Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

Fled my father in La Jolla

What happened to San Diego tuna, Lemon Grove pigeon racers, inside Fallbrook orange grove, Olaf Wieghorst swindler, San Diego mafia before the war, family of gleaners, behind Fotomat, Afghanis

Author at Princeton (third from left). The last time I had intersected with him, he had swept through Princeton in a car sought for repossession, charging clothes and books and jazz records to my accounts.
Author at Princeton (third from left). The last time I had intersected with him, he had swept through Princeton in a car sought for repossession, charging clothes and books and jazz records to my accounts.
  • La Jolla 1962

  • 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.
  • By Geoffrey Wolff, May 9, 1996
The ports of Long Beach and San Pedro were home to a fleet of purse-seine boats, which used nets strung in a circle that closed at the bottom like a drawstring purse to surround the schools of fish.
  • Flipper victorious

  • 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.
  • By Douglas Whyknott, May 23, 1996
When European breeders come to the U.S. to auction their birds, they open at $100."
  • If God didn't love pigeons, He wouldn't have given them wings

  • 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.
  • By Judy Henske, April 25, 1996
He lifts a clump of leaves to show us the black soot that clings to our leaves and fruit like coal dust on Victorian buildings. “That’s the whitefly."
  • Diary of an orange grove

  • 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.
  • By Laura McNeal, Jan. 4, 1996
Grace and George Thackeray. George was one of Wieghorst’s first friends when Wieghorst arrived in El Cajon. They painted together. “I used to travel to shows with him a lot.”
  • Olaf Wieghorst trusted the wrong man

  • 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.
  • By Phyllis Orrick, Jan. 25, 1996
Golden Lion, 4th and F Street, 1924. Bootlegged liquor was delivered to the Golden Lion in crates of lettuce.
  • Mafia in San Diego before World War II

  • (first in series of six stories)
  • “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.
  • By Judith Moore, Dec. 5, 1996
Our house on Hartzel Hill in 1963, close to where Spring Valley touches La Mesa at Spring Street and Highway 94.
  • How we lived off the land

  • 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.
  • By Cris Mazza, Nov. 28, 1996
Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Graham, July 1967. "Kathy Graham could sure spend that money. They bought Bing Crosby’s old ranch out there in Rancho Santa Fe, Rancho Osuna, and Cliff totally remodeled it for her."
  • Fotomat, Jack Kemp, and misbehavior.

  • 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.
  • By Matt Potter, Oct. 24, 1996
Villagers in Kalawar, 1990. Afghanistan is a world at once frightening and seductive to a Westerner.
  • The Silk Route Ends in San Diego

  • 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.
  • By Bill Manson, Sept. 26, 1996 .
As we pull away from San Diego, 23 people are in the upper-deck car I’ve picked at random, 21 of them Caucasian. No children, no old people, no shabbily dressed, no unfashionable amounts or styles of hair, no tattoos, no men in undershirts or women in lime-green polyester, no lunch pails, prison T-shirts.
  • The freeway is nobody's home

  • 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.
  • By Tim Brookes, Sept. 12, 1996
Members of B Company, 1st Marine Division, 1st Motor Transport Battalion, Korea (Robert Weishan at far left). Weishan: “There were terrible problems with high tides — at Inchon they ran 18 to 20 feet."
  • The forgotten war

  • 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.”
  • By David Burge, June 20, 1996
Black's Beach
  • Last Eden

  • 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?
  • By Alexander Theroux, June 13, 1996
  • Sponsored
    Sponsored

The latest copy of the Reader

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

Elevated ice crystals lead to solar halos, Cottonwoods still showing their tawny foliage

New moon brings high tides this weekend
Author at Princeton (third from left). The last time I had intersected with him, he had swept through Princeton in a car sought for repossession, charging clothes and books and jazz records to my accounts.
Author at Princeton (third from left). The last time I had intersected with him, he had swept through Princeton in a car sought for repossession, charging clothes and books and jazz records to my accounts.
  • La Jolla 1962

  • 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.
  • By Geoffrey Wolff, May 9, 1996
The ports of Long Beach and San Pedro were home to a fleet of purse-seine boats, which used nets strung in a circle that closed at the bottom like a drawstring purse to surround the schools of fish.
  • Flipper victorious

  • 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.
  • By Douglas Whyknott, May 23, 1996
When European breeders come to the U.S. to auction their birds, they open at $100."
  • If God didn't love pigeons, He wouldn't have given them wings

  • 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.
  • By Judy Henske, April 25, 1996
He lifts a clump of leaves to show us the black soot that clings to our leaves and fruit like coal dust on Victorian buildings. “That’s the whitefly."
  • Diary of an orange grove

  • 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.
  • By Laura McNeal, Jan. 4, 1996
Grace and George Thackeray. George was one of Wieghorst’s first friends when Wieghorst arrived in El Cajon. They painted together. “I used to travel to shows with him a lot.”
  • Olaf Wieghorst trusted the wrong man

  • 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.
  • By Phyllis Orrick, Jan. 25, 1996
Golden Lion, 4th and F Street, 1924. Bootlegged liquor was delivered to the Golden Lion in crates of lettuce.
  • Mafia in San Diego before World War II

  • (first in series of six stories)
  • “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.
  • By Judith Moore, Dec. 5, 1996
Our house on Hartzel Hill in 1963, close to where Spring Valley touches La Mesa at Spring Street and Highway 94.
  • How we lived off the land

  • 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.
  • By Cris Mazza, Nov. 28, 1996
Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Graham, July 1967. "Kathy Graham could sure spend that money. They bought Bing Crosby’s old ranch out there in Rancho Santa Fe, Rancho Osuna, and Cliff totally remodeled it for her."
  • Fotomat, Jack Kemp, and misbehavior.

  • 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.
  • By Matt Potter, Oct. 24, 1996
Villagers in Kalawar, 1990. Afghanistan is a world at once frightening and seductive to a Westerner.
  • The Silk Route Ends in San Diego

  • 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.
  • By Bill Manson, Sept. 26, 1996 .
As we pull away from San Diego, 23 people are in the upper-deck car I’ve picked at random, 21 of them Caucasian. No children, no old people, no shabbily dressed, no unfashionable amounts or styles of hair, no tattoos, no men in undershirts or women in lime-green polyester, no lunch pails, prison T-shirts.
  • The freeway is nobody's home

  • 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.
  • By Tim Brookes, Sept. 12, 1996
Members of B Company, 1st Marine Division, 1st Motor Transport Battalion, Korea (Robert Weishan at far left). Weishan: “There were terrible problems with high tides — at Inchon they ran 18 to 20 feet."
  • The forgotten war

  • 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.”
  • By David Burge, June 20, 1996
Black's Beach
  • Last Eden

  • 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?
  • By Alexander Theroux, June 13, 1996
  • Sponsored
    Sponsored
Comments
Sponsored

The latest copy of the Reader

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

For nutty pies at Pizza by Aromi in La Mesa

Sicilian cousins add to the Italian goodness they dish out around Lake Murray
Next Article

Remote work = cleaner air for San Diego

Locals working from home went from 8.1 percent to 17.8 percent
Comments
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

This Week’s Reader This Week’s Reader