Life guardsAt the top of the Grandview stairway sits a bench, dedicated to the memory of the three women who died under the weight of a 50-ton blockfall in 2019. In a late-July meetup, Dr. …
November 20, 2024
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Stories by Thomas Larson
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Now what can they do with Encinitas unstable cliffs?
Fateful picnic at Grandview beach in Encinitas
The cliff collapseOn August 2, 2019, at around 1 pm, Dr. J. Patrick Davis, his wife, Julie Davis, Julie’s sister, Elizabeth Charles Cox, and Pat and Julie’s daughter, Annie Davis Clave — all three of …
November 13, 2024
The Pete Wilson legacy in 30 pieces
1. No California politician gets more blame for the denigration of the migrant than Peter Barton Wilson, now 91, last century’s Mr. San Diego. Now, in a political year that has been inflamed by another crisis at …
May 8, 2024
New San Diego dads run to therapists
Many fathers, including myself, know the feeling: a strange and heady mix of joy, wonder, and fear, brought on by the first meeting with our progeny. We went into the hospital as supportive partners for …
February 14, 2024
Six-week prep school at Miramar for therapy dogs
It’s an evening in early October, and Charli King, co-founder of Pawsitive Teams, is opening a new class for dog owners, canines in tow, who aspire to help people in need. That need is great …
January 10, 2024
Padres bribe city council
Masters of DeceitPadres' bribes of councilwoman Valerie Stallings“On December 14, 1999, despite urgings from the San Diego Taxpayers Association and others to delay its vote, the city council voted to push ahead with bonds for …
November 27, 2023
San Diego book clubs – only for girls?
San Diego book clubs – what's the point?Perhaps it’s the idea of the book club book that we find unbearable. It brings to mind that women’s marketing motto, “Pink it and shrink it.” Pink it: …
November 26, 2023
Blood purity fight among Pala Mission Indians
Pala tribe cuts dissident members off rollsThe cited cause of tribal disenrollment is a blood-purity dispute. All 164 disenrolled members are relatives of the late Margarita Brittain, a woman whose lineage has long been questioned …
November 4, 2023
Alleys are San Diego's last frontier
A tour of San Diego alleysJack Whalen hands me a beer. “I’m king of this alley,” Whalen says, then points west. “Down there, the king of that next alley is Tom Sweet. He’s 97.” Whalen …
October 16, 2023
Stick figures of men and a tall sailing ship – close to the Mexican border
Pictographs of Cabrillo's San Salvador east of Jacumba"There’s some petroglyphs over in Pinto Canyon," Frank said as he passed me on the trail. Frank Johnson, a handsome 75-year-old man, with flowing white hair and a superb …
October 15, 2023
Border Angels strew water bottles for migrants
Border angelsI wanted to learn about a group called Border Angels that, among other things, sets out water in the desert areas of the 66-mile San Diego sector. Usually, gallon bottles of water are placed …
October 7, 2023
Mercy Air's intrepid pilots
Board up and go"What had happened was one of the SANDAG tow truck drivers had stopped to help this fellow and the guy had shot him. Four or five or six times. A Marine saw …
September 25, 2023
Mark Twain's daughter ends up tragically in San Diego
Decent men elude Mark Twain’s daughterDespite Clemens’s preferring one daughter over the others, all three sisters experienced the frequently tyrannical side of their father. Caroline Harnsberger, Clara’s biographer, has written that Clemens’s daughters were afraid …
September 18, 2023
San Diego's rare fruit and vegetable growers
• Stephen Facciola's edible worldHe and Caplan started to swap names, to compare notes on big players in the exotic fruits and vegetables community. (“I’m sure you’re acquainted with Paul Thomas in …
September 2, 2023
The San Diego look, according to painters
What distinguishes San Diego landscape to paintersIn Coronado one day, after lunch with a friend, he went into a CD shop while his friend waited outside on a bench. When Crooks came out, he noticed …
August 27, 2023
How will the Padres fix Gallagher Square?
Daniel Hendy, in his book Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, writes of the aural confusion in an airport terminal, “its burbled announcements, the steady tread of feet on linoleum floors, the squeak …
August 23, 2023
There are two Sorrento Valleys
Sorrento Valley lacks stickiness It’s among the safest of neighborhoods. A glance at crime statistics shows negligible amounts in Sorrento Valley proper (most months: no murder, no rape, 20 nonresidential burglaries). The place is either …
May 1, 2023
Poolside shooting near UTC involving Selis and Wilf clans
University City massacre done by developer family donor They are the crème de crème of San Diego business and political society, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to both Democrats and Republicans, and in turn …
March 20, 2023
San Diego State math guy, South Bay realtor, North Coast Rep actor, UCSD cognitive scientist
The first thing you realize once you start investigating “intelligence” is that it seems like no two people — people whose personalities, abilities, capacities, and traits are as different as their DNA — use the …
February 8, 2023
Nathanael West killed near El Centro
Almost Beautiful: the death in El Centro of Nathanael West, one of America’s most mordant authors Fifteen minutes ago, a bit after 2:30, they started driving north from the grand, desert-white De Anza Hotel in …
January 14, 2023
Will you understand this Murrieta and Lemon Grove casual killer?
In the infinite flatness of southern California’s Imperial Valley, an irrigated desert of cropland and skin-frying heat, lies Calipatria State Prison, a mostly maximum-security Level IV warren of cellblocks, surrounded for miles by massive ag …
August 31, 2022
San Diego crime boss gunned down on Lamont St.
How Frank Bompensiero met his fate "Bomp kicked the door shut, Mirabile wrapped his arms around Borgia just as Jimmy dropped the garrote over his head, handing the other end of the rope to Bompensiero. …
July 17, 2022
USD students look back at high school, the campus's Catholicism
Class Struggle “We had a lot of cliques at my school. There were the drama kids, and we had a group we actually called the Clique. It was just the people that seemed to party …
February 7, 2022
Judith Moore feels her daughters' pain, Reader writer marries Cynthis Heimel
Lines of Love, Lines of Pain We lived by the hospital. I heard sirens every day. When both girls were with me in the house, I felt a smug assurance when I heard the sirens …
January 30, 2022
Where is San Diego's local news going now?
It’s been a couple years since the alt-weekly San Diego CityBeat and its blend of local news, irreverent columns, and cultural coverage went silent. The paper disappeared after a cascade of events, starting when Times …
I-15 mimics L.A traffic, when there were quail in Bonita
Traffic spares no one “People say, ‘You got a real transportation problem on the 15.’ Well, it’s less a transportation problem than it is a land-use problem. A lot of the people, because they can’t …
January 24, 2022
Nathanael West, Jim Thompson, Max Miller
Janet, My Mother, and Me “We went out to Belmont, and Harry couldn’t stop picking winners. We went to the 21 Club for dinner, and we scalped tickets for a Broadway musical in the fourth …
November 20, 2021
Where do San Diego’s ex-Christians go?
Christianity in America is waning. In 2016, only 26 percent of weddings took place in a church, which seems to suggest that religious matters are becoming more peripheral to our social and economic life. The …
September 1, 2021
The Hemet-San Diego State commute, bulldozing Mexicans out of central Escondido
Chinaberry Farm: Finding Home Half our belongings still packed in the barn, paths form a quotidian maze between stacked boxes. The house livable, anyway. A rat takes up residence in Cindy’s paintings stored in the …
July 12, 2021
Jack Kemp and the fugitive, U.S. Grant's son, Seals ambivalent about Jesse Ventura
Kemp and the Fugitive Fotomat also gave Graham a political base. One of the first beneficiaries was Jack Kemp. On May 23, 1968, the San Diego Union reported that Kemp had “joined Fotomat Corp., La …
July 5, 2021
San Diego stupid
Sign of the Times: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla, written and published privately in 1976 and reissued in April, is a sudden bestseller. Hardly unexpected, given the times. If you’ve …
June 30, 2021
San Diego's worst white collar crime these days
White-collar criminals come in all sizes and styles, but they share a motive: to steal money. Anyone’s stash will do. According to the FBI, they are experts at “deceit, concealment, [and] violation of trust.” Of …
May 5, 2021
SEALs talk war atrocities, Rolling Stone embeds at Camp Pendleton
A Soldier's Pay Bradley is an animated woman of 36, whose tousled long black hair and French accent give her an exotic cast. When I acknowledge her accent, she replies, “Yes, I’m sorry, I’m from …
February 27, 2021
Will sand save San Diego North County's bluffs?
The Sand at Encinitas Jayme Timberlake — tide-watcher, restoration ecologist, avid surfer — light-foots it down Encinitas’s iconic Stone Steps. She’s barefoot, having kicked off her shoes and left them on the sand-dusted floor of …
January 13, 2021
San Diego's shadiest characters: John Moores, David Malcolm, Dick Silberman
UCSD, Big Money, and the Ball Club When Gray Davis appointed Padres owner John Moores to the Board of Regents of the University of California, Dynes said, “I’m really looking forward to working with him…I’m …
January 4, 2021
San Diego's gay bathhouses, wild life of our foreign cabbies, best light in the city
Bathhouse Quagmire "I was in those San Francisco bathhouses in the late 1970s," says James Hartline, an HIV-positive Hillcrest man who is campaigning to get San Diego's three bathhouses shut down. "Those bathhouses were a …
November 23, 2020
Border Angels, being Muslim in San Diego, what's a green card worth?
Border Angels "We know the kind of people we catch here. They're horrible people." The Border Patrol agent's tone was no more than blandly informative. It was 7:00 p.m. July 16, and we were at …
November 14, 2020
Tijuana country club kidnapping, shootout near school, nostalgia for Jai Alai, casino, racetrack
Don't look now Abduction and murder at T.J.’s Camp Campestre Under normal circumstances, it would be difficult not to stare at ten men dressed in black who brandished submachine guns. Under normal circumstances, ten men …
November 9, 2020
Local rocker Chris Squire troubles, intimate murder, abortionist Bertha Bugarin
He Should Have Known Better It had been another sleepless night for Chris Squire, pedaling around San Diego delivering drugs. When the sun rolled into the sky on August 14, 2006, he knew he was …
November 2, 2020
Race in 19th century San Diego, Marilyn Monroe in Coronado, early drive-in theaters
None Darker Than Me Racial obsession in 19th-century San Diego People of color were beginning to move into Sherman Heights and Golden Hill. There were colored Civil War veterans who lived in Golden Hill — …
October 31, 2020
What restaurant staffs eat, Eleanor Widmer, how far San Diego's food comes
What Insiders Eat Restaurant staff gab and gobble. Travis Murphy, also a cook, planned the staff’s daily dinner. At Nine-Ten, he said, the hardest part of arranging the staff meal, also called the “family meal,” …
October 18, 2020
San Diego fishing life, dirty work, tools of the trade
Tools of the Trade The implements for bringing home the bacon. Have your friends and neighbors looked weighed down, put upon, or bent low to the ground lately? Perhaps they are! After all, many of …
October 17, 2020
The Chargers crowd, the Padres crowd, where old Chargers are
Cheerleading Is More Dangerous than Fighting Cage-fightin’ rock stars. It’s Wednesday at 1:00 p.m., and I am waiting for amateur mixed martial arts fighter Jaime Reyes at the Lakeside Cafe. When he walks past me, …
October 11, 2020
In vitro baby trouble, Mark Twain's daughter, after foster care
Never Die Like many newly married couples, Cristen and Jeffry Hays wanted to get pregnant soon after their wedding in 1992 but felt it best to wait. They used birth control until Jeffry finished three …
October 10, 2020
Orchid zealots, brave beekeepers, pit bulls not so bad, vicious seagulls, San Diego birds surveyed, a cactus will take a bullet
Hive Mentality Beekeeping runs in families. “The book said to call the fire department and tell them you’ll take swarms. That’s what I did. I got the swarms.” By Shari McCullough, Sept. 16, 2004 | …
September 27, 2020
Korean War survivors, Hotel Del expels Prince Edward, Spanish Civil War vets, escape from Vietnam, tortured by Japanese
The Forgotten War Conversations with men who never forgot I do not recall putting my foot on Korean soil for the first time. I only remember the cold rain, and running, and others running with …
September 20, 2020
Oddness of the Waldorf School, food critic Eleanor Widmer, why San Diego's light is unique, MiG killer Randy Cunningham
A Single Mother Alone in the World If the child-support check is late, I let it be. I resent having to beg for anything. I used to be on my ex like white on rice, …
September 14, 2020
Mark Twain's daughter ends up at the Bahia Hotel, Osama bin Laden's brother at USIU
Third Spud from the Sun: Cameron Crowe Then and Now “A couple things about Cameron set him down a peg from even the rank and file of ’zine greenhorn dust-suckers. He for all intents & …
September 12, 2020
Most notable San Diego Reader stories of the early 21st Century
Bathhouse Quagmire "I was in those San Francisco bathhouses in the late 1970s," says James Hartline, an HIV-positive Hillcrest man who is campaigning to get San Diego's three bathhouses shut down. "Those bathhouses were a …
August 23, 2020
Immigrants flock to San Diego
Border Angels "We know the kind of people we catch here. They're horrible people." The Border Patrol agent's tone was no more than blandly informative. It was 7:00 p.m. July 16, and we were at …
August 9, 2020