Feature Stories
Shannon Stewart is a typical Southern California beach girl. At 28, she is blond and tanned. She speaks in “Valley Girl” tones. She smiles a lot, and when she does, her brown eyes sparkle. She …
"There were five canneries on Harbor Drive. I ended up on a fish boat for about seven years because they were paying pretty good money, but Larry never worked as a fisherman. He was too intellectual for that."
Hemet remains stuck in the ’50s where I grew up, Pleasantville ferried to the new millennium. Driving home from teaching at San Diego State, I am charmed into a nostalgic trance by the Everly Brothers.
All winter I have struggled to hold the bees in the hive of my head. Because I had no time to write about them, they threatened to rise up as a single blonde body and …
When she walks along Pacific Beach in the warm evenings of summer, Renee Lowe turns heads. The 38-year-old has long brown hair and the good looks that once made her a teen model, but it …
"Back in the late 1960s, there was only one Thai market I was aware of, Bangkok Market on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. It opened in 1968 and it carried mostly canned goods, no vegetables, no spices."
On November 11, 1912, after giving warning, the police stormed through the Stingaree at 6:00 a.m. They hit the Oasis, at 416 Fourth Avenue, then made wholesale assaults on 11 other establishments. They arrested 138 women.
Certain questions will plague me to my grave. The larger ones, I have, with maturity, made peace with in a way, accepting that answers will most likely be denied me in this life. Questions such …
I notice he has thrown away some color slides — family pictures. The bag breaks and they spill out. I don’t say anything, just pick them up off the driveway and put them in a …
My father was older than other kids’ fathers. The disappearing and already disappeared hair on the top of his head offered testimony to that. The mustache that linked him to an earlier generation of Hollywood …
When I got in trouble, my father’s impulse was to hug me. He did punish me for the little things, but when I did something corrupt, committed a youthful transgression that had the potential to …
Dead, dead, dead is what I think now when I think, “Father.” My father’s dead. My father’s underground. More than a decade, my father’s moldered. His big belly’s deflated. His big belly’s dust and rubble. …
My father died in the autumn of 1989 of congestive heart failure. His name was Lester and he was 79 and, as he recedes into the past, he gradually ceases to be a single human …
Moe: Not with the bare feet! Susie: Dad, I’m just going in the back yard. Moe: I wouldn’t go out there with the bare feet, Susie. You don’t know what’s on the ground. Those birds …
I was born on a Sunday evening in May 1953, so I probably first tasted cigarette smoke, first inhaled it, the following Wednesday. If my dad smoked as he drove my mom and me home …
There were six pairs of Sunday school shoes lined up on the kitchen floor every Saturday night, three little patent-leather pairs with rounded toes and a single strap across the top of the foot, and …