Q: What's the difference between Normal Heights and East San Diego? Or Normal Heights and University Heights? Or Normal Heights and a dozen other fading, middle-class San Diego neighborhoods? A: The Normal Heights sign. You …

When Bob Sioss strides into the Channel 8 newsroom this cloudy morning in March, the radio scanners are already blaring. It’s just before 7:00 a.m. The metallic gabble of the city’s police and fire dispatchers …

Whenever Rudolf and Frank Mahnke meet a skeptic, they should take him down to Southwood. The Mahnkes are color specialists — and more than that, really. They believe that human beings actually change with the …

Even if you don’t have the slightest interest in classical music, would you turn down the chance to meet Mozart? Say you could go back in time and talk to the young Mozart, nine years …

Vomhof calls it The Case of the Too Many Skids and says it went.like this: Kid was on his way to the beach. Drove his folks’ 1970 Mercury from his home in El Cajon to …

Thaddeus Kostrubala was jogging when he had the vision. As a long-distance runner he was accustomed to hallucinations, but this one turned out to be rather significant. The psychiatrist was up in the Sierras of …

Nancy lost her baby in the spring, but that miscarriage early in her pregnancy could have had a dozen causes. Then Kim lost the baby she was carrying. And then so did another young woman. …

It is possible to acquire a toehold in the Farms for far less, of course. Just two doors north of the Gagosian splendor on La Jolla Farms Road is the clifftop manor built two years …

Most of you will live another thirty or forty years; some won’t survive the next decade; one or two of you probably will die in the next few days. And you’ll all, everyone, regret that …

One could find worse symbols for the Loma Portal area than the Midway Drive-In. Opened in 1947, San Diego’s first outdoor movie theater commanded the position at the intersection of Midway Drive and Sports Arena …

On this evening in the summer of 1953, Lionel Van Deerlin was late again. The newsman sat at his desk in the Channel 6 office on Park Boulevard and frantically finished marking on sheets of …

Kent Wilson began surfing 15 years ago. At first the UCSD chemistry professor would lug his board two or three mornings a week to the La Jolla and Del Mar beaches; then nine years ago …

The only genuine fast-food outlet in Ocean Beach is the Jack-in-the-Box at the corner of Voltaire Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, a garish orange structure erected in 1956, a time when leering fifty-foot-tall clown heads …

Sparks of light fly from the cluster of diamonds on Bill Drexler’s right hand whenever he jabs the air with his index finger. He does this frequently. “Taxation is theft" — jab! “You have a …

King Canute, the presumptuous monarch who ordered the tide not to roll in, would get a chuckle from a stroll down the length of Sunset Cliffs. For a graphic history of man’s attempts to stop …

Unfortunately for the Zendikians, the Fugitive was sending out “weird, bust-me vibes.”

On the night of January 21, the first day Circus Vargas came to town, Larry Gill stood on a Plexiglas platform high above the University Towne Centre parking lot. With his right hand, he grasped …

The walls of Louis Spaulding’s tunnel are a hundred million years old, and they glitter. Patches of quartz shine like milky glass, near scratchy outcroppings of a form of felspar called cleavelandite. Spaulding points out …

You are floating weightless in a warm, still place where only now and then do feathery tendrils of sensation tickle your naked body. The darkness is so thick in here that it feels as if …

This is a test. You are standing in Room 36 at Encanto Elementary School where Diane Moss-Curry is the teacher. Encanto is the San Diego neighborhood just east of Lemon Grove; it’s run-down and barren …

Last Saturday the sun was shining on the 5100 block of Cape May Avenue in Ocean Beach, and Red House at 5113 was in full flower. At the side yard gate, casually dressed visitors (mostly …

There’s a room on the second floor of the old San Diego Zoo hospital where a person can feel like a god. Two metal chests that look like overgrown dishwashers stand against one wall of …

Nancy Beauchaine has a slender body, and she carries it erect, supple as a dancer. Nancy is discussing how she uses her body in her work as a sexologist. She is sitting in Hob Nob …

The scene opens in the tiny kitchen of a one-bedroom apartment downtown. Tom Kozden, the prominent rent control activist, and Fred Schnaubelt, the city councilman, are sitting at a small kitchen table. It is afternoon. …

Wolfgang has taken a small white pill. In about an hour he’ll begin to lose consciousness. Gradually, his brain waves will warp into a succession of strange patterns. As the hours pass, periodic paralysis will …

When Derek was in college, he and his friends talked a lot about guns and karma. They were very sure of themselves when they postulated that violence attracts violence; that the people who like guns …

The big, drunk Chicano in Horton Plaza who tried to rip off my Hare Krishna gown got to me so quickly I never even saw him coming. By the time I realized what was happening, …

Amtrak insists this is not a commuter train. “A commuter train run is not 128 miles in length,” the Amtrak spokesman in San Francisco says with an edge to his voice. You can almost see …

Jehl complains that this is where the environmental movement has gone wrong. “We get so terribly concerned with little dickey birds and snail darters and we lose sight of the big picture.”

Once upon a time there was a freckle-faced little girl named Maureen who lived in Mission Hills. She had twelve brothers and sisters, and though her parents didn’t have much money, they boasted that instead …

Eydie Mae Hunsberger’s breasts contain six lumps of cancer. She has come to lecture here at the Hippocrates Health Institute, and she’s generating vitality like a cheerleader at a pep rally. So many people jam …

May we introduce you to Burl Stiff, bon vivant, man-about-town, who’s sitting at the moment in the Whaling Bar at La Valencia Hotel? Of course you already recognize the face, which tops Stiff’s Union society …

Now Ron Jensen knows what it’s like to run a newspaper south of the border. He learned his lesson last summer, when a Rosarito Beach businessman named Hugo Torres hired him to start the Baja …

Martha and Jim Swaffield saw the first photograph of their baby three and a half months before it was born. A technician at Palomar Hospital in Escondido had aimed an ultrasound machine at Martha’s growing …

Quitting time comes at five o’clock for Angie Bowen, and Angie’s routine usually doesn’t vary. Her noisy office, the San Diego branch of the Automobile Club of Southern California, lies across from the southern fringe …

Once upon a time I sneered at game show contestants. I think I considered them to be vapid and shallow, and certainly to lack self-respect, particularly those who’d make fools of themselves for the mere …

People in Coronado are saying that Hotel Del Coronado owner Larry Lawrence and others associated with the Coronado landmark are making thousands of dollars a month on city-owned property for the same reason that decisions …

Pat sounded nervous the moment he got on the phone. His wife had picked up the receiver first and had called to him ominously, almost as if she had sniffed trouble brewing. When I announced …

“People don’t like to talk about breeding ... the current trend is that everybody is born equal. But actually, if you breed livestock you find out very quickly that everyone is not born equal.”

You can still find that first inflammatory sign in the windows of a few homes in north Ocean Beach. Bright green on white, the letter “O” was a peace symbol which eventually changed into a …

When Jay Musselman teaches someone how to sell funerals door to door, he sits him down and looks him in the eye. Musselman himself is a salesman extraordinaire, and his stare crackles with magnetism; his …

They say that Genghis Khan and his men played polo using the heads of defeated enemies as balls, and that doesn’t surprise me at ail. No other sport could couple with epic bloodthirstiness more harmoniously. …

I keep envisioning this photon from the Messier 87 galaxy. I know it's unscientific to think about photons — the smallest physical units of light — as individuals, however I have no trouble with the …

“There have been a lot of assassination attempts on me, and I have no intention of making it easy for the next would-be killer. I own nine automobiles, including the Rolls and two special-bodied Cadillacs, …

If I ever have a child of my own, I want him or her to be like Alex Coolman. Alex is a sturdy three-year-old who’s already more poised and articulate than a lot of adults …

There are at least three themes which are utterly taboo: incest; a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a …

Abdul Nahidi is a psychology student at United States International University, but his face could belong to a professional mime. When he talks, his dark visage melts into one rubbery mask after another. Now he …

This is a story about the nudist camps tucked away in San Diego, but it has to start with a small forewarning. It doesn't convey the most fascinating thing about nudism. I will tell you …

Ever since the Ocean Beach Planning Board has begun recommending how the beach community should grow, they have given fast-food franchises the cold shoulder; OB’s only existing such establishments either managed to circumvent the board …

Ann Watson bustles around her kitchen, serving up dark steaming coffee and warm cherry strudel, and she thinks about the Communists marching into her living room. The vision strains the imagination, for Watson’s home nestles …