Cover Stories
About one o’clock in the morning. Wells Fargo security guard Bill Wingo was making a routine security round at his regular post, an apartment complex in La Jolla Shores. Coming up to the apartment’s pool …
"If I've had a nutritional meal in the last year, it’ll come as a surprise to my stomach," quips Dan McLain in between resounding burps. It is almost midnight and we are sitting outside a …
Nancy Beauchaine has a slender body, and she carries it erect, supple as a dancer. Nancy is discussing how she uses her body in her work as a sexologist. She is sitting in Hob Nob …
Very few neighborhoods can claim to have a song written about them. San Diego's Burlingame is one of those few, and even though the song is, well, corny, it evokes a distinctive feeling, one that …
When C. Arnholt Smith fell under federal indictment and lost his U.S. National Bank, the Union ran the story on its second-section page under a headline that merely said the bank was being sold.
The scene opens in the tiny kitchen of a one-bedroom apartment downtown. Tom Kozden, the prominent rent control activist, and Fred Schnaubelt, the city councilman, are sitting at a small kitchen table. It is afternoon. …
Dick King knows what time everyone in San Diego wakes up in the morning. Approximately, at least. King is the city’s director of water and sewer utilities, and he knows that people tend to use …
Vic McCully’s head shop Synthetic Trips has sat in its ramshackle contentment at University and Euclid for eleven years, squeezed between a bar (currently called the Dynamite Den) and a closet-size diner. It is the …
"One of the secrets of a successful campaign is to know where the hell you’re going,” says the candidate, fumbling with a folded piece of paper on which one of his workers has written cryptic …
Wolfgang has taken a small white pill. In about an hour he’ll begin to lose consciousness. Gradually, his brain waves will warp into a succession of strange patterns. As the hours pass, periodic paralysis will …
“Hurry up and get your work done, so I can clean up this mess,” said Anne, a nineteen-year-old journalist in East San Diego. “Well excuse me!” replied the policeman who had just walked into her …
Everyone in the room was divorced or separated, except for one woman who explained how and why she and her husband didn't communicate. The man on the floor said he liked her and felt good about her.
When Derek was in college, he and his friends talked a lot about guns and karma. They were very sure of themselves when they postulated that violence attracts violence; that the people who like guns …
Barbara Dunne was exhausted. Yet she was relaxed, too, a feeling she hadn’t experienced in months of turmoil. First her mother died in the summer of 1978, then she’d cared for her father until he …
Tijuana’s reputation as a wide-open town is fast declining, much to the satisfaction of the city fathers, who started phasing out the more blatant aspects of the commercial sex scene in the 1960s. The motivation …
The big, drunk Chicano in Horton Plaza who tried to rip off my Hare Krishna gown got to me so quickly I never even saw him coming. By the time I realized what was happening, …