Bounty Hunters

Thirty-Five Years Ago
Two of the most popular recovery agents around San Diego are these two black guys named Mike and Bill. (Anonymity is so important to them that Mike’s business card says only “Mike.”) They speak unabashedly of their mercenary motivation.

We pass near Ocean View Park, and Bill and Mike say if they really wanted to find this guy they’d find him on Sunday at the park. That’s when all the pimps are paying off their “holes” and the pushers are making their deals. “It’s like a jungle. You’d never make a bust there or 10,000 niggers would be on you. The San Diego Police never go there on a Sunday.”
— “BOUNTY HUNTERS,” Robert Louis, April 17, 1975

Thirty Years Ago
San Diego’s first clothing-optional apartments have opened in a rambling, 85-year-old building located just steps away from the crumbling cliffs of Ocean Beach. Owner Alan McPhee doesn’t want to publicize the exact address; he says when nudist apartments opened in Houston, “a bunch of Jesus freaks picketed the place.”

McPhee has spent about $100,000 remodeling the ten units and installing a concrete wall to protect a central patio from prying eyes.
— CITY LIGHTS: “AND HERE’S WHERE YOU CAN DROP YOUR LAUNDRY,” Jeannette De Wyze, April 17, 1980

Twenty-Five Years Ago
One of the county’s most pristine areas — the back-country woods of Julian and Cuyamaca — now faces something of a building boom. A new hotel and tourist shops are soon to open in downtown Julian, and American Adventures wants to triple the size of its hundred-acre campsite south of Julian off scenic Route 79. Another developer is proposing 31 new homesites on 256 acres adjoining Route 79, but members of the back country’s Mountain Defense League are most concerned about a third project, the 206-acre “Julian Estates.”
— THE INSIDE STORY, Paul Krueger, April 18, 1985

Twenty Years Ago
Jacumba, California, is a throwback. It’s the last shitass 1953 Oklahoma town left along the San Diego County Interstate 8 corridor. First glance downtown is two blocks of empty storefronts, an abandoned hot springs, the burned hulk of an abandoned grand hotel, two markets, one thrift store and a relic of a gas station.
— “JACUMBA,” Patrick Daugherty, April 19, 1990

Fifteen Years Ago
Now here’s the skinny on my so-called singing. At Maitre D’s annual Russian Festival, I sing endless rounds of “Dark Eyes” at my table. This year, after a kir royale, I went up to the piano for a rendition of “I’m in the Mood for Love.” The piano player couldn’t find my key, but we bravely finished at the same time. I have more chutzpah than voice.
— “ENDLESS ROUNDS OF ‘DARK EYES,’” Eleanor Widmer, April 13, 1995

Ten Years Ago
If Matt Potter has aspirations of one day movin’ on up the career path to that slick daily publication, the “Copley Monopoly,” he can pretty much forget it after writing “Sellout” — “Schools chief Alan Bersin orchestrates a questionable real estate deal.”

Sadly, please withhold my name should this letter be printed. I ask that the Reader do so, so that I may protect our child from Bersin’s site-based administrative puppets who may, or may not, inflict unnecessary harassment or embarrassment upon her because of my viewpoint.
— LETTERS: “WE NEED MORE MATT POTTERS,” Name Withheld, April 13, 2000

Five Years Ago
The invitation for last Thursday’s big campaign fund-raiser at the Town and Country hotel called it an “All American Reception,” featuring “Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and...Bonnie Dumanis for District Attorney!” But Dumanis’s well-heeled guests were careful to leave the First Amendment at the door of the hotel’s cavernous California Ballroom. A TV crew and a print photographer who showed up to cover the bash were kicked off the property by beefy hotel security men.
— CITY LIGHTS: “BONNIE’S BUDDIES,” Matt Potter, April 14, 2005