La Jolla 1962 Dressed in long trousers and boat shoes and a white Lacoste tennis shirt, I accompanied Toby across Vista del Mar and Neptune Place to the Pump House and down concrete steps to …
August 19, 2023
Articles by Cris Mazza
Fled my father in La Jolla
Apple Tree's produce man talks, writer joins Gulf Coast Grill cooks, donut immersion
Banana Man Across the aisle, is another table like yours neatly stacked with oranges, grapefruits, pineapples, papayas, and other fruits. That table, as well as the rack against the wall, are refrigerated. Your table is …
January 31, 2021
Best Reader stories from 1996
Mafia in San Diego before World War II (first in series of six stories) “The raids, all made with search warrants, started soon after noon and were not completed until early evening. All of the …
January 12, 2020
How San Diego Symphony musicians and their spouses scrape by
At this moment, with my title written and nothing else, the former San Diego Symphony is preparing to announce the end of its silence. A month after disclosing a final plan to bankruptcy court, the …
September 24, 1998
Fiction writer Cris Mazza suffers death of a shelti
When I was a freshman in college, our family pet, a Shetland sheepdog named Shep, was killed by a car as he roamed the neighborhood in search of a bitch in season. A student in …
December 4, 1997
Canine talent agency uses Morley Field – at its peril
His name is "Scat." Sounds like the name for an annoying cat, but Scat is a dual champion Shetland sheepdog. Not only was he deemed worthy of the title as a representation of his breed, …
June 5, 1997
How we lived off the land – in La Costa, Vista, Dairy Mart Rd., and Spring Valley
What might’ve seemed like an indigent family scavenging — a family going on weekend outings to gather abandoned or discarded, still living, freshly killed, or already dead food from the countryside — was actually just a way of life.
November 28, 1996