From the archives

The most important woman

Unreal Slab City, the inimitable food critic Eleanor Widmer, UCSD tests PolyHeme blood transfusions on patients south of I-8

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Irene Grimm. She could make and bag seven school lunches faster than I can make one sandwich for myself.
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  • The woman we never forget

  • By Abe Opincar, Amy Gerstler, Barbarella Fokos, Deirdre Lickona, Ernie Grimm, Geoff Bouvier, Jeannette DeWyze, Jeff Smith, Jennifer Ball, Jim Morris, Laura McNeal, Mary Grimm, Matthew Lickona, Patrick Daugherty, RF Jurjevics, Suzanne Finnamore, May 5, 2005
  • Salvation Mountain

    Salvation Mountain

  • The Slabs are Slab City, three miles east of Niland, between the sultry Salton Sea and the Chocolate Mountains. Years ago the concrete slabs supported the barracks of Camp Dunlap, where General George Patton and his tanks rehearsed desert-warfare tactics fro the North African Campaign of 1942. Now the slabs are used by squatters who park their RVs and trailers on the crumbling concrete.
  • By Stephen Dobyns, Nov. 3, 2005
  • Eleanor Widmer in La Jolla, 1958. "I would see Kingsley and Eleanor in swimsuits walking down to the ocean from time to time, and they looked like models."

    The late long-time queen of the cafe critics

  • One of the ironies of Eleanor Widmer's life is what she ate in her last months. Widmer had become a restaurant critic in 1974. In the following years, Widmer had dined on Japanese donburi and barbecue ribs, Peruvian anticuchos and French quenelles, Turkish baklava and Indian raitas, fresh pastas and moles and dumplings. But toward the end, confined to her bed in La Jolla, she wanted only chocolate.
  • By Jeannette DeWyze, Nov. 23, 2005
  • "What ambulances can do is give you saline to keep up your blood volume, but they can't actually provide you with blood."

    Bad blood

  • A small Illinois biotech company cuts a deal with UCSD. The university agrees to test a substitute for human blood on comatose patients — victims of gunshots and car crashes — without the patients' consent. Within the city of San Diego, the experiment is targeted at several neighborhoods south of I-8, where many poor and minority residents are unlikely to have heard of the study.
  • By Matt Potter, July 28, 2005
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