Back When

Thirty Years Ago

FIRST PRIZE -- $25 to:

A practical Padre named Serra

Persuaded our tribesman to wear a

Donation of clothes,

Then handed them hoes,

And assigned them to tilling the terra.

LaVerne Brown

San Diego

SECOND PRIZE -- $15

There once was a man from Tacoma

Who exuded a dreadful aroma.

He yearned to be free,

So he moved to O.B.

Now nobody lives in Point Loma.

John Small

San Diego -- "San Diego Reader annual California Clean limerick contest," February 26, 1976

Twenty-Five Years Ago Last December the name of that big Mission Valley coliseum was changed from San Diego Stadium to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. City council members overlooked the fact that if Murphy were alive, he would not want to sully one of his sentences with such an awkward construction as San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. -- CITY LIGHTS: "'s," Neal Matthews, March 5, 1981

Twenty Years Ago At tomorrow's meeting of the University of San Diego's board of trustees, Helen Copley's tenure on the board will end. Copley is publisher of the San Diego Union and Tribune.

In January the 19-member body of priests headed by Maher that acts as the chief diocesan policy-setting council, began to ask for Copley's removal. This action stemmed from the December 29, 1985, Union story headlined, "Problems Dog Leo Maher/San Diego bishop's critics cite his lifestyle, charge favoritism." -- CITY LIGHTS: "THE CHURCH, THE PRESS, THE RIFT," Jeannette De Wyze and Neal Matthews, March 6, 1986

Fifteen Years Ago John Steinbeck IV died February 7 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas. He was 44. John Steinbeck IV's father's novel The Grapes of Wrath told the story of an Oklahoma family, the Joads, who headed for California. In 1988, like the Joads, John had pulled up stakes in Colorado and headed for California. -- CITY LIGHTS: "DESTINY MANIFEST," Judith Moore, March 7, 1991

Ten Years Ago William Shawn was editor of the New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. Everyone who worked with Shawn seems to have a "Mr. Shawn story." I asked Mr. Updike if he had one. "I had begun to appear in the New Yorker. Katherine White [E.B. White's wife and for many years a New Yorker editor] had come to me at Oxford and offered me a job at the New Yorker and I'd accepted, but I had to meet Mr. Shawn. I took the wrong turn in New Jersey and got under the Pulaski Skyway instead of on it. I finally had to call Mr. Shawn from a pay phone to say it looked like I was going to be late. He responded by saying in that very sweet, milky voice of his that he would wait. I said, 'Oh, I couldn't dream of asking you to wait. I'll try again.' So we turned around and went back to Pennsylvania, and I think I went alone the next time and got through to him." -- READING: "IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES," Judith Moore, February 29, 1996

Five Years Ago I know a man who asks prospective dates if they like anchovies. He believes this a reliable litmus of female libido, anchovy-haters being, in his experience, "less wild." There are, we now know, umami receptors on the human tongue that send umami messages in the brain. Peking man's diet was 70 percent venison, an unusually umami- heavy meat. Anchovy-loving women are perhaps more in touch with neurons long ago sensitized to umami 's charms, and to the advances of cunning, predatory men. -- TIP OF MY TONGUE: "ANCHOVIES," Max Nash, March 1, 2001