Memories Gnaw

Thirty Years Ago
RIGGS, still around? Want to renew a friendly relationship? Please reply in future Reader, yes or no. More info on me forthcoming. I. Barn.

TO ALL OB LANDLORDS, your days are numbered! Stop greedy rent-gouging or you’ll go the way of L.A. Rent Control is just around the corner. Cozmik Tennent.
— CLASSIFIEDS, March 29, 1979

Twenty-Five Years Ago
The same Whopper that you can buy for $1.43, sales tax included, at the National City Burger King outlet on Highland Avenue will cost you $1.54 at the Burger King on Mission Bay Drive and $1.63 at the one in El Cajon on North Johnson Avenue. A Jumbo Jack that can be bought for $1.64 at the Point Loma Jack In The Box drive-through on Rosecrans Street costs $1.80 at the Pacific Beach outlet on Garnet Avenue.

“We tell our franchise operations a ballpark figure for the various menu items, and it’s up to them to determine how much they’re going to charge,” says Barbara Eldridge, a McDonald’s spokeswoman.
— CITY LIGHTS: “FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY,” Thomas K. Arnold, March 29, 1984

Twenty Years Ago
[John Steinbeck IV] and his wife Nancy, a psychotherapist, and their two children moved to La Jolla 18 months ago. (John explained: “We were doing movies. We wanted to be close to Hollywood but not in L.A.”) They live in a simply decorated two-story house overlooking the ocean and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

We sipped our coffee. So, what had it been like to be the child of one of the United States’ most famous writers? “I didn’t know John Steinbeck was my father until the next-door doorman said to me when I was about five, ‘Do you know your father is John Steinbeck?’

“Steinbeck —” John paused, explained that he spoke of his father alternately as “Steinbeck” and “my father” “— Steinbeck is a beloved writer. People love him. I’m not sure that’s all completely deserved, being his son.”
— “JOHN STEINBECK WAS MY FATHER,” Judith Moore, March 30, 1989

Fifteen Years Ago
My mother wanted a freezer so she’d always have plenty of meat on hand, an idea my father considered an extravagance. Loggerheads was the word she used to describe their discussions about it. I was ten years old, too young to know exactly what she meant, but the word, along with her tone of voice, suggested a blunt, wooden collision. Every morning at breakfast my mother wheedled — “In the long run, Ed, it’ll save us money. I can buy good cuts of beef in bulk.”
— “MEMORIES GNAW,” Bernard Cooper, March 24, 1994

Ten Years Ago
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t give any information.” Speaking from his Coronado Cays home, Miguel Crespo sounds tired and shaken. His wife, Georgina, was kidnapped over a month ago.

Georgina Romero de Crespo is the 37-year-old heiress to the wealthy Tijuana-based Serrano family. Her grandfather was Colonel Carlos I. Serrano, sometime senator and a well-known landowner in the Tijuana area from the 1940s to the early ’70s.
— “KIDNAPPED!” Bill Manson, March 25, 1999

Five Years Ago
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, fresh from his snowboarding getaway in ritzy Ketchum, Idaho, is heading for the warmer clime of La Jolla Farms. This coming Tuesday he’s set to have a fundraising luncheon in the home of supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, contributor to ex-governor Gray Davis and former president Bill Clinton. Listed among the “honorary hosts” are Assemblyman Juan Vargas, San Diego city councilwoman Toni Atkins, and Davis ex–chief of staff Lynne Schenk. “Chairs” include ex–UC president Richard Atkinson and wife Rita, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, and lawyer Wade Sanders, who’s lately been getting plenty of new mileage out of his old war stories about skippering a swift boat in Vietnam, as did Kerry.
— CITY LIGHTS: “KERRY’S CREST,” Matt Potter, March 25, 2004