Pay for gas and I will deliver your van to an Eastern state
San Diego Reader Classified ads, January 23, 2020
3 p.m., Jan. 22
Lawrence Osborne
Osborne is a British novelist who wrote feature stories for the Reader from 1992 to 1994.
Articles by Lawrence Osborne
Best Reader stories from 1993
Mike Doyle, Tarawa, El Centro, Dahmer's Diner, Baja boom towns, Chinese refugees, Dale Akiki, San Diego tomatoes, Balboa Park violence, Mexican fighting bulls, Mother Teresa's TJ, Zeta
In time for the morning glass For a few years back in the '60s, Mike Doyle was the hottest surfer in the world. With an unusual combination of power on big waves and stylistic grace ...
Passage From India: San Diego's Quietly Prosperous Minority
“Indians came to the valley in the ’20s. They settled out there, particularly the Punjabis, and married Mexican girls because they couldn’t marry Americans. That’s why out in Calexico you’ve got so many Mexican kids named Singh."
El Centro awaits the metropolis
Out here in the middle of nowhere
“I moved here from San Diego and I actually prefer it. I really do. I married a Mexican girl and settled down. They’re the best people I’ve come across yet in California. Certainly the most kind.”
Baja boom towns: Las Quintas, San Antonio, Real Del Mar, La Paloma, Castillo del Mar, Costa del Sol, Villa del Mar, Costa Bella, Calafia
So far from God, so close to the United States
“Developers are basically rapists. I grew up in Uruguay and Colombia, and I saw what developers from places like Miami did there. Holiday Inns all over the place, totally messing up the coastlines.”
Life on Mount Soledad has always been about turning back the clock
Why does Ivan Boesky live there?
Mount Soledad, it is true, is one of the most haughty neighborhoods in the United States. And it’s suffocatingly quaint. Small, cracked tarmac roads weave their way arduously up the crests of canyons and through slopes of chaparral.
Del Mar Plaza overcomes finicky hostility
Never use the "M" word
A $30 million development covering 69,000 square feet at the intersection of 15th Street and Camino Del Mar, it styles itself as a “European retail village.” Gone, we gather, are megalomaniac spaces of yesteryear’s malls.
New agers tell us the truth about UFOs
Unhinged at the Lafayette Hotel
The Lafayette Hotel on El Cajon Boulevard seems at first an unlikely venue for a major alternative conference dealing with the “Truth About UFOs” — or to give it its proper title, the National New ...
An English child in southern California
I don't want to go to the bikini ladies
Imagine an eight-year-old English boy arriving at LAX for the first time in his life. Having taken off from a freezing, raining London, he arrives 14 hours later to a freezing, raining Los Angeles. He ...
Coronado Cays villages have a distinctly nervous feel
No amount of pith-helmeted colonials can protect you from chaos
Gated communities are the coming trend in Southern California, ad although this isn’t really a gated community, it sort of has that feel. People here feel safe because of the security measures.
