help start the territory’s first university. But the money doesn’t cover the land purchase. The city is about to return the money when two gamblers and a saloonkeeper step forward and donate the land. Classes begin in 1891 with 32 students.

Arizona becomes 48th state

February 14, 1912

President Taft signs the proclamation making Arizona a state.

The Citizen reports that when a dispatch from the White House arrived with the news, Tucson greeted it “with an an outburst of whistles and bells.” The paper says the demonstration was as great as when the railroad first arrived in Tucson.

Lindbergh visits Tucson

Sept. 23, 1927

Thousands gather to greet the “Lone Eagle,” flier Charles Lindbergh, and his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh, who months earlier became the first to fly solo across the Atlantic, speaks at the University of Arizona and helps dedicate Davis-Monthan Airfield.

Dillinger gang captured

Jan. 26, 1934

Tucson police capture desperado John Dillinger and six gang members without firing a shot. Members of the gang had been staying at the Hotel Congress, where some of them were recognized when a fire forced the evacuation of the hotel. Dillinger himself is captured in a residential neighborhood a few blocks northeast of downtown. Dillinger, who eventually escapes, dies a few months later when he is gunned down outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago.

Raytheon’s ancestor

Feb. 2, 1951

Calif.-based Hughes Tools, owned by the reclusive Howard Hughes, announces plans for a plant in Tucson that will eventually employ as many as 10,000 people. The operation, now owned by Raytheon, is the city’s largest private employer.

Jet hits supermarket

Dec. 8, 1967

It was called a miracle when just four people died after an Air Force F-4D jet fighter crashed into the Food City supermarket at 1830 S. Alvernon Way.

Tucson celebrates 200

Aug. 20, 1975

Residents mark the 1775 founding of the Tucson presidio by Capt. Hugo O’Conor, an Irish mercenary working for the Spanish crown. It is the first European settlement in what is now Tucson, but the area had been inhabited for thousands of years by Native Americans.

IBM plans new plant

Oct. 12, 1977

The plant, located on the Southeast Side, opens in May 1978, with as many as 5,000 employees predicted. Ten years later, IBM announces it will cut 2,800 jobs there. The plant site is now also home to the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park.

Inferno claims Old Tucson

April 25, 1995

Fire destroys three-fourths of the movie studio and Western theme park, which had been a site for numerous Western films since 1939. The cause of the fire is never determined, although arson is suspected.

CAP water arrives

November 1992

Tucsonans get their first taste of Central Arizona Project water after the final link in the 336-mile-long project from the Colorado River is completed. The delivery means Tucson will no longer have to depend solely on its rapidly shrinking supply of groundwater. But many Tucsonans complain about the taste and the water’s corrosive effect on appliances. Delivery is halted while those problems are solved.

Wildcats win NCAA basketball title

April 1997

The University of Arizona Wildcats beat Kentucky in overtime for the school’s first national title in men’s basketball. The Cats become the first team to defeat three No. 1 seeds on the way to the title. Although the Wildcats had won national titles in baseball, the basketball championship brings attention on UA sports to a new level.

After the game, thousands of fans converge on Fourth Avenue to celebrate the win.