"Smith did everything first class, even if it wasn’t with his own money,” Hahn was quoted as saying, praising Smith for his vision in triggering the revival of downtown with his bank building and adjacent West-gate Plaza Hotel.
January 7, 1993
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Stories by Thomas K. Arnold
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How C. Arnholt Smith got Ernie Hahn – and Fashion Valley – going
Larry Lawrence and the Greening of American Politics
“Bill and I go back 16 years,” Lawrence says. “I met him when he was attorney general of Arkansas. And the first time Shelia met Hillary was at some social function. And she and Hillary hit it off."
December 17, 1992
L.A. Times leaves San Diego
LA Times scoop: “The Police Department has dismissed tickets for Police Chief Bill Kolender’s wife and son, Asst. Police Chief Bob Burgreen’s daughter and some of Kolender’s friends, among them KSDO sportscaster Ron Reina.”
November 12, 1992
The death of the San Diego Tribune
On the day it was announced that the Tribune was folding — er, merging with the San Diego Union — a lot of things happened that didn't quite make it into the front-page story that …
September 19, 1991
Gangs of San Diego beaches
Most come from broken homes. The younger ones live either on their own or with their grandparents. The older ones don’t have permanent homes; they stay with friends.
August 1, 1991
Banned clothes at San Diego high schools
San Diego High: No hats or caps worn in class. Any “colors” that are worn for any particular gangs are prohibited, as are scarves hanging out of pockets and pegged khaki pants with slits at the ankles.
April 4, 1991
Police crack down on Ocean Beach skateboarders
Skateboarders, particularly in San Diego’s beach communities, are accustomed to getting citations from police for riding in either in the street or on the sidewalk in a business district. But in Ocean Beach, the penalties …
March 14, 1991
First names most popular with San Diego businesses: Bob, Dave, Mike, Jim, Don
Hundreds, if not thousands of San Diego businesses bear the first names of their owners, and the most popular business names aren't necessarily the most popular baby names. Top honors go to Bob, ranked 21st …
April 26, 1990
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
Garnet Avenue between Mission Boulevard and Morrell Street – “Main Street U.S.A.”
It always pays to read the fine print. San Diego city planners learned this lesson the hard way last month, when they belatedly discovered that their two-year-old proposal to rezone the commercial center of Pacific …
April 21, 1989
Bloods in trouble at Mission Beach jetty parking lot
This summer, the jetty parking lot on the south end of the Mission Beach isthmus became a popular hangout for the Bloods, a coalition of black street gangs whose members invariably wear something red. Their …
September 22, 1988
Ocean Beach People’s Food directors take over from founders
A month after it began, the workers’ revolt is over. The two-week-old rebel government has been toppled. Its leader and his three top lieutenants have been exiled. Several other “subversive elements,” in the words of …
November 26, 1987
Ocean Beach – most dangerous place to swim in San Diego
Ocean Beach is the most dangerous place to swim in the entire county, according to recue figures compiles by the various lifeguard agencies that service San Diego’s seventy miles of coastline. During August, city lifeguards …
September 17, 1987
Shortcut from La Jolla to I-5 rendered impossible
For years Pacific Beach and La Jolla residents trying to reach northbound Interstate 5 have used a short cut to avoid the congested intersection of Garnet Avenue and Mission Bay Drive. (Several blocks north of …
August 21, 1986
Point Loma Tennis Club condominium owners getting fined
Aside from their regular monthly mortgage payments, tax bills insurance premiums, and homeowner association fees, Point Loma Tennis Club condominium owners also have to worry about another potential drain on their finances: fines for breaking …
January 9, 1986
Hunter S. Thompson's most recent adventure in San Diego
At the Radisson’s twelfth-floor concierge desk, a young woman asked, “Excuse me, but are you the Hunter S. Thompson? I heard what you do to hotel rooms. Please don’t destroy your room here.”
October 17, 1985
Volleyball players take on bayfront homeowners in Mission Beach
David Whittaker is the guru of Mission Beach volleyball. When he moved here seven years ago, he recalls, there were only two volleyball courts in Mission Beach, both on the bay side at the foot …
June 20, 1985
Pacific Beach steals the nightlife from La Jolla
La Jollans, to paraphrase an old Kingston Trio song, may well be wondering, “Where have all the people gone?” The office vacancy rate is fifty percent, local realtors say, and recently completed office buildings along …
March 28, 1985
USA Today set up 2000 coin boxes in San Diego County
The street-level penetration of USA Today into the San Diego market, which began two years ago and now includes 2000 coin boxes countywide, has prompted a number of other out-of-town dailies to try similar tactics …
January 24, 1985
Prophet Vegetarian restaurant shuts doors
From the time the Prophet International Vegetarian Restaurant opened in 1971 until just recently, the East San Diego eatery served as the mainstay of San Diego's health food crowd. Vegetarians and health food aficionados from …
January 10, 1985
Luigi's, Poma's, Square Pan, Giant New York, Rebel Bakers, Pompei Vesuvio – all in O.B.
Back in the late Sixties, the foot of Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach was considered San Diego’s answer to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district becase of a steady invasion of peace/love/brotherhood-espousing “hippies.” A decade and a …
November 8, 1984
Catamaran Hotel to add a second Bahia Belle
The late Mission Bay hotelier Bill Evans began making plans two years ago to add a second cruise boat to the one already plying the waters of Mission Bay between the two hotels he owns …
October 11, 1984
Hotel del Coronado buys Oxford Hotel
The Hotel Del Coronado’s plans to move the Oxford Hotel onto its grounds is actually the first step in a five-phase conceptual master plan completed by San Diego architectural firm Bradt Ackerman & Associates just …
September 6, 1984
Coronado casts cold eye on Glorietta Bay live-aboards
In the waters just off the Coronado Municipal Golf Course, from the clubhouse stretching south about half a mile, more than twenty boats are anchored year-round while their owners live aboard them, and another seventy …
August 2, 1984
Developer Terry Sheldon takes out option to buy Famosa Slough
A year ago, most residents living in the vicinity of Famosa Slough thought the matter of what to do with the twenty-acre marsh had pretty much been resolved. The slough, located on the southeast corner …
July 26, 1984
Union, Tribune, L.A. Times chase J. David Dominelli to Montserrat
Ralph Frammolino was the first American journalist to arrive on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in search of fugitive financier J. David Dominelli. A reporter for the San Diego County edition of the Los Angeles …
May 10, 1984
Le Chalet keeping motorcyclists out
When Paul Krug bought the Le Chalet nightclub near the foot of Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach a year ago last December, he was well aware of the club’s notoriety as a hangout for bikers, …
March 15, 1984
When Roger Hedgecock was a concert promoter
Throughout all the recent commotion about stadium rock concerts, one city politician was tangly silent: Mayor Roger Hedgecock. And that seems a bit ironic, since of all city officials, Hedgecock's background in rock and roll …
November 17, 1983
Owner of the Surfside Motel impersonates Mayor Bilbray
Imperial Beach Mayor Brian Bilbray, whose ambitions for higher office are no secret, has enough problems on his hands in the recent past, with his city’s treasury nearly empty and with his beaches closed for …
September 1, 1983
Neil Morgan loves Dick Cramer, IMED, and IVAC
Most everybody likes to see his name in the paper, and Tribune editor Neil Morgan certainly takes care of his old friend Dick Cramer in that regard. When Cramer's medical instruments firm, IMED, was sold …
April 28, 1983
Singer-songwriter-eccentric-stock market whiz Arthur-Edward Seykot
A few classics drawn from the deep well of stories about Encinitas millionaire Ed Seykota: He’s walking down the street with a friend when he glimpses some butterflies fluttering nearby. Immediately he hurries off to …
April 21, 1983
O.B Rag, O.B. Times, O.B. News, O. B. Scene, O-Beacon
Three and a half years ago, Stan Sorenson, who at the time operated a small bookstore on Bacons Street in Ocean Beach, decided on a whim to start a community newspaper. It had been four …
November 11, 1982
San Carlos's Wyatts are desperate to know who killed their daughter in Santee
The Santee condominium in which Michelle Wyatt lived for the last nine months of her life is typical of the hundreds of others that were constructed during the late Seventies in similar newly developed East …
March 25, 1982
Byrd Thysell, Coronado bridge manager, gives a tour
A few things that went into the San Diego Coronado Bay Bridge: 13,000 tons of steel; 75,000 gallons of paint; more than 100,000 tons of concrete; about $27 million; and an enormous amount of politcal clout. A few of the results: 38,000 cars per day, endless political controversy, and nearly 100 suicides.
January 28, 1982
The short career of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap
Fall 1981 Anthony’s Harborside is one of more than a dozen lounges along the San Diego waterfront from the Embarcadero north to La Jolla. Located on Harbor Drive at the western edge of downtown, Anthony’s …
November 25, 1981
He brought punk rock to San Diego
The patrons heading into the Spirit club shortly before nine on a recent Saturday night might have thought it peculiar that a large, paint-splattered wooden stepladder would be propped up against the roof just to …
August 20, 1981
Ocean Beach – the Haight Ashbury of San Diego
The January, 1968 opening of the In Between, a youth-counseling center originally sponsored by the Point Loma Methodist Church, didn’t help matters much; it seemed to attract as many troublemakers as it did those in search of help.
August 13, 1981
Lakeside Hotel – roughest nightspot in San Diego County
“Most of the fights are just fist swinging, but I’ve seen people get knocked down on that concrete porch out there and then someone comes along and just pounds their head open."
July 16, 1981