American gothic horror By late October they had an apartment at Fortieth Street and Orange Avenue. Early one morning Garrett saw two men at the front door, one of whom was Marck Lambros III, a …

The town that San Diego would like to forget “San Ysidro’s dead,’’ says an Hispanic banker whose branch is on San Ysidro Boulevard, within sniffing distance of a McDonald’s, a donut shop, the Main Attraction, …

Twist and Shout There are a lot of reasons for reporters to take up public relations. The prospect of making more money is one. A good journeyman at the Union or the Tribune these days …

Reggae matriarch of San Diego vegetarians “We served Balinese food, like gado-gado. We were into Japanese cooking. We did a lot of tempura.” Near the cash register they sold herbs and — for a while …

Mystery of the Gypsy Song His one overriding desire is to find some shred of evidence that the Gypsy Song did in fact sink. “I just want to put that lady’s mind to rest,” he …

Channel 6, our Mexican TV station Channel 39’s cofounder, Larry Shushan, confirms that he and his partners from the outset looked forward eventually to capturing Channel 6’s ABC affiliation. Shushan (who then owned KPRI radio …

Death of an island “There’s not another island off the Pacific coast of North America, including Alaska, that ever evolved five of its own bird species.” points out Bill Everett, a local ornithological consultant and …

Downtown's YMCA – doors always open In 1944 alone, almost eight million people came through the front doors. A continual flow of humanity, 22.000 per day, filed through them. “They say it was a sea …

Life of a Tijuana street urchin Isabel sells her bouquets for two dollars each, and she gives half of what she makes to her mother. With the rest, “I buy myself something to eat, ” …

The cumulative hiss of thousands of wings Mikolich moves bees to the Imperial Valley, for melon pollination, onion seed pollination, and alfalfa seed pollination. Hives there are usually set under “shades,” shelters that protect them …

Down, Boy “Steady, Yucon, it’s okay boy, calm down now Yucon.” Rich and DeGroot croon. The difficulty of the job registers on both their faces. DeGroot forces most of the barbiturate through the needle and …

Used car dealings When my septuagenarian mother (who knows nothing about automobiles) observed that the floor of the trunk was cracked, that the body had been repainted with two tones of non-matching red, that the …

Bushwhacked We look at a Wieghorst painting called Spring Rain, a dark, impressionistic work, one of about a dozen Wieghorsts on the walls. Thackeray can remember when Wieghorst painted it. “It was raining cats and …

The Unbearable Rightness of Being Roger Hedgecock “I was at Santa Barbara, a junior in college, and I got appointed as the head of all social programs. And we did Ray Charles, the Doors, we …

A Little Bit East of Eden There are also sharp disputes about Noah's Ark within the Creationist movement. Some years ago, in the ICR museum, I helped John Morris, their principal ark investigator, look for …

Escape! Then he emptied out the bag before us. Two small cans and some plastic sacks with lump sugar, salt, and sesame seeds fell to the ground. Glancing around, I could see that all my …

The Lost Roads of San Diego In 1944, the land between Midway Drive and Sports Arena Boulevard (then Frontier Street) became combed with the short streets of a wartime housing project. After the war, transients …

Wave Gangsters Socially, Van Artsdalen became a marked man. His reputation as a brawler traveled beyond the predominantly white population of La Jolla to tougher neighborhoods. Butch had already proved himself among the few black …

Notes from Underground Most of the paper's staff lived in the Door commune in a Victorian House on Albatross Street that rented for $295 a month. In late 1973 they were asked to move by …

The Frontier They Want Us to Forget By the late 1960s, the only Frontier structures that still remained were two war-era public schools, Barnard Elementary and the Midway Continuation High School. The city council had …

Lie Down in Darkness The submarine had been discovered by two San Diego State students who were financing their educations by salvaging objects. They had located S-37 about 300 yards off the coast and in …

Porno King Tied to T.J. Hot Spot Reached by phone on May 14 at his residence in Rosarito (he also owns and rents a gated luxury condo in Tijuana, directly behind the American consulate building), …

Beneath the Bunya Bunya They lived on the ranch [Scripps Ranch] for six years. He supervised teams of men in planting thousands of eucalyptuses, all together about forty percent of those that were set out …

God’s Dirt “It’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s pretty high-risk because they’re very, very, very, very perishable. When the flowers are bloomed, you have to pick ’em. And you have to sell ’em. Otherwise you …

Just Flop The camaraderie among skateboarders goes beyond advanced skaters tolerating beginners and into the realm of solidarity. “Totally,” he said, “because there’s an us-against-the-world feeling. It’s the last kind of rebel-spirited outlaw activity that …

Two Views of San DiegoI used to consider San Diego roads relatively sane, compared to L.A. Now the freeway is full of lunatics. Everyone’s trying to go faster than the next guy. People used to …

Kemp and the Fugitive Fotomat also gave Graham a political base. One of the first beneficiaries was Jack Kemp. On May 23, 1968, the San Diego Union reported that Kemp had “joined Fotomat Corp., La …

The Spectacle at Moonlight Beach Not so many years ago the spectacle at Moonlight Beach was strictly a limited engagement, running approximately from Memorial Day to Labor Day. After that the set was dismantled, the …

Cardiff man builds DC-3 to drive on freeway After six months his scavenger hunt came to an end in Tucson, Arizona. There, he paid $1500 for the GMC bus chassis and another $9000 for the …

The glories of San Diego's trolley system The spacious trolley car carried them up Sixteenth Street and down Broadway, where at Horton Plaza they switched to the line heading up what is now Pacific Highway. …

Wing Men On June 15, 1988, they headed north to the Aleutians, where the F-14s played their usual games with Russian MiGs and bombers: VF-51 pilots shot excellent video of the Soviet planes on patrol …

How Alex Spanos Made Off with the Police Building Fund “Yeah, that’s right, they’re going to steal the money for Alex’s Chargers training field from the cops’ pueblo land fund. A big chunk of their …

When It’s Over When I was there in Vietnam, toward the end, I wanted only to get home again alive. I prayed to God and promised him that I would believe in him and tell …

Inside the Padres' lockers Caught looking. Tony Gwynn sat in a canvas-backed chair and peered into the wooden cubicle in front of him. “What’s in my locker?” he asked, repeating the question that had been …

The Forgotten War Conversations with men who never forgot I do not recall putting my foot on Korean soil for the first time. I only remember the cold rain, and running, and others running with …

A Single Mother Alone in the World If the child-support check is late, I let it be. I resent having to beg for anything. I used to be on my ex like white on rice, …

Complete public sleeping ban Imperial Beach has banned camping or sleeping in public with an ordinance that reaches into every last corner, from pavement to median, "including but not limited to dirt or landscaped areas." …

The Forgotten War I do not recall putting my foot on Korean soil for the first time. I only remember the cold rain, and running, and others running with me. By David Burge, June 20, …

A Single Mother Alone in the World If the child-support check is late, I let it be. I resent having to beg for anything. I used to be on my ex like white on rice, …

Hillcrest: gayborhood or ghetto? “I was only in West Hollywood for four years and I came from the East Coast by way of Las Vegas,” he says. “To me, Hillcrest is just normal. At least …

San Ysidro – the town that San Diego would like to forget San Ysidro’s Jack-in-the-Box sells more fast food than any other Jack-in-the-Box in California. Its Big Bear market alone sells more eggs than the …

Tijuana destroys Spanish and English “Tengo que ir hacer laundry, then I have to study en la biblioteca,” I’m paraphrasing what the Latina students in my college sounded like. My first real encounter with Spanglish …

Notes from Underground San Diego's Free Press (later renamed the Street Journal) was defunct by the end of 1970; the San Diego Door came and went with the Nixon Presidency, 1968 to August 1974.The O.B. …

Satan chasers San Diego has many experts in the field of Satanism who say the county is a hotbed of Satanic activity. The hidden canyons of the back country, Ramona, Santee, Escondido, even Oceanside, are …

The Hale blinks Twilight has ebbed to a fringe of lapis on the western horizon, and the stars spin slowly as the dome of the 200-inch Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain blinks awake. Bob Thicksten, …

Till death do us part For so long, she wanted so badly to talk about her relationship with Daniel Broderick. Betty Broderick wanted to tell the their divorce and the awful injustice she felt she …

Ku Klux Klan 's John Metzger talks of hate and tears "My father was in the Crusaders, a national organization that was pretty powerful in San Diego, which was part Christian Identity. It’s a church …

Explosion! The sighting of San Diego was a welcome event for the crew of the GSS Bennington on a sunny July 19,1905. The patrol gunboat had just completed a rough, seventeen-day journey from Hawaii, and …

Tight-lipped submariners aboard the Blueback open up Of course, all submariners are interested in naval history, and remain closer than even infantrymen to their dramatic and bloody heritage, and the Blueback crew seems to sense …

From San Diego's 41st Street, Japan was a more odious enemy than Germany I may be the youngest San Diegan to remember the Second World War, especially the time immediately following the attack on Pearl …