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What they built in the trolley suburbs – Ocean Beach, Hillcrest, North Park
Editor's pick of stories Joe Applegate wrote for the Reader
3772 Park Boulevard, San Diego. By the 1930s, bungalow courts were appearing in a fantastic variety of styles: Tudor, Dutch, French, Moorish, Egyptian (celebrating the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922).
San Diego bungalows: Tudor, Dutch, French, Moorish, Egyptian, Spanish, and Mission
- Ron Wigginton, a young landscape designer who leads a well-ordered life, was out roaming the streets of Hillcrest one day four years ago, suddenly on the lookout for a place to live. (November 24, 1982)
Ruby Yamada is seventy-nine years old, and was, I have heard, a good shooter in her day.
Eight ball in the corner pocket
- To promote the development of the Gaslamp Quarter he once asked Mrs. Yamada if she were interested in selling. She replied with a quiet word about wanting to keep going for a year or two. (November 4, 1982)
Theobald as coxswain. Theobald became prominent in one of Oxford’s traditional sports, rowing, while also being published in Oxford Poetry, the literary magazine.
What greater curse than life without verse
- A few months back, John Theobald, the former chairman of the English department at San Diego State University, went out to campus with a clipboard and a pen to solicit signatures for a nuclear-freeze petition. He’d taught for twenty-three years at the school, but having retired in 1969, was unknown to the present mass of students. (July 8, 1982)
Chris O'Rourke
A bump on the head could kill Chris O'Rourke
- Here at Windansea Beach in La Jolla, surfers prefer the Vespa motor scooter for solo transportation. This is a low, fat motorcycle that you'd be crazy to take for a long fast ride. Your Vespa in the parking lot makes silent claim that you have come a short distance to Windansea beach, and this implies that you live nearby, which is definitely the best place to live. (Aug. 3, 1978)
“Got a bell at Palm and Kettner. Anybody for Palm and Kettner?”
Did somebody call a cab?
- There is only one Easy Street in San Diego and Pierre Taheri, ace cab driver, doesn't know where it is. He knows the tourist bars and the Navy gates and the Travolator Hotel where the flight crews for National Airlines stay. Taheri knows what it's like to be thrown into his windshield at two in the morning, and once he had foreknowledge of when he was going to be robbed. (May 18, 1978)
He had hoped for a while that he would turn out like Wallace Stevens, plodding to the office every day, turning down the rides that neighbors in station wagons offered.
A step closer to suburbia
- The house sits up from Juniper Street in North Park on a square of lawn girdled by pink cinderblock. The gables above the front door and window make the house look slightly exotic — English or Bavarian. (Dec. 18, 1980)
Gregg sees the Baja peninsula as the only frontier he’s ever known, in the sense of being a land that still attracts frontiersmen, people with nothing to lose.
Fisherman's knot
- A couple of months ago a friend of mine named Gregg wrote from North County asking if I could spare a week to camp and fish with him in Baja. Gregg is a teacher, thirty-seven years old, with a capillary-red nose and a beard more white than black, and with a head of gray-brown hair at just that point of thinness that he likes the way he looks in a hat. (Feb. 28, 1980)
People who would not cheat at solitaire, who never in their lives have made a personal long-distance telephone call from the office — think nothing of parking in an unattended lot and ignoring the slotted vertical box.
The rise of Ace Parking's Jones family
- On the afternoon of the All-Star baseball game in July, Evan Jones was standing on top of one of those pedestrian towers that corkscrew up the side of San Diego Stadium. (Nov. 22, 1979)
There was a street named for Padre Kino, one of the great explorers and colonizers of the Southwest and another street for Emiliano Zapata, who led a peasants’ revolt.He was murdered in 1919 by an emissary of President Venustiano Carranza, whose name is now a street three blocks to the north of Zapata’s.
Got to know Dad in La Paz and Cabo San Lucas
- I might have forced the money on him, but the day was too young to be ruined, and we had a four-hour bus ride ahead of us. Dad always wins because it’s not only easier to give in, it’s cheaper. (May 24, 1979)
I told him he could sleep in my apartment until the first of the month but that afterward he'd be on his own.
Postcards From Western Civilization
- Some years ago at Christmastime, when I was a teller at a bank downtown, I came to know Wayne Boyer, who was then an apprentice bum. I met him in the Jack-in-the-Box on Broadway, where I had stepped inside for a Coke; he was in the next line over, standing on crutches, his right leg in a cast from ankle to hip. I was twenty-two then and he looked about my age, but different in other ways. (Dec. 10, 1981)
Unable to read, bored and aimless, Dana had gone to sea, not as a paying passenger but as an ordinary sailor quartered forward of the mast.
When Richard Henry Dana returned to Point Loma
- On the 22nd of August, 1859, the little steamer Senator called at San Diego with passengers from Los Angeles. It rounded the point under the lighthouse and entered the harbor’s narrow channel at about 8:00 (November 21, 1990)
Private airstrip. Flying over North County, in the vicinity of Fallbrook Airpark, you can spot about 30 private and personal airstrips.
The small airports of North San Diego County
- Harry Aberle died in the Pitts Special. He crashed after takeoff while Yvonne watched from in front of the hangar. "The only other witness said he was doing an aerobatic maneuver, but I know he wasn't.” (May 24, 1990)
I felt like running to him and offering my support, as one unrecognized writer to another, shouting. “Neil! Neil Simon! Compadre!” and giving him a warm abrazo.
Steinbeck, Bergman, Alan Ayckbourn as script writers
- Plays are short enough to allow for re-reading. The suspense is gone the second time, but there’s twice as much pleasure in interpretation once you know where the characters are going. (April 26, 1990)
Deborah Gilmore Smyth: "...And so I need some help in there, because Stephanie is gone, Ruth isn't answering the phone anymore during lunch, and Beth goes home in the afternoon with her kids."
Lamb's Players Theatre – like a commune but...
- Except for its Christmas festival, the company's plays are not bombastically Christian. In one season, the play selection included Rhinoceros, an adaptation of Dracula, Dames at Sea, and Godspell. On record, the theater declines to call itself Christian at all. One reason Smyth gives is that "Christian theater" usually means second-rate. (March 15, 1990)
Carraso's hunting stand was an outcropping of stone in Dyche Valley, on a slope of Palomar Mountain.
The unlikely rescue
- For an hour and a half, 80-year-old Tony Carrasco had been waiting for a deer to pass within range of his old bolt-action Remington, but now he was getting bored. (January 11, 1990)
For all of this roping the steer lasts ten seconds — five and a halt seconds if the team is to be guaranteed some prize money.
Ropers prep for Brawley cattle call
If he wanted to get ahead in rodeo he'd have to make the commitment to travel. He'd been told as much m a roping class he'd taken in Brawley "Get out of the valley,” said Taylor, summarizing the instruction. (Dec. 7, 1989)
I-5 and Highway 163. On a typical freeway, the top layer of concrete is ten inches thick in the truck lanes and tapers to eight inches in lane number one at the center.
Down the lane with Jacob Dekema
- He takes it for granted that suburbs are great. “We built these freeways, and they’re not generating less trips, they’re generating more. More freedom. People want to live out away from the city and drive in to work." (March 23, 1989)
1380 Hermes Avenue, December, 1982. Danny moved into a small building near the main house. He called it the Pit.
Requiem for a rebel
- In relationships of all kinds, Danny liked to stir things up. “You’d be sitting there listening to the radio and he’d pick it up and throw it past your head,” said someone who knew him only slightly. (May 19, 1983)
Skip Frye is still stoked
- Frye is back at Gordon & Smith after a voluntary layoff of four years — "my wilderness years," he calls them — during which his marriage dissolved and he retreated, in reverse of the hermit crab, from a larger shell into a smaller, and into a smaller. He gave up his job, his dwelling, his church, his car, until he was living in a backyard shed in Pacific Beach and riding a bike. (April 14, 1983)
Joe Applegate wrote for the Reader from 1976 through 1990.
Here's something you might be interested in.
What they built in the trolley suburbs – Ocean Beach, Hillcrest, North Park
Editor's pick of stories Joe Applegate wrote for the Reader
What they built in the trolley suburbs – Ocean Beach, Hillcrest, North Park
Editor's pick of stories Joe Applegate wrote for the Reader
3772 Park Boulevard, San Diego. By the 1930s, bungalow courts were appearing in a fantastic variety of styles: Tudor, Dutch, French, Moorish, Egyptian (celebrating the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922).
San Diego bungalows: Tudor, Dutch, French, Moorish, Egyptian, Spanish, and Mission
- Ron Wigginton, a young landscape designer who leads a well-ordered life, was out roaming the streets of Hillcrest one day four years ago, suddenly on the lookout for a place to live. (November 24, 1982)
Ruby Yamada is seventy-nine years old, and was, I have heard, a good shooter in her day.
Eight ball in the corner pocket
- To promote the development of the Gaslamp Quarter he once asked Mrs. Yamada if she were interested in selling. She replied with a quiet word about wanting to keep going for a year or two. (November 4, 1982)
Theobald as coxswain. Theobald became prominent in one of Oxford’s traditional sports, rowing, while also being published in Oxford Poetry, the literary magazine.
What greater curse than life without verse
- A few months back, John Theobald, the former chairman of the English department at San Diego State University, went out to campus with a clipboard and a pen to solicit signatures for a nuclear-freeze petition. He’d taught for twenty-three years at the school, but having retired in 1969, was unknown to the present mass of students. (July 8, 1982)
Chris O'Rourke
A bump on the head could kill Chris O'Rourke
- Here at Windansea Beach in La Jolla, surfers prefer the Vespa motor scooter for solo transportation. This is a low, fat motorcycle that you'd be crazy to take for a long fast ride. Your Vespa in the parking lot makes silent claim that you have come a short distance to Windansea beach, and this implies that you live nearby, which is definitely the best place to live. (Aug. 3, 1978)
“Got a bell at Palm and Kettner. Anybody for Palm and Kettner?”
Did somebody call a cab?
- There is only one Easy Street in San Diego and Pierre Taheri, ace cab driver, doesn't know where it is. He knows the tourist bars and the Navy gates and the Travolator Hotel where the flight crews for National Airlines stay. Taheri knows what it's like to be thrown into his windshield at two in the morning, and once he had foreknowledge of when he was going to be robbed. (May 18, 1978)
He had hoped for a while that he would turn out like Wallace Stevens, plodding to the office every day, turning down the rides that neighbors in station wagons offered.
A step closer to suburbia
- The house sits up from Juniper Street in North Park on a square of lawn girdled by pink cinderblock. The gables above the front door and window make the house look slightly exotic — English or Bavarian. (Dec. 18, 1980)
Gregg sees the Baja peninsula as the only frontier he’s ever known, in the sense of being a land that still attracts frontiersmen, people with nothing to lose.
Fisherman's knot
- A couple of months ago a friend of mine named Gregg wrote from North County asking if I could spare a week to camp and fish with him in Baja. Gregg is a teacher, thirty-seven years old, with a capillary-red nose and a beard more white than black, and with a head of gray-brown hair at just that point of thinness that he likes the way he looks in a hat. (Feb. 28, 1980)
People who would not cheat at solitaire, who never in their lives have made a personal long-distance telephone call from the office — think nothing of parking in an unattended lot and ignoring the slotted vertical box.
The rise of Ace Parking's Jones family
- On the afternoon of the All-Star baseball game in July, Evan Jones was standing on top of one of those pedestrian towers that corkscrew up the side of San Diego Stadium. (Nov. 22, 1979)
There was a street named for Padre Kino, one of the great explorers and colonizers of the Southwest and another street for Emiliano Zapata, who led a peasants’ revolt.He was murdered in 1919 by an emissary of President Venustiano Carranza, whose name is now a street three blocks to the north of Zapata’s.
Got to know Dad in La Paz and Cabo San Lucas
- I might have forced the money on him, but the day was too young to be ruined, and we had a four-hour bus ride ahead of us. Dad always wins because it’s not only easier to give in, it’s cheaper. (May 24, 1979)
I told him he could sleep in my apartment until the first of the month but that afterward he'd be on his own.
Postcards From Western Civilization
- Some years ago at Christmastime, when I was a teller at a bank downtown, I came to know Wayne Boyer, who was then an apprentice bum. I met him in the Jack-in-the-Box on Broadway, where I had stepped inside for a Coke; he was in the next line over, standing on crutches, his right leg in a cast from ankle to hip. I was twenty-two then and he looked about my age, but different in other ways. (Dec. 10, 1981)
Unable to read, bored and aimless, Dana had gone to sea, not as a paying passenger but as an ordinary sailor quartered forward of the mast.
When Richard Henry Dana returned to Point Loma
- On the 22nd of August, 1859, the little steamer Senator called at San Diego with passengers from Los Angeles. It rounded the point under the lighthouse and entered the harbor’s narrow channel at about 8:00 (November 21, 1990)
Private airstrip. Flying over North County, in the vicinity of Fallbrook Airpark, you can spot about 30 private and personal airstrips.
The small airports of North San Diego County
- Harry Aberle died in the Pitts Special. He crashed after takeoff while Yvonne watched from in front of the hangar. "The only other witness said he was doing an aerobatic maneuver, but I know he wasn't.” (May 24, 1990)
I felt like running to him and offering my support, as one unrecognized writer to another, shouting. “Neil! Neil Simon! Compadre!” and giving him a warm abrazo.
Steinbeck, Bergman, Alan Ayckbourn as script writers
- Plays are short enough to allow for re-reading. The suspense is gone the second time, but there’s twice as much pleasure in interpretation once you know where the characters are going. (April 26, 1990)
Deborah Gilmore Smyth: "...And so I need some help in there, because Stephanie is gone, Ruth isn't answering the phone anymore during lunch, and Beth goes home in the afternoon with her kids."
Lamb's Players Theatre – like a commune but...
- Except for its Christmas festival, the company's plays are not bombastically Christian. In one season, the play selection included Rhinoceros, an adaptation of Dracula, Dames at Sea, and Godspell. On record, the theater declines to call itself Christian at all. One reason Smyth gives is that "Christian theater" usually means second-rate. (March 15, 1990)
Carraso's hunting stand was an outcropping of stone in Dyche Valley, on a slope of Palomar Mountain.
The unlikely rescue
- For an hour and a half, 80-year-old Tony Carrasco had been waiting for a deer to pass within range of his old bolt-action Remington, but now he was getting bored. (January 11, 1990)
For all of this roping the steer lasts ten seconds — five and a halt seconds if the team is to be guaranteed some prize money.
Ropers prep for Brawley cattle call
If he wanted to get ahead in rodeo he'd have to make the commitment to travel. He'd been told as much m a roping class he'd taken in Brawley "Get out of the valley,” said Taylor, summarizing the instruction. (Dec. 7, 1989)
I-5 and Highway 163. On a typical freeway, the top layer of concrete is ten inches thick in the truck lanes and tapers to eight inches in lane number one at the center.
Down the lane with Jacob Dekema
- He takes it for granted that suburbs are great. “We built these freeways, and they’re not generating less trips, they’re generating more. More freedom. People want to live out away from the city and drive in to work." (March 23, 1989)
1380 Hermes Avenue, December, 1982. Danny moved into a small building near the main house. He called it the Pit.
Requiem for a rebel
- In relationships of all kinds, Danny liked to stir things up. “You’d be sitting there listening to the radio and he’d pick it up and throw it past your head,” said someone who knew him only slightly. (May 19, 1983)
Skip Frye is still stoked
- Frye is back at Gordon & Smith after a voluntary layoff of four years — "my wilderness years," he calls them — during which his marriage dissolved and he retreated, in reverse of the hermit crab, from a larger shell into a smaller, and into a smaller. He gave up his job, his dwelling, his church, his car, until he was living in a backyard shed in Pacific Beach and riding a bike. (April 14, 1983)
Joe Applegate wrote for the Reader from 1976 through 1990.
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