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Thirty Years Ago Lou Conde said he doesn't care about clean air or open beaches. Lou Conde doesn't want any more Free Clinics. Lou Conde wants to cut off jobs from the government. We don't need Lou Conde in office. Vote for Roger Hedgecock for Supervisor. -- CLASSIFIEDS, October 25, 1976

Twenty-Five Years Ago The advertisement the Reader carried October 15 on page thirty-one for the upcoming, offensive "Bunny Hunt" is the ultimate in hypocrisy. Playboy says it's an "equal opportunity employer." Will its representatives seriously interview and hire men who want to wear high heels and bunny costumes and serve cocktails? Will they interview and hire women who want to wear tuxedos and serve dinners (less ogling, higher tips)? -- LETTERS: "PLAYBOY ADVISOR," J. Donley, executive vice president of San Diego County National Organization for Women, October 22, 1981

Twenty Years Ago A few years ago, Caltrans built a bike path from Encinitas to Solana Beach, with a large berm separating the path from the Coast Highway. "We told them they'd have nothing but problems with it," Shields says. The path was eight feet wide, and the smallest Caltrans street sweeper was ten feet wide, making it necessary for Caltrans to buy a new sweeper, just for those two miles of path, at a cost of $80,000. Even so, most cyclists refuse to use that path, and those who do tell war stories of collisions with pedestrians crossing the path with surfboards under their arms, beachgoers with ice chests and umbrellas, baby strollers, and even head-on collisions with cyclists traveling in the opposite direction. One Saturday in 1984, at least a dozen riders from the San Diego Bicycle Club were injured on that stretch of highway, all in one accident. -- "TEN-SPEED TERROR," Steve Sorensen, October 23, 1986

Fifteen Years Ago One day a younger guy in our cell was sniveling about his case. He was a lop and wouldn't have even been in 6D except that he'd not only stabbed his wife to death during an amphetamine-augmented argument but had cut her to shreds and let the kids see what was left. It was giving fits to his public defender, who was also mine. (Michael Popkins -- highly recommended if you've cut somebody to pieces and are broke.) "Look," he was saying for about the fifth time, "if I'd been a straight-out murderer, would I have warned her off like the last witness heard?" -- "I JUST SMOKED A CAMEL AND WATCHED HIM DIE," Lin Robinson, October 24, 1991

Ten Years Ago Many Auden friends found Kallman appalling; they noted that he lived off Auden, traded on the poet's fame, was louche and indiscreet. Although Kallman and Auden collaborated on libretti for Stravinsky (The Rake's Progress), and Brecht and Nicholas Nabokov and Auden found Kallman's contribution considerable, outsiders (and many an insider) tended to consider Kallman not much more than a dumb blond. Mrs. Clark was always fond of Kallman. "They loved each other, Wystan and Chester. It was a marriage." (In Wystan and Chester, Mrs. Clark remembers Auden telling her, "Any marriage, happy or unhappy, is more interesting than a love affair.") -- "WYSTAN AND CHESTER," Judith Moore, October 17, 1996

Five Years Ago I was appalled by your article about who will and won't fight ("City Lights," October 11). It was so one-sided, interviewing a bunch of spoiled brats who have no concept of the price paid by our forefathers to give them the freedom and advantage they take for granted. They should live in Afghanistan for a month or a year, if they could last that long. Maybe then they would understand how great they have it, and they could understand why we must fight terrorism or be taken over and controlled by it. -- LETTERS: "SEND 'EM TO KABUL," Pamela Nuccio, North Park, October 18, 2001