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La Jolla plumber flew narcotics for contras

Early days of Lamb's Players, Reader writer tries stoop labor, Brute Krulak, Palomar Mountain rescue, Hale telescope, an early panda hunter, Camp Pendleton, TJ torture, Caliente's owner

(1) Delgado Ranch, San Felipe. Owned by murderer of DEA agent
(1) Delgado Ranch, San Felipe. Owned by murderer of DEA agent
  • I ran drugs for Uncle Sam .

  • Fifty-two-year old Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, who has lived in the San Diego area off and on since 1976, has decided to come forward with the details of his work as a pilot in Central America during the time the U.S. government was secretly arming the Nicaraguan contras. From 1979 to 1986, between his assignments – ferrying cargo and people into the jungles of Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, sometimes returning to the U.S. with shipments of cocaine and marijuana – Plumlee has a blue-collar job in San Diego.
  • By Neal Matthews, April 5, 1990
Prayer before performance. The members prayed for themselves. Three turned to God for more patience in time of stress.
  • Everybody onstage for the forgiveness and reconciliation number

  • Lamb's Players is not in the same league as the big regional companies, the Old Globe, the La Jolla Playhouse, and the San Diego Rep, with their out-of-town guest artists and subsidized summer seasons. But it has come to be regarded as one of the best locals and has done so with a full-time core group of only a dozen artists, most of whom have houses, families, and a commitment to making their careers not only in theater but in this theater.
  • By Joe Applegate, March 15, 1990
Who gave you permission to work here? I hired 20 guys for this block. I see 21. Nobody hired you.” “No, I just wanted to see what the work is like. I’m writing a story.”
  • A spear in the dirt

  • At exactly 2:00 a.m., I line up in front of the buses with the others. Some hardly spare me a glance; others take in my fatigue shirt, L.A. Angels baseball cap, black Levis, and week’s growth of beard and clock me for a gringo right away. To an Anglo, I could have passed; but to a Mexican, I might as well be Pat Boone.
  • By John Brizzolara, March 8, 1990
Krulak with eldest son at Chu Lai, South Vietnam, 1965. "All three sons were all there at the same time. Only family in the United States that had four officers there at once. I worried about them just on the basis of the laws of chance."
  • Brute knows war

  • Five feet 4 inches in height, 120 pounds when he “got his full growth,” Victor Krulak was dubbed “Brute” by his fellow cadets at Annapolis. The now-77-year-old retired marine Lt. Gen. Krulak graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1934 and saw service in World War II. During the Korean war, helped plan the 1950 Inchon landing. In 1956, at 43, he became the youngest general in the history of the U.S. Marines.
  • By Judith Moore, Feb. 15, 1990
The question was whether they could make it in the dark.
  • The unlikely rescue

  • For an hour and a half, 80-year-old Tony Carrasco had been waiting for a deer to pass within range of his old bolt-action Remington, but now he was getting bored. It was a splendid morning in late October, the sun coming full and strong out of a blank sky. His hunting stand was an outcropping of stone in Dyche Valley, on the remote eastern slope of Palomar Mountain.
  • By Joe Applegate, Jan. 11, 1990
Kingsley McClaren, program host, KFSD
  • Famous San Diegans recite poetry on top of their minds

  • A number of San Diegans were called on the telephone and asked to recite, on the spur of the moment, any poem they might know by heart. Some were up to the task; Laura Buxton didn't miss a beat. Michael Davidson immediately launched into Middle English; Jim Sills rattled off "Invictus" with dramatic flair. But a few struggled and were allowed to call back.
  • Compiled by Sue Greenberg, Oct. 18, 1990
The Monastery - the lodge where the astronomers eat and sleep.
  • The Hale blinks

  • Twilight has ebbed to a fringe of lapis on the western horizon, and the stars spin slowly as the dome of the 200-inch Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain blinks awake. Bob Thicksten, the observatory's superintendent, stands on the catwalk that rings the outside of the seven-story dome. We float through space, about 100 feet up, as the dome and the telescope turn toward a distant galaxy.
  • By Neal Matthews, Dec. 13, 1990
Quentin and Swan Young (1990) live in a two-room apartment close enough to Miramar Naval Air Station that occasionally Navy jets drown out conversation.
  • Quentin Young, Ruth Harkness, and the pandas in China

  • The first giant panda ever captured alive and exhibited in a zoo now sits mounted in a glass case at Chicago’s Field Museum, next to its distant evolutionary cousins, the raccoon and the lesser or red panda. It died in 1938 when it was 16 months old and never attained the size of the other two pandas on display, one of which was killed in 1929 by Kermit Roosevelt and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., sons of the ex-president.
  • By Michael Kiefer, Nov. 29, 1990
Sketch of the brig Pilgrim
  • When Richard Henry Dana returned to Point Loma

  • On the 22nd of August, 1859, the little steamer Senator called at San Diego with passengers from Los Angeles. It rounded the point under the lighthouse and entered the harbor’s narrow channel at about 8:00 on a hot blue morning. Its destination was the new wharf, on the site of the present-day sportfishing piers, near Shelter Island, but it stopped in the stream to accommodate one important passenger who wished to be rowed ashore on Point Loma to revisit an old haunt.
  • By Joe Applegate, Nov. 21, 1990
Slader Buck: "Mother Nature’s been growing that stuff for a long time, and to overnight create it can be very difficult.”
  • The Marines are sitting on a few good acres

  • Master Sergeant Raul Marroquin is my escort. I’d entered the main gate of Camp Pendleton (no problem) and bluffed my way onto the restricted grounds of Edson Range Marroquin's a Mexican-American from the old school, a Vietnam vet with 21 years in the Corps. We walk through chilling sea mist toward ghostly pops and cracks of Ml6s.
  • By Ray Westberg, Nov. 8, 1990
Most of the torture methods used by the police, however, leave little physical evidence.
  • Torture in TJ

  • "They apprehended me of work and handcuffed me They took me in on old grey van with, I think, blue license plates—maybe I didn't see them well. the inside of the van was really scratched up, and there was a mattress in back. And they started to kick me in the stomach and climbed on top of me and slapped me hard, twice.
  • By Abe Opincar, June 14, 1990
Palestina, apprehended in Los Angeles, being returned to Mexico.
  • Jorge Hank finally talks

  • As word of Vera's arrest spread through the city, Jorge Hank Rhon, principal owner of the Caliente Racetrack and the man Vera had guarded for the last several years was in Mexico City. Ever since Vera's disappearance, the April 20, 1988 murder of Héctor "Gato" Felix Miranda, a widely read columnist for the Tijuana newspaper Zeta, had been laid at Hank's feet. Another of Hank's bodyguards, Victoriano Medina Moreno, was convicted of the murder last August and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
  • By Neal Matthews, May 10, 1990
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(1) Delgado Ranch, San Felipe. Owned by murderer of DEA agent
(1) Delgado Ranch, San Felipe. Owned by murderer of DEA agent
  • I ran drugs for Uncle Sam .

  • Fifty-two-year old Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, who has lived in the San Diego area off and on since 1976, has decided to come forward with the details of his work as a pilot in Central America during the time the U.S. government was secretly arming the Nicaraguan contras. From 1979 to 1986, between his assignments – ferrying cargo and people into the jungles of Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, sometimes returning to the U.S. with shipments of cocaine and marijuana – Plumlee has a blue-collar job in San Diego.
  • By Neal Matthews, April 5, 1990
Prayer before performance. The members prayed for themselves. Three turned to God for more patience in time of stress.
  • Everybody onstage for the forgiveness and reconciliation number

  • Lamb's Players is not in the same league as the big regional companies, the Old Globe, the La Jolla Playhouse, and the San Diego Rep, with their out-of-town guest artists and subsidized summer seasons. But it has come to be regarded as one of the best locals and has done so with a full-time core group of only a dozen artists, most of whom have houses, families, and a commitment to making their careers not only in theater but in this theater.
  • By Joe Applegate, March 15, 1990
Who gave you permission to work here? I hired 20 guys for this block. I see 21. Nobody hired you.” “No, I just wanted to see what the work is like. I’m writing a story.”
  • A spear in the dirt

  • At exactly 2:00 a.m., I line up in front of the buses with the others. Some hardly spare me a glance; others take in my fatigue shirt, L.A. Angels baseball cap, black Levis, and week’s growth of beard and clock me for a gringo right away. To an Anglo, I could have passed; but to a Mexican, I might as well be Pat Boone.
  • By John Brizzolara, March 8, 1990
Krulak with eldest son at Chu Lai, South Vietnam, 1965. "All three sons were all there at the same time. Only family in the United States that had four officers there at once. I worried about them just on the basis of the laws of chance."
  • Brute knows war

  • Five feet 4 inches in height, 120 pounds when he “got his full growth,” Victor Krulak was dubbed “Brute” by his fellow cadets at Annapolis. The now-77-year-old retired marine Lt. Gen. Krulak graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1934 and saw service in World War II. During the Korean war, helped plan the 1950 Inchon landing. In 1956, at 43, he became the youngest general in the history of the U.S. Marines.
  • By Judith Moore, Feb. 15, 1990
The question was whether they could make it in the dark.
  • The unlikely rescue

  • For an hour and a half, 80-year-old Tony Carrasco had been waiting for a deer to pass within range of his old bolt-action Remington, but now he was getting bored. It was a splendid morning in late October, the sun coming full and strong out of a blank sky. His hunting stand was an outcropping of stone in Dyche Valley, on the remote eastern slope of Palomar Mountain.
  • By Joe Applegate, Jan. 11, 1990
Kingsley McClaren, program host, KFSD
  • Famous San Diegans recite poetry on top of their minds

  • A number of San Diegans were called on the telephone and asked to recite, on the spur of the moment, any poem they might know by heart. Some were up to the task; Laura Buxton didn't miss a beat. Michael Davidson immediately launched into Middle English; Jim Sills rattled off "Invictus" with dramatic flair. But a few struggled and were allowed to call back.
  • Compiled by Sue Greenberg, Oct. 18, 1990
The Monastery - the lodge where the astronomers eat and sleep.
  • The Hale blinks

  • Twilight has ebbed to a fringe of lapis on the western horizon, and the stars spin slowly as the dome of the 200-inch Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain blinks awake. Bob Thicksten, the observatory's superintendent, stands on the catwalk that rings the outside of the seven-story dome. We float through space, about 100 feet up, as the dome and the telescope turn toward a distant galaxy.
  • By Neal Matthews, Dec. 13, 1990
Quentin and Swan Young (1990) live in a two-room apartment close enough to Miramar Naval Air Station that occasionally Navy jets drown out conversation.
  • Quentin Young, Ruth Harkness, and the pandas in China

  • The first giant panda ever captured alive and exhibited in a zoo now sits mounted in a glass case at Chicago’s Field Museum, next to its distant evolutionary cousins, the raccoon and the lesser or red panda. It died in 1938 when it was 16 months old and never attained the size of the other two pandas on display, one of which was killed in 1929 by Kermit Roosevelt and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., sons of the ex-president.
  • By Michael Kiefer, Nov. 29, 1990
Sketch of the brig Pilgrim
  • When Richard Henry Dana returned to Point Loma

  • On the 22nd of August, 1859, the little steamer Senator called at San Diego with passengers from Los Angeles. It rounded the point under the lighthouse and entered the harbor’s narrow channel at about 8:00 on a hot blue morning. Its destination was the new wharf, on the site of the present-day sportfishing piers, near Shelter Island, but it stopped in the stream to accommodate one important passenger who wished to be rowed ashore on Point Loma to revisit an old haunt.
  • By Joe Applegate, Nov. 21, 1990
Slader Buck: "Mother Nature’s been growing that stuff for a long time, and to overnight create it can be very difficult.”
  • The Marines are sitting on a few good acres

  • Master Sergeant Raul Marroquin is my escort. I’d entered the main gate of Camp Pendleton (no problem) and bluffed my way onto the restricted grounds of Edson Range Marroquin's a Mexican-American from the old school, a Vietnam vet with 21 years in the Corps. We walk through chilling sea mist toward ghostly pops and cracks of Ml6s.
  • By Ray Westberg, Nov. 8, 1990
Most of the torture methods used by the police, however, leave little physical evidence.
  • Torture in TJ

  • "They apprehended me of work and handcuffed me They took me in on old grey van with, I think, blue license plates—maybe I didn't see them well. the inside of the van was really scratched up, and there was a mattress in back. And they started to kick me in the stomach and climbed on top of me and slapped me hard, twice.
  • By Abe Opincar, June 14, 1990
Palestina, apprehended in Los Angeles, being returned to Mexico.
  • Jorge Hank finally talks

  • As word of Vera's arrest spread through the city, Jorge Hank Rhon, principal owner of the Caliente Racetrack and the man Vera had guarded for the last several years was in Mexico City. Ever since Vera's disappearance, the April 20, 1988 murder of Héctor "Gato" Felix Miranda, a widely read columnist for the Tijuana newspaper Zeta, had been laid at Hank's feet. Another of Hank's bodyguards, Victoriano Medina Moreno, was convicted of the murder last August and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
  • By Neal Matthews, May 10, 1990
  • Sponsored
    Sponsored
Comments
Sponsored

The latest copy of the Reader

Please enjoy this clickable Reader flipbook. Linked text and ads are flash-highlighted in blue for your convenience. To enhance your viewing, please open full screen mode by clicking the icon on the far right of the black flipbook toolbar.

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
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Lawson-Remer – what about censoring Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men?

Encanto girl has a fan
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Southern California Asks: 'What Is Vinivia?' Meet the New Creator-First Livestreaming App

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