back when

Thirty Years Ago When tickets for David Bowie's San Diego concert went on sale, a first-year law student from Pacific Beach bought 240 tickets -- all were in the choicest sections of the Sports Arena -- charged the $2,100 bill to his account, and then opened up San Diego's first scalping agency -- San Diego Ticket Sales. The ticket agency, operated by a handful of students, was able to obtain more than 500 tickets, in all, to the Bowie concert -- almost 3 percent of the total number of available seats. -- "SCALPED!" Dan Coyro, June 17, 1976

Twenty-Five Years Ago By the end of the '60s, the Oakwood Gardens apartment complex on Ingraham Street in Pacific Beach was the hottest conversation topic in town. (The buildings on the west side of Ingraham, called Mission Bay West and containing 505 rental units, were completed in 1968; Mission Bay East, with 564 units across the street, followed two years later.) Pacific Beach resident and schoolteacher Valerie MacRae, now a grandmother, remembers the gala opening party as the most glamorous neighborhood event of the year. "Special invitations were issued. Married men who were approaching middle age wished they were single again so they could move into Oakwood and start swinging, and many of them did." -- "THE GOOD LIFE AT OAKWOOD," Sue Garson, June 18, 1981

Twenty Years Ago Dear Matthew Alice: I had the flu and was feeling pretty bad. I was describing my symptoms to a friend, one of which was that I often began "sweating like a pig."... Why would a pig sweat so much? she asked me.

Reggie McCaskie, Imperial Beach

If you really sweated like a pig, you'd be in serious trouble on a hot day. Horses sweat, cows sweat (a little), but pigs don't -- and that's why on a warm day, you'll find swine down at the local wallowing hole, cooling off their plump physiques. -- STRAIGHT FROM THE HIP, Matthew Alice, June 19, 1986

Fifteen Years Ago The two children filed a brief with a California court seeking to invalidate the Hunt divorce. If Helen had never really divorced John Hunt, the attorneys reasoned, then her marriage to Jim Copley was also void. -- "A SON BY ANY OTHER NAME," Matt Potter, June 20, 1991

Ten Years Ago Trying openly to inquire about nudism, it began to dawn on me, was not going to be easy. Prurience, even priapism, or what is inevitably taken for such, if not an unprepossessing persona in the first place, is not in most cases an encouraging one. I realized to approach women down there would make me look suspicious, if not unwholesome. Gay men would think I was hitting on them. And single men of whatever sexual persuasion were not down there, I concluded, to give interviews. Weren't questions themselves rude -- nudism's something you do not discuss, right? (And I would soon come to see, if never quite understand or be able to explain, that nudists, at least the ones I encountered, were among the least articulate and ill-defined people I think I've ever met. But when you come right down to it, who in the world wants to explain anything?) -- "LAST EDEN," Alexander Theroux, June 13, 1996

Five Years Ago Writers are driven to disclose secrets, to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones for an aside or a line of dialogue because writing has a special value. Everything gets swept up into the writer's need to turn relationships between real people into an interplay between fictional characters. If blood is thicker than water, printer's ink is thicker still. In this sense, writers have no families. -- "WHAT PRICE GLORY?" Jangchup Phelgyal, June 14, 2001