Where a job with Time magazine led William Weber Johnson Ernest Hemingway was good company, but his drinking and hard living were difficult to keep up with. Argentinian president Juan Peron was either a tad …
April 4, 2021
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Stories by Roger Anderson (RIP)
Buddy of Hemingway, Peron surfaces in Balboa Park, confessions of pot smuggler
El Cajon classmates Robert Houghton, Roger Anderson, Andrew Hamlin on Lester Bangs
Lester Bangs, El Cajon Kid These “great man” theorists see Lester as self-made and El Cajon actually was a hindrance. Those of us from El Cajon, especially those who knew him well, have a much …
January 24, 2021
Beat Farmers, Frank Zappa, Lester Bangs
Birth of the Beat Farmers Jerry Raney: “This guy from El Cajon High named Jack Chan knew how to play, we’d go out and get the Beatles songbooks and go through 'em and he’d teach …
June 7, 2020
Ramona – a lot of stories
Was Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona real? During late winter and early spring of every year, a bit of confusion reigns up north in the town of Ramona. The folks at the chamber of commerce there …
January 13, 2020
Best Reader stories from 1988
Ku Klux Klan 's John Metzger talks of hate and tears "My father was in the Crusaders, a national organization that was pretty powerful in San Diego, which was part Christian Identity. It’s a church …
December 15, 2019
Roger Anderson and the Reader
Roger Anderson grew up in El Cajon, was part of early San Diego rock scene, wrote for alternative weeklies, and served as art director for the Washington Post. He died in January, 2003 in Baltimore, …
April 14, 2019
Pot smuggler's accident, Belmont Park, Willie Shoemaker, prostitution after Stingaree, truth serum, a family's letters
The Zipper – near death at the Del Mar Fair The Zipper was a new wrinkle on the midway: this big, gleaming apparatus that looked like a gigantic fan belt, with body-hugging cages attached along …
February 3, 2019
Old Highway 80: Guatay, Buckman Springs, La Posta, Live Oak Springs, Boulevard, Bankhead Springs, and Jacumba
"Shorty’d gotten on a freight tram in San Diego, headed for Chicago. Got locked in there and froze to death. They found his body later — he was wearing two pairs of pants, and his wrist was cut."
February 22, 1990
Eucalyptus, the non-native tree that does so much. Like kill people.
The branches grow so fast that they cut off views; the roots crack sidewalks, curbs, and roads; they steal water from nearby plants, drop litter on the ground, and exude an oil that kills other plants.
December 14, 1989
Lester Bangs on Altamont the day the music died
In summer of 1969, when the Rolling Stones announced that they were going to tour the United States, it was one of the biggest deals to come along in hippieland in a good long while.
December 14, 1989
Reader writers: the story I wanted to write... but didn't
Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.
October 5, 1989
When early filmmakers zoomed in on San Diego
Disappointingly, the movie shows no scenes of recognizable Lakeside streets or structures that I can compare with the town as I’ve known it during my lifetime. But it does show something more evocative: vistas of wild grass and brush…
September 7, 1989
The Zipper – near death at the Del Mar Fair
Through the hard frozen streets we go at a regular canter; often I am upraised as high as the first story of a house; n*ver do I sink as low as the house doors. — …
July 13, 1989
My grandfather in Point Loma killed himself
My father’s death from cancer last June, at age 71, was a mercy not just because it freed him from the pain of his illness but because he was — always had been — a …
May 25, 1989
Birth of the Beat Farmers
“Country Dick was a Glory fan during the old days, back when he was in high school. As a matter fact, he was student-body vice president at Grossmont High and hired us to play a dance there.”
March 16, 1989
Development more rapacious in San Diego's South Bay
The City of El Cajon bought from us (at an enforced discount) about two-thirds of our front yard and sent in heavy machinery to chop down the olive trees and grade away the lawn and the fence.
December 8, 1988
Was Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona real?
“I there was such a woman as Ramona, the odds are that she was married not here but in a little chapel on Conde Street. Father Yubach said he seemed to remember marrying a woman by that name.”
September 29, 1988
The Hardback Lester Bangs
I moved to the Bay Area from El Cajon and the fifteen- or twenty-page letters we used to exchange dwindled down to a precious few and the next thing I know you had quit Creem.
November 26, 1987