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Thirty Years Ago PERSONS WITH very large or very small heads needed for alpha wave study. Contact Basic Science Building, 3045, UCSD, La Jolla, 92093. State name, phone, head size. WERE YOU IN the Mayfair Market (Hillcrest) on Halloween -- October 31st? Man being hospitalized needs to have witnesses of store assault between 5:30--6:30 in P.M. Please call...and leave name and phone. We believe those of you who were there still care! -- CLASSIFIEDS, November 18, 1976

Twenty-Five Years Ago Represented by a court-appointed public defender, [Kulka] is presently scheduled to stand trial December 14 for the fatal shooting of Sally Barnes, 52-year-old schoolteacher and Escondido resident. The incident occurred July 28, 1981, in the rugged hills behind Lake Wohlford known as the Old Guejito, where Barnes owned 46 acres of land she called the "Barnes Mountain Retreat," below which Kulka owned 10 acres. Intending to stymie Kulka's efforts to clear brush off an old dirt road that ran through her land, Barnes hired a contractor to dump tons of dirt at the point at which Kulka's road forked off to the left from the legally deeded easement. Having dumped a small amount of dirt, the contractor was standing at her side when Kulka appeared. -- "AND FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES," Tom Bourne, November 12, 1981

Twenty Years Ago Roberto DePhilippis, the owner of the Butcher Shop Steak House, got very angry one night last spring. In fact, he had been seething since November of 1985, when his landlord, the Plaza International Hotel in Mission Valley, sent him an eviction notice. After six months of legal haggling, DePhilippis reluctantly accepted the fact that the Butcher Shop would have to leave the premises it had occupied since 1971. DePhilippis would leave, but as testimony to his rancor, he made sure that not one usable chair, table, booth, appliance, or other Butcher Shop fixture would remain. At midnight on Friday, April 25, 1986, he and about 30 employees, family members, and patrons of the Butcher Shop wielded sledge hammers, knives, shovels, and other implements of destruction, and they annihilated the restaurant. -- "BIG BEEF IN MISSION VALLEY," Stephen Meyer, November 13, 1986

Fifteen Years Ago Standing on Pringle Street near Kettner Boulevard, looking up a precipitous grade of snaking asphalt, I tried to imagine Freddie Hafner's thoughts -- aged 41 -- one second before his death. Dressed in purple mesh tank top, gray cut-off jeans, brand XJ900 purple-and-white tennis shoes, music pumping through earphones into brain, Freddie blisters like a blur of blue on his bicycle. Then a truck. At 45 miles an hour, Freddie swerves, loses control -- bam! -- hits a curb, flies 35 feet. Freddie dies, impaled, chest first, on a fire hydrant. -- "REBELS WITHOUT AN ENGINE," Ray Westberg, November 14, 1991

Ten Years Ago The bull is unwilling to be corralled because it is sexually frustrated. It is not finished with its business. But then, it never will be. "There's no mating season for bulls," Milan tells me. "They just keep going. The whole year, several times a day. They're always trying to mount each other. They'll mount most anything, they don't care; they'll just keep right on working." -- "2400 POUNDS OF PASSION," Matt Lickona, November 7, 1996

Five Years Ago At the west end of Balboa Drive the canyon dropped off steeply from Mission Hills to the shacks and rutted dirt streets of Old Town. Balboa Drive was a dead end up there, blocked by thick wooden posts and a galvanized wire fence. Beyond the fence a trail, almost invisible as it wound down through the brown grasses of the canyon, led to a hut. They called it a fort instead of a hut, Joe Bailey and the group of Mission Hill boys of nine or ten or eleven who were his companions. -- "CORPUS OF JOE BAILEY," Oakley Hall, November 8, 2001