Park there, pay here On the afternoon of the All-Star baseball game in July, Evan Jones was standing on top of one of those pedestrian towers that corkscrew up the side of San Diego Stadium. …

From Spanish rancho to hard-core Marines In 1942, the Ninth Marine Division marched in and took over what had been the Santa Margarita y Las Flores Ranch. The Second World War had begun and the …

No trolley in my backyard A group of neighborhood conservationists in University City are hoping to put the brakes on a plan to extend trolley service from downtown San Diego's Santa Fe Depot to a …

Editor: The following feature stories appeared in the interior pages of the Reader in the 1970s and 1980s and have just been converted to digital form. My Triumph, my defeat Five years later I still …

Editor: The following feature stories appeared in the interior pages of the Reader in the 1970s and 1980s and have just been converted to digital form. Meditations while riding San Diego Transit “Yes, these people …

On the 22nd of August, 1859, the little steamer Senator called at San Diego with passengers from Los Angeles. It rounded the point under the lighthouse and entered the harbor’s narrow channel at about 8:00 …

Harry Aberle died in the Pitts Special. He crashed after takeoff while Yvonne watched from in front of the hangar. "The only other witness said he was doing an aerobatic maneuver, but I know he wasn't.”

I’m Talking Monster Books Amy had a title on this book. She called it Wind and Water. She was using the theme of the I Ching. I looked at these synopses of the stories, and …

Plays are short enough to allow for re-reading. The suspense is gone the second time, but there’s twice as much pleasure in interpretation once you know where the characters are going.

One thing Robert Smyth likes about his used Merkur is that it's a turbocharged car with no sign on it saying "turbocharged." Power without show: that's Smyth (he pronounces it "Smith"). At 40, he is …

For an hour and a half, 80-year-old Tony Carrasco had been waiting for a deer to pass within range of his old bolt-action Remington, but now he was getting bored. It was a splendid morning …

If he wanted to get ahead in rodeo he'd have to make the commitment to travel. He'd been told as much m a roping class he'd taken in Brawley "Get out of the valley,” said Taylor, summarizing the instruction.

Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.

He takes it for granted that suburbs are great. “We built these freeways, and they’re not generating less trips, they’re generating more. More freedom. People want to live out away from the city and drive in to work.

Since I'm the cook of the house, if the phone should ring around dinner time my wife Jane answers it — unless there's a Padres game on TV and we've broken for a commercial message. …

Just about everything this city knows about suburban living (comparable to what Milwaukee knows about beer) has gone into the making of the southern end of University city, ten miles south of downtown and a …

“Those of you who don’t go to church, don’t think we’re funny when we clap and shout,” said Ann Murray to us who had come to hear an afternoon of gospel music. “’Cause when we …

In relationships of all kinds, Danny liked to stir things up. “You’d be sitting there listening to the radio and he’d pick it up and throw it past your head,” said someone who knew him only slightly. ‘

If a surfer wants a medium short board of six to seven feet, or an old fashioned board of eight feet or longer, and he wants Skip Frye to shape it for him, Frye will …

He was eighteen, maybe nineteen years old, with cola eyes and whiskerless brown skin, and his hair, which was swept back in an impeccable bubble, was black with a brown sheen. With calm disdain he …

He was charged with planting and maintaining the parkland trees. Most of the trees in Balboa Park, and many of those in other public places — Old Town, for one — were planted by Jerabek.

One bright Saturday morning this winter near the Black Frog restaurant in Southeast San Diego, a Volkswagen pulled off Forty-seventh Street and entered the parking lot of a modest and unadorned church. From the car …

‘‘And you know you’ll have to borrow twice as much from your parents to buy the Cedar Street house?” ‘‘Sure.” ‘‘And you’re going to ask them?” ‘‘God,” I said, “it’s an investment. What are parents for?”

Ron Wigginton, a young landscape designer who leads a well-ordered life, was out roaming the streets of Hillcrest one day four years ago, suddenly on the lookout for a place to live. His rent on …

To promote the development of the Gaslamp Quarter he once asked Mrs. Yamada if she were interested in selling. She replied with a quiet word about wanting to keep going for a year or two.

In June of 1974, when Steve Schanes was twenty years old and Bill, his brother, was fifteen, they opened their first store, on Cass Street in Pacific Beach, to sell old and new comic books …

The Frog booked jazz: the clientele found it closer to home than Chuck's Steakhouse in La Jolla, and the neighborhood seemed safer than the Crossroads’ on Market Street, downtown.

“He was truly one of the better teachers at San Diego State,” said Daniel McLeod, chairman of the department of English and comparative literature, who attended classes at the college and heard Theobald lecture in 1949.

What was curious about the nurse as she moved expertly about the room, preparing my wife for surgery, was that her forearm was in a fresh cast. I noticed that it didn't hinder her in …

Darlene for many years has lived alone in a flight-path apartment. She’s as independent as one can be these days: she upholsters her own furniture, takes long solo vacations in her van. She is in …

I guess the first thing I try to tell people when I stop them is what I thought they were doing wrong. They see the flashing lights in their rearview mirror and a lot of …

I have ridden in a Deux Chevaux and so I know a little of what James Bond and the G-girl were going through. The gear shift is weird; it comes straight out of the dash.

I invited him for dinner and bought two quarts of Miller, some frozen dinners, and a bottle of catsup. We ate on the living room floor by the heater, Wayne first drinking his beer.

I am Father Luis Jaume, but to spare you the difficulty of pronouncing my last name, please think of me as Father Luis. On the morning of November 5, 1775, at thirty-five years of age …

The arson suspect was nineteen years old and had short black hair, brown-yellow eyes, and a wide, plump face. He was sitting in the corner stall of the visiting room of the Imperial County jail …

It is an intersection that only God could love. Market and Twenty-fourth streets: its sidewalks are stuck about with telephone poles, shadeless palms, and a few eugenias trimmed into skinny trees; its corners are occupied …

One cloudy morning in July of 1978, I drove Mrs. Beatrice Walker See and her family to visit the reformatory in Whittier where Mrs. See's son was an inmate. His name (not his real one, …

The house sits up from Juniper Street in North Park on a square of lawn girdled by pink cinderblock. The gables above the front door and window make the house look slightly exotic — English or Bavarian.

No dwelling escapes coincidence. There's a thick-walled apartment building in Hillcrest, one with just enough character in its tiles to make the rest of it look better for being rundown, where I lived for a …

Beyond this was a tall, guano-covered rock, where a few dozen black cormorants were sitting in even rows on a slope like keys on an adding machine — if that isn’t too farfetched.

On the afternoon of the All-Star baseball game in July, Evan Jones was standing on top of one of those pedestrian towers that corkscrew up the side of San Diego Stadium. Jones is the owner …

“Hurry up and get your work done, so I can clean up this mess,” said Anne, a nineteen-year-old journalist in East San Diego. “Well excuse me!” replied the policeman who had just walked into her …

Baca says that Mexican-Americans have been “colonized,” severed from their culture, and dominated by a class that profits from them. Yet Baca himself doesn’t seem much damaged by this colonization, not outwardly at least.

I might have forced the money on him, but the day was too young to be ruined, and we had a four-hour bus ride ahead of us. Dad always wins because it’s not only easier to give in, it’s cheaper.

When he died four months ago. James Edward Morris. Jr., had his fingers on top of the wall that successful people stand on. He was climbing, then he fell. Thirty-one years old, he had just …

“We’re both in the Navy, and our pay is supposed to go up when we’re married. The housing allowance is higher for married couples. Then there’s insurance, which is bound to go down. "

Here at Windansea Beach in La Jolla, surfers prefer the Vespa motor scooter for solo transportation. This is a low, fat motorcycle that you'd be crazy to take for a long fast ride. Your Vespa …

Neddy Massaro’s jail is the best in San Diego. She lives on the tenth floor of the sleek Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal highrise at F and Union streets in downtown San Diego. There are …

The city requires its 71 cab companies to provide fair and speedy service, but the cabbies in this divided industry do not — or cannot — make a living by following the city's rules.

“You have dyed-in-the-wool historical wargamers; you have fantasy freaks who have read all the Tolkien books; you have people we’ve never seen in here and will never see again."