Best Reader stories from 1982

Unwanted pregnancy, bad accident in Baja, alcohol and Indians, Sol Price, Fred Schnaubelt, Florence Chadwick, San Diego's version of Tarahumara runner

Author

By Jeannette DeWyze, David Steinman, Joe Applegate, Amy Chu, Bob Dorn (RIP), Kathryn Phillips

Publish Date

Nov. 24, 2019

Fred Scnaulbelt: "If there were nine of me on the council, none of you would be working." (Robert Burroughs)

The other house, a bungalow with crystal doorknobs, was on the powerline side of Thirty-second Street in a part of North Park that I have heard described as “South Sav-On.” (David Diaz)

What on earth am I settling for
“Goddamnit,” said Jane one evening about six months ago when I answered the door of our apartment in Golden Hill and found her on the stoop, Jeanne sliding out of her arms and a sack of groceries spilled at her feet. ‘‘Go down and get Julie, she’s screaming in the car. I can’t believe this. It takes half an hour to unload anything around here. I hate these stairs.”
By Joe Applegate, Dec. 2, 1982

One man, one woman, no baby
Kelly Anjon had called the San Diego Institute of Pathology in Solana Beach, and a woman there had told her the results of a test: she was pregnant. That was July 8, 1982, the same day Kelly had rented us a home in Cardiff. The home was our first together, Kelly was my girlfriend, and the pregnancy was a mistake.
By David Steinman, Nov. 18, 1982

At first Kelly said that she felt fine. But Linda couldn’t help noticing how nervously Kelly would laugh as she told about the day she went in for the abortion, and that her left eye seemed to have developed a tic. (Mark Zingarelli)

Tim Joe Key. His first day in San Diego he walked along the San Diego River jetty. Four boys pelted him with rocks. (Jim Coit)

San Diego's version of a Tarahumara runner
They had all been drinking and a dark-haired guy who looked Italian to Tim Joe Key came into the Clairemont Bowl pool room with his gang from Linda Vista. “That guy ought to know this is Blue Jacket territory,” Key told his buddy John Bruckner, and purposely put his beer on the pool table’s edge and waited for the tension to build as he moved around to size his shots and finish the game.
By David Steinman, Oct. 21, 1982

Somewhere between death and the border
Friday the thirteenth — Good Friday in April. 1979 — dawned hot and clear over Baja California, and was hotter still by late morning or noon, when Eddie Duenez and Mike Askey pulled into Punta Prieta to join an untidy knot of humanity waiting at the Pemex station for a tanker to come and replenish pumps already drained by the early wave of long-weekend travelers.
By Bob Dorn, Sept. 16, 1982

“Karla and I went to different homes looking for pilots. We finally found an American who said he’d fly out at first light and everyone kept saying it was impossible to do anything at night there." (Catherine Kanner)

Florence Chadwick in and out of the water
Many years earlier, on her return to San Diego from a trip abroad, Chadwick had been greeted by city officials with considerably more pomp - a jubilant ticker-tape parade down Broadway, a key to the city, numerous gifts, and the exalted status befitting her celebrity. At the age of thirty-one she had conquered the English Channel in world-record time, and had done so with such innocence and naïveté and spunk that instantly became famous and admired throughout the world.
By Kathryn Phillips, June 17, 1982

Florence Chadwick, Las Vegas, 1952. Covered with six pounds of grease, Chadwick set out in 1960 to become the first woman to swim the twenty-two-mile-wide North Channel of the Irish Sea. Her crew informed her later that they could tell she was freezing. A crewmember jumped in the water to push her into the boat. She refused to go.

William and Margret Largo. There was no liquor on the old reservation, says Margaret Largo, but as soon as the tribe was moved to Viejas, in 1931, “there was plenty of it." (Robert Burroughs)

The slow massacre
Margaret Largo is making tortillas, which she puts aside to talk, and then, as the talking goes on, she returns to them again. She is a short woman with gray hair that curls around her ears, a direct gaze, and a smile that makes her face crinkle and her eyebrows pucker. She is fifty-nine, and remembers very clearly when the valley was greener. The two wells on the reservation are drying up, she explains in her quiet manner.
By Amy Chu, June 10, 1982

San Diego will never see another city councilman like Fred Schnaubelt
When the assistant director of the city’s planning department invited Schnaubelt to explain his philosophy of government to that department’s bureaucrats, Schnaubelt accepted with gusto. This occurred November 18, just two and a half weeks before the end of Schnaubelt’s first and only term on the San Diego City Council. “I wish I had done this four years ago, but I think I was more scared of you back then,” Schnaubelt confided to the fifty or sixty men and women who crowded into the large meeting room on the second floor of city hall downtown.
By Jeannette DeWyze, Jan. 7, 1982

Sol Price (Tom Voss)

Sol Price and the FedMart story
To those who know him, there is no great mystery to Sol Price. He is almost always described in the same terms — he’s down-to-earth, he’s brilliant and clearheaded, he’s honest, energetic, and outspoken. It comes as a surprise to some who think of him as a modest man that his latest merchandising bonanza, the Price Club, takes its name from his name. But that little hint of vanity — very little, considering the natural attraction of the double meaning — in the naming of this enterprise is accompanied by other little hints of the same trait: he’s rarely photographed.
By Bob Dorn, April 1, 1982