Along the Way: Green Valley radiates with hospitality

There’s a lot of sunshine in Green Valley, and daylight is pretty nice, too.

From our house, I can watch the new day shimmy up behind the Santa Rita Mountains and transmit its warmth. But the real glow comes from the people who live here.

We’re newcomers, my wife Marge and I. We moved here in October. Tucson’s growth had long since become sprawl, and the enchanting mid-size Tucson where we settled in 1974 was no more.

Why retire and spend your time fighting noise and traffic and broken streets?

So we chose this not-so-faraway community, and the first thing we noticed was the way people who never laid eyes on you wave hello, anyhow.

The second was this: No meeting in Green Valley can begin without a decent supply of cookies. Gavels don’t bring meetings to order here — brownies, oatmeal and chocolate-chip cookies do.

I’ll bet people here decide which church to attend by the quality of the cookies in the fellowship hall. I know of one local congregation that has a regular gathering called Doctrine and Donuts. That would be better than Hot Dogma, I guess, or Conviction and Casseroles. Well, maybe not.

Anyhow, hospitality is as much a Green Valley trademark as the Lion is to MGM or the Peacock to NBC.

And it’s a neat place to retire.

The vineyard I toiled in for many years, almost 50 of them, was the newspaper business. I was a sportswriter with the Tucson Citizen from September 1974 until Dec. 22, 2006. Before that I worked in Carthage, Mo.; Springfield, Ill.; Wellington, Kan.; and Phoenix.

Shortly after we moved down here, I called on my old friend, James Bennett, editor of the Green Valley News. We had breakfast a couple of times at Dona’s, one thing led to another and. . .well, here’s my first column for this fine newspaper.

Over the years at the Citizen, I wrote about all the sports, mostly those at the University of Arizona. I was fortunate enough to cover five NCAA Final Four men’s basketball tournaments, four of them involving the Wildcats. And there were a couple of Super Bowls, one Summer Olympics and the 2001 World Series in which the Arizona Diamondbacks defeated the New York Yankees.

I also covered four College World Series baseball championships and 20 NCAA national conventions. In 1996, I was national president of the Football Writers Association of America.

It was a career that enabled me to meet a guy who walked on the moon, Alan Shepard, as well as a lot of sports stars, including:

Joe DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Henry Aaron, Stan Musial, Lefty Gomez, Bill Dickey, Peewee Reese, Joe Black, Don Drysdale, Duke Snider, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Julius Erving, Bob Cousy, George Mikan, Bob Lilly, Doak Walker, Bart Starr, Johnny Unitas, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Francoise Durr, Kerry Melville, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Gary Player, Gene Littler, Bear Bryant, Bud Wilkinson, Don Faurot, Bo Schembechler and many others.

Oh, and one of my best friends was the late Jay Simon, who retired as managing editor of Golf Digest, moved to Green Valley and wrote a column for the Green Valley News. Jay died here a few years ago. If he were still around, he’d be very happy that Marge and I were here.

Jay fit in well because he was a bright, friendly, warm, funny guy. Green Valley, he discovered — and Marge and I have quickly learned --has an enormous pool of talent, leadership, experience, versatility, commitment, common sense, humor. . .

And cookies.

So, here I am and I’m pleased to meet you. I look forward to chatting with you, once a week in the Green Valley News.

Corky Simpson was the first inductee into the Arizona Associated Press Sports Editors Hall of Fame in 2003. He became nationally known in 1992 for being the only college football writer to pick Alabama to win the national championship from the start of the season. His column will appear Fridays in the Green Valley News. Contact him at corkmarge@cox.net. Comment on this column online at www.gvnews.com.