Cover Stories
Beyond this was a tall, guano-covered rock, where a few dozen black cormorants were sitting in even rows on a slope like keys on an adding machine — if that isn’t too farfetched.
On the night of January 21, the first day Circus Vargas came to town, Larry Gill stood on a Plexiglas platform high above the University Towne Centre parking lot. With his right hand, he grasped …
The walls of Louis Spaulding’s tunnel are a hundred million years old, and they glitter. Patches of quartz shine like milky glass, near scratchy outcroppings of a form of felspar called cleavelandite. Spaulding points out …
“One of my grandfathers came to San Diego as the honorary German consul and the representative of a steamship line. I don’t think very many people come here representing shipping lines any more, and I …
The members of the rock climbing section of the Sierra Club in San Diego, like Harlan, are city people with full-time jobs or studies. During the week, they practice bouldering at Mission Gorge or Mt. Woodson.
When they leave for the weekend this Friday afternoon in autumn, employees at 1600 Pacific Highway are reassured, as they depart through the west exit, that they work in the “San Diego County Administration Center, …
Pianist Kevin Cope knocks another tune out of the weathered Gulbransen upright piano, and again the group jumps into song unabashedly, with more hands held above heads and more upward-searching faces. But this time the …
San Diego County’s back roads wind through hills overgrown with chaparral a thick cover of brush that stands in most places no higher than the average person. Here and there boulders lie nakedly in the …
Rape of the Earth Medal of Dishonor The year's most infamous award goes to the voters of San Diego, a majority of whom agreed to exchange 39 acres of prime canyonland in Balboa Park for …
This is a test. You are standing in Room 36 at Encanto Elementary School where Diane Moss-Curry is the teacher. Encanto is the San Diego neighborhood just east of Lemon Grove; it’s run-down and barren …
The young Hungarian conductor was sure the great George Szell wouldn’t bother to come, but he invited Szell to one of his Amsterdam concerts anyway. The year was 1959, George Szell was conductor with the …
He had refrigeration trucks made up to look like camper vans to transport the illegal shorts, and he made arrangements for airplanes to land at San Clemente Island to pick up the shorts and fly them to Las Vegas.
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. Jones is the owner …
There’s a room on the second floor of the old San Diego Zoo hospital where a person can feel like a god. Two metal chests that look like overgrown dishwashers stand against one wall of …
In the lobby of the San Diego Gas and Electric Company’s main office building in downtown San Diego, people come and go across the black stone floor. A receptionist stands behind a long metal desk, …
Starting in 1959, the tournament was played farther down at South Mission Beach, at the end of San Gabriel Court, which runs out to the Beachcomber Bar on Mission Boulevard, now OMBAC’s unofficial clubhouse.