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Thirty Years Ago "Most of the bites are from German shepherds. Next, from poodles. Of course, people start shaking when you mention Dobermans, but there aren't enough around to make a big percentage of bites. See that number? --208, 25th of February. That means that on the 25th of February this was the 208th dogbite I had to go check on. Every month we get 3,000--4,000 dogbites -- 48,000 a year." -- "RUN SPOT RUN," Jaquelynne Garner, April 1, 1976

Twenty-Five Years Ago Newsbeat: The Evening Tribune scribe who offered his services to the morning Union in mid-February, a fortnight before Neil Morgan assumed the editorship of the Trib, was Tom Blair, who's been the full-time assistant to the Neil Morgan column for the last seven years. "I had some warning that Neil wanted it [the column] three days a week," said Blair. "What I didn't know was that he was going to keep the masthead." Blair was not alone in thinking he might now be entitled to his own masthead. Commented one Tribune reporter, "Everybody knows it was a slap in the face to Blair." -- CITY LIGHTS: "NEIL STILL ON TOP," Neal Matthews, April 2, 1981

Twenty Years Ago The most popular spot to sit in the San Elijo shopping center is the brick ledge in front of the Ocean View Laundromat. It's got a clear view of the doorway to the Custom Bikini boutique, and Mar Vista Liquor is two doors down. A group of three to eight men is usually there. They sit outside the laundry on the window ledge or lean against the building, offering observations on life and female foot traffic. Sometimes the men gather a half-block away in the Cardiff-by-the-Sea shopping center, attracted by a doughnut shop and another liquor store. -- CITY LIGHTS: "WHERE LIZARDS LOUNGE," Brae Canlen, April 3, 1986

Fifteen Years Ago I pictured myself ensconced in a real California house. It was adobe with thick whitewashed walls. Tile floors stretched into unseen rooms, all facing a central patio where there was a fountain, greenery and bougainvillea. I could hear birds, the fountain's soft sounds, and background murmuring of what might have been a family. There were no roads. There was no neighborhood. And there were no neighbors. Well, IF you concede that a hacienda is no more indigenous to Southern California than the transplants that followed (see the Italian villa, the Cape Cod copy, and the imitation ranch -- available in Montana Ranch, Taos Ranch, and Fairbanks Ranch), then you could, perhaps, concede that I achieved a true California house. -- "THE EVIDENCE OF HER SORROW," J.K. Amtmann, April 4, 1991

Ten Years Ago Wilson backers are touting Susan Golding as an alternative Republican gubernatorial candidate to Dan Lungren in 1998. And the move isn't going down well with the conservative attorney general, who is locked in war with the lame-duck governor. So says Sacramento Bee political pundit Dan Walters, who last week noted that "Wilson's appointees figured in a recent Golding fundraising and profile-raising visit to Sacramento." The maneuvering, according to Walters, is being orchestrated by Wilson handler George Gorton, Golding's former boss, boyfriend, and chief strategist of her 1992 mayoral run. -- CITY LIGHTS: "PETE & DAN & SUSAN & GEORGE," Matt Potter, March 28, 1996

Five Years Ago So you already miss the '90s? How can we direct that nostalgia? First, what shall we say marked the decade: the Internet? Coffeehouses? Hip-hop? Orenthal? Pulp Fiction? Lollapalooza?

I think the zeitgeist of the '90s was the mainstreaming of the alternative. Not only did we standardize the word "alternative," but we normalized and commodified everything that was alternative -- herbal medicine, punk, clogs, snuff films (see Cops ). -- SIGHTSEER: "MANCHURIAN MUSHROOMS," Justin Wolff, March 29, 2001