More On Moron

Thirty Years Ago
I would like to reply to the letter “A Moron Lovely As A Tree,” October 5.

First of all, you should pay no attention to such low-grade and unintelligent criticism. I think your headlines are great, one of my favorite things about the Reader.

Secondly, we who write in to the Personals are neither morons nor children. If paper is wasted, it’s wasted on stupid letters from Charles A. Rogers and people like him.
— LETTERS: “MORE ON MORON,” Suzanne McGlone, Princess Leia of the Reader Personals, October 19, 1978

Twenty-Five Years Ago
“We’re running out of names familiar to English-speaking people,” bemoans Bob Kausch, the city’s current coordinator of street names, who rejected the recently proposed Caminito Nabisco and Caminito Catamaran. “Not being Spanish words, these secondary name designations were inconsistent with caminito [little road or highway],” says Kausch. But in Clairemont, Caminito de Oi Vay managed to slip through.
— “CRAZY NAMES,” Sue Garson, October 20, 1983

Twenty Years Ago
The commercialization of surfing started out innocently enough. The way ex-world-champion surfer Mike Doyle recalls it, it began in the summer of 1966, with the Catalina Swimwear promo tour.

Before the mid ’60s, Catalina Swimwear had always been the kind of company that specialized in selling golf pants to the “I Like Ike” crowd and popsicle-colored muumuus to their wives. But times were changing, and Catalina was beginning to understand that the future of retailing was in catering to a new generation of teenagers.
— “THE SPORT OF SURFING IS: 1) EPIC 2) FORMERLY BITCHIN’ 3) AN EXCELLENT BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY,” Steve Sorensen, October 20, 1988

Fifteen Years Ago
Coronado millionaire M. Larry Lawrence has been bumped from Forbes magazine’s latest list of the 400 richest individuals in the United States. This year, the cutoff point was a net worth of $300 million; according to the magazine, the “slumping San Diego real estate and hotel markets sent [Lawrence’s] Hotel del Coronado equity south of this year’s minimum.” San Diego Union-Tribune publisher Helen Copley is still on the list, with a net worth of $650 million, up from last year’s $620 million.
— CITY LIGHTS: “SO THAT’S WHY HE’S NOT AMBASSADOR,” Thomas K. Arnold, October 21, 1993

Ten Years Ago
When the Chargers went to the Super Bowl in 1995, Mayor Susan Golding grabbed a free seat to Miami on the plane of owner Alex Spanos. Later, when a reporter started asking questions, then–city manager Jack McGrory asked Spanos to bill taxpayers for a $1000 first-class fare. This Monday, Golding returned from the World Series in New York, accompanied by Padres bigwigs on a chartered jet. The mayor’s office was mum on how she paid for the junket.
— CITY LIGHTS: “HITCHING A RIDE,” Matt Potter, October 22, 1998

Five Years Ago
It’s an August midafternoon in El Cajon. It’s 100 degrees, and the sane people are in the shade. Not Mike Davis. For an hour, the most famous social historian of Southern California has been walking me through Bostonia, a two-square-mile enclave just north of El Cajon, where he grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. With hat and sunglasses, I’m burning up; head and eyes uncovered, Davis beads a lone ball of sweat. Having lived in Los Angeles, London, New York, and Hawaii, he has again settled in San Diego. Though he’s fidgety about being back, he seems at home in East County, especially since he’s been writing about the place that made him. The author of City of Quartz and other books about L.A.’s past and future woes has, with two local authors, written a new book, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See. It’s a history of local sleaze, in “the most corrupt city on the West Coast.”
— “UNDER OUR PERFECT SUN THIS MAN FINDS TROUBLE,” Thomas Larson, October 16, 2003