Feature Stories
I really didn’t like the other gang. They were weak. They let people push them around. We could go kick back in their park, and they wouldn’t say nothing about it. Anyone could go to their park.
We moved to 13th and Island because we found a mortgage we could afford near our office. We expected we would assert our turf. We brought a gun and a bad attitude from Gaslamp.
“We decided to keep it simple. We loaded eight men in two Blackhawks with a trail bird and made a low-level night approach at 20 feet off the deck at a hundred knots or so.”
Families appear whose fathers have gone across the wire, not to return. The mothers can be seen, later, hauling the gifts and the food and the candy up the steep cliffsides, their children yelling and laughing.
One hot afternoon last summer, Susan Peters's rock band Fiction, whom DJ Chase of SDSU’s student-run radio station KCR refers to as “San Diego’s Premier Gothic Rock Band,” played a gig at theGrove shopping mall …
“Yes. I remember the case,’’ the doctor said. “It was a home birth, with, I believe, a midwife. We could have saved the child, had it been born in the hospital or treated right away."
Julian is still the real thing. The town has a genuine turn-of-the-century feel, not contrived like San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. Still, it is poised on the brink of self-consciousness, a cute parody of itself.
My friend James recently left an astounding list on my desk: "Final Meals Requested by Inmates Executed in Texas." Two pages, 34 names (all men), 28 meals. He picked it up from a Mr. Brown, …
About a year ago, I found myself unemployed again. I’d had a string of counseling assignments, intertwined with periods of joblessness. I had even been an employment counselor, so supposedly I knew the ins and …
While walking along Kiyamachi Street, headingtoward Shijo, I noticed a couple of teenage girls handing out what looked to be large quantities of soft tissue paper. Although I had been in Kyoto just a few …
He liked his peanut butter and banana sandwiches grilled in butter. He wouldn't sunbathe without an electric fan blowing directly on his body. He saw the faces of Stalin and Jesus in cloud formations. These …
"I worked for the city engineering department for years, writing manuals and things — and when I got the first inkling of a poem, I’d come home and write down some ideas or the first few lines."
When Frank Morris talks about going to the city — and he tries not to even think about it — it’s San Diego he is referring to, though it’s a two-hour drive to that city …
Lee Ellen Butcher is Ken Butcher's widow. Ken was a Navy SEAL lost at sea during the Grenada invasion. Ken and I served together with Underwater Demolition Team Eleven at the Amphibious Base in Coronado. …
It was one of the weekends when my wife announces, out of the blue, that she is miserable, and except for our son, our marriage, essentially, is a disaster. I was building a chicken coop. …
Gabacho: This is the border word for gringo. It seems to come from the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain, referring to someone who speaks gavat — who speaks Spanish badly. But how did this word get to Tijuana?