Feature Stories
THE FAKE MEMOby Josh Board, Rancho PeñasquitosI used to work on a morning show for Magic 102, a former classic rock station here in San Diego. I usually got to work before the other DJs, …
Leather-clad misfits from suburbia massed outside the California Theatre. Like angry hornets they formed a large hive around the front door of the concert hall, spilling onto the sidewalk. All members of the various tribes …
Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, of a garden, in his 1854 collection of stories Mosses from an Old Manse: “I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation …
I was leaving California, and NOT looking back. Yet, every mile, my eyes returned to the rearview mirror. This was not out of some feeling of nostalgia — it was out of fear. Was he …
One of the greatest casualties of the First World War was information. A devastating H1N1 influenza virus broke out early in 1918. Even though it originated, some now speculate, in Haskell County, Kansas, the virus …
She’d send, she proclaimed, “a message from above.” On Thursday, January 27, 1921, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson stood in the cockpit of a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny.” Wearing a leather coat and cap, tinted goggles across …
Michael Bolton is following me. In perfect cadence, he belts “When a Man Loves a Woman,” down the boardwalk. Okay, so maybe he’s inside this 60-year-old’s iPod, rigged to the back of his bike cruiser …
Kid Smith was disgusted. For three rounds, the iron-jawed middleweight took the fight to Jimmy Meyers, but their bout ended in a draw. After a monster right almost cracked his ribs, Meyers steered clear, and …
A SPECULATION. John W. Collins had nothing left. One of San Diego’s most beloved citizens and president of California National Bank, Collins lost his wife and two children in a boating accident in 1890. Eighteen …
THE FALL. On September 1, 1890, while he was in San Francisco on business, John W. Collins’s wife Fannie, daughter Mary, son Johnny, and three others drowned in a boating accident off Point Loma. “Nothing …
I love autograph stories. When a friend found out I wrote for Autograph Magazine, he told me about a guy he knows who runs an art gallery in North Park. This guy’s mother sewed clothing …
THE RISE. In 1880, San Diego County had 4961 official residents. By early 1887, an estimated 30,000 newcomers had arrived, with thousands more on the way. Immigrants, health-seekers, and speculators came to buy property for …
THE RAID. On September 10, 1909, city prosecutor Edgar Luce, chief of police Keno Wilson, and a detective named Smith crossed the Market Street “dead line” and took a stroll through the Stingaree, San Diego’s …
THE MOST HATED MAN IN SAN DIEGO. From 1910 to 1912, Walter Bellon inspected San Diego’s waterfront, Chinatown, and the Stingaree district for the health department. If an owner failed to make basic improvements, the …
WALTER BELLON. In 1936, Max Miller’s I Cover the Waterfront became a national bestseller. Miller wrote about San Diego’s tough harbor district, its “land sharks” and “bruisers.” Fifty-five-year-old Walter Bellon read the book and roared: …
On February 15, 1898, the Monterey sailed into San Diego Bay. The ship had been at sea for more than a month. The next day around noon, half the crew got liberty and hurtled through …