San Diego mafia, Fotomat, Afghans, freeway driving, Korean War, Black's Beach, dolphins kill tuna fishing, Olaf Wieghorst, pigeon racing, diary of orange grove
“The raids, all made with search warrants, started soon after noon and were not completed until early evening. All of the seizures, incidentally, were made within a radius of a few blocks either in or near the 1600 block on India Street. Some of the addresses where raids were made were on West Date, West Grape and Atlantic Streets and Kettner Blvd. The raiding officers described the work as a general house cleaning of wine-selling establishments in the Italian section.
My father would scout the county, looking for potential hunting sites, often finding caches just as valuable. Somewhere between Solana Beach and Oceanside, where the original El Camino Real was two parallel dirt ruts through the weeds going up a hill near an old adobe stagecoach stop (which is most likely now enclosed in chainlink fencing), he found huge beaver tail cactus, bearing fruits called nopales or cactus apples.
Compact, red-headed, with bulging biceps, Cliff Graham was admired by his ski buddies for his bravado, intelligence, wit, and ability to milk cash from schemes that ended up losing money for everybody but himself and his friends. He drove fast cars, worked out in a private gym, skied Aspen and Mammoth, sailed boats, packed a pistol, owned two airplanes, buddied up with pro football stars, claimed he "owned" San Diego's judges.
They were going to suffocate the boy. "We knew if the baby cried, we would all be dead. So one of the men put his hand over the baby. To suffocate it. It was terrible, but better one child die than ll the children, all of us."mThese are the choices in war. “You don’t know what people have been through to get here to San Diego,” Zia Waleh says.
The traffic, which has been moving fairly smoothly, stops at Santa Fe Drive. “That’s almost a constant,” Anly says casually. Beside us, people line up at the freeway ramp lights; she’s known it to take five minutes just to get onto the freeway. Sometimes the police will set up a device that will shoot a photo of anyone who runs the light, recording the front of their car and the license plate. Amy once triggered it, she said. “I could see it flash. But I don’t have a front license plate,” and she got off scot-free.
It’s just like it was yesterday. On November 27 [1950] we were in a little village of Hagaru [North Korea]. That was the day the Chinese attacked further north and headed our way. There were three of us on a street corner with a 30-caliber machine gun. Our field of fire was the main street of the town. To our left, to the east, was a building — maybe it was a school — with what must have been a playground next to it. It was snowing, you know, and we laid there all night, waiting for we didn’t know what.”
I realized to approach women down there would make me look suspicious, if not unwholesome. Gay men would think I was hitting on them. And single men of whatever sexual persuasion were not down there, I concluded, to give interviews. Weren’t questions themselves rude — nudism’s something you do, not discuss, right?
Dressed in long trousers and boat shoes and a white Lacoste tennis shirt, I accompanied Toby across Vista del Mar and Neptune Place to the Pump House and down concrete steps to the beach. The first things I noticed were not the bitchin’ sets of waves breaking way off shore, nor the surfers paddling way out there waiting to ride, nor the surfers with lots of white hair waxing their boards near the water’s edge. I noticed, of course, the babes, and so did Toby.
In 1960 San Diego was the most active tuna port in the world. The fleet consisted of about 135 boats. At any given time, 30 or 40 were tied up at the Embarcadero, in port between trips to the tropical grounds, to places as distant as the Galapagos Islands. There was the familiar sight of cotton bait nets drying after being cured or of the new, large nylon nets just coming into use. And nearby were the canneries that employed hundreds of people. And the steamy, billowing smell of fish processing.
In desperation I went to the white pages. There, straightforwardly and to the point, was the listing “Pigeon Racing," with a phone number in Lemon Grove. My call was answered by Ron Steinbrenner, keeper of the Lemon Grove loft. He told me that a big race was coming up. He called it the Kentucky Derby of pigeon racing.
So when we came to Fallbrook two years ago, we built our house on a hill above an acre of orange trees. They were planted in the 1960s by a man named Mr. Barr who, like us, was not a farmer. The leaves are green and eyeshaped, and beyond them to the north and south other hills are scored with avocado, lemon, lime, and orange groves, the distant rows curving in precise, parallel lines.
The Louis Almeida case should be closed. During a seven-year period in the ’80s, he took San Diego art collectors for hundreds of thousands of dollars through forgeries and fraud. At least, that’s what he admitted to when he was caught in 1989. He was sent to prison that same year, served his time, and was released in July 1994.