The walk down the Ocean Beach fishing pier is longer than I remember it. Three years ago I lived in an apartment building close to the land end of the pier, and I walked it …
January 28, 1999
Ocean Beach News & Stories
At night on the Ocean Beach pier with the Mackerel Queen
Why do the seagulls always fly south at sunset in M.B. and Sunset Cliffs?
Dear Matt: I've lived in Manhattan Beach and San Diego and noticed the same thing at sunset at both locations. The seagulls always flew south at sunset in M.B., and the seagulls and pelicans do …
March 26, 1998
Ocean Beach motor homers – gypsies with sand between their toes
Although Wolfman’s rig is registered, he has no insurance. “I drive real slow and careful.... I don’t even want to talk about it. You talk about the devil, and he’ll be knocking at your door.”
March 14, 1996
Bummed Out, the O.B. Spaceman Passes On
He sold Spaceman of Ocean Beach bumper stickers. He began handing out free “space cards,” assuring their bearers passage to a new planet once the earth was “cleansed” of people in the year 2005.
December 23, 1993
The fantastical odyssey of Ocean Beach's fuel
"I can vividly see Del Monte, the street where we lived, and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, which was Defoe then [renamed in the '20s after the Sunset Cliffs development]. There was no pavement, just dirt streets."
December 3, 1992
Riptide Watch at O.B.
There’s a whole lot of floundering going on at Ocean Beach. Lifeguards there rescue more swimmers per mile than any beach in California — and maybe the world. Some say that makes the waters of …
July 11, 1991
Police crack down on Ocean Beach skateboarders
Skateboarders, particularly in San Diego’s beach communities, are accustomed to getting citations from police for riding in either in the street or on the sidewalk in a business district. But in Ocean Beach, the penalties …
March 14, 1991
Ocean Beach People’s Food directors take over from founders
A month after it began, the workers’ revolt is over. The two-week-old rebel government has been toppled. Its leader and his three top lieutenants have been exiled. Several other “subversive elements,” in the words of …
November 26, 1987
The Spaceman of OB Checks In
In May of 1986, Clint Cary, the Spaceman of Ocean Beach, was convalescing in a South Bay nursing home. It looked like curtains for him, after the sight in his one remaining eye was destroyed …
October 8, 1987
Ocean Beach – most dangerous place to swim in San Diego
Ocean Beach is the most dangerous place to swim in the entire county, according to recue figures compiles by the various lifeguard agencies that service San Diego’s seventy miles of coastline. During August, city lifeguards …
September 17, 1987
The would-be developer of Famosa Slough
Flash back a few years. We are about to witness an act of what appears to be extraordinary masochism. Terry Sheldon is standing out on West Point Loma Boulevard, looking at twenty acres of marshland. …
May 29, 1986
Luigi's, Poma's, Square Pan, Giant New York, Rebel Bakers, Pompei Vesuvio – all in O.B.
Back in the late Sixties, the foot of Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach was considered San Diego’s answer to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district becase of a steady invasion of peace/love/brotherhood-espousing “hippies.” A decade and a …
November 8, 1984
Le Chalet keeping motorcyclists out
When Paul Krug bought the Le Chalet nightclub near the foot of Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach a year ago last December, he was well aware of the club’s notoriety as a hangout for bikers, …
March 15, 1984
OB's Strand stops X-rated fare
The city council, city attorney, state courts, and a group of dedicated residents keep trying to make it impossible for Vince Miranda to show X-rated films at his Strand theater in Ocean Beach, but Miranda …
November 10, 1983
A 7-11 at Voltaire and Bacon?
At least the folks at the Southland Corporation are persistent. Various Ocean Beach residents recall that in the last decade Southland has tried three or four times to build a 7-Eleven store in Ocean Beach, …
February 17, 1983
O.B Rag, O.B. Times, O.B. News, O. B. Scene, O-Beacon
Three and a half years ago, Stan Sorenson, who at the time operated a small bookstore on Bacons Street in Ocean Beach, decided on a whim to start a community newspaper. It had been four …
November 11, 1982
O.B. coffeeshop wars between the Little Chef and Old Townhouse
Looking west from the corner of Newport Avenue and Cable Street in Ocean Beach, the hard angular marquee of the Strand Theater is the dominant landmark. The Strand has also been pilloried of late – …
August 26, 1982
But who in OB would eat KFC stuff?
Representatives of the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation recently talked with Ocean Beach activist Jackie Sanders about how that community would greet proposals for a KFC drive-thru. “I hope people like their chicken well done,” Sanders …
August 27, 1981
Ocean Beach – the Haight Ashbury of San Diego
The January, 1968 opening of the In Between, a youth-counseling center originally sponsored by the Point Loma Methodist Church, didn’t help matters much; it seemed to attract as many troublemakers as it did those in search of help.
August 13, 1981
Jack in the Box to double size in Ocean Beach
The only genuine fast-food outlet in Ocean Beach is the Jack-in-the-Box at the corner of Voltaire Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, a garish orange structure erected in 1956, a time when leering fifty-foot-tall clown heads …
April 17, 1980