The Silk Road Ends in San Diego “One of the Russians said, ‘Treat these [Russians] and kill these [Afghans].’ The other doctor said, 'How can I do that?’ The Russian said, 'Like this!’ and he …
February 6, 2022
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Stories by Lawrence Osborne
The first Afghan wave, San Diego's true Okies
Fallbrook school bus driver, firemen at 32nd and Lincoln
Stop Food Fights, Clean up after Motion Sickness When Renee drives the pink route, she wears a white visor and shorts that make her seem calmly athletic, like the directress of a tennis camp. Twenty-four …
January 3, 2022
Eccentric North Park bungalows, Mexican architecture everywhere in San Diego
Radical, Whole-Wheat Architecture He describes Dryden, who died in 1946, as “flamboyant, quixotic,” and “a personality who ranged from high to low.” He says, “He also describes this scene: “His family said he made and …
December 18, 2021
Stuck on Russian ship in Ensenada, in Baja for the eclipse
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 …
November 28, 2021
Tijuana through white eyes: the bus from Mexico City, where margaritas came from, the La Mesa prison
Destination Tijuana “Don’t let them tell me the bus is new. Of course, we always get there on time; it’s just on the way there are, well, complications. It’s in the nature of the route. …
August 15, 2021
Dune buggies, the Marshal South hermit family, the human race at its worst
Are Off-Roaders Destroying Anza-Borrego? "A green-sticker dune buggy decides to drive in past the closure sign and fiddle around. There’s a camper back in there, and they have a verbal duel. The camper takes down …
July 25, 2021
El Centro gangs, Holtville High football, 115 in the afternoon at Calipatria prison
Out Here in the Middle of Nowhere “Before, gangs were racially segregated, so you had the Mexicans, the blacks, the Aryan Brotherhood, and so on. Now, the Bloods and all are recruiting across the racial …
July 19, 2021
Pt. Loma's rich Portuguese, who would live on Mt. Soledad, OB's motorhome gypsies
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 …
July 17, 2021
La Jolla – a shoreline and a mountain
What Windansea surfers said about Tom Wolfe Eight summers have drifted by since Tom Wolfe (author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) traveled to California to write a series on “The New Life Out There” …
July 20, 2020
Best Reader stories from 1993
In time for the morning glass For a few years back in the '60s, Mike Doyle was the hottest surfer in the world. With an unusual combination of power on big waves and stylistic grace …
January 4, 2020
Passage From India: San Diego's Quietly Prosperous Minority
“Indians came to the valley in the ’20s. They settled out there, particularly the Punjabis, and married Mexican girls because they couldn’t marry Americans. That’s why out in Calexico you’ve got so many Mexican kids named Singh."
January 13, 1994
El Centro awaits the metropolis
“I moved here from San Diego and I actually prefer it. I really do. I married a Mexican girl and settled down. They’re the best people I’ve come across yet in California. Certainly the most kind.”
October 21, 1993
Baja boom towns: Las Quintas, San Antonio, Real Del Mar, La Paloma, Castillo del Mar, Costa del Sol, Villa del Mar, Costa Bella, Calafia
“Developers are basically rapists. I grew up in Uruguay and Colombia, and I saw what developers from places like Miami did there. Holiday Inns all over the place, totally messing up the coastlines.”
September 23, 1993
Life on Mount Soledad has always been about turning back the clock
Mount Soledad, it is true, is one of the most haughty neighborhoods in the United States. And it’s suffocatingly quaint. Small, cracked tarmac roads weave their way arduously up the crests of canyons and through slopes of chaparral.
August 12, 1993
Del Mar Plaza overcomes finicky hostility
A $30 million development covering 69,000 square feet at the intersection of 15th Street and Camino Del Mar, it styles itself as a “European retail village.” Gone, we gather, are megalomaniac spaces of yesteryear’s malls.
August 5, 1993
New agers tell us the truth about UFOs
The Lafayette Hotel on El Cajon Boulevard seems at first an unlikely venue for a major alternative conference dealing with the “Truth About UFOs” — or to give it its proper title, the National New …
May 13, 1993
An English child in southern California
Imagine an eight-year-old English boy arriving at LAX for the first time in his life. Having taken off from a freezing, raining London, he arrives 14 hours later to a freezing, raining Los Angeles. He …
April 29, 1993
Coronado Cays villages have a distinctly nervous feel
Gated communities are the coming trend in Southern California, ad although this isn’t really a gated community, it sort of has that feel. People here feel safe because of the security measures.
April 22, 1993
Iranians settle on Girard Avenue to show carpets
There is a cult Iranian movie, popular both in Iran and among exiles in the U.S., called Agha-ye Avareh, "Mr. Exile." In it a kind of Iranian Charlie Chaplin, complete with shabby suit coat, loosened …
April 1, 1993
The wild pagan roots of Mission Valley's Jack Murphy Stadium
Its skeletal frame, with rectangles of empty space, gives it the half-ruined aspect of an ancient arena like that in Arles or the Coliseum itself, as if the architects had been unable to resist a pun.
March 4, 1993
Where they grow wine grapes in San Diego
Over the last year the powerful, sumptuous vineyards of Northern California, the Napa and Simi estates that have poured the Golden State’s vinous nectar across the globe, have been the scenes of viticultural carnage of …
February 11, 1993
San Diego — only city in the world with a teddy bear museum
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town, the song (and most New Yorkers’ pride) proclaims. The great Babylon of American cities, the true capital of the nation, and home to lots of very tall …
January 14, 1993
Loss: what San Diegans left behind In 1992
Unlike 1984, when Ronald Reagan made it a point to finish his campaign at a giant rally in the parking lot of Fashion Valley, George Bush came to see the All-Star game and was booed by the locals.
December 23, 1992
Origins and reality of Lucha Libre
Sunday nights at the Lagunilla wrestling gym at Calle Primera and Ninos Heroes in Tijuana have not been designed to seduce the pacifist or the coward. Already from the street — that sloping section of …
December 3, 1992
Surreal Mormon architecture comes to La Jolla
The La Jolla facility will be the third Mormon temple in California and the first to be built in the state in more than 20 years. (Los Angeles’s temple was built in 1956, Oakland’s in 1964.)
November 25, 1992
San Diegans who cling to their guns
On a quiet street in suburban Escondido, in a neighborhood dominated by warehouses and light industrial factories just off Auto Park Way, the inertia of an empty provincial evening is suddenly shattered by a burst …
October 29, 1992
Society for Creative Anachronism - San Diego
Walk through Balboa Park on a weekend afternoon and there is a chance you will come upon a sight you might think had passed with the War of the Roses or the Field of the …
October 8, 1992
What men get away with wearing in San Diego
Until recently San Diego could boast no Saville Row, no Place des Victoires. It was content to have a few designer shops dispersed among its pastoral malls and the odd British tailor tucked away in …
August 27, 1992
Faith and love in the Anza-Borrego Desert
When you get out of your car to investigate, you will find nothing but a circle of trailers in the middle of the desert, a corral of lights like the lanterns hung in a circle of pioneer wagons.
August 20, 1992
Why National City is called Nasty City
On Highland Avenue, in the heart of National City — a mile-and-a-half-long boulevard along which the city's gangs conduct their lethal parades on weekend nights — a red car sits in a small parking lot …
August 6, 1992
Those in San Diego who stay up past midnight
On the toy-town ferry that crosses the bay from San Diego s downtown to Coronado, noctumal romantics have taken to the water. They have come to watch a sunset, to immerse themselves in the melodrama …
June 11, 1992
Most San Diegans won't eat snooty food
The 19th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin once noted that it is not the heart or the soul that lies at the root of human happiness and equilibrium, it is the intestine. To the French of that century, …
May 28, 1992
Mexico City to Tijuana on Autobuses del Norte
“They didn’t fix it, you can tell. It is all bravado. They’re hoping that when it happens the second time it’ll be in Tepic. If it doesn’t happen there, we’ll all be sleeping under the moon.”
April 2, 1992
The medieval pleasures of Tijuana's Zona Norte
Sitting at tables with cocktails while watching half-dressed boys and girls mime to Liza Minelli songs as they wade through a miasma of dried ice is a concept of entertainment that has died out elsewhere
March 26, 1992
Innocence in California Indian casinos
When Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler at the end of the 19th Century, the gambler was already a type. Highly strung, wild-eyed, given to unaccountable superstitions, he was the most engaging anti-hero of them all. But …
February 6, 1992
La Jolla Simic Gallery has a formula
A cultivated childhood in Europe is unthinkable without a strained and sulky relationship with paintings. Even among the Anglo-Saxons, the race that during the Reformation defaced their own churches and peeled their frescoes away with …
January 16, 1992