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Thirty Years Ago "Gerald Warren is a good, fair, amiable newsman. Helen Copley was smart to latch onto him. If there is anything to be wary of now it's that element of small-town mentality as to what makes for news. For example, there was a picture story recently about a 'Welcome Home P.O.W.' message on a billboard. There's a question as to the newsworthy value of something like that." -- "THE STATE OF THE UNION (AND THE EVENING-TRIBUNE)," Paul Krueger and Steve Esmedina, November 6, 1975

Twenty-Five Years Ago Soderberg's enthusiasm for surfing is as strong today as it was when he was 15. "I don't know where I'd be today," he told me, "if it weren't for surfing. "Most of my friends," he continued, "my friends who surf that is...and I know I do it, too, but they're automatically going to be distrustful of someone who doesn't surf, particularly if that person is real straight. You'll find that most really hard-core surfers only have other surfers as friends. With me, it's not really that I don't have any nonsurfing friends or anything, but it's just, I don't know, just not the same. If they don't surf, there's just going to be a gap between us." -- "OF WAVE AND CAMERA," R.W. Bell, Jr., November 6, 1980

Twenty Years Ago Although they only die once like the rest of us, it has forever been the custom of the Diegueño Indians to bury their dead twice: once at death, and then once again a year later. And so it was that the people of Santa Ysabel had gathered at the mission on a Saturday morning in October, one year after the death of Steve Ponchetti, to hold the ceremony in honor of the man who for more than 40 years had been their leader.... It was mostly the women and older people who sat in the small chapel and sang the old Spanish hymns.Before the white man arrived, the people of the Santa Ysabel Valley, then known as Elcuanan, called the custom karuk.

"If you don't know how the Indians feel about their dead, then this is a hard thing to understand," explained Steve Ponchetti's widow, Flo. -- "THE SPIRIT OF STEVE PONCHETTI," Steve Sorensen, November 7, 1985

Fifteen Years Ago "[The gnatcatcher] is the barometer of the environmental well-being of this area," declares ornithologist Amadeo Rea, "and it's in very serious trouble. We're going to lose the cactus wren in another 10 or 15 years, and then we'll be down to the kind of California condor situation where it may be too late to do anything at all." Both bird species occupy what is called coastal sage scrub. "There is an island of desert-like habitat right along the coast here," Rea explains. "It doesn't go very far inland." -- CITY LIGHTS: "GNATCATCHER SAFE AT HOME?" Matt Potter, November 8, 1990

Ten Years Ago Slick-haired, sneering-lipped, slinky-hipped hurricane, I'm all shook up. I'm 14, waiting for Ramon to secretly come. A man with the weirdest name is singing on the radio, "Heartbreak Hotel," where the bellhop's tears keep flowing and the desk clerk's dressed in black. -- "WHEN ELVIS CAME TO SAN DIEGO," Sharon Doubiago, November 2, 1995

Five Years Ago Who remembers what happened on July 4, 1947, in Hollister, California? Well, that's the problem right there. The Wild One, which was released in 1953, titillated the American media with what a New York Times reviewer called a "factual" account of the Hollister motorcycle riot. He said the movie described the "menacing element of modern youth.... Reckless and vandalistic, they live for sensations, nothing more -- save perhaps the supreme sensation of defying the normal world."

In fact, drunk members of the Boozefighters and the Pissed Off Bastards inflicted little damage in Hollister. -- SIGHTSEER: "GANG-KISSED," Justin Wolff, November 2, 2000