José Tasende has one request: “Make me the subject of your interviews, not the object. Take what I say and use it. But don’t make me the story. Write about what I say, not what …

When Jay and Geri Sobarnia filed for bankruptcy in 1980, they owned a $550,000 house, a couple of small businesses, and two apartment houses, and their monthly payments were current on the $1,670,000 they owed …

It’s not quite 7:00 a.m., and the fog hangs so thick over Otay Mesa that Richard Cacho cannot see all the way across his cucumber field. At least it’s not windy, or raining, or freezing, …

San Diego's first and only official earthquake alert was sounded in June of 1985, after swarms of small earthquakes started a five-day rumble beneath San Diego Bay. Three of the biggest shakers, with Richter scale …

He turns a corner near 38th and Acacia, where a new auto body shop has been squeezed between two homes. Nielsen shakes his head. "Only in Southeast. Where else would that be allowed to happen?"

Thirty years of accumulated sportscasting experience was about to be marshalled into two hours on the evening of September 30, when Jerry Gross sat down at the microphone to perform his radio show, Hotline Sports, …

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 …

IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, the San Diego City Council will be grappling with a proposed master plan for Balboa Park. In all, there are now six alternatives to that original plan, drawn up by …

IT IS SIX IN THE MORNING at the stockyards in Mexicali, and Frank Enders is rummaging for his cowboy boots and his ancient straw cowboy hat in the back seat of his U.S. government-issued Chevette. …

On Sunday, April 19, the last known California condor was snatched from the wild. Depending on your viewpoint, this event was a great tragedy that marked the extinction of the wild condor or a great …

Avenida Revolucion, where two great civilizations collide to form a Himalayan range of apposite images and attitudes, has made business geniuses out of men like Hector Santillan. Starting as a shoeshine boy in the 1940s, …

George Gueria was an engineer at the posh Westgate Hotel on Second Avenue downtown from 1978 to 1984. now he's designated by the Social Security Administration as "totally disabled." he contends in a lawsuit filed …

Today Ataricio Loriga Gomez’s right wrist works again, and Pablo Pena Valdez no longer shows the unmistakable symptoms of starvation. When the two former political prisoners were released from Cuba six months ago and introduced …

In a morning’s work in Alpine, Larry Himmel has interviewed Aggie McGuffie at her soda fountain, provided some smart-ass, on-camera commentary poking fun at the Alpine Mobile Estates sign, spent five minutes trying to get …

The first time the Boy Scouts wrecked a backpacking trip for me was in 1976, on the trail up San Gorgonio in the San Bernardino Mountains. Two of us had struggled for most of a …

Greg Garver has the look of a man who knows his way around dual carbs. More precisely, with a rounded mustache and goatee on his boyish face, he looks like rock star Bob Seger, which …

George G. Heye a wealthy New Yorker established the Museum of the American Indian in New York City. In 1915 Heye purchased Davis's collection and appointed Davis a field collector for the museum.

It is just past 9:30 on a cool Thursday night when locomotive engineer Jim Scudella radios for clearance from the San Diego Trolley controller to move out across the trolley tracks at Thirteenth and Imperial …

In the beginning of the end, which for West Coast Indians was 217 years ago, the site of Mission San Diego de Alcala was an Indian village known as Nipaguay. Indians had occupied the site, …

The biggest shootout in San Diego police history took place on April 8, 1965 at the Hub pawnshop downtown. The shootout is the case the California Supreme Court used in abolishing the state's death penalty in 1972.

The season of the gray whale migration is approaching, just as archaeologist Ron May and his volunteers complete their summer excavations on the old Ballast Point whaling station. The group had discovered the station during …

“They don’t know what they’re doing, but they go ahead and do it anyway,” says William Kellogg, referring to the Army Corps of Engineers, the California Coastal Commission, and the City of Imperial Beach. The …

“You’re like my opponents. Inquisitive. But they are not to touch me.” — Archie Moore Archie Moore was true to his words. I never really touched him. You don’t touch the Mongoose, by consensus the …

Just three weeks ago an octogenarian, who is either truly brilliant or merely skillful, moved down from Ojai, southeast of Santa Barbara, to rural Escondido. His name is Stephan Riess. He’s eighty-seven, and for fifty …

Late on a cold Monday night Jose Griego took his place on a pile of weeds outside his small apartment in Golden Hill, the seventh of what were to be nine San Diego murder victims …

November 5, 1984 I returned home around 6 o’clock to find Billy in yard shouting obscenities loud & clear. Neighbors came over to say that police had been called — that Billy was breaking things, …

Twilight has descended on the eight officers and ninety-four enlisted men of the submarine Blueback (SS-581), and on this warm Saturday evening in mid-October the waning of an era has occasioned some serious celebrating. Garbed …

Two hours before the fights begin, the boxing ring is a clean canvas framed by loose ropes and illuminated from above by stars of blue neon. Surrounding the ring, the wooden floor at the Palisades …

So rabid for a stadium was Jack Murphy that several of his columns dealt with an idea, proffered by a local design firm, for building a floating stadium in newly developed Mission Bay.

I’ve always been really puzzled at what kind of grudge Teddy Roosevelt had agin’ ol’ Grover Cleveland, to name this goddam brush patch here as a forest after him.

Randy Cunningham taxied the F-4 Phantom onto the catapult aboard the USS Constellation, and both he and Bill Driscoll, the radar intercept officer in the back seat, turned to look at the spinning fingers of …

Diego’s nightclub in Pacific Beach may be all the rage with the disco/video set, but its popularity also extends to the nightstick/badge set. Officer Gary Hill, who patrols the beach on the late shift, says …

Until last October 7 at 1:15 a.m., John “Dirty Foot” Shultz thought he’d seen it all. Since graduating from Mission Bay High in 1961 Shultz has pretty much been a regular along the boardwalk in …

“The patent office people call me all the time, asking about new stuff like this that might be patentable,” says Cooke, who holds four other patents for the navy and three for General Dynamics.

They massed in the parking lot of the Lockheed building on Harbor Island one Saturday in mid-September, a disciplined group of Vietnamese refugees all wearing the brown shirt and tan slacks that constitute their uniform. …

It was a ride that replays itself periodically in his mind, a rare moment of physical and spiritual revelation. The place was Petacalco, on the western coast of southern Mexico, where the waves break inside …

Cockcrow at midday! Oh, how it makes me remember! Alone in a strange land Suddenly my soul flies far away To my home town in the middle of the day . . . Cockcrow at …

North’s jaws clamped around my left forearm and a bolt of comprehension peeled back the night. As his teeth began to squeeze through my jacket, all that I had been learning about police dogs became …

You have before you the offender, Donald Marshall Mabry. His ample girth fills completely the fold-down seat in Judge Michael Greer’s courtroom. It is judgment day, and outside, the May morning is hot, the air …

Dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang. The grandfather clock in Bill Mitchell’s city council office strikes 11:00 p.m. Time has run out on his campaign for mayor. The last of …

Twenty-five white caps were lined authoritatively straight and even on the table in a large banquet room at Tom Ham’s Lighthouse on Harbor Island. Each one bore the gold band signifying its owner was a …

All he knows for sure is that he woke up beside Otay Reservoir, just north of the Mexican border, on a Friday evening in early November, and that now he’s in the county’s emergency mental …

Marston knew of the cannon because his department store, which occupied the same block, was annexing the hotel, and his employees had had to move the 2000 pounds of Spanish bronze too many times.

Try to picture the incongruities of the place: San Ysidro embraces the new branch of the Main Attraction, a strip joint boasting more than $100,000 worth of lights and sound paraphernalia, whose owners figure there …

Wes Alvens was decked out like a cowboy long before you ever slid your tender feet into a pair of citified cowboy boots, and he’ll likely be tucking his riding gloves under his broad leather …

Even by Texas standards it was a bold and daring exhibition of contemporary art. And while it had a lot to do with the firing of Lefty Adler from his job as director of the …

Monday, April 20,9:07a.m. Five hundred and twenty-six Marines are packed into a dozen buses barreling toward the Salton Sea, where they will begin a five-day walk back to Camp Pendleton. The private sitting next to …

She had dreamed the last moments her husband’s life and the first moments of his death so often and so vividly that when the time finally came, Joani Taylor kept wishing she’d awaken. But this …

We’re standing on the corrugated steel decking six floors above Columbia Street, and Joe Silva, the welding supervisor, is shouting. “There’s no heroes here!” he yells over the incessant clattering of a nearby impact wrench. …

The long view Here is frenetic Golden Hall on an otherwise placid evening, the first Tuesday of June, 1980. It is the scene of election central for the first primary of the decade, and San …