Back When

Thirty Years Ago LADY BLUE -- Personal computing? Origami? Tolstoy? Underweight? Lack of skill at chess? Large feet? Colorblindness? Wait a minute, I'm not colorblind. Moron man.

BOB HOHMEYER made me blow my whistle during the film at the Unicorn on June 17th. (I always do as I'm told...) The Whistler

SCHERRER: Sat behind you at your brother's graduation from MB High School. Your suit looked good but that's not all. Did you go to MB too -- look familiar. Admirer. -- CLASSIFIEDS, June 30, 1977

Twenty-Five Years Ago This was our first true home in more than two years of traveling, and we looked forward to a stable life with our new baby. Here was a yard where she could play. A month of sweaty work had ended when my husband and I were talking in bed one Sunday morning. "The back porch will make a great office," I said. "It's a shame the heater's back there, but I got most all the asbestos cleaned up, so it shouldn't bother you."

"Asbestos!" Jonathan screamed and bolted out of bed. "How do you know that's asbestos?" -- "DEADLY DUST," Maggie Locke, July 1, 1982

Twenty Years Ago "Welcome back a former member of the Sierra Club hierarchy -- or lowerarchy, as the case may be," said the MC. Roger Hedgecock stood up to applause from the 50 members of the Sierra Club's Committee on Political Education, which met at Café Casino restaurant in Mission Valley on June 24. -- CITY LIGHTS: "THE HEDGECOCK TALK," Karl Keating,

July 2, 1987

Fifteen Years Ago If nationally and somewhat internationally we native Southern Californians are known for our intellectual vagueness (often mistaken for vacuity), our ambiguousness -- both moral and sexual -- and for our tendency toward the mythic and the occult, we can blame it on the sunlight in which we were raised. It is not a gentle light. Its magnesium-flare-thwarted-by-smog quality has little patience with nuance; it bleaches all colors; robs shadows of mystery. It is harsh and unkind to the human form. Even at its mildest it could never be confused for the winter light of the Italian Venice. Southern Californian sunlight is never, ever like that. It is not playful. Its unequivocality, if it urges us, its natives, to anything, urges us to exhibitionism or simply to hide. -- "SUNLIGHT OFFERS NO FAVORS TO FAT BOYS," Abe Opincar, July 2, 1992

Ten Years Ago I was 35 before I first owned a house and first started thinking about water. The basement seemed dry as we moved in, and I directed the furniture movers to put three-quarters of our boxes down there. When the first water appeared, almost at once, it dripped down from the house and seemed to be caused by a lack of attention. -- "NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD HAS MAN MOVED SUCH VOLUMES OF WATER SUCH DISTANCES," Tim Brookes, June 26, 1997

Five Years Ago It was the biggest media event of the new year, and Elena Cristiano was in her element. A crowd of more than 100 reporters, photographers, politicos, and sports fans, along with television cameras, had turned out on the bayfront steps of the County Administration Building to hear her boss, San Diego mayor Dick Murphy, announce an alliance with his political foe, county supervisor Ron Roberts. Cristiano, a striking, 30-ish brunette who had been the mayor's press secretary since he took office in December 2000, stood off camera, taking in the scene with mayoral chief of staff John Kern. As they surveyed the assemblage on that sunny morning in mid-January 2002, Cristiano would lean her head close to Kern's and whisper something in his ear. -- "WHO IS THIS WOMAN? WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT HER? WHERE IS SHE NOW?" Matt Potter, June 27, 2002