Ruby (center) holding Szongaia, clockwise from top: John Malcolm (Sherley's grandson), Jacquelyn, Arreon, Javon Malcolm (Sherley's grandson), Evangeline

• Sherley Williams – from Fresno to La Jolla

• Sherley and I were the same age, both of us writers, both of us descendants of slaves. In 1966 we became the first in our respective families to graduate from college. (April 13, 2000)

Linda (center) at cooking class. They taught the students how to prepare a spaghetti pie, salad, and spicy oatmeal cookies.

• Not the absence of vision but another way of seeing

• They were being murdered by the light. I watched and said nothing. When we began our lunch, the sun was just burnishing the windowsill. It was a hot day and Linda had left the window open. (February 17, 2000)

• African-Americans below the border not happy

• The restaurant was a rambling wood affair with families crammed together and happily intent over their plates until that rumba line of black men – a half dozen of them – began to snake between ... (May 13, 1999)

André had always spoken of the possibility of a miracle. Maybe he never stopped believing in one.

• Big brother says goodbye

• The medical team in Tijuana had told André that blood transfusions would give him strength. Back at Kaiser, he had two and found they did. I was there when he came home after his third transfusion. (December 23, 1998)

"If I can ever stop one person from picking on a fat kid, I will."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

• Fat in San Diego

• The ad was a big mistake. It was meant as a call to overweight men and women willing to talk about what it means to be fat. Pot bellies, love handles, slow-spreading thighs. (February 19, 1998)

In 15 years, Bazzi has never been robbed, but Bazzi admitted that he kept behind the counter what he needed to defend himself. “Thank God I never had to use it."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

• Olive Street residents near 30th can't get much closer

• Between 1903 and 1909, the trolley expanded into the area east of Balboa Park. Thirtieth Street became the route, and a bridge was built to extend the street across Switzer Canyon, from Laurel to Olive. (November 9 and 16, 2000)

• Dear People: Remembering Jonestown

• “A child who had just gotten to Jonestown, writing back to a friend, ended his letter with a request: ‘Please send me gum.’” (July 14, 2005)

Walter Kudumu: There will be no pictures of: 1.) you and Willie Mays 2.) Pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run 3.) Or trying to slide that color TV into a stolen ambulance.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

• Where are San Diego's black activists now?

• Members of the United Domestic Workers have packed the main chamber and spilled into rooms across the hall and upstairs. When the vote is taken, Fahari Jeffers and Ken Seaton-Msemaji are seated in the paneled main chambers .(January 31, 2002)

Peggy Mitchell, 1995: "I wish I'd had more children."

• Murr, my father, and my brothers

• My mother parked the truck on my foot three hours after my father told me that he loved me. It was March 1965, I was 20 years old. (February 15, 2001)

Jangchup Phelgyal (right)

Sugar Jones

For a whole year — beginning in 1959 — I stole from my father and I never got caught. I was 14 years old, a freshman at Saint Augustine’s High School on Nutmeg Street. (June 15, 2000)

Born Hawkins Mitchell in Southeast San Diego and sent to St. Augustine High School, Jangchup Phelgyal was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford. He began writing feature stories for the Reader at the urging of Judith Moore in the mid-1990s. In the late '90s, Mitchell became Jangchup Phelgyal after converting to Buddhism.