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Homeboy on the RangeAfter school, 1965: Spring. Wearing my idiotic St. Jude’s Academy uniform. My bright red sweater calling vatos and homeboys from miles around to come kick my ass. I had a crew cut …
I Have Purchased a Grey Cardigan Sweater My wife and I fell in love over wine, bourbon, and cognac. We attended a college with a dry campus, and many evenings were spent sitting in my …
Ship of Fools “She poured wine for all of us. I picked up a glass and raised it in a toast and said, ‘Nostrovia ... Gorbachev... Nostro-via.’ The place erupted. The damn first engineer comes …
Koch Overboard Jack told me how a retired SEAL officer and CIA operative had recruited SEAL Team guys for a commando op: to recon the underwater hulls — and especially the keels — of the …
How to Do Genealogical Research in SD “On July 1, 1769, soon after the arrival of Father Serra, burials began in consecrated ground on Presidio Hill.... Even though people began moving off Presidio Hill and …
Recipes for an Overbite Rabbit fictions permeate childhood: Br’er Rabbit, Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, the Velveteen Rabbit, Hazel and Fiver and company in Watership Down, Bambi’s Thumper, Father Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland’s White …
Janet, My Mother, and Me “We went out to Belmont, and Harry couldn’t stop picking winners. We went to the 21 Club for dinner, and we scalped tickets for a Broadway musical in the fourth …
I Wasn’t There to Hold the Candle Mary Ann said that her grandmother Bompensiero worried about her son, but that she spoke little English and could not read. “Her daughter and my uncle Sammie kept …
Wave Gangsters Socially, Van Artsdalen became a marked man. His reputation as a brawler traveled beyond the predominantly white population of La Jolla to tougher neighborhoods. Butch had already proved himself among the few black …
The Door’s Open. Go In! Some beards, like Alan’s, are magnificent in their autonomy — they grow as they wish, untrimmed and untamed. “You shall not round the corners of your beard.” These beards grow …
When Dick Nixon Came to Town San Diego entrepreneur Arnholt Smith, one of Nixon’s earliest supporters, remembered a melancholy evening in the early ’60s when Nixon was holding a meeting and asked him to get …
We’re the New Wardens "A gray fox is a small animal, so usually the trap breaks their leg bones, and the only thing holding them in the trap is the skin that gets pinched between …
Notes from Underground Most of the paper's staff lived in the Door commune in a Victorian House on Albatross Street that rented for $295 a month. In late 1973 they were asked to move by …
Hard-boiled local Brizzolara recalled an evening when, together with three other suspense writers, he was invited to Grounds for Murder, a San Diego mystery bookstore, to discuss his work. “There was some controversy about Wirecutter. …
I’m Morgan, He’s Cronkite Scholars, particularly Vjaceslav Vsevolodovic Ivanov, director of the Section on Structural Typology of the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Walter Leland Cronkite Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in St. …
A Fairy Godmother’s Art I can recall the way a certain blouse, puffy-sleeved and lace-collared, tugged at the pits of my arms the year I fell in love with Matt Denhalter. The same mistakes I …
Memories of Main Street “Sometimes I would see kids my age, girls with makeup and clothes like girls I’d see on American Bandstand. I’d stare at and study them and when we got home they’d …
Break a Leg In 1993, Hal Holbrook was performing King Lear in the title role. Tom Hall, a San Diego actor, likes to tell the story. Hal came on too soon and started a completely …
Murder in Mission Valley There was a history of immigrants to the area penning Indians up in reservations after throwing them off Mission lands. Indians tried to regain their lands, but they were often unable …
Show Me Your Saphenous Vein, James! I had wanted to be a doctor since graduating from elementary school; I never seriously considered anything else. I did not have any doctor role models in my immediate …