“The big sheepshead stayed off in the distance, as if they were too proud to struggle for food with the riffraff kelp bass, buttermouth perch, and señoritas.”
- One of the oddest of these noises, an irregular bumping sound heard frequently in the rocks and ridges off the beaches from the La Jolla Caves south to Bird Rock, had been a disconcerting mystery to me for fifteen years. Then about three weeks ago, while free-diving (without the aid of compressed-air tanks) near the Children’s Pool off La Jolla, this little mystery began to unravel. Dropping fifteen feet down to a ridge fringed with eel grass, I noticed that the startling bumping sound seemed to be coming from inside the ridge.
- By Neal Matthews, Aug. 11, 1988
The future of Scripps Howard will soon be in the hands of the twenty-eight heirs of Robert Scripps.
- Sixty-six years ago, Edward Wyllis Scripps, the premier newspaper baron of nineteenth-century America, sat aboard his yacht the Ohio, which lay in the still waters off Jacksonville, Florida. On that day in 1922, he took pen in hand and deprived all but one of his children of the legacy of his vast media empire. By then his relationship |with his wife and family had so deteriorated that he was forced to desert Rancho Miramar, the sprawling 2100-acre ranch he had blasted out of the dusty scrub country north of San Diego.
- By Matt Potter, April 7, 1988
Leonard spends most of his time working on a kind of Christian Mt. Rushmore.
- The roosters start at exactly 4:52 a.m. At first it’s just one restless old bird grumping about the long winter night. But before long, his rabble-rousing has stirred every chicken within a mile of town. By 5:00 a.m. the place sounds like the Chicken Tabernacle Choir, and nobody in Slab City can sleep. At least nobody with his hearing aid on.
- By Steve Sorensen, March 10, 1988
"My wife's a terrific mom, meanwhile, to the boys ... but no, she’s no mere housewife, no Stepford Wife, no lobotomy case...”
- What?! Can this be right? Actual, literal Q and A with R * O * G * E * R H * E * D * G * E * C * O * C * K, who you thought would rather lose his dingus than submit to another, ulp, ordeal by newsprint??? Yup, that’s right: not a bluff, nor ploy, nor “yellow journalistic” slight of copy. Your eyes, and this newssheet, deceive you not. The real “thing,” daddy-o!
- By Richard Meltzer, March 24, 1988
Gerarldo Rivera talk show taping, Nov. 3, 1988, John put San Diego in the national news. Metzger called Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, an “Uncle Tom.”
- "My father was in the Crusaders, a national organization that was pretty powerful in San Diego, which was part Christian Identity. It’s a church which espouses the doctrine that whites are the chosen people and that no one else fits into the agenda. It was a street-action-oriented church, somewhat related to what Reverend [Dorman] Owens did with abortion. They were religious, but they were out there in the streets. They were anti-Catholic."
- By Abe Opincar, Nov. 10, 1988
Mission San Luis Rey. "She was never in Ramona! She was in San Diego and went out to San Luis Rey and traveled up to Hemet and Riverside, but she never came through here."
- During late winter and early spring of every year, a bit of confusion reigns up north in the town of Ramona. The folks at the chamber of commerce there get a rash of long-distance phone calls and upwards of twenty-five letters a day — many of them with checks enclosed — from people all over the nation who want to buy tickets to the Ramona Outdoor Pageant, which they believe to be held each spring in the town of Ramona.
- By Roger Anderson, Sept. 29, 1988
"When I was twelve, I started my newspaper career, writing social news about all our neighbors for the Ramona Sentinel.”
- We stood outside her Mission Hills home. She nodded toward a two-story house half a block uphill and said, "That was my father’s house." She led the way down stone steps set into a steep incline, toward her own house. Halfway down the steps, she stopped, looked back over her shoulder, and laughed. "Last Sunday we tried to have a party here. But our friends are too old. They couldn't manage these steps. We moved the party to our daughter's place."
- By Judith Moore, June 30, 1988
Hannibal spent five months in the Descanso detention facility, and although he’d had many friends in the police department, not one of them visited or contacted him.
- Now that he’s out of jail, off probation, and living contentedly in Vista, former San Diego vice squad officer Bob Hannibal can finally talk publicly about the job that precipitated his downfall. He says that going to jail was “the best thing that ever happened to me. It turned my life around. I became sober; it saved my marriage; I learned to communicate; I learned to be an individual and not a cop."
- By Neal Matthews, Sept. 22, 1988