From the archives

That pesky natural San Diego light

Duke Cunningham's dogfight over Vietnam, restaurant critic Eleanor Widmer, homeless love the Water Man, roots of the Waldorf School

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Cunningham (gesturing) and Driscoll (behind him) recounting the Col. Tomb battle, U.S.S. Constellation, May 10, 1972

  • A Single Mother Alone in the World

  • If the child-support check is late, I let it be. I resent having to beg for anything. I used to be on my ex like white on rice, saying how I needed the child-support money and needed it on time. "I want mah $200!" I'd say, quoting Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon.
  • By Suzanne Finnamore, Aug. 4, 2005

  • Randy Cunningham in the air over Vietnam

  • Cunningham and Grant got separated when they realized they'd been pincered between two SAM sites that eventually fired off 18 of the "flying telephone poles" at them. As Cunningham's electronic warning gear indicated a locked-on SAM, he called to his wingman, "Brian, you're on your own!" and then broke hard down to the right. The missile followed. He then pulled up into an eight-G climb, but the missile couldn't make the same turn, and it exploded far below him.
  • By Neal Matthews, Dec. 15, 2005
Cunningham. I asked him the same question that had stunned him that night on the Constellation. His face drained, and he sat back down, elbows on his knees. "The first kill I had was against the MiG-21, and I could see the guy in the airplane when I went over him, as he died."

  • He Loves the People No One Wants

  • “Here I am in my warm car, with a heater and my dog, and I'm about to go home, and here's this homeless man laying in a hole in a building in the freezing rain, yelling out to me that my tire is low.”
  • By John Brizzolara, Oct. 5, 2006
David Ross: "I found this man at the corner of 16th and G Street on New Year's Eve. He's very very ill. He has a colostomy bag, some injuries, he's been released from somewhere and he has nothing. The man is dying." (Chris Woo)

  • Follow Me

  • On a hilltop playground in City Heights, a woman in a pink wraparound apron and straw hat is walking. She looks like an American mother of a certain period — before feminism and dual careers — but thinner, thin as a flapper, as thin as the girls in Kate Greenaway illustrations. She steps patiently toward the Waldorf School of San Diego, a raw stucco building among raw stucco buildings, barred windows, paved yards, chain-link fences, and houses, houses, houses.
  • “Follow, follow, follow,” the woman sings, “follow me.”
  • By Laura McNeal, Feb. 21, 2002
An Austrian mystic named Rudolf Steiner aimed, in a country ravaged by the First World War, to educate children of factory workers for what he called “a more humane existence than we have had.” (Sandy Huffaker, Jr.)

  • The Late Long-time Queen of the Cafe Critics

  • Eleanor Widmer had become a restaurant critic in 1974, back when brunch at La Valencia featured molded Jell-O "Seafoam," made with pulped fruit, cream cheese, and whipped cream. In the following years, Widmer had dined on Japanese donburi and barbecue ribs, Peruvian anticuchos and French quenelles, Turkish baklava and Indian raitas, fresh pastas and moles and dumplings. But toward the end, confined to her bed in La Jolla, she wanted only chocolate.
  • By Jeannette DeWyze, Nov. 23, 2005
Eleanor Widmer on KNSD 7/39 news
If San Diegans, on occasion, avoid going out, Kopec knows the reason: the sun "is always here." (Derek Plank)

  • Beautiful Light

  • It's not even noon and already I'm closing the blinds on the south-facing windows of my home office. That pesky natural light is overrunning the glow of the lamp by which I work. Too much of a bright thing. Shades inside and sunglasses outside attest to my contending with the slow-unfolding, then Wham! Southern California light. How did it get so damn bright when it's not even that hot?
  • By Thomas Larson, Oct. 7, 2004
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