Thirty Years Ago

“Got a bell at Palm and Kettner. Anybody for Palm and Kettner?”

The call means someone at that corner has telephoned for a cab. But Taheri, cruising nearby, considers the location of the call and the time of day. Then he translates the message to mean (roughly):

“Who wants to stop at a stucco apartment and take an old woman for a $1.80 ride to the market or the doctor’s office?”

— “DID SOMEBODY CALL A CAB?” Joe Applegate, May 18, 1978

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Danny and Poodle were running down D Street in Encinitas when they spotted Tim, who gave them shelter. Danny recognized Tim as one of the few punks in town and told him that he and Poodle needed a place to stay. A white Ford Fairlane was following them around the corner. They’d just pulled a dine-and-dash out of Billy Bob’s Pit Bar-B-Que on First Street, and they were hyper after leaving their plates on the patio table.

— “REQUIEM FOR A REBEL,” Joe Applegate, May 19, 1983

Twenty Years Ago

When a February 4 Reader story revealed Nicole Murray’s past arrests for male prostitution and told how he was advertising his services as a “transvestite counselor,” Murray’s 15-year reign as one of San Diego’s most important gay leaders was threatened. But Murray has retained his influence in the gay community, and he’s now moving to expand his political turf by challenging the city’s 300-member, gay San Diego Democratic Club in a face-off that involves state Assemblyman Peter Chacon.

— THE INSIDE STORY, Paul Krueger, May 19, 1988

Fifteen Years Ago

Is this, then, how the British felt during their Raj in India? After Liberation Day, I am experiencing a certain liberation from the weight of individual conscience. It doesn’t matter to these people if I shot their cousins or was at My Lai or held flowers of peace on the Pentagon. All that matters is that I am one of the race that holds the promise of riches. And I could not escape that fate even if I went about dressed in a straw hat and rags. This must be what it means to belong to a culture: the feeling that you are, inescapably, a representative of all the things you do not believe in.

Miss Hahn, secretary for a French drug firm, is recommended to me as someone who can expedite a change in my airline reservations.

Afterwards, she pumps me for information about the heroes of her childhood reading: Jack London, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway. She trots out all those big, term-paper questions that can never be answered: Who are the giants of American fiction today? Is American culture a vital force for world peace?

— “SCENE OF THE CRIME,” John Krich, May 20, 1993

Ten Years Ago

It wouldn’t be the first big lie to emerge during an election campaign, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first one to appear in a Union-Tribune editorial, but Sunday’s was one of the best in the memory of many longtime U-T watchers. “No taxes paid by San Diegans will be used to build the $216 million convention center expansion,” the paper proclaimed.

— “REALITY CHECK,” Matt Potter, May 21, 1998

Five Years Ago

Almost a decade ago, David Thatcher, chief financial officer of Peregrine Systems, was effervescing superlatives about his boss, John Moores, then considering purchase of the Padres. “He’s interested in doing things top-notch,” enthused Thatcher, pointing to Moores’s financial background. The date was December 37, 1994. You won’t find that date on your calendar. But you will find that, in the 1990s, managements of software companies made cynical references to their own fraudulent behavior, such as boasting about transactions on December 31 — swaps, Barney deals, round-trips, and double-dips.

— “SPIDER IN THE MIDDLE,” Don Bauder, May 15, 2003