Feature Stories
What’s in the sack? That’s all they care about.Is it a rock or a rolled-up giraffe?Is it pickles or nickels or busted bicycles?And if we guess it, will you give us half?Do they ask where …
Robert Byron of La Mesa, who claims to be the only living direct male descendant of the poet Lord George Gordon Byron, gave us a call the other day. He sounded pleased. Although he’s known …
ON THE PHONE, EDITH, my re-employment dominatrix, was emphatic: “Wear a tie, Mr. Looper, and don’t be late.” Let go, and “out-placed” as a senior design engineer at 58 years of age, I am about …
I come home from Florence with $26.40 in my bank account. I need a job, preferably at an Italian restaurant, some upscale place in the Gaslamp where I can speak the language occasionally. I find …
Michael Jackson is in a good mood. It’s a muggy Saturday afternoon downtown, and he’s just been released from jail at Front and C Street after six months inside. “I was in for narcotics. My …
Detectives followed a trail that traversed the kitchen, then continued across the dining room and through the hallway. The bloody footprints faded noticeably with each step up the staircase. More bloody footprints led to the …
If there is a human being who takes himself and what he does for work more seriously than a junior Hollywood publicist, I have yet to meet that person. These fresh-faced 20-somethings make a neurosurgeon …
The Butterfield Stage line between Warner’s Ranch and Oak Grove was a narrow trail, dusty in summer, soggy in winter, rutted the year round. On its weekly treks, the stage always stopped at Deadman’s Hole, …
When he recalled his early years in San Diego, Herbert Hensley loved to tell about the time Jimmie Dillar saw the devil. In June 1890, as he explored the treeless mesa where Balboa Park stands …
In the great romantic legend of early San Diego, Josefa Carrillo falls in love with Henry Delano Fitch, a Massachusetts seaman. But Governor José Maria Echeandia forbids their marriage. So late one night, the star-crossed …
“What nameless tortures and miseries Americans suffer in foreign climes from despots,” complained the mountain man James Ohio Pattie. “They hate the victims of their oppression, as judging their hearts by their own.” One of …
“You are a devil!” the Mexican governor of California shouted at his American prisoner, a shaggy-haired fur trapper named James Ohio Pattie. Then, with the eye of “an enraged beast” and the “growl of a …
In the spirit of this census year, we offer this unofficial, informal, and unscientific census of daily life in San Diego. (No census workers were lynched or faked their own lynchings while gathering the following …
“The disk is a whale,” Howard Blakeslee, science editor at Associated Press, wrote to George Ellery Hale in 1934. “Every detail is on a scale so much larger than anything heretofore attempted.” “And if the …
Jack Belyea’s truck company became world famous for hauling gargantuan objects. In 1930, he and his brothers transported a 110-foot, 115-ton kiln 26 miles, then lowered it down a 20-percent grade with winches. They moved …
Rattler ManJoseph Beresford, son of a British Lord, fell in love with the gardener’s daughter. His father, whose lineage went back to James I, gave him an ultimatum: marry beneath your rank and lose your …