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Fallbrook – 56 miles and an eternity from San Diego
Oranges, avocados, crime, schools, attempt to change the town center
When I say Fallbrook, nothing comes to mind
- “They are going to fix the streets? For whom? Every other shop is vacant and has been for the last few years. There’s no draw for tourists. You can install as many sidewalks with lawns as you want to perk up downtown, but until the people who actually live here shop here and support local restaurateurs, I don’t how anything will change.”
- By Ruth Newell, June 24, 2012 Read full story
Dishonor among Varrio Fallbrook Locos
- Their primary rival was the Vista Home Boys, from the town west of Fallbrook. But while in prison, Nico was expected to get along with his rivals, and even take orders from them. “There, we run together,” he explained. “At first I would do what they would tell me to do,” Nico remembered. “I didn’t really have a choice.” But then he started to rebel, for example, he declined to pay “taxes.” And what happens if you do not pay your taxes? “They will usually send somebody to rob you, for your stuff.”
- By Eva Knott, June 24, 2015 Read full story
Diary of an orange grove
- More and more often, avocado and orange groves are let go — the water turned off, the trees sent into a sudden and final autumn. When orange trees die standing up, the branches turn yellow-brown, like scorched tumbleweeds. When someone is ready to build an office building or a subdivision, the limbs are sold for firewood and the stumps are dragged into piles and burned. Dead avocado groves are more picturesque, and they sit on dry hills in Fallbrook like graveyards
- By Laura McNeal, Jan. 4, 1996 Read full story
Stop food fights, clean up after motion sickness
- We passed silent, staring dogs, white chickens, vineyards, new shoots of corn, rows of lettuce, dead avocado trees, live avocado trees, and an owl on a street sign. We climbed hills and took curves as tight as paper clips. Horses kept their backs to us, and the houses seemed uninhabited. We climbed more hills, and Sharon wheeled the leviathan around more curves. “When you’re steering a bus,” Sharon told me, “you’re steering the back."
- By Laura McNeal, Sept. 19, 1996 Read full story
I want the backwards clock to go forward and the forward clock to go backwards
- Outside the barbershop, the street is usually sunny. Cars stop for the light and move past us, windows down, arms resting on doors. As we wait I tend to think of what we’ll do after the haircuts. We could eat at the soda fountain across the street, in what used to be a drugstore but is now the Café des Artistes and a gallery. We could walk another hundred yards and ask the librarian if there are any new books about the Titanic.
- By Laura McNeal, Dec. 24, 2003 Read full story
Avocado growers fight off thieves
- Arrests are rare in avocado theft, but another one occurred in Fallbrook just a few days after Jeanne Strand fired a shot in the air. On a street called Paso de Oro Verde, or the Road to Green Gold, an employee of the Bejoca grove service found a man named Edward D. Allan picking avocados in a 32-acre grove. According to Bejoca, Allan asked if he could have or buy the dozen or so he'd already picked. The worker, whom I'll call Frank Salazar, refused, and Allan left.
- By Laura McNeal, Nov. 26, 1997 Read full story
Substitute teacher at Pendleton, La Paloma, Fallbrook Elementary, Potter Jr. High, and Fallbrook High
- Fallbrook is north of Escondido and south of Temecula, the very northern tip of San Diego County. It is still a town of feed stores and avocado groves though the farms are giving way to melon-colored stucco houses on streets named Rodeo Queen and Debra Ann. At every curve of Mission Road there are homemade wooden signs advertising lemons, limes, oranges, tangelos, macadamias, avocados, strawberries, pumpkins, or persimmons, depending on the season
- By Laura McNeal, Jan 5, 1995 Read full story
The death of Judy Huscher
- In downtown Fallbrook, the shops were closed and silent, the windows full of stuffed rabbits and Easter eggs, the sorts of things Judy would like. On Valentine’s Day, the last holiday that had involved gifts of chocolate, Mr. Huscher had driven through town with two Valentines, one for Gladys and one for Judy, because this had seemed like the best course, but it wasn’t. Gladys refused hers, and then Judy said, “Why are you so mean to my daddy?”
- By Laura McNeal, Nov. 7, 2002 Read full story