Feature Stories
On the San Diego Trolley, the decision to buy a ticket or not is up to you. It's called the honor system. When I first heard about the trolley in 1981, the implications of honor …
A waitress at a local cafe greeted an unexpected shower — not a Carolina monsoon, mind you, just a drizzle — with the awe of a Hawaiian contemplating her first snow. She nearly dropped our tostadas.
I was intrigued by one woman who kept saying to her fussy two-year-old child, “If you don’t shut up, I’m gonna bust you one, little girl.” She said it with as much affection as anger.
These large first-floor rooms at the Hotel del Coronado overlooking the tennis courts and picturesque beach are some of the most expensive in San Diego. And they’re a mess. The bedding in them is rumpled; …
Three yankers ago, I lost between a pint and a quart when the jerk nicked an artery during a "routine" wisdom extraction. Four dentists (and another wisdom tooth) back, I lost a pint from just a vein.
“So, why you want to write about a pimp, girl?” “I need money.” We’d met through a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of a friend. He was 31 years old and had been …
For an instant, Benny heard them again, those last shouts. He saw the sea leaping. He’d survived. Benny sat on the straight-backed chair under the single light at his desk. The shotgun stared at him, …
The 1927 romance of Maria Elena “Nina” Gutierrez Salcedo and Francisco Javier Sauza Mora had a made-in-Hollywood feel to it. She was a red-haired beauty from an old, moneyed Guadalajara family; he was a dashing …
Ernest Hemingway was good company, but his drinking and hard living were difficult to keep up with. Argentinian president Juan Peron was either a tad insincere, or he didn’t dare challenge the will of his …
I was sitting in the captain’s chair of a big thirty-four-foot Executive, surrounded by all the plush comfort's due a man of significant corporate weight: rich burgundy carpets, vinyl-walnut cabinets, and dramatic scarlet curtains. In …
The Coast is for the “working class,” as a co-owner of the hotel, Lee Howard Jr., likes to say. Others compare it to fly paper. Still others say it merely provides a stopping off for misfits.
On a Monday morning in midsummer, shortly after 8:30, I went to the office of the city’s Street Youth Program in Southeast San Diego. Ben Tukufu and Richard “Liko” Davis, two of the counselors in …
Sherover learned to shoot, meeting for target practice every Saturday afternoon, and she and several other students asked a nonstudent friend if he would sit in Marcuse’s large survey courses with a gun, “just in case.” He did.
Immediately I had a strong sense of my father's love for that gun; when he handed it over to me, I knew it wasn’t without some regrets. “It’s yours, under one condition. Don’t you ever sell it.”
Among the famous and the celebrated who have turned up there are Pete Seeger. Quentin Crisp, Holly Near, David Ogden Stiers, and locals Russ T. Nailz and Larry Himmel.