Photo by Dave Allen

Rick Post: “A lot of the people who I do investigations for can’t even pay.”

• Satan chasers

• San Diego County is crawling with Satanic cult groups, in Post’s view, including the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of Thelema, the Temple of Set, the Brotherhood of the Mind, the Rainbow Children, a group that meets in Balboa Park called the Knights of Satan, and a Satanic “enforcement arm” of a group of bikers in the meth trade known as the Crystal Circle (Dec. 5, 1991)

Beachy Byrom: "We’d see a good-lookin’ girl walkin’ down the street, we'd pull over and pick 'em up...."

Photo by Dave Allen

• We went to Hoover High School

• The pretty, popular girls, still fashionably dressed, coiffed, with lacquered fingernails, moving about the room in clouds of perfume and confidence. The forgettable girls, peripheral characters sitting quietly in their flower-printed knits — old-lady clothes. The girls neither popular nor unpopular, dependable on committees, good students, like Jean. (Nov. 2, 1989)

A hand holding the forceps grasps a tip of the liver’s lower edge, lifting it gingerly, revealing the gallbladder, nestled against the liver’s back.

Janet Taylor

• Under the knife

• The man whose body lay pale and naked in UCSD Medical Center’s Operating Room 3 suffered from increasingly frequent attacks of pain, the result of gallstones. As in almost all cases of surgery for gallstones, the man’s entire gallbladder was to be removed. Cholecystectomy is considered a major operation but not a dangerous one. The mortality rate is less than one percent. (July 20, 1989)

Traffic on San Diego's freeways has increased by more than 50 percent since 1980.

• In the Time It Took You to Read this Headline, San Diego's Traffic Troubles Got a Little Worse

• The Cessna curves up and left, beginning a flight pattern that will encompass the southern half of San Diego County: I-805 south, from Clairemont to Mission Valley; east on I-8; a cut across Gillespie Field to torn highway 67 in El Cajon; a curve southward near the Route 125 connector to highway 94 at Grossmont Center; west to downtown; over Coronado and down the Silver Strand. (Sept. 14, 1989)

Stingaree, 1924. The Stingaree flourished because it was the first U.S. port of call sailors reached after rounding Cape Horn.

San Diego Historical Society

• San Diego prostitutes after the Stingaree shut down

• When Guthrie joined the police force back in ’29, his superiors explained to him that sex was “nice and necessary” but needed to be kept quiet. If it’s illegal, he reasons, you can hold the threat of jail over sex workers’ heads to keep them in line. You keep it discreet and low-key, you keep out pimps and organized crime, you keep the price reasonable, you control the spread of disease. (July 15, 1993)

“We’re worried about the ability of the women to get hired wearing their veils. That may impede employment."

Photo by Dave Allen

• Home before dark

• All their lives they’ve worked and provided for their families, and all of a sudden they’re here. They can’t do anything. They can’t get a job. It’s very hard for a Somali man to feel, ‘Yeah. You’re worthless. You can’t do anything.' " (Feb. 18, 1993)

“It was a Marine with a Southern accent. Suicidal because his wife, whom he beat, has finally left him. At the beginning of the call he was in tears. You don't hear a man cry that often."

Paul Stachelek

• With a shotgun in one hand and the phone in the other

• “The unusual thing was that my last caller was referred by the Coronado bridge. She said the phone is out. The only other phone it can reach is this one." She points to a beige rotary-dial phone on a comer table beneath a framed photograph of a tropical beach. “Most bridge calls are from people who had a flat tire." (July 23, 1992)

Caro Birchfield got into The Robe and The Silver Chalice — by Costain.

Randy Hoffman

• In love 17 hours a day

• The romances of yesteryear, the old Harlequins, were all nurses and doctors and probably wouldn't have interested her in the least. She did read Forever Amber when she was 15 and thought that was a great book. Got into The Robe and The Silver Chalice — by Costain. Thomas Costain. (June 4, 1992)

"Our boys stick out so much. The white shirts and dark trousers, riding bicycles.”

Randy Hoffman

• Nobody doesn't like Mormons

• In Steve Andersen’s garage are four 50-gallon drums of fresh drinking water, 30-gallon canisters of wheat, some honey, sugar, salt, and dried prepared foods. “During the time in the church’s history when the nearness of the Millenium was a more potent part of our everyday feelings about life, it may have been the case that people were stockpiling food and clothing because they wanted to survive its arrival. (Oct. 31, 1991)

Mary Lang wrote feature stories from the late 1980s through the late 1990s, including a social column called On the Town by Liz Lang.