San Aliso Creek rest area dwellers

Bob McPhail's favorite stories he wrote for the Reader

Author

By Bob McPhail (RIP)

Publish Date

March 25, 2023

The Aliso Creek Rest Area. "The area is well lighted, has public rest rooms, twenty-four-hour catering trucks, running water, and a minimal police presence..." (Jay Pierre)

The unconventional community of San Aliso Creek
“What is a bum?” asks Jo, a short, animated, talkative man of thirty whose troubled life has included a stint in prison for possession of illegal drugs, a broken marriage, and a recent flirtation with suicide. Jo says he is one of fourteen more-or-less permanent residents of the Aliso Creek rest area, (March 26, 1987)

No meat, no bullfights, no zonkeys
Animal-rights activists took to the streets of downtown Tijuana again on Saturday, January 31, in their most recent protest against what they say is the maltreatment of the city's iconic zonkeys — donkeys painted to look like zebras. (Feb. 3, 2015)

150 West Washington. In February of 1982, however, 16,433 dead fetuses were discovered stored in twenty-foot steel boxes inside a metal shipping container repossessed from a Woodland Hills pathologist.

What Becomes of San Diego County's 20,000 Fetuses Every Year?
The stench is much worse in the small room where BFI maintains a large gas-fired incinerator. The smell gets into your nostrils and clings. It is a cross between formaldehyde and wet animal fur. (July 14, 1988)

Poor dogs

All was not well in Lo Yen City
Four employees and the owner of a Chinese restaurant in Tijuana were arrested on April 7 after food inspectors discovered the eatery was butchering and cooking dog meat. (April 9, 2015)

The rejected plan. The archbishop has asked architects interested in the cathedral’s re-design to submit their plans by mid-June.

Tijuana’s new archbishop rejects the design of a new cathedral
In an undated press release posted on the new cathedral’s website, Archbishop Francisco Moreno Barrón said, among other things, “That in eagerness that it be modern, the project does not look like a Catholic church, much less a cathedral.” Tijuana’s archbishop orders re-design of new cathedral (May 30, 2017)

Edenfield initially told police he and Smith were headed downtown to drop in at some bars. But he told a military superior that he left the Countryside nightclub with Smith because Smith was drunk and Edenfield feared for the man's safety. (David Diaz)

Camp Pendleton Marine kills older gay man — what else is new?
Very early one morning in April of 1983, David G. Smith met his death in a downtown Oceanside motel room. It was an ugly, painful, panic-stricken departure from this life. (January 29, 1987)

Entrance. “They were going to tear the Balboa down and put in a parking garage.” (Robert Burroughs)

Stage fight
This is a story about the collision of dreams in the arena of redevelopment politics. One dream was that of Danah Fayman, a wealthy and influential arts patron with powerful political allies. She wanted to convert San Diego's landmark Balboa Theater into an art museum, thereby ensuring employment for her talented friend, Sebastian “Lefty” Adler. (June 4, 1987)

Why had I moved to Tijuana? Had I married a Mexican woman? Did I want to? (Jessica Hische)

Why Tijuana for sick man?
Everything was just out of reach as I lay on my left side in a bed at Tijuana's newest and most modern hospital. I had to sit up or lie down only on my left side because of a stinking wound the size of a pack of cigarettes on my lower right back. (Nov. 15, 2007)

Bob McPhail came to the Reader from the Oceanside Blade-Tribune in 1987 and wrote stories for the Reader through 2018. He died in November, 2021.