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Tunaville Times Crew members, nearly three-quarters of whom were Portuguese, addressed each other in the idioms of their native villages while they laid the huge black purse seine nets on the docks. Nautical designers and …
Chinaberry Farm: Finding Home Half our belongings still packed in the barn, paths form a quotidian maze between stacked boxes. The house livable, anyway. A rat takes up residence in Cindy’s paintings stored in the …
I Didn’t Chew My Rice Enough As I sat down to write this review, a woman I know told me not to lie: “I’ve never read an honest restaurant review in San Diego (she said). …
Raised Not to Hope Too Hard Sherley Anne Williams built her career celebrating the ways black folks talked and acted. School-wise, street-smart, and quick-tongued, she reserved her deepest antipathy for those outside the African-American experience …
Kemp and the Fugitive Fotomat also gave Graham a political base. One of the first beneficiaries was Jack Kemp. On May 23, 1968, the San Diego Union reported that Kemp had “joined Fotomat Corp., La …
Everybody I Need to Know I Met in Kindergarten “My dad told me that blacks were moving in because they couldn’t go anywhere else,” Kenny recalls. “But he told me they were just like us.” …
Theodore Dreiser Unlike Hurstwood, Dreiser was able to save himself. In 1907, Sister Carrie was republished by B.W. Dodge and Company and received acclaim from reviewers and readers, establishing Dreiser as an important American novelist. …
V.S. Naipaul Naipaul, on one October after another, witnessed the Nobel’s crown placed on other heads, including that of another Trinidadian, the poet Derek Walcott, who won the prize in 1992. Paul Theroux writing in …
Blood Brothers It wasn’t long before the owner of the radiator shop discovered that Rat had been sleeping in the van. But when the man saw Rat’s beat-up face and how sick he was, he …
One Thousand Survivors On the shores of the dry lakebed known as the Laguna Salada, about 250 Cucapa reside. Perhaps 50 — Kiliwa Indians live in an area known as Arroyo de Leon at the …
San Diego is no place for cows "You should see the casino [the Pala Band] are building up there," Verboom says. "It's the Taj Mahal. They're going to employ something like 1200 people. And they …
Wallace Stevens I remember why I bought The Collected Poems. Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar,” from his first collection, Harmonium, published in 1923, was in an anthology I owned. I read and reread “Anecdote of …
Thought for Food Bob Peterson (husband to Mayor Maureen O’Connor) opened his first Jack-in-the-Box restaurant at 63rd Street and El Cajon Boulevard in 1951. Peterson had expanded his chain to include 350 units by the …
Heart Man They were trying to distract me from the fact that Koumjian had now installed a rack of metal onto the patient's chest and was separating his rib cage with the thing by cranking …
The Skin of Their Teeth Where are the best food bargains in downtown San Diego? Five-pound packages of nonfat milk powder can be purchased at the S and F store located at 15th and G …
Return of the Mountain Lion In October 1983, a lion killed a domestic goat at a ranch near Julian; in November 1983, a dead lion cub was found on the road near Santa Ysabel. In …
Unfashionable Castles This Stick/Eastlake house, which stood at the southeast corner of Second and Fir, was designed by Comstock and Trotsche for John Sherman, a cousin of General William Tecumseh Sherman. From 1892 until 1965, …
The Lesson the Moonflower Teaches He showed her that everything he’d planted had grown: the cosmos, the tomatoes, the chamomile, the mint, the marigolds, the nasturtiums, the baby’s breath, the basil, the oregano, the anise, …
First Lines of Novels “I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white …
Professor Horrdendo Discovers on Page 23 That I've Called an Orange a Tangerine “Then there were a couple of older gentlemen here in California, one an ophthalmologist in Santa Monica and the other a retired …