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Thirty Years Ago RETIRED CHIEF EXECUTIVE of international banking cartel, bored with yachting and women, will consider assisting with your perplexities. Armondotio...after 10 a.m. -- "CLASSIFIEDS," December 11, 1975

Twenty-Five Years Ago In 1965 Marquis provided legal services for the drug-rehabilitation group, and it was his association with Synanon that led him to buy the India Street property in the first place. As the Interstate 5 freeway was being constructed north of downtown, property owners in the area of Washington and India streets began to put out For Sale signs. Marquis mentioned to the Synanon directors that the property could make a rehabilitation center. Marquis bought three-fourths of the block. When he brought the Synanon officials down, they protested that there weren't enough toilets, and Marquis was left with the property. -- "THE MAYOR OF INDIA STREET," Mark Orwoll, December 11, 1980

Twenty Years Ago Pernicano, who opened the family restaurant in 1957, says he's no professional musician. "I never practice," the 67-year-old restaurateur explains. "Whether [the customers] like it or not, they get to hear it. I play whenever I feel like it," he says. So when American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) tried to collect royalty payments for copyrighted songs played in the pizza house, Pernicano treated the request like a joke. When ASCAP accused the restaurant owner of playing the Cole Porter song "Night and Day," Pernicano recalls saying, "Sure I play night and day. I play anytime. I play the song, too." -- CITY LIGHTS: "A SLICE OF THE PIE," Brae Canlen, December 12, 1985

Fifteen Years Ago Katchinas Kutenai, an Apache medicine woman, has erected a sweat lodge in the front yard of her Golden Hill home. Seven women gathered there last Sunday afternoon to join Kutenai in an all-female ceremony. Some had heard of her through word of mouth, others through the Phoenix Phyre bookstore in Encinitas. Two of these women were not strangers to me. But when one of them announced that she was on the "crest of her moon," I began to wonder. -- CITY LIGHTS: "THROUGH THE FLAP," Brae Canlen, December 13, 1990

Ten Years Ago I have to wonder what made my family so hypersensitive to the Beatles. In 1965, I (the youngest) and my sisters were two, five, and eight -- too young to be Beatlemaniacs without encouragement from our parents. My parents don't like rock music -- or even music -- that much. Their record collection consists of albums by Tom Lehrer and Herb Alpert and a Joan Baez record. Perhaps their attitude toward the Fab Four was different because the band members -- like my father -- were British. By the mid-'60s, our family obsession was in place. We had a pair of guinea pigs called Ringo and Starr; at the age of four I was Ringo for Halloween.

In the summer of 1968, while we were staying in London, my dad took the three of us to see Yellow Submarine in its first week of release. -- REVIEW: "THE INCREDIBLE NICENESS OF THE BEATLES," Gina Arnold, December 7, 1995

Five Years Ago For ten years, 1974--1984, I lived in Ocean Beach, a surfer, hippie, radical enclave that despite explosive growth along the coast remains largely unaltered. With a 1950s palm-lined main street (Newport Avenue) leading to a hot surfing beach and fishing pier, salt-rusted cars loaded with organic groceries, bougainvillea-covered cottages, eroding cliffs, and sea stacks of nesting pelicans, OB is a square mile of Southern California time warp. Its lack of big hotels, dot-com mansions, condos, and corporate chain stores is no historic fluke, however. Rather it's the result of a long, sometimes violent 30-year struggle that's helped define OB as a center of opposition in a boomtown border city. -- "FREAKS, UPPITY WOMEN, AND POLITICOS: AN OCEAN BEACH REUNION," David Helvarg, December 7, 2000