Fifteen years are a lot — particularly in Southern California, where already you are apt to see businesses hanging out signs to boast of having been established in 1982 or a tradition since 1977. There are far too many for a weekly newspaper of that age (upwards of 750 issues) to hope to distill into two issues' worth of "highlights." Everyone, whether inside the paper or outside, will have different reasons for believing that justice has failed to be done. The writer who considers his forte to be his grasp of structure or tightness of logic will feel slighted by the brief snippet; the local actress who remembers her rave review as the paper's journalistic apex will be ripe for disappointment, too. Justice is not and could never have been the idea. Reflection is. So, think of the sampling in this issue and next week's as a prod to the memory, an invitation to join in the toast or to propose your own.

Now — and by all means in the future — read on.

1972

“There’s money down there,” he answers gravely. The girl’s mother rushes up and yanks her away.

Alex Farnsley

South of Broadway

The pigeons in Horton Plaza — now there's an issue the city council could agree on.

Oh, a few old ladies will always be scattering birdseed, but most of our voters realize that pigeons just don't belong here. They simply aren't San Diego. Did you ever see one on the beach, for instance. or in a suburban shopping center? Those bright pink feet, that officious waddle — preposterous!

A pigeon is a big-city, back-alleyway bird. Living on handouts. Not even a pretty song. A messy nuisance. Let's clean up Horton Plaza!

While we're at it, let's take a look at the human inhabitants - they're as bad as the pigeons, cluttering the area south of Broadway with their card rooms, two-buck hotels, porno bookstores. Let's clean them out and make the area "harmonize" with beautiful downtown San Diego.

— Nancy Banks, October 5 | Read full article

Classifieds

DEAR FRANKIE: Please come home. We'll raise your allowance and let you play your drums. Marlyn can stay with you on weekends too. Mom and Dad.

ON THE BEACH. I mean ON the beach. Two bedroom, 2 bath. All utilities paid. Kitchen equipped, all you need is sheets and towels. $255.

FREAK FAMILY wishes to "adopt" one well-balanced child, 2 years old, any 8 hours between 12 noon and 11 p.m. as a "partner" for our child.

Letters

Dear Reader,

Who is the guy who reviews the movies? Doesn't he like anything he sees?

The Reader's film page is the best thing that ever happened to San Diego filmgoers, but life is too short to take your reviewer seriously. He hates everything!

Ricter Stepheson, La Jolla

Jane Fonda described how tens of thousands of Vietnamese women would march on district headquarters in South Vietnam, and with police shooting at them, the women would ask them, "Why are you shooting at us?"

Schoepfer

Whither the San Diego Peace Movement?

It was back in 1970 at the mostly long-haired White Whale in La Jolla when I got my first peace handshake. My thumb caught him on the palm and he squeezed the tips of my fingers. Our faces both flushed. A quick readjustment to the conventional shake. "Kevin. this is John Cantwell. He's the head of Concerned Officers."

"Hi."

"Hi."

I had heard a few things a antiwar G.l.s but mostly that were trying to gel out of the because they had orders to Vietnam. Highly suspect. I'd graduated from college in 1968 what I thought was the height antiwar feeling. We students Vi right under the thumb of the draft. Lots of antiwar demonstrations my senior year But even two years later, there was Kent State. Students again. An undergraduate up at UCSD burned himself to death on Revelle Plaza that spring. Late, 1970 and in 1971, however, wit! the advent of the lottery system and the general drop in draft calls, the peace movement in San Diego began to shift, away from the college campuses and toward the military bases.

— Kevin Mallory, November 9 | Read full article

And you begin to think you could be Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald

For my birthday last week, one of my friends told me he would take me to dinner anywhere in San Diego — with two stipulations. It had to be a place I had never been and it had to be extravagant. The decision was simple. The Fontainbleu at the Westgate Plaza Hotel. The Westgate Plaza may be only a block away from Horton Plaza, but it's classes apart, so far apart, in fact, that last year Esquire named it one of the three best hotels in the entire world for its extraordinary elegance and luxury. The lobby is modeled on an anteroom in the palace at Versailles, the paintings are attributed to Velasquez. and the furniture is authentic period from Europe. We have, in other words. in downtown San Diego a living museum which, although open now two years, few still know about. One warning. Make sure you wear shoes. The other afternoon I was wearing long pants, and the doorman, evidently taking me for riffraff, stopped me to make sure my pants didn't conceal bare feet.

Take the wide and curving stairs up to the dining room on the second floor. It doesn't matter if you can't afford to eat here - who can? - because it's a pleasure just to look at the dining room: the supreme rectitude of Louis XV and XVI in ice-blues and blue-grays is upset only by the, yes, red plastic of the carnations at each table.

— Kathleen Woodward, October 26 | Read full article

1973

Seals

Lounging around in the lounge at the Seal Team One's headquarter on the Strand in Coronado, two Seal officers wanted desperately to remember the good old days. "There was this warrant officer — what was his name? — he bought a used car and drove it off the Coronado ferry just for kicks," Lieutenant Rockne offered.

"Yeah, and there was Gerry. Remember when he went to that girl's party in Mission Beach and bit off the head of one of her pet kittens? Oh, but be didn't eat it. He just spit it out on the floor," Lt. Kincaid one-upped his friend.

"And then there was that party where they killed a real hawk and hung it over the beer kegs, so you couldn't help but get blood dripped in your beer."

— Carlos Bey, April 12 | Read full article

God Save Me from Becoming a Senior Citizen

Eve Arden, who is of course the only reason for going to see this abominable play at all, has — and always has had — only two strings to her bow. — Jonathan Saville, May 24

The Wallabies' Tale

Nothing could have revealed more poignantly the poverty of our local musical life than the ragged and pedestrian concert of the San Diego Symphony on Thursday evening. This orchestra has in past years resembled a group of amiable passersby, dragooned by a desperate impresario into donning evening clothes and hazarding some well-intentioned scratches and tootles on various unfamiliar instruments. — Jonathan Saville, February 1

Painless Gas

I knew snails were part of French and Belgian cuisine, but I never met a maitre d' who was one. This man, whose lush accent intimidated and excited me on the phone, almost slid across the restaurant floor on a trail of unctuous goodwill. — Jeff Weinstein, March 15 | Read full article

Private Lives, Major Boredom, General Malaise

Elyot and Amanda are in a state of virtually total alienation. They are members of a leisure class which has had the time to cultivate an exquisite grace in each sentence, each step, each lighting of a cigarette, each nonchalant response to the most embarrassing of situations. Yet it is a grace which serves for nothing but its own display, and the lives it adorns are supreme works of absolutely purposeless art. This is an aristocracy alienated not only from work, as all aristocracies are, but from the responsibilities of leadership as well. Elyot and Amanda seem to have no contact with their social class and its functions in society; they simply devote their endless supply of money to having (or attempting to have) a good time. They are indifferent to history: though their emotional adventures are taking place in the 1930s, never a word is breathed about the Great Depression, about the rise of Fascism, about the precipitous crumbling of nineteenth-century civilization going on all around them. They have no family — no mothers, no fathers, no siblings, no children, and no notion of having children. And they have no beliefs. They do not believe in God or the Devil, they do not believe life has any meaning at all; it is just an aimless though amusing party, which one had better enjoy while one may, before youth passes by and the body begins to rot. All these two partygoers have is each other, and there is a deep poignancy to their relationship — so strong and yet so fragile, so loving, and yet so selfish, so desperate, so devouring. — Jonathan Saville, July 12

Too Outrageous for Point Loma

At first, the tale sounded strange enough: back in the early 1900s, a very mystical woman of extraordinary powers founded a colony of Universal Brotherhood, 500 acres on the tip of Point Loma that went by the name of Lomaland. There she started the School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity, built exotic structures with huge glass domes whose aquamarine and amethyst light shone nightly for miles out to sea — where some sailors must surely have thought they dreamed, that their enchanted vision was the shores of Byzantium; and within the deep canyons and eucalyptus groves, fulsome orchards, pampas grass and rose gardens of this paradisical Lomaland, the woman held court, surrounding herself with the devoted, who ranged from men of great wealth — of most renown was sporting goods king A.G. Spalding, who built his own glass-domed house and 9-hole golf course on the grounds — to nearly a hundred Cuban orphans, all clothed, fed, and schooled at the expense of Lomaland. — Connie Bruck, July 26

The Santa Claus Scandal

C. (for Creep) Arnholt Smith, who owns a bank, an airline, and a luxury hotel, among other things, has just sold his baseball team because he could not keep up the payments. In a deal arranged by John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, the San Diego Padres baseball team was sold to Washington, D.C. group headed by dry-cleaning magnate Joseph Danzansky.

In December 1972, during the height of speculation of a Padres move to Washington, Buzzie Bavasi, president and part owner of the Padres, held a press conference to announce that "there is only one Santa Claus it baseball, and his name is C.A. Smith." Sportswriters, baseball fans, and the people of San Diego interpreted this statement to mean that the Padres were going to remain in San Diego. In actuality, this statement was to signal the beginning of an operation to be known by the code name "Santa Claus."

— Alan Pesin, June 7 | Read full article

Letters

Duncan Shepherd's movie reviews do not demand to be discussed or criticized but if you quint your eyes and tilt your head, to the left or right or totally upside down, they do appear to be about or concerning or in re: cinema. The column always seems to be — most often, that is — on page 3. Nothing that happens in these columns is more convincing or beguiling than the genuine American backgrounds of space between the lines — or hearty newsprinty-type paper underneath. Most compelling are the peppy, purposeful, eventful, unending, continual — most common — run-on sentences. The peruser will wonder at Mr. Shepherd's adeptness at hitting commas but be awestruck at his difficulty at finding the periods.

The summer heat wave of Thursday night ennui has as its equivalent the weekly — every seven days — issuance of the Reader, so I would not consider passing it up. (And most assuredly, I would give Mr. Shepherd's column three stars and one black spot.)

— Mike Waters

The Whole Area Was the City Dump

.... Elizabeth, a six-year-old who knows some English from having gone to school in the States, invites me to come to her house. She is staying with her grandmother, who is pleased that my friend and I say we would like to come, and the four of us set out from the clinic.

"Welcome to Tijuana! From a group of teenage boys, lounging around a storefront. It is not intended as a greeting. Elizabeth and her grandmother appear not to notice, and we continue on in the dazing sun, crossing the dry riverbed. This is where the garbage is, new garbage and garbage not covered over from the time when this whole area was the city dump. Tiny shacks are raised high off the ground by stacks of old tires. Hundreds more, not yet conscripted, are strewn through the garbage. The scene grows more and more unreal, the riverbed fined with garbage, the shacks on their strange stilts, I begin to think vaguely of pictures I have seen of ... where? ... India? ... China'? My mind is miasmic, slowing to a halt, I see myself phasing out.

"Sit down," Elizabeth orders, pushing me into the one chair. The air is thick with flies. For the first time since coming to San Martin, I am fervently glad that I don't speak Spanish. I turn to my friend, the Spanish speaker, and wonder what be will say. He rises, more or less to the occasion.

"Buena vista," he remarks enthusiastically, gesturing out the open door. Knowing, even in the depth of my torpor, that we overlook the garbage, I think for a moment that he has succumbed. taken temporary but definite leave. But then I look out the door, following their gaze, and see that from this height what is visible is a weeping willow tree on the other side of the riverbed, and some hills beyond.

"Yes," smiles Elizabeth's grandmother, "the hills."

Then she offers us lunch of tortillas and beans, offers it again and again. She tells us how she lives there with Elizabeth and the older girl, whom she took out of an orphanage in Ensenada, and how she supports them by sewing patchwork bedspreads; each one takes her two days to make, and she charges two dollars apiece.

I make the inevitable, inadequate gesture, buy the bedspread too small for my bed, and thank her ... ·

— Connie Bruck, August 16 | Read full article

Praise the Lord

"Hallelujah!" The tambourine lady now begins to jump, a strangely mechanical motion, her arms hanging limp at her sides, her eyes shut tight. She is elsewhere, oblivious of the woman she is moving into who pays her no mind, just keeping her motion, then suddenly arms shoot out in a wide embrace of what I cannot see, and she cries, "Yes God yes God yes God hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah" again and again, so many times more, until word becomes sound signifying ecstasy, and from deep within her comes one continual "Hallelelelelelelelelel..." — Connie Bruck, July 12 | Read full article

Howard Fruit-of-the-Loom Cosell

Howard Cosell has fewer friends than Moses at a Nazi Party meeting and more enemies than a telephone operator on Mother's Day. — Alan Pesin, May 17

Waxing Jerry Lewis in Effigy

On September 4, 1972, I was at a Padres baseball game. In the second inning, the message board read, "Give a San Diego welcome to Jerry Lewis." I turned around and saw him in the press box. JERRY LEWIS!! He was sitting with two of his sons. If it had been Charlton Heston, Veronica Lake, Jim Brown, or even Katherine Hepburn, I would not have done what I then did. But I'm the one who as an usher in the ninety-degree heat of New York City insisted on the wearing of cardboard dickeys en hommage to Jerry Lewis. I'm the guy who watched him guest host the Tonight Show, even though I had a playoff basketball game the next day. I'm the person who cried with Jerry during the Ethel Merman medley on his ill-fated ABC talk show. And I'm the one who did not watch the Dick Cavett repeat of a solo interview with Orson Welles because Orson had described Lewis's movie intellect in a disparaging way. So how could I let this opportunity slip by? — Alan Pesin, November 15 | Read full article

Year in Review

The most significant deals that took place in San Diego this year, Richard Spaulding of the Daily Transcript:

1. The buying of U.S. National by Crocker Bank
2. The sale of the Padres (if it goes through)
3. The sale of the 502-unit Plaza Apartment complex in Pacific Beach for over $10 million. (The largest sale of its kind in local history)
4. The sale of USIU campus to Pasadena College and the City of San Diego for $11.4 million (when it becomes final)
5. The Penasquitos, Inc. land “sold’’ by Irvin Kahn to the Teamsters Pension Fund for $22.5 million.
6. The sale of Kearny Industrial Park to a Canadian insurance company for $3.95 million. (11 buildings. 14 acres). The largest sale of its kind in southern California

Where I’ve eaten the best meals of 1973, Neil Morgan:

1. At home
2. La Favorite
3. Bamboo House
4. Nino's
5. The Wine and Food Society Dinner at the Westgate

December 20 | Read full article

1974

New Dog. Old Tricks

The other play is Passionella, a spoof about the artificial personalities of movie actresses and rock stars. Its satirical edge could not cut through whipped cream, but it is quick-moving and sometimes funny in a televisiony way and certainly preferable to, let's say, being dead. — Jonathan Saville, July 4

An Awkward Honeymoon

Mr. Smith is a passionate and impulsive man, aside from being a good musician, and he directed much of his passion and impulsiveness at concert-mistress Nancy Garvey. Every time he took a bow, he would pounce on Miss Garvey and drag her from her seat to share the applause, as the same time madly beckoning the rest of the orchestra to rise, like Zarathustra summoning the sunrise. On two or three occasions, returning from the wings, he pounced on her from behind. grabbing at her elbow and virtually lifting her erect - apparently a rather startling experience for Miss Garvey, who never quite seemed to get used to it. — Jonathan Saville, May 2

If NASA Only Knew about Sunrise Hills

Mrs. Ruth Norman used to be "in the restaurant business" in Pasadena. She met her husband, Dr. Ernest Norman, at a church meeting in 1954 and since that time has helped him make tapes and publish books from conversations with the "higher beings." Actually, Dr. and Mrs. Norman had met before, 2000 years ago, when he was Jesus Christ and she was his betrothed, Mary Magdalene. And even before that, when he was the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton and she was his mother Queen Ti; or before that, when he was the Greek teacher Anaxagoras and she his wife; or before that, when they were Osiris and Isis. Talk about deja vu! — Jerry Leverentz, July 25

Mud and Sand

The mudflats sometimes stank at low tide: it wasn't really a bad smell, but a grassy, muddy smell that could be pleasant if you associated it with the kinds of things you did on the mudflats. When tourists and even people who lived in other parts of San Diego saw them, they usually called them sand bars, but nobody in South Mission Beach ever said anything but mudflats. They were very black mud, except for a few areas which never were covered by high tide; these, indeed. were made of sand, but they were still called mudflats. not out of ignorance, but because one of the relationships we had with the mudflats was the clubby right to call them that.

There were several things one did on the mudflats, so that a mention of them was a way of reminding ourselves that we were cool and everybody outside of South Mission was a hick. We called them all hicks, and hickville was everything except the other parts of San Diego. which we called downtown; a person from the government project called Frontier Housing, where the Sports Arena is now, was a hick from downtown, and and so was a person from East San Diego, Mission Hills, Kensington, Lorna Portal, or wherever. If there had been a Clairemont then, somebody from Clairemont who showed up in our section of Mission Bay would have-been the archetypal hick from downtown. I suppose our naive and smug use of these appellations was a cousin to our habit of saying that anybody from Chicago, Omaha, Cleveland, or the like was from back East.

But as I was saying, the mudflats in the southernmost part of Mission Bay in the Forties were many things to us. There was a sort of rite, for instance, which occurred at about the age of first Communion, when one rode for the first time in the stem thwart of a skiff rowed by an older pal all the way over to the mudflats: if there is anyone from those days who can't remember his first giddy step on the oozy, sand-dollar-lined edge of the mudflats, trying not to act too excited while looking across the entire 300 yards of water to his house on Bayside Walk or Dover Court or San Gabriel Place. be must have had a constant surfeit of thrills since that moment, for I can imagine almost nothing that might displace my own memory of the pivotal moment. And then, of course, one day you got to do the rowing, and Eddie or w.:yne or whoever the older guy was didn't even have to tell you he was doing you a favor. You didn't get alarmed when the tide carried you many yards north or south of the point you were aiming for on the mudflats, but you would have if Wayne or Eddie hadn't been there, coolly disregarding your navigational ineptitude; many trips later, you finally asked how he always got where he was going, and with casual sagacity he taught you to line yourself up with houses or trees and aim above or below your destination. depending on the action of the tide. Ludicrously simple, but absolutely cosmic to an eight-year-old.

Keith Robinson, July 11 | Read full article

Up There among the Greats

Anyway, now that KFSD is sold and the purpose of the station has changed, how will that affect the listener?

What will be different, according to Rosenberg, is that "it's going to be the greatest classical station ever. It's like taking a beautiful chick and putting something on her. It's going to be up there among the greats - WFMT in Chicago, KKHI in San Francisco. KFAC in Los Angeles, WQXR in New York ... We're going to get some complaints as we change things. Like moving jazz to the evening and classical to the morning, we got complaints. But our total audience has gone up 50 percent."

John Martin, August 1

A Complete Opera?

I don't think there will ever be a good rock opera. You can't paint the Sistine ceiling with a set or Woolworth watercolors. — Jonathan Saville, September 12

Can Christianity Survive Godspell?

Christianity has been having a hard time since about 1400. Nevertheless, it is a hardy religion, with tremendous emotional appeal, and every time it seems to be totally knocked out it springs up from the mat with renewed pugnacity. It has survived the paganism of the Renaissance; it has survived the rationalist skepticism of the age or enlightenment; it has survived nineteenth century materialism, scientism, Marxism, Darwinism and the higher criticism; it has survived the Russian revolution, Jean-Paul Sartre and molecular biology. The question is whether it can survive Godspell ....

Jesus and one or his clownish pals do a soft-shoe number called "All for the Best." which conveys the idea that it does DOl matter bow much we or anybody else may suffer; however awful things in this world may be, they are part of God's wise plan, and all is for the best. There is admittedly a strong element of this stoical Panglossery in certain kinds of Christian thought - but has it ever before been expressed quite as callously as this?

Jonathan Saville, October 24 | Read full article

Classified Ads

EMERGENCY! Help needed! trailer about to be repainted hit by drunk driver twisting it away from curb and back 4 feet which makes it susceptible to citation by police. Need 4 brawny young men early evening to shove trailer back into place. PAY. Up to 3 beers per helper and maybe more if trailer owner does not diminish present supply too drastically whilst waiting replies to the CALL FOR HELP. Possible Bonus of Exclusive invitation to Dedication of Aspirin Tablet sculpture in Balboa Park. Phone 555-4756. Ask for Hortense.

TO ALL YOU Star Trek freaks: I have only begun to fight. Reader Personals were much better before you guys started to fill it up with your drivel. Watch for my ad next week for the AntiStar Trek Committee, San Diego branch. Hal J.

HAL J. May you rot in Hell! - the Federation Magician. Postscript: Reader ads are not monopolized, so there!

HAL J: As an insignificant peon, not worthy of the recognition of a reputable organization such as the United Federation Of Planets, your inane remark has caused no more than a slight amount of static in communications. However, if you continue these petty disturbances, Starfleet shall be compelled to take firm measures to silence you. Furthermore, you lack intelligence and perception by not realizing that although your ad would be commonplace of most "good old normal" personals, it would still be permitted space among the Reader Personals. Captains Lisa and Kary of the U.S.S. Andrea Doria and Valiant respectively.

Starting Out Early

Rumors fly fast and thick around town about the Copley Press. Especially now, with Jim Copley dead. One Copley employee, obviously trying to emphasize the benevolence of the company he works for, threw out this one: "A lotta people don't realize it, but y'know, Jim Copley had a heart of gold. Someone came to him once to try to sell him an automated paper-delivery machine, one that would deliver newspapers by computer. And you know what he said? He told the guy that he didn't want to see his paperboys lose their jobs, no matter how efficient the machine would've been." — John Martin, May 23 | Read full article

1975

Goodbye, Radical Chic

The first time I saw B.B. was 1967; she was in a white corduroy jockey suit and cap. She reminded me of a 90-pound white rat on speed. Later at an afterparty for Theatre Five in Pacific Beach, Bob Glaudini, the director, threw her over his shoulder and carried her from the theater screaming, "You're all fascists, you live off the rich." I looked to check the response of her husband, San Diego Superior Court Judge Roger S. Ruffin; there was none. A few years ago, Warhol put her in his film he shot on the beach at La Jolla. She appeared in a black Rudy Gemreich bathing suit with top, but she was the first American woman I'd ever seen who didn't shave. The film was not released but B.B. was.

Recently, I interviewed her as she sat among the Bekins boxes as she prepared to evacuate her family from San Diego.

B.B.: I had a perfectly sane life until I was dropped off in front of the Rexall in La Jolla with a box and $60. Perfectly sane and perfectly anonymous, until I married Roger.

W.: I thought it was the other way around. How'd he get to be known as Ruffin the Red?

B.B.: When I met him he was isolated, surrounded by real-estate men and elevator salesmen. You don't have to do much in San Diego to get known. All he did was free a few Black Panthers, who wouldn't steal an apple pie from their mothers. As soon as the movement ended, they started taking drugs; not heroin but pills they get from their family doctors. That's why I'm leaving here. Things get so magnified. All you have to do is nothing and you open San Diego magazine ... B.B. Winsett, B.B. Bright, B.B. Dog or whatever. All they had was Bronowski, Theatre Five and me. First you go social and they invite you to the Jewell Ball, then you go in the theatre and you get rave reviews, then you go into Radical Chic and you are known as Ruffin the Red and B. B. the Comm ... Marxist.

W.: What do you think of La Jolla?

B.B.: This is a youth-oriented town. Everything is youthful, beautiful and blond. It's Fascist. Fascism is very romantic and elegant. The uniforms, the young lieutenant tah, tah, Mick Jagger, the costume. Communism is the dull blue suit, Mao Tse Tung. The Wall Street Journal said that in San Diego you have the ocean on one side, mountains on the other, and lethargy in the middle. One thing they do have here is good heroin. People from N.Y. used to the weak stuff come here and overdose.

W.: You went from radicalism to working for Jack Walsh. Explain yourself.

B.B.: Radicalism meant you didn't want to go to war, so when they got the voluntary army you went back to panty raids. That's what radicalism means to me. I put a whole goddamn bunch of money and ten years of my life into this left wing and where is it? Bastards. They're buying $80,000 houses.

W.: So what did you do in Walsh's office?

B.B.: Jack Walsh called and I had a job.

W.: Like getting a part in a play.

B.B.: Exactly, I got in there and it was a circus. Jack Walsh works harder than any politician in San Diego, a 15-hour day. Bernstein (his aide) had this terrific energy. They were like two children playing with ideas; but they were very serious. Right off I did something wrong. I hit this girl over the head with a purse. She was bragging about how many guys she made it with at Wounded Knee. I figured that if I could remain anonymous then I could get something done. The first week I kept hearing, "She's a commie, she's married to a pinko." But that stopped when they got more socialists in the government.

Winifred, November 1 | Read full article

The Poets of San Diego

Perhaps one of the mediating factors between San Diego and an active poetry scene is demographic. New York is an island, San Francisco is a peninsula thrusting up into cold waters, Paris is a city built on a grid of concentric circles. Somehow the idea of an active artistic community coincides with numbers of people living in close quarters who feel that beyond their city is the wilderness. Beyond San Diego is more San Diego ... or Los Angeles. The tissue of freeways and boulevards, housing tracts, resort parks and split-level living in general carves up the landscape according to algebraic propositions rather than topographic features.

It is also no accident that the life of the arts in the past has depended to a large extent on a sense of a1ienation and resistance. Zurich Dada, after all, was formed by a group of expatriate Europeans fleeing World War I and seeking a neutral country. Paris during the Twenties became a culture of exiles from America and London. And the San Francisco "Beat" movement was established not so much by local writers but by a New York book dealer, a Columbia dropout and a railroad brakeman from Lowell.

Michael Davidson, February 20 | Read full article

Death of a Veteran

Greg's first weeks after Detox were rough. He was nervous, irritable, smoked huge quantities of marijuana trying to settle down. He went to AA meetings every night, except on his wedding anniversary. Finally, he began to make it. His swollen kidneys receded. He looked amazingly better. He became mellow. AA has a phrase, "Easy Does It." Greg put an Easy Does It bumper sticker on his truck. We sat and talked and he was mentally quicker than he'd been in years. I thought he'd make it all the way.

I was leaving town on a camping trip and stopped by Greg's to visit before I split. His wife told me he had laughed all through the copy of the article I had given him to check out. That, and the obvious fact that my friend once more had his shit together made me feel really good. Greg's only bitch was a sore throat (I realize now that his system had been weakened by alcoholic withdrawal); he complained that smoking dope made his inflamed and raw throat ache. It seemed a minor thing. I said goodbye and went to the mountains.

On July 2, 1975, in the early afternoon, Greg went into his upstairs bathroom and locked the door. The sore throat was persistent, he couldn't shake it, and he planned to spend the rest of the day, his day off, in bed. He wanted to beat his cold so that he could party on July Fourth. His throat was so sore, there was no way he could smoke any dope.

At his job he had access to various animal tranquilizers. Animal tranc doesn't necessarily get a person high. It's one of those drugs that simply kills the pain. Sitting on the john, Greg tied off and stuck a needle in his arm. Shortly afterward he fell off the toilet and laid on the cold tile floor, nude and dying. When his wife returned from shopping and had a neighbor break down the door, his body was still warm. It would never be warm again.

— Robert M. Cook, Jr., July 31 | Read full article

Letters

If it were possible to obtain another set of mini-reviews besides your own, then Duncan Shepherd's cynical, snooty, masturbatory paragraphs could be considered a harmless editorial column rather than a misguided service to the community. But such is not the case. J wonder if any Reader readers other than Duncan Shepherd found the humor in M*ASH to be "nauseating" or considered The King of Hearts to be a "moldering confection." Who among your readership knows enough about such obscure references as a "vacant Tunesian landscape" or "Hawks's (movie) his girl Friday of 1940" or the "genteel fiction of Eudora Welty" to make their inclusion any more than typewriter jack-off? In lieu of the service to the community your movie reviews could be, Duncan Shepherd's enormous distance from the gut of his readership can only be thought of as (to use his terminology) "inexcusable." — Steve Austin, Del Mar

Since no new movies turned up to turn my head last week, I find myself with no alibi for further delays in attending to my mail. Letters of this strain have been piling up for a while now, and they've been weighing me down like lint. So, I will take a deep breath and puff, though my heart is not really in it. (a) Steve Austin, while toying with masturbation metaphors, gives us something finn to grab hold of, for he documents his case with a few tangible examples. With these, he has exposed himself. He feels perfectly snug about revealing an indifference to Tunisia (and he misspells it to rub the point in), Hawks's His Girl Friday, and Eudora Welty. If he does not know about them, they surely cannot amount to much. Why, I wonder, does this person read at all? — Duncan Shepherd

I tell them my name is Ernie Klein, I'm 42 years old, and I'm unemployed.

It's the day after Thanksgiving and I'm standing in line at the unemployment office. I'm near the end of my line, and I have a kind of quivering pain in my stomach which kept me from eating breakfast this morning and has been making me wonder lately if maybe I have an ulcer.

Nearly everyone else here is paired up with someone else, talking about their last job, their cars, their children, anything. I prefer to stand alone. In fact, I avoid these people. They're crazy.

Standing in front of me is a short, stout lady with arms like hamhocks. Her nose and chin point to each other. I'm casually interested in a large, dark mole (cancer?) under her ear. A young man, clearly her son, is standing beside her. It's obvious by his short hair and sunglasses that he's home on leave from the service.

"There was these ol boys from a infantry in Frisco," he's telling his mother, "say it tookem twelve hours jesta ketcha flight outa Tokyo. So I askem how cummit tookem so long jesta ketcha flight, and they said cuz there wasn't no flight outa Tokyo. Well know what Mama? When ar outfit pulled inta Tokyo, why they called upa flight rightnow jesta git us out .... is the lines ahways like this?"

It's a long time I have to wait, and after awhile I lose interest in what's around me. This waiting and these people seem so insignificant. I'm sort of lulling myself into a stupor, when I become aware of the strangest odor. It's a kind of soury, stale smell. A rankness. Like an old mop. I'm repulsed by the smell, yet curious. I start wondering where the hell it's coming from ... and then I begin to realize ... it's been here the whole time. In fact, it's here every time I come. Only I was never exactly aware of it before. What it is, is the smell of these people. People who are out of work ... and maybe even like it that way. It's the smell of people who don't eat breakfast. Who drink beer all day long. Drink coffee all day long. Drink wine all night long. Maybe it's even the smell of someone who has a house full of kids in underwear drinking Pepsi all day. Maybe it's the smell of someone who has two dead cars parked on the front lawn. One dead dog on the back lawn. One half-dead body under them. Maybe it's the smell of someone who has yellow teeth. Rotten teeth. No teeth.

I'm getting nauseous.

It's the smell of the appliance salesman who stammers. The janitor who's indifferent to filth. The mechanic who stammers. The farmworker who can't get up early. The beautician with split-ends and bad skin. The teacher who's ignorant. The carpenter without a pickup. The lineman with a potbelly. The student who's learned nothing after all. The South Viet Namese in America.

I laugh out loud when I see that it's the smell of every useless mutation. It's an appendix. Tonsils. A rooster's comb. A mule's sex. A bat's eyes. It's a dog's thumb, and a cat with six toes. It's a woman's mustache. It's the World Football League. Any Buick!

— Steve Sorensen, November 27 | Read full article

Classifieds

DID PROMETHEUS flick his Bic? Does Eros wear an Arrow shirt? For answers on these and other matters, contact Delphi.

WAS ATHENA THE FIRST daughter to give her dad a splitting headache? Did Mercury found the Quicksilver Messenger Service? Delphi knows.

DELPHI: Nobody likes a smart oracle. Persephone is complaining about the tour you booked - too wann this time of year. Shape up! Apollo.

PHOEBUS APOLLO: Why are you criticizing your own oracle? After all, I didn't direct her to the local pomegranate stand. Yours in prophecy, the Pythia.

WAS ACTAEON a real dear person who went to the dogs? Is Callisto unbearable? Come to Delphi, centre of the world, the oracle is in.

SHOULD ORPHEUS have had a back-up group instead of going solo? Did PygmaIion graduate from buiIding better mousetraps to building something better?

IS IT TRUE Cronus can't believe he ate the "whole" family? Did Adonis meet a crashing (through the woods) boat'! Delphi is very long distance.

1976

She's No Mother Tums

They tell tales, in the back rooms and archives and lecture halls of the anthropological world, of one John Peabody Harrington, linguist. Now that a comfortable fifteen years have elapsed since his death, they delight in his. maniacal dedication to his work. Example: Harrington was pulling on a billy goat's ears in a very painful manner. The billy goat was protesting. A passerby asked him, "Harrington, what in God's name are you doing?" Harrington, however, continued pulling, and the billy goat continued protesting. Finally, when the passerby was about to burst with curiosity, Harrington sighed rapturously, "Isn't that the most perfect umlaut you've ever heard?"

— Rachel Flick, January 22 | Read full article

A Moby Grape Survivor

Spending New Year’s Eve in National City’s Harold’s Club wasn’t my idea of a good time. Packed elbow to torso with servicemen who danced with cigarettes jutting from their lips and the West Pac widows who sat on barstools with moist Bud bottles in their hands and staring off into the club’s smokey red tinted atmosphere, I spent the entire evening safe in my seat rubbing knees with those I came with. I felt like a vegetarian in a steakhouse.

After a while, I started paying attention to the band Gopher Broke, a group that rattled off dispassionate versions of current chart toppers. The bassist looked familiar, and after some squinting I remember who it was, Bob Mosley.

Ted Navin Burke, January 29 | Read full article

Rendezvous with Marilyn

Last Saturday night at 8:00 p.m., Marilyn Chambers, Marilyn Chambers, star of Behind the Green Door and Resurrection of Eve, appeared naked at the Capri Theater, answering questions and promoting her most recent film, Inside Marilyn Chambers, advertised in the progressive Union-Tribune under the title The Marilyn Chambers Story. General admission was $4. Senior citizens were admitted for $2. — Robert Moreau, February 5 | Read full article

A Kingdom Bought and Sold

There was a wild-haired lunatic. He stomped around in paratrooper boots, carried an eight-inch hunting knife on his belt and was constantly being stopped by the local police because of his similarity to a local dime-store bandit. He was one of these guys who has to shave maybe three, four times a day not to look like one of the Beagle Boys in Donald Duck comics. And he did it too, rather than, as he put it, “be another damn bum with a beard.” He was very partial to cats, and one time when a mother was run over by a car minutes after dropping her litter, he bought sweet milk and a little toy baby bottle and nursed them himself. His lunacy was not the effect of drug or drink. In fact he swore them both off — but was natural. On Saturday night he would put on a white shirt, slick back his hair, and show up at parties with a briefcase of Urantia books under his arm like some kind of Bible salesman. He believed in Urantia, but I suspect he also used it as a tool to meet the ladies.

And the ladies! There was this girl... the perfect beauty. She had a face like a cat, green eyes, long limbs, but she never spoke a word. She laughed often enough, but it’s hard to say at what. She was rarely seen wearing anything but a bikini, but wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about her alarming good looks. They say her father was an embezzling accountant who dragged his family all over the West as he worked his scam from town to town, until the beauty made her escape to Encinitas. They say her father is looking for her still.

Steve Sorensen, Dec. 9 | Read full article

Lost In Logan Heights

Not Vincente. He doesn’t have anything to celebrate, at least not in the way of tassles. scholarships. and congratulations from proud parents. Tonight's graduation night for St. Augustine High, the school ’Cente has attended for four years. But after six months of spray-paint sniffing sessions, the only diploma 'Cente has to show is a blank one. and the only congratulation he has gotten is an eviction notice from his foster father.

So here ’Cente sits, on the top of his smashed-up Vega, huffing copper paint, downing a few reds, and staring half-dazed into the ocean. He and three of his friends from Los Hermanos came out to. South Mission because they heard some of their partners from Shelltown were throwing a beach party. But now, all they see around them is a bunch of puto looking white dudes.

“After I didn’t graduate from high school, I used to just jive with the boys constantly. We were all pretty young then, so it was easy to find stuff to do. We used to go sniffing up at St. Jude’s church, try to pull on broads, or go jump white dudes. I did this all summer. It was the best time of my life."

“But it was really different in San Diego four years ago. I had more fun in those days. There were a buncha clubs — Los Hermanos. Zapata, Nosotros, Brown Image, all kinds of clubs. And everyone was closer then. There was more happening. Dances and parties. Now it’s like everyone I hung out with before is too old. they all got kids and jobs at National Steel.”

’Cente even looks upon the old ghetto territorial imperative sentimentally.

“Logan Heights is supposedly divided up into territories. Shell- town. which stretches from 43rd and Highland all the way to Wabash and National and from Division to Imperial. After that comes Logan and that goes from the stoplights at Wabash all the way up to 25th and Imperial, and from Main Street to Ocean View. There’s Sherman, from 25th and Imperial up to Broadway. Then there’s OTNC. which is the old part of National City, down by 13th Street. That’s Gato territory. They were supposed to be the meanest dudes, the baddest gang, but I never seen them. I think they’re just like a vato boogieman. Watch out or else the Gato's gonna get you!”

Steve Esmedina, March 11 | Read full article

The High and the Low of San Diego Sports

The bare bottom of San Diego sport is epitomized by the face of Canadian entrepreneur and Sports Arena operator Peter Graham. This contemptuous double-dealer is the best case yet for confiscatory inheritance taxes. He presently controls San Diego's indoor sports destiny, only because his ancestors placed their millions in self-perpetuating family trusts. Graham has stripped San Diego of its professional indoor sports credibility with his selfaggrandizing and unhappily successful efforts to keep major sports teams out of his (sic) arena unless he can own them himself. If the San Clemente checkpoint patrol wants to make a case for its continued existence. it ought to pull over Graham one day and begin deportation proceedings to Canada. — Alan Pesln, July 15

Nay-Saying

"I'd like to see you hire a new film reviewer! He is too down on everything!" (Betty Jo Bums)

"The doom and negativism of his reviews are ... depressing. C'mon Dune, don't be such a grump." (Shannon Bailey)

"Duncan Shepherd sucks! Can't you get rid of him? I'm really sick of his boring negativism! I have a master's degree, and I've been a teacher, a P.R. person, and a management consultant. I've also traveled worldwide and I'm 34." (Anne Ames)

The recent swell of letters to the editor (printable and, mostly, unprintable) on the subject of my sourness, or sore-headedness, or however it's diagnosed, has reached a point where it seems advisable for me to step forward and say something conciliatory before the grumblers out there band together and show up on the doorstep with battering ram and lynch rope. Now, I'm not in the habit of rationalizing my behavior, and I don't intend to cultivate the habit until I've taken care of a few others of higher priority (changing the oil in my car every 3000 miles, visiting the dentist twice yearly, and balancing the checkbook at the end of each month). But in order to attack some of the common attitudes that seem to block and snag the reader's understanding of a movie reviewer's job, I'm willing to do a little light gardening work, pruning, weeding, rooting up.... Negativism in a movie reviewer is to a large extent a matter of proportion, and consequently a matter of circumstance. And a cold statistical calculation of negativism is readily misleading. (A man may come up to me and deliver a deft soccer-style kick to the shins. "How do you like that?" he tests me. Not very much, I shrug. He drills his finger tips sharply into my solar plexus. "Take that." I'd rather not, I decline, Offended, he spits In my face. "And that?" My face goes ashen. "What's the matter with you?" he cries, echoing the sentiment I hear approximately every week of my sorry existence. "Don't you like anything?") Put me on a strict diet, two weeks long, of OW, Griffith films, for example, and I would be almost as cheerful as Helen Gurley Brown, Joe Garagiola, or Hubert Humphrey, But how much fulfillment can a movie reviewer be expected to find in the narrow mainstream of American commercial movies which, with few exceptions, fill the theaters of San Diego? — Duncan Shepherd

Hillcrest

Clean and white under bougainvillea, Wanda's house was the joy of her life, When she found it four years ago, she thought she might never move again. She took out three-year subscriptions to magazines. She had personal stationery printed. She bought tools and a garden hose, started a savings account, looked at brand-new couches.

The cottage was situated behind a stately, two-story house - the kind that makes you think of a country judge, though it was owned by an engineer in the city. He told Wanda one day that her cottage must have been a servant's quarters, and she clapped her hands together and laughed, A servant's quarters! This was the house that had saved her from that. She would never be anyone's servant. She remembered opening the screen door for the first time and seeing the abbreviated living room and thinking: "One house for one person." It was as though the spirit of a former servant were speaking to her, telling her plainly that the ideal society is one in which everyone has one plate and washes it.

"You've only got one plate," Harry said over his first breakfast with Wanda.

"Yes," she said. "I've been meaning to get another for months."

— Joe Applegate, December 2 | Read full article

Open the Doors, See All the People

In a raspy voice that fluttered like a hummingbird, she described how it was: "I came here from New Orleans and Calexico with my husband over forty years ago. In those days, we called San Diego the 'Mississippi of the West.' People here didn't have time for people like me. There weren't enough of us to matter. You could count the number of colored folk on the fingers of one hand and still have a couple fingers left. My husband, he was a half-breed. There was a lot of half-breeds in New Orleans when I was a child. And we all spoke French. Ships from all over the world docked in New Orleans, and that was all right, too. We were just the human race.

"Four of my children died in five years. But we got over it. Times went by. We went on ....

"I believe it was because of my mother dying that I started Christ the King Church. After I got it all started, something happened that hurt me very much. It cut me deep. It was like on the train when the white folks would make us dance a jig to the gun. For years I taught the little children their catechisms. I'd walk blocks and blocks, instead of riding the bus, so I could save a dime for a prize to give to the child who did the best.

"Because of my classes, the bishop got interested in putting a church down here, and so they finally built Christ the King Church to take care of all the new Catholics who I'd taught for all these years. Here, look at this picture. Do you see what happened? All the white people - the priests and the nuns and those society women - they crowded up and got their picture taken for the newspaper, while somebody else kept me busy back here so I wouldn't be in the picture. I was the only colored person there, but they managed to keep me out of the paper and take all the credit themselves. Sure they did. So I just went off to one side and stood by myself.

"Then they took the Mardi Gras away from me. My husband and I put up the money, year after year. I'd make over 200 uniforms for the children from skin of satin every year. Oh, it was wonderful. But then one year, this white man took me aside and said, 'Mrs. Picou, there's some important people coming down this year to the organizing meeting, and there just won't be enough room for you at the meeting: I was just struck dumb.

I walked away from her, and oh God, it would have been nice to walk and walk for miles until I came upon a muddy, shall I say, stagnant slough of water. I would've walked so far that I'd just lay down in the water and go to sleep."

Richard Louv, September 23 | Read full article

Naked Came the Strangers

A hang-glider cruises low over the beach, his huge shadow startling sunbathers, awakening sleepers. He finds a break in the bodies, swoops, and lands. He unstraps himself, takes off his helmet, then his clothes. Someone hands him a beer, and he gets lost in the mass of nude bodies.

This place, Black's Beach, is a tourist attraction. There's maybe 2000 people on the beach on a Sunday and that many again milling around on the cliffs trying to get a glimpse of the action. They want to see the nude volleyballers frolicking like kids at summer camp, the nude grandmother helping her nude granddaughter build a sand castle. They want to see the nude bodybuilders doing push-ups in the surf, the pudgy bald men lying nude on their backs while they squint to read magazines held at arm's length, the merry family of four playing nude Frisbee. They want to see nude surfers, pink from the cold, thrashing with arms and legs to slip into waves, and of course, the nude meat-andpotato Marines roaming around in loud restless packs.

— Steve Sorensen, April 29 | Read full article

San Diego Overview

san diego, lyrics: mr. history looks down on the city

i don’t want you to think san diego sounds funny. i don’t understand why the most powerful feeling this city evokes, at sunset, a sort of Grand Calm, never appears in any of my descriptions. let me try to capture it: with indeterminate vistas of lines, all flat perpendicular covered with soft shimmering air and a patina of indistinct sounds, the center city lies quiet. la jolla draws the jewels of attention to its exotic plants and stores, san diego is only as palpable as the curled light which rises from it, at night it dies, slowly. i want to qualify, but if i do it will turn trivial or sarcastic. the heirloom of a watering place at the end of the desert must be accounted. it isn’t the style, the taste, the accoutrements of trying to be happy in a city that must be described, but rather the fact that anything exists here at all, and the form that assertion takes, imposition on the land has settled, the dust has settled, it is superbly still. we breathe heavy, moist breath. i don’t even want to touch you. pale violet is the primary color, ice blue on its border. something is hot somewhere but not necessarily now, and the sun will be hot enough in the morning.

Jeff Weinstien, Dec. 9 | Read full article

Bull o' the Woods

Up in the hills outside Leucadia, above the ocean, not far from where the flower fields are spread out along Old Highway 101, there's a grove of eucalyptus trees with a maze of dirt roads running in and out of it. A woman cruises these roads in a battered International pickup. She has a cigarette arching from her lip. Her sleeves are rolled up above her biceps. One elbow rests out the window. She has a cup of coffee sloshing between her legs, and there’s a scowlish grin on her face. Her name is Audrey, and she runs a woodcutting outfit in these hills.

Audrey’s tough. She doesn’t take nothin' from no one. She keeps her hair slicked back, wears black Can't Bust 'Ems, and a dirty white workshirt. She doesn't have breasts-or at least you can't see them-and instead of anything looking like a figure, she sports a proud, union-looking beerbelly. She's tough all right, but she doesn't talk tough, doesn't have to; in fact, talks in a kind of nice, sympathetic voice, like a good-guy foreman.

What Audrey does is thin out the mature trees on this land, buck them into 16-inch lengths, and sell them, by the cord to woodyards. Or else she splits them, dries them, and sells them herself; there’s more money in it this way, but it takes longer, and it requires a yard to dry them in. Either way, firewood brings a good price in San Diego County.

Audrey owns a pickup, a half-dozen smoke-beiching chainsaws, a 3/4 ton stakeside, sledges, and wedges. She doesn't do the work herself; she’s the bull o' the woods, and a bull needs a crew. So she hires North County surfers down on their luck - and that includes a lot of surfers in the fall and winter months.

Steve Sorensen, March 4 | Read full article

North Park from My Window

From the window by my desk I can see a sign advertising an auto dealership. I can also see it from the bedroom window, the kitchen window, and the rear balcony. Actually, to merely say that I can use it understates the matter; dominates my view would be more accurate. It soars well over one hundred feet into the air, illuminated by thousands of yellow and turquoise bulbs. About half of them blink. If its offensiveness weren't so imposing, it might be amusing in a perverse sort of way. Unfortunately, whatever value it may have as a first-rate specimen of garish design is utterly lost on me. I am forced to live with the thing. Day and night it permeates, standing guard over its four-wheeled kingdom.

Elliot Swill, December 2 | Read full article

1977