Only 25-35 percent of the candidates who enter SEAL training at Coronado graduate.

WITH A LOW WHINE the plane began its descent toward San Diego, skimming in over the roofs of the highest buildings. Graves didn’t much like San Diego. It was a utilitarian town dominated by the needs of the Navy, which ran it with a firm, conservative hand. Even its sins were dreary: the downtown area was filled with bars, pool halls, and porno movie houses which advertised “Beaver films — direct from Frisco!” as if San Francisco were six thousand miles away and not just an hour up the coast. Fresh-faced sailors wandered all over the downtown area looking for something to do. They never seemed to understand that there was nothing to do. Except, possibly, to get drunk.

John Lange Binary 1972

AT THE VISITOR INFORMATION CENTER I learn that seventeen million people a year visit San Diego, to play, to swim, to surf, to bask, to dine, to see the Air and Space Museum (Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was designed and tested here), to walk through the world’s largest zoo....

I try to break this down to some manageable number. It roughs out to fifty thousand people per day. Plus a thousand new residents per week....

I ... meet a young fellow in Santa Barbara who grew up in La Jolla.... Slender, blond, well tanned, he is one of those athlete/diplomats who can surf well and also get himself into law school. His college room is filled with surfing trophies, small statues of golden men crouched on the slopes of golden waves, while his bookshelves are crammed with volumes such as Coastline in Crisis, Protecting the Golden Shore, Citizens Guide to the California Coastal Act of 1976.... As for his hometown, where beachfront property can sell for a million or more, he does not think he will ever be able to live there.

“It has just changed too much. It isn’t what it used to be. It’s like L.A. In fact, it is L.A. That’s how I see it now, everything from Ventura to the border, it is all L.A.”

“When did this happen?”

I ask him. “When did you personally start to feel it?”

“There had always been a two-story building limit along the beaches. After that was lifted, the first thing that went in was a highrise hotel, right where Mission Beach turns into Pacific Beach. There had been highrises ' downtown, but never anything built right near where I was living. This was just about the time it was in the papers that San Diego was passing San Francisco to become the second-largest city in the state. I was in high school, and I thought it was just great that now we had our own hotel and this meant we were going to be a big city Actually it was the beginning of the end. Three more have gone in there since then. On weekends the whole area is hopelessly congested. Now I see how my first reaction represents one of the misconceptions we all are raised on – that progress is good, and bigger is better. It makes me think of people I used to know who would rip off their younger brothers and sisters by trading them pennies for dimes. The pennies were bigger, so the young kids automatically figured they were worth more.”

“What will you do?” 1 ask him. “Where do you think you will live?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe I will head for New Zealand. Maybe I will stay here and fight it. Somebody has to fight it.”

James D. Houston Californians 1982

"THE FBI IS DEAD SERIOUS. Why else would the Director himself meet with me, an insignificant rookie lawyer from Memphis, in fifteen-degree weather on a concrete park bench? He’s assigned five agents in Memphis and three in Washington, and he said they’ll spend whatever it takes to get the firm. So if I keep my mouth shut, ignore them and go about my business of being a good and faithful member of Bendini, Lambert & Locke, one day they’ll show up with arrest warrants and haul everybody away.

"And if I choose to cooperate, you and I will leave Memphis in the dead of the night after I hand the firm to the feds, and we’ll go off and live in Boise, Idaho, as Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Gates. We’ll have plenty of money, but we’ll have to work to avoid suspicion. After my plastic surgery, I’ll get a job driving a forklift in a warehouse, and you can work part-time at a day care. We’ll have two, maybe three kids and pray every night that people we have never met keep their mouths shut and forget about us. We'll live every hour of every day in morbid fear of being discovered.”

“That’s perfect, Mitch, just perfect.” She was trying hard not to cry.

He smiled and glanced around the room. “We have a third option. We can walk out that door, buy two tickets to San Diego, sneak across the border and eat tortillas for the rest of our lives.”

“Let’s go.”

But they’d probably follow us. With my luck, Oliver Lambert will be waiting in Tijuana with a squad of goons.

It won’t work.”

John Grisham The Firm 1991

HISTORICALLY ONLY 25 TO 35 PERCENT of the candidates who enter Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training at Coronado endure the program’s intense physical and emotional demands and graduate. Quitting is made diabolically simple: a recruit need only walk into the school’s courtyard and ring a brass bell three times, no questions asked.

One might think the difference between a successful aerobics instructor and a more successful BUD/S instructor is the leverage bar of military sadism. In my first few days at Coronado, though, the instructors I observed were less abusive than the average high school football coach and far more positive.... The instructor most often discussed was Bobby Richardson; better known to his students as the Anti-Christ. One morning I arrived on the beach at 5:15 a.m. — slightly late, unfortunately, to participate in a four-mile run (sub seven-minute miles), but just in time to hear Richardson for the first time. A student (an Annapolis graduate, so he had to be called “sir” by the instructors) had also arrived late, so now, at Richardson’s request, he was sitting fully clothed in the water.

“What happens when we’re late, sir?”

“We get to enjoy the water, Instructor Richardson!” “Is the water nice, sir?” “Hoo-YAH, Instructor Richardson.”

“Sir, I have had four cups of fucking coffee and I’m like a fucking wild man. Piss me off again and I’ll show you why SEAL-fucking training is the roughest military training on planet-fucking Earth. I’ll bet you laid around in bed listening to the surf report at the Wedge.”

“We’re going surfing at the Wedge this weekend. Instructor Richardson.”

“AND YOU DIDN’T INVITE ME?”

“I was going to invite you, Instructor Richardson, I really was —”

“Sir, I have personally busted my ass for you, and you don’t even invite me to go surfing?”

“I was going to loan you my boogie board —”

“BOOGIE BOARD? That really hurts, sir. Now you’ve gone and broke my fucking heart.”

Randy Wayne White Batfishing in the Rainforest 1991

IN THE SAME INSTANT the music on the cab’s radio cut out and an announcer who was obviously out of breath came on the air.

“We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. In an emergency message the San Diego Naval Base reported the landing of the Karkong monster in southern California’s Balboa Park Area only a few minutes ago. The message was interrupted by power failure. No estimate of casualties or property damage has yet been made. This is an authentic newscast. Repeat, this is an authentic newscast.” Collins and Kovsky stared numbly at one another. Then they listened as America got its first small shock; its first minute experience with the breakdown of form and everyday radio etiquette. The announcer said: “Oh, my God!” Then, “A report has just come in ...” He stumbled, then began again.-“Half of San Diego is in flames. We can’t get any more out of the area now, but will you please stand by? We’ll get what we can to you just as soon as we make contact again.” ...

Collins slid into the seat slowly, then let his face fall in his hands. “Dear Lord,” he said. “What really happened down there? How bad did they catch it?”...

Every ship that was anchored or moored in San Diego that night had a different account of what happened entered in its log. But there were two points upon which they all agreed. The first was that sometime between 2110 and 2115 hours a nebulous mass was seen to pass over the base heading northwest toward Balboa Park. The second thing was that every ship generator went stone dead at exactly the same time that the lights in the city went out....

Allen A. Adler Mach 1 1957

A FEW NIGHTS AGO during an intermission at Avery Fisher Hall, a friend in the next seat asked if in the pursuit of participatory journalism I had ever conducted a symphony orchestra....

I explained that I had been invited to conduct the San Diego Symphony as part of the festivities to raise money for local public broadcasting. They wanted me to prepare Leonard Bernstein’s overture to Candide....

“The conductor was a guy named David Atherton, British-born, very serious.... He just wanted me to rehearse the overture with the orchestra. No fooling around. So a half hour before the public performance, he took me out to the podium and introduced me to his musicians. He handed me the baton — the stick, musicians call it — and left for the wings....

“Frankly, I thought my rendition was fairly true to the Candide I had played endlessly on my Walkman. But when Mr. Atherton came striding back onstage, I noticed his expression was grim. He stepped up on the podium and took the stick away from me — a somewhat inconsiderate gesture, I thought. Looking out at his musicians, he said as follows: 'You will be playing the overture before the public in twenty minutes or so. I want you to do something quite against the grain for orchestral musicians.’ He made a slight gesture toward me. ‘Do not look at this man.

I told [my friend] that I meekly followed [Atherton] down to his dressing room....

“He then told me what to do,” I continued. “He handed me back the stick and said that he wanted me to start [the orchestra] off. But after that, I should make no sudden movements for that

would throw them off. After the downbeat,’ he said, I want you to writhe. Writhe like a cobra.’ God, he was serious. ‘Just writhe,’ he kept saying.”

George Plimpton “Overture for Imposter” Esquire ‘May 1992

I GOT TO SAN DIEGO shortly before noon. The Trask house on Bayview Avenue stood near the base of Point Loma, overlooking North Island and the bay. It was a solid hillside ranchhouse with a nicely tended lawn and flowerbeds.

I knocked on the front door with an iron knocker shaped like a seahorse. No answer. I knocked and waited, and tried the knob. The door didn’t open....

I went back to my car, which I’d parked diagonally across the street, and settled down to wait. The house was ordinary enough, but some-I how it gripped my attention. The traffic of the harbor and the sky, ferries and fishing boats, planes and gulls, all seemed to move in relation to it.

Ross MacDonald The Goodbye Look 1969

IN DENVER WE [THE RAIDERS] always stayed at the Continental Hotel and we always beat Denver and we always won our division championship. I guess the Denver management... has some superstitious blood in them because they took over the Continental and moved us out. The team never really liked staying there anyway. It was an old, cinder block building, drafty and cold, and not my idea of upper-middle-class living. But [Raider managing general partner] A1 Davis insisted that we beat Denver because we stayed at the Continental. This past season, when Denver took over the hotel, A1 fought to keep us there, but the management of the place said we had to go. Last season Denver beat us twice and won the Division title for the first time in the history of their club. A1 Davis went around scowling at everyone and saying, “I told you so!”

I didn’t believe in that sort of witchcraft, but then we went to San Diego for a game. Strange things started to happen. In the past we stayed at the Star Dust Motel [sic] and the Chargers hadn’t beaten us in sixteen games.

As a matter of fact, San Diego couldn’t muster enough points on the scoreboard to make the games respectable. But this past season, for some unknown reason, the Chargers’ general staff decided to move their team into the Star Dust and they shifted us over to the Hylanda [sic]. 1 don’t know if superstition spurred the move or not but we were quartered on the other side of town and San Diego had our winning motel.

A1 Davis and [Raider head coach] John Madden were upset over the deal, but it didn’t shake up any of the players. We still went on with a normal pregame night (five wild parties) and showed up at the stadium early Sunday afternoon in time for the kick-off. The game was simply unbelievable. The Chargers won, 12-10. After that experience, every member on the team started to avoid stepladders, black cats, and new hotels. Every pregame burp and sneeze became a new ritual.

Jack Tatum with Bill Kushner They Call Me Assassin 1979

THE ROOM WAS SILENT except for traffic noises — the growlings of cars and the rattlings of trucks as they traveled up Fifth Avenue, and from a few blocks north sounded the belligerent streetcar bells of downtown San Diego. He slipped his arms into the shirt he found piled on the dresser top and buttoned it while he studied his face in the contorted mirror surface. Red-rimmed eyes above an unshaven chin stared back at him. The broadness of his face escaped sheer ugliness by the highness of his cheekbones and the strong arch of his nose....

Max Thursday glanced down the wide carpeted corridor that led to the front door of the Tower Bowl. It was dark on Broadway now and the street lights and neon signs glowed fuzzily on the wet sidewalks. He gulped down the last few sips in the glass of 7-Up and swung off the lunch counter stool.

The thunder of bowling balls in two dozen alleys was out of place in the artificial daylight of the Tower. The noise belonged out in the night with the rain. Thursday returned the borrowed stub of pencil to the girl at the registration counter. She smiled. “Bowl a couple frames, sir? Relax the nerves.”

He discovered the muscles in his face were pulled tight. Somehow he managed a chuckle. “No, thanks. Got a date with a boat.” He went down the carpeted corridor to the street.

Balled in his right fist were two napkins covered with writing. Questions. Questions he couldn’t answer. Thursday angrily flung the wad of paper into the swollen gutter. He stalked down Broadway dodging around sailors and their girls, keeping abreast of the floating napkins until they sank....

Thursday continued striding west, toward the waterfront. Watchfully, he passed the stern front of the Huggins Building. The Spagnoletti offices were just as dark as the rest of the windows. The monster bulk of the United airliner thundered overhead, plunging toward Lindbergh Field.

Right on Harbor Drive. Past the baseball park. Coast Guard cutters sighed against the sea wall as they bounced in the jagged waters. The boulevard curved gently to the left, encircling the harbor. Past the flood-lighted modern hulk of the Civic Center....

Thursday shivered and kept his eyes squinted at the misty waters. There were no government ships here. The shallows were dotted with tiny single-masted hulls. Their cabin windows were dark. This was the tuna fleet.

Wade Miller Guilty Bystander 1947

THE MAKERS OF SAN DIEGO could, and did, glory in the town’s possession of 20,000 inhabitants in the year 1905. Counting tourists and Mexican laborers there may have been something more than 30,000 people within the spacious pueblo limits in August, 1909. Then and there it was solemnly proposed that a World’s Fair in San Diego would be a fitting celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915, as well as an enterprise becoming to the growing ambitions and importance of the town as the first Pacific port of call in United States territory. Honesty compels the confession that the chief material assets of the city at that time consisted of the large and handsome bay harbor, in much the same stage of development and commercial use as when Father Junipero Serra founded the Spanish Mission and town in 1769....

Jerre C. Murphy MSan Diego’s Evolutionary Exposition” Colliers December 5,1914

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