For her short (1000-word), weekly column, which she produced for four and a half years, she interviewed people from Edward O. Wilson and Tammy Fay Bakker to Tony Hawk and Edward Gorey’s literary executor, Andreas Brown, as well as lesser-knowns, from graphic novelists to Australian Rules footballers to residents of a Zen Buddhist monastery. The territory ranged from the northernmost point of San Diego County down to Tijuana.
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 …
Real hardcore true punkThe roots of the San Diego music scene run deep. Musicians who began gigging around town in the mid- to late 1980s later became the bedrock of the diverse early ’90s scene, …
Tugboats of San Diego Bay“We got a call from a friend with the Navy on a Saturday morning before Easter, and he said, ‘How fast can you get to Camp Pendleton?’ We said we could …
Birds squared “Five days out of the last seven I’ve been on ten-mile hikes. I’ve been birding in really remote parts of the county. What people for this project do is adopt a square. They’re …
Eight Ball in the Corner Pocket You could smoke a joint so long as you kept it at a respectable distance from Mrs. Yamada. You could do most anything you wanted except fight, which brought …
Valley Love The Lower Sweetwater Valley has served as a recreational and inspirational resource. One morning I looked up on the levee and saw a colorful line of kindergartners singing to the ducks in the …
A Long Shelf Life Valverde unburdens a perspiring white-haired man loaded from waist to double chin with titles about World War II. He says to Valverde, I'm just kinda reminiscing about my war.” Waiting in …
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 …
140-Mile Mistake Ritz calls the Chinese the railroad’s “unsung heroes,” but new evidence suggests that labor problems were perhaps the major reason why the railroad took so long to be built. The route of the …