Being born in the mid-‘50s, my schoolmates and I were just old enough to look on in wonder at the tumult of the ‘60s but not really to participate in any adult kind of way. We went through school and …

For a dozen days before Christmas last month, I took a trip to Southern Florida. A native San Diegan and lifelong beach lover vacationing in Miami Beach is sorta like a hardcore biker renting a candy-colored Vespa scooter, but I …

Back in the '60s, there was a kid who lived on a cul-de-sac with a yard facing the drainage ditch that ran behind the houses on the east side of College Avenue, between Adelaide and University. He was my inseparable …

I grew up near the corner of Avenues College and University, which sounds like a bad metaphor but is really just a statement of fact. The house is still there, and it's only recently that I've found myself driving past …

The movie American Graffitti closes with the scene of Richard Dreyfuss heading off to college, sitting in the seat of a propeller-driven airliner as short vignettes recounting the future lives of the movie's main characters flash across the screen. The …

The site of the little shopping mall along University Avenue between Rolando Blvd and Aragon Drive was once at the center of some very grand designs. It was the original proposed site for the campus of San Diego State University, …

I go to way too many funerals and memorial services nowadays. It's that time of life. I spend a lot of time visiting former teachers and parents of friends and such in hospitals and care facilities too. It isn't fun, …

It was a fall morning in 2008. The impression that all was not going swimmingly economics-wise had reached critical mass. Reading the news had become an exasperating downer; was there nothing good going on anywhere? The presidential election was coming …

For the first three decades of adulthood, the place where I grew up was a link to a world for which I held a lot of affection but little real connection. Brought up on a busy street not far from …

Growing up as an SDSU area local, Inland North County was always the Unknown Zone. Until a dozen years ago, I'd hear the traffic report for the 78 corridor or Vista/San Marcos and tune it out with a vague "Where-the-heck-is-that?" …

This university has loomed large with me from the earliest days of my life. Dad was starting on a master’s degree in education at “State College” at the time I was born, and recalls me crawling around restlessly on the …

The world was not exactly a technologically primitive place at the time this guy I am now was born. A decade before, World War II was wrapping up. My father had been in the military then, like all of our …

This neighborhood of mine was laid out in the late 1920s to provide a complementary community for the new San Diego State College campus. It gets its name from its rolling hills and winding streets. There’s a La Mesa and …