1-Stop closes after decades as a town hub

A little bit of Sahuarita’s Mayberry flavor just died.

For the first time in almost forever, you won’t be able to run out and buy New Year’s Eve party supplies at the 1-Stop convenience store.

It has long been the place in Sahuarita to get milk, cookies, ice cream, diapers, liquor, cigarettes, lottery tickets, snack and grocery foods and notions. But Dick Jensen, who has owned the store since New Year’s Day 1983, is throwing in the (paper) towel a day before 2008 ends.

The plan was to close yesterday, but there has been a buy-one, get-one-free sale going on for a while, and the shelves were almost bare by late Monday.

The old part of the store was rumored to have been built in 1915, Jensen said, but no one knows for sure.

To newcomers, the ramshackle store at Nogales Highway and Sahuarita Road may seem like a run-down remnant of the area’s rural past, with its dirt parking lot and its generic gasoline and battered ancient gasoline dispensers that look like refugees from the original Route 66.

Longtime residents recall it as one of the last gasps of the era when farming and mining dominated the local economy, before there was an incorporated town of Sahuarita.

Local gathering spot

Town Council member Charles Oldham years ago said the way Sahuarita residents got their news in the old days was when they ran into each other at either the Sahuarita Landfill or at the 1-Stop. Those out for a ride would tie up their horses behind the 1-Stop.

Once, that intersection was the heart of Sahuarita. There was a tiny post office just south of the 1-Stop. Across the highway and the Union Pacific railroad tracks are many other FICO buildings as well as Lamb Excavating and Sahuarita Auto Parts and Repairs. Across Sahuarita Road is the once-notorious but now closed Sahuarita Bar, where decades ago, many Hispanic residents tasted their first hamburgers. In later years, it had a reputation for fighting and rowdiness and was closed earlier this decade.

The 1-Stop family business has been home to various members of the extended Jensen clan. On a recent day there, grandson Ryan Jensen was hanging out on a Sahuarita High School vacation day. A smiling Dick Jensen recalled that granddaughter Randi Sue Johnson literally grew up in the store, as she was placed in a bassinet that sat on the counter by the cash register. She is now a dermatologist.

When the 100-year flood of 1983 swelled the suddenly wet Santa Cruz River far over its banks, with water, debris and even a few bellowing and panic-stricken livestock, the store was filled with more than three feet of water and sludge. Most of the family was trapped there for several days, as the bridges were out, and Jensen slept in the van.

That was his first year in the store, after years of running a concrete contracting business that the family still operates, and Jensen might have been discouraged that his first monsoon brought so much trouble. However, when the rain let up and the water levels finally subsided, many neighbors from Sahuarita Heights showed up with wheelbarrows and shovels and helped clean out the muck, Jensen said.

“It was an army” of helpers, he said, and when the clean-up was done, “we had a party” in the parking lot.

Many ups, downs

Jensen arrived in town in 1958 from Chicago and seven years later founded and still owns RDJ Concrete, which is run by his son-in-law and daughter.

He has seen many ups and down in construction, and survived them by staying out of debt and not over-investing in trucks. He said this downturn seems to be different because potential home buyers, especially those from California’s overheated real estate market, can no longer sell their homes elsewhere to move here.

Jensen was one of the backers of Sahuarita’s 1994 incorporation. He recalled that what galvanized it was an effort to incorporate Green Valley and to include the southern part of Sahuarita into Green Valley.

“We beat them to the draw. They were a bunch of (retired) CEOs who thought we were hicks,” Jensen said, still grinning after all these years.

Jensen is a former school board member in Sahuarita and has served on the board of Green Valley Assistance Services, noting that many in Green Valley were skeptical that there were people in need in that community.

He said his motivation for working to incorporate Sahuarita was partly because he feared that Green Valley retirees might somehow get involved in the Sahuarita school district, where they could vote against school bonds. He is pleased with the outcome, saying that the town now has the political power to get its share of resources from the county, which long had leaned to Green Valley and its voting power.

With a laugh he also noted that when he was doing concrete work in Green Valley, many a bored resident told him “don’t ever retire.”

The 71-year-old said he doesn’t know what is next for him, but he will keep busy. He always has.

As Sahuarita has grown and grown upscale in recent years, the 1-Stop survived the arrival of the Super Stop at the entrance to Rancho Sahuarita, largely by serving the construction workers and those living on the east side of town.

The Super Stop hurt business, but was not a crippling blow, Jensen said. The end came with the construction downturn.

Since January, he said, “guys have been coming in, saying ‘this my last day’.”

And now the last day has come for the store itself.

pfranchine@sahuaritasun.com | 547-9738