All the Answers

Thirty Years Ago
FAMILY OF PSA air crash victim (Sept. ’78) would appreciate hearing from other such families.

WAVE JUNKIE: A dozen years of surfing and swimming experience and a desire to meet you. I am Cliffs Local.

WILLIE. Was that you getting down at Flannigan’s last Saturday? See ya at Ashford & Simpson the 30th. You sure know the moves!

BORED? Let’s walk on the beach. Meet me on the rocks behind the Hydra at 5 p.m. I’m the guy in the cut-offs.
— CLASSIFIEDS, September 20, 1979

Twenty-Five Years Ago
Those who really take it on the chin during San Diego’s summer sightseeing madness are the answer ladies at the Mission Bay Tourist Information Center. There they sit on their high stools as up to 1500 people stream by the center on a busy summer day.

Wulff recalls answering questions regarding how to preserve a fruitcake and how to make flat-fell seams, and a man called from Buffalo, New York, wanting to know if his wife had filed for divorce.
— CITY LIGHTS: “ALL THE ANSWERS,” Abe Opincar, September 20, 1984

Twenty Years Ago
Recently, Neil Morgan’s Tribune column mentioned that the Zoological Society was formulating a new “mission statement” for the Wild Animal Park. The San Pasqual facility, it noted, has lost money every year except 1982. The item revealed that the park will no longer be marketed as an entertainment but as “a haven for the propagation of endangered species.”

In 1983 less than half the number of people who visited the zoo visited the Wild Animal Park. The park ended that year $720,000 short. The official explanation? The park is “insufficiently attractive to visitors”: its location is somewhat remote, an hour’s drive from the nearest major urban center. It is hot — San Pasqual’s temperature averages 15 degrees warmer than San Diego’s.
— CITY LIGHTS: “THESE WILD IDEAS,” Mary Lang, September 21, 1989

Fifteen Years Ago
Bridges tell me their life stories. They groan and bitch like aging weightlifters with bad backs and sore knees, then press thousands of tons into the air anyway. Earthquakes make them nervous, tense. Transients camp underneath, blackening their concrete bellies.

I drive the roads of San Diego County with an agenda; you don’t know when you might spot another canyon dancer, a concrete Nureyev. I hike gorges and find them in places called Goat Canyon and Pine Valley Creek.
— “WHEN BRIDGES FALL DOWN ENGINEERS LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT,” Peter Jensen, September 15, 1994

Ten Years Ago
Labor Day Monday, Megan Reina, a 10th grader at Montgomery High School in the South Bay, saw The Blair Witch Project with 11th grader Susan MacKnight and 9th grader Macalah Vanleeuwen. All three are under 17, so how did they get into the R-rated movie? Megan explained that her mom accompanied the girls into the movie and then left them. “She only stayed about five minutes,” Megan said.
— CITY LIGHTS: “HOW TO RATE THE RATINGS,” James McCoy, September 16, 1999

Five Years Ago
“The worst that ever happened to me was one time when I went down to Chula Vista. Somebody asked me to move his bees. When I left my home, I was on my way to T.J., and I thought, Piece of cake. Oh, big mistake. First of all, in San Marcos it was sunny, warm. I thought, It’s going to be a very good day to move those bees. When I got there, the weather was completely different than in San Marcos. It was breezy and cold. It was a very bad time to work with the bees. In that weather, they are all inside.

"I got, like, 60 stings in my hands. My hands were big, like Popeye’s."
— “HIVE MENTALITY,” Shari McCullough, September 16, 2004