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Anza Borrego rangers spend most of their time observing the human race at its worst
Volcanos and islands under San Diego, Randy Cunningham's MiG shoot-outs, Cadillac wheels made skateboarding, Navy nerds above Pt. Loma, submariners, Hedgecock grand jury, North County migrant camps
Where demons thrive
- Like city cops, the BLM rangers spend most of their time observing the human race at its worst. You might think the desert would be a place where you could get away from people like that, the rangers say, and maybe it was, once; but not anymore.
- By Steve Sorensen, May 3, 1984
San Diego primeval
- Ancient volcanoes lie buried beneath the beaches of San Diego. Mountain ranges that once rose across the county have disappeared. A river that flowed here from Sonora, Mexico dried up long ago, when tapirs the size of terriers wandered the county and crocodiles wallowed in marshy lagoons. The history that Gastil studies is a history beyond people, a history of primitive planetary energies and great, unfathomable time.
- By Gordon Smith, April 5, 1984
The deadly circle
- Randy Cunningham taxied the F-4 Phantom onto the catapult aboard the USS Constellation, and both he and Bill Driscoll, the radar intercept officer in the back seat, turned to look at the spinning fingers of the catapult officer. It was January 19, 1972, and the carrier was cruising into the wind off North Vietnam. Above them circled the RA-5 photo reconnaissance plane and the A-7 and A-6 attack bombers that were accompanying it on the recon mission over the North Vietnamese airfield at Quan Lang near the Laotian border.
- By Neal Matthews, March 29, 1984
Shred till you're dead
- “Yes, the whole place has kind of gone to hell now,“ the caretaker says, crawling out from under his truck and wiping his greasy hands on his pants. His trailer is parked in front of the dead skateboard park — now a fish-for-fee pool—next to the Carlsbad Raceway. “It was famous once. In Reader's Digest. The first one like it in the world. I built it myself. . . . You could skate in there for a month and never do the same thing twice.”
- By Steve Sorensen, Feb. 23, 1984
Inventions, inventors, patents, and military secrets atop Point Loma
- It had been a long day, and dusk was settling on the white gravestones and the khaki government buildings atop Point Loma. But for Carroll White it was a dawn, and he was filled with the elation he'd been withholding from himself for months. On this evening in 1968, as he was leaving his office in the Naval Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC), Carroll White was about to admit openly that he and a colleague, Russell Harter, had made a major discovery: they had found a way to test eyesight objectively.
- By Neal Matthews, Feb. 2, 1984
Tight-lipped submariners aboard the Blueback open up
- Of course, all submariners are interested in naval history, and remain closer than even infantrymen to their dramatic and bloody heritage, and the Blueback crew seems to sense the significance of this event. They’re the caretakers of one of only five remaining diesel boats in the U.S. fleet, a boat that in many ways was the link between the technology of World War II and the nuclear navy of today.
- By Neal Matthews, Nov. 29, 1984
Transcripts from Grand Jury investigation into Roger Hedgecock's campaign finances
- He is one of Hedgecock's closest friends and advisors, he is a veteran of local politics, and he was the principal strategist for Hedgecock's 1983 mayoral campaign. Among the eighty-two witnesses who appeared for questioning, McDade revealed the keenest insight into contemporary San Diego politics; the transcription of his testimony is an engrossing document.
- Nov. 1, 1984
The Devil's Peak
- In the summer of 1967, when I first heard about El Picacho del Diablo, I was still young enough to think I was indestructible. I was a smart-assed college student at the time, with more daring than good sense, attempting my first wilderness adventures in the mountains of Utah and on the granite walls of Yosemite Valley. I was convinced that injury and pain were experiences only other people had to suffer, and that death was just one more thing the older generation had lied about.
- By Steve Sorensen, Aug. 2, 1984
Fear, sweat, and profit
- The canyons and hillsides throughout the North County conceal a sprawling network of hidden colonies in which undocumented farmworkers live under worse conditions than do the vast majority of Tijuana residents, hanging their perishable food supplies from tree branches, sleeping under cardboard, defecating on rotting piles of human waste.
- By Jeannette DeWyze, July 12, 1984
The last vaquero
- Papa worked different ranches and things, and he didn’t settle down till he started homesteadin’ in 1898 or '99 up at Boulder Crick, about twelve miles southwest of Julian. A hundred and sixty acres there, I still have the deed signed by ol’ Teddy Roosevelt.
- By Neal Matthews, May 17, 1984