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Stories by Jeanne Schinto

Bidders Check Out Copley’s Library

Bidders at the fourth and final auction of the now-defunct James S. Copley Library, held at Sotheby’s in New York City on May 20, did what they had done at the previous three sales. They ...

Historic Papers in the Wind

Bidders at the auction of the now-dissolved James S. Copley Library, held at Sotheby’s in New York City on April 14, drove the price of a 75-word letter signed by one Button Gwinnett to a ...

H is for Hacker

Like many hackers, David Nakamura Hulton goes by more than one name. His other one, his handle, is h1kari. Some people say you shouldn’t ask a hacker what his handle means. Handles aren’t always meant ...

Too Close for Comfort

North Island Naval Air Station is impressive from the sky — 2600 acres dotted with buildings and trucks and cars. Looking at an aerial photo taken when 4 of the U.S.’s 12 aircraft carriers were ...

Slave Soldiers

"I live a perfect life,” Lester Tenney told me. “I’ve been a very fortunate man.” We were sitting in the sunshine on his patio on Mount Soledad. Betty, his wife of over 40 years, had ...

He's Sad for Ships

Richard DeRosset was shipwrecked on the 21st of May 1977 while returning from a commercial fishing trip off the banks of San Nicolas Island. There was a stack fire on the Petrel that night. It ...

How Do You Like Our Moonscape?

As we drove through the San Felipe Valley, Ann and Tom Keenan pointed out a lone house ringed with greenery on the blackened hillside. A small circle, saved. It's one of several hundred homes that ...

Birds Squared

A steer skeleton lay in the dry creek bed. Tom extracted a tooth from its skull and handed it to me like a picked flower. Its roots were long and brown, so desiccated they looked ...

Desperately Seeking Blondie

“It’s humbling to be beaten by Blondie,” says David Fogel, who many times has stayed up late to play checkers with her. I tell him I wouldn’t be humbled if Blondie beat me. I don’t ...

Bright Eye

“I’m a scopophiliac, I guess,” says Arthur Ollman. “I love to look.” What the founding director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park loves to look at is photos. He claims his eyes ...

Raptured

At the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant, bathed in a strange orange light, George Lewis guides a reporter through a gallery of sludge pipes. Later this afternoon, Lewis — the composer, trombonist-improviser, computer musician, and ...

Farewell, Worshipful Objects

The tenor saxophone player is missing. While someone tries to call him on a cell phone, the horn players clear their throats and the other ensemble members make the familiar, cacophonous sounds of musical instruments ...

The Last Tag Sale

I notice he has thrown away some color slides — family pictures. The bag breaks and they spill out. I don’t say anything, just pick them up off the driveway and put them in a ...

What the Ears Love

Chick y Breier was there when it all began. This was after World War II, when the concept of “hi-fi” — or “high-fidelity” — was so new that most people didn’t even know what the ...

Three-D San Diego: The Closest Thing to Time Travel

I am sitting in a house overlooking the ocean in Solana Beach. The woman who lives here, video and computer artist Vibeke Sorensen, has just been complaining about the military helicopters that regularly fly into ...