Photo by Robert Burroughs

Rancho Bernardo

Orchids and Onions — 20 years later

The ’95 jury opened by dubbing 1976 Orchid-winner Rancho Bernardo “the ultimate suburb.” Nicoloff and Collins concurred, calling it “one of the few really successful and well-planned new towns in America today.” At its best, RB is an echo of an Italian village like Assisi — red-tile roofs dotting a hillside, masses of leafy trees hiding the streets and shopping centers. Now and then, the wilderness creeps in.

By Matthew Lickona, Nov. 22, 1995 Read full article

Gerry Burris, a construction project manager, scores tools at Kobey's.

Paul Stachelek

The ubiquitous swap meets of San Diego

Was the seller at Kobey’s trying to take me when he swore that the $250 Louis Vuitton garment bag he was fondling was not only “genuine” but “costs $1400 at Horton Plaza”? Does it? Does Louis Vuitton even make a garment bag? As Sir Mix-A-Lot would put it, I don’t know “jack about Louie.” And if you don’t either, you shouldn’t be buying LV at a flea market.

By Bill Stern, July 7, 1994 Read full article

Bear jawbone

Paul Stachelek

Mammoths, camels, and hyaenadons roamed San Diego

Between one and five or six million years ago. the Vallecito Badlands looked like parts of East Africa. Lush trees and plants filled a grasslands that stretched as far as the eye could see. The savannah resounded with the sounds of llamas, camels, horses, zebra and other large mammals. “We found the mandible [part of a jaw bone) of a peccary (a wild swine] that turned out to be the only one of its kind west of Nebraska”

By Jeannette DeWyze, June 18, 1992 Read full article

Emily Manhart, John Pringle. Pringle's steady job is baritone with the Australian Opera.

Paul Stachelek

Opera gypsies

I go to Vancouver to do the same thing in March. I have a week off in between. Then I go to Hong Kong, and this summer I’ll be singing Figaro at the “Met in the Park” series, the Rossini Figaro. Then I go to Buenos Aires to make my debut at the Theatro Colon as Ford in Falstaff and then hack to San Francisco to do Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

By Patrick Daugherty, April 30, 1992 Read full article

99 percent of supermarket shoppers place great importance on the quality of a store’s produce.

Photo by Joe Klein

How Big Bear markets make a tiny profit

For every item in today’s supermarket selling for a 30 to 50 percent gross markup, there remain others priced at or near what their producers sell them for. “We’re taking people first through the departments which make us a ton of money,” Bercuson commented as we made our way past the kumquats and the California rolls and the cheddar vegetable soup. “This is all 45 to 50 percent (gross margins].”

By Jeannette DeWyze, Dec. 10, 1992 Read full article

"I wish I didn’t have to wake up and put a uniform on every morning or make formation."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

An unhampered look at Carlsbad's Army Navy Academy

“If I ask ’em, Are you using drugs? they will admit it. Even without me ordering a test. Because they think my information’s better than it really is. They think I’ve got cameras all over the place. Now, can I say we don’t have anybody using drugs? Absolutely not. Can I say we have a good likelihood of catching somebody doing drugs? Yes, I can. Drugs is one area where cadets will tell on each other.”

By Ray Westberg, March 6, 1992 Read full article

Author and her brother, late 40s. We rode the number 11 bus up Linda Vista Road.

Socialist Dad loves Linda Vista paradise

In those days, everybody felt themselves to be upwardly mobile. For most of the residents of Linda Vista, it was an interim place to live until they could raise the money for a down payment on a new house in Clairemont or La Mesa. For a long time we had no car, so it was hard to keep in touch with kids who were attending school in another part of town, kids whose parents had no wish to be reminded of having lived in Linda Vista.

By Anne Curo, March 28, 1996 Read full article

I want a cheeseburger with a dense, unaerated bun, sweet as a kiss and solid as a high school girl's femur.

Photo by Joe Klein

Alexander Theroux's San Diego hamburger survey

The In-N-Out burger, by a firm started in 1948 by the Snyder family and which just came to San Diego from Los Angeles about four years ago, is easily the best of the junk-food burgers. There are now 9 in San Diego, 39 in L.A., and 112 in California and Nevada. In-N-Out is a hospital-clean white and red, but I find the burgers, while good, a bit too salty and ultimately nothing special. The abuse of salt in American cuisine surely warrants further study.

By Alexander Theroux, July 3, 1996 Read full article

Andre Bordes had always been “French,” but never “of France.”

Photo by Joe Klein

San Diego's first French school

These kids have gotten the pure hoot-owl ooo sound, the throaty GRRR tiger growl of a French R, flicking that uvula back and forth like professionals, with just the right amount of saliva to make it roll more smoothly than the drier, more guttural German R. Their L at the end of journal is a French L. On the tip of the tongue, light, like a French pastry, not an Anglo, back-of-mouth L, glutinous and syrupy.

By Bill Manson, June 29, 1995 Read full article