Back When
If God didn't love pigeons, He wouldn't have given them wings In the 45 minutes it took to get from Solana Beach to San Diego, he presented an overview of the history of homing pigeons, …
Slabs of Persia “We succeed, like the Koreans, because of the indestructible family unit, which makes a certain kind of economic growth possible. Take the carpet shops. Without families they’d disappear. But carpet stores keep …
Valedictorians twenty years later “Probably most people who have kids would say that their ultimate thing would have something to do with their kids. But if you don’t have kids, you really have to think …
Brief Eden We didn’t see too much of the man in trailer number eight, who was supposed to be a Federale, except for the times when he would step out onto his wooden deck and …
Baja's tough-love drug rehab “My best friend’s parents paid $10,000 to send him to a place in Arizona, which he went to for a month. He came back, and the next day he woke up …
Balboa Park museums do surgery on masterpieces “At this point, I have removed the old discolored varnish and the old inpainting that no longer matched, but there is a residual varnish down within the interstices …
The cumulative hiss of thousands of wings In some years, when the desert flowers are blooming, Alan Mikolich takes his bees into the Borrego desert. But the heat can be a problem. He sets out …
What's wrong with Frank? Lita bursts into tears. Frankie’s her beloved eldest son by her first marriage. The one she dedicated to God the day he was bom, throwing all her marbles into her Roman …
An unhampered look at Carlsbad's Army Navy Academy “If I ask ’em, Are you using drugs? they will admit it. Even without me ordering a test. Because they think my information’s better than it really …
It started the Encinitas drug scene When I was 18, I robbed a gas station with a ski mask on, so I already had that under my belt. I went into another room and started …
A raw, wild, reckless San Diego In 1947 competitors would have included Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. If comparisons are to be made Wade and Miller’s crime novels are much more like Hammett’s in their …
California Jew returns to the source He began to read anything and everything he could about religion and religious experience, books by Hindus, Catholics, Jews, and Moslems, books of Western and non-Westem cosmology; books by …
Children's Hospital gave AIDS to hemophiliacs So even after talking with Hartman, I still cannot get a date for when my sons were first tested. The only thing that I have in concrete, from Steven’s …
Some Women You Want to Hate Lt. Weinpel knew Ms. Smith was the girl for him. “From then on, it was just a matter of how am I going to finance the ring?” The lieutenant, …
Orchids and Onions — 20 years later “You could actually turn off Highway 80 at various points and go to the farms. Mission Valley Center was the one thing that changed the whole character of …
TeeJay — Back To The Way It Used To Be At Cali-Max, T-bone steaks were selling for 90 cents a pound, compared to American prices of about $1.88. Filet mignon, when bought uncut, costs around …
San Diego's Porn Studios Fourteen women, ranging in age from 18 through 22, including one still in high school, may have felt like stars when they walked into the Hard Rock Hotel and the Kimptbn's …
San Diego beekeepers know all the flowering plants One time, Mikolich says, he got a call from a friend, a commercial beekeeper whose helper had driven a truckload of hives off a road and then …
Why locals mis-pronounce Garnet P.B.’s OGs (original gentry) pronounced the name as it should be, like the jewel, “GARnet.” Because they witnessed the name-change, they recognized that the street was part of a series of …
No Mexican food without epazote When I finish cutting back my epazote, I can’t get the smell off my hands. It reminds me of a friend who, while living in rural Mexico, once purged herself …