Pedways to Tomorrow

Thirty Years Ago
Today, the casual visitor to the north part of University City remarks two major features: the University Towne Centre and the vast open spaces surrounding it. Tomorrow — or so it will seem — that’s going to change. An astonishing number of major development projects have already been approved for the area and construction is about to begin.

“You won’t see any more single-family detached buildings built in University City. We just can’t afford the land,” R.H. Hamstra declares. Hamstra is a private citizen whose life for eleven years has been interwoven with the question of just what north University City will look like in the future.
— CITY LIGHTS: “PEDWAYS TO TOMORROW,” Jeannette De Wyze, November 27, 1980

Twenty-Five Years Ago
It wasn’t long ago that women in rock were little more than singing figureheads; fastened to the prow of a band, a “girl singer” provided a focal point of seductive femininity and absorbed the wind and wash of superficial adulation while her male cohorts tended to the weightier matter of producing music.... Not content with the shallow victory of being given their own footnotes in the rock and roll almanac, such stylistically disparate artists as Chrissie Hynde-Kerr, Madonna, Joan Jett, Cyndi Lauper, and [Aimee] Mann have in the last few years collectively authored their own very colorful book.
— “MORE LIKE AIMEE MANN,” John D’Agostino, November 27, 1985

Twenty Years Ago
The inclusion in the Dances with Wolves press kit of a five-page lexicon of “useful words” in the Lakota-Sioux language had naturally inspired me to compose my new review of it bilingually if not wholly in the alien tongue. But finding no Lakota words for “long” and “slow,” I have had to rein in my ambition, despite a seemingly limitless capacity to put together such useful sentences as “Angry enemy no smell happy moccasin.”
— MOVIE REVIEW: “THE RED AND THE WHITE,” Duncan Shepherd, November 29, 1990

Fifteen Years Ago
Pertaining to your answer on T-shirts [the name came from the shape of the shirt], here is information I got in Reader’s Digest and the Boston Tea Party Museum. Long ago, workers of the tea trade had a small problem with leaves getting in their clothing. One of the wives of the workers made a tea shirt so it would be easy to shake the leaves out.
— Mark Lyons, Encinitas

The BTP Museum staff laughed so hard at the idea, they squirted orange pekoe out their noses. “T-shirt” is no older than the early part of the 20th Century, when men’s longjohn underwear became two-piece and buttonless.
— STRAIGHT FROM THE HIP, Matthew Alice, November 22, 1995

Ten Years Ago
Justice Charlie Froehlich...“figured out that in the wine business, the first thing you should do is see if you can sell wine.... Most people make a ton of money on the stock market or in oil or something, and then they go look at beautiful vistas in Napa Valley and decide they want to plant a vineyard. Then they say, ‘This is no good. I’m getting only $400 a ton for my grapes and I can’t make any money.’ So they start a winery. Or maybe they go and build a beautiful winery building first — that also is silly. About three or four years down the road, they come to the horrifying conclusion that if they’re ever going to make money, they’re going to have to go out personally on the road and sell this stuff. That’s a big shock.”
— CRUSH: “HORRIFYING CONCLUSION,”
Matthew Lickona, November 22, 2000

Five Years Ago
It was not until recent months that I began noticing a foreign sensation I can only describe as a creeping sense of genuine gratitude for things equally as small as tomatoes and toilet paper. As this is the week to consciously take note of this stuff, I will make up for the lapse in journal writing with a gratitude column.

For one thing, I am grateful I am not expected to keep such a thing as a journal on the subject.
— T.G.I.F., John Brizzolara, November 23, 2005