Cover Stories
"I used to look at myself as the worker," he told me over coffee at a truck stop off Interstate 8 in La Mesa. “I was proud of being in the construction trades. When I …
“I there was such a woman as Ramona, the odds are that she was married not here but in a little chapel on Conde Street. Father Yubach said he seemed to remember marrying a woman by that name.”
Now that he’s out of jail, off probation, and living contentedly in Vista, former San Diego vice squad officer Bob Hannibal can finally talk publicly about the job that precipitated his downfall. He says that …
“The first thing we have here by you at the desk in the pet cemetery office is the box of Kleenex,” says Velma Matthews. “That means, ‘We offer you our sympathy.’ The Kleenex is used …
I wanted to buy some Mexican wine. So I called a half-dozen San Diego Liquor stores, giant alcohol emporiums like Liquor Barn and Liquor Land, as well as smaller havens for wine connoisseurs such as …
Aurore and Ethel Lee await their turn in the shuffleboard tourney. In the winter of life, they sit, legs crossed at ankles, on folding chairs at a card table. The skin on the tops of …
Today, the largest populations of San Diego mesa mint are found on Miramar Naval Air Station. “Driving by there on 1-15 on a warm day in April, you can smell a pleasant, minty aroma,”
“The Ranch sprawls all over. There’s no sense of it being an island. Here it’s gated, and the homes are close enough together to have some camaraderie, a sense of neighborhood.”
At the Thirty-second Street Naval Station, the instructors made us conduct a search on the bottom of San Diego Bay at night without lights. There was no moon, and we crawled along the bottom muck in total darkness.
It’s not that fajitas are hard to prepare. When the meat is cooked, you transfer it to a surface where you cut it into strips. “But we don’t have the facility or the time to hand-strip the meat.”
She always sleeps with her clothes on. Today she wakes up in jeans, a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt that covers layers of T-shirts, three finger rings, and six earrings. She doesn’t remember ever having had a …
In the strip mall set back from the 6500 block of El Cajon Boulevard, on a Saturday night, they stood, hand gripping hand. They sized each other up, handicapping their luck, noted his hair was …
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.
Most of us walk around through our lives with our “selves” glued tight to our skin. No creases. No folds. No spots where it chafes or rubs spots raw to the bone. When we look …
We stood outside her Mission Hills home. She nodded toward a two-story house half a block uphill and said, "That was my father’s house." She led the way down stone steps set into a steep …
This spring a trial unfolded in San Diego federal court that received almost no news coverage, perhaps because the case was so long and messy. On one side, it featured a group of influential local …