THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Reader December 7, 2000)

Last March California voters approved Proposition 21, the anti-juvenile crime initiative, by a gang-busting 62 percent. San Diegans passed the measure by a full two-thirds. To date it’s been a galvanizing nine months for local prosecutors, who are using the law to charge violent teenagers with new trial mandates and prison sentences. The main thrust of Prop 21 requires that juveniles, aged 14 to 17, who commit murder, sexual offenses, and gang-related violence, be tried in adult court. The law also permits teens to be tried as adults for robbery, arson, carjacking, and kidnaping, where the degree of violence is the determining factor. To allow district attorneys to decide the venue of the prosecution means bumping a convicted defendant up from the rehabilitation guarantees of a more lenient juvenile court to the harsher incarceration penalties of adult court. You do the adult crime, you do the adult time.

(San Diego Reader September 14, 2000)

Day-of-Air

Today at the East County Community Health Services clinic in El Cajon, Supervisor Dianne Jacob is holding a “newser,” an announcement directed at the media. Because Scripps East Hospital in El Cajon has recently closed, Jacob wants people to know Grossmont is the nearest hospital for emergencies. But she also wants people to use an emergency room only when it’s necessary. On this issue the public needs educating, a job some feel is not the bailiwick of elected officials. Not to worry. For Jacob and Jacob’s media-relations officer, the solution is a no-brainer: Stage a media event. Facing the cameras will be a line-up of doctors, patients, and emergency medical technicians, standing behind Jacob and supporting her speech at the portable amplified podium with a seal whose motto reads, “The noblest motive is the public good.”

(Southwest Art July 2000)

Many viewers regard William Glen Crooks’ crystalline landscapes of Southern California and neighborhood portraits of San Diego as nostalgic. The artist, however, disagrees. He sees his spare paintings, which feature the region’s glaring and diffused light, not as nostalgic but tragic. Crooks tries to paint what is essential for him about human life: the lingering of “loss and regret.” Whether collectors are aware of these emotions or not, they seem to be as moved by them as the artist is. His spring show at SOMA Gallery in La Jolla, California, featured some twenty-five paintings and nearly sold out.

(San Diego Reader June 15, 2000: Special Father's Day Issue "Daddy." Original title, "Torn Past.")

At breakfast my father asked me what I thought we should do if, in Grandma and Grandpa’s safety deposit box, we found the document identifying his real parents. The year was 1967, and he and I were in Evanston, Illinois, arranging a funeral for his adoptive mother, Elizabeth, who had died suddenly of a stroke. That he was given up at birth he had not learned until his 35th year, when Elizabeth sprang the news on him one Easter. Around the dinner table they were remembering her father, Sam Hill, descendant of a Revolutionary War general, who had often wondered aloud why Elizabeth’s child looked nothing like his parents. Dad had wondered, too.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Dad said to his mother that day, “to discover that I —”

“John, as a matter of fact, you were adopted,” she blurted out, vexing his remaining years with an insoluble conflict, namely, whether he should track down his real parents or let them be. Now that we were burying his mother and packing his 86-year-old dad into a retirement home, this bank-vault visit would be his last chance at a birthright.

(San Diego Reader April 20, 2000)

Royce Riggan Jr., a biological consultant in San Diego for 25 years, was driving back to his office one Sunday afternoon in January. His route, from the west end of Miramar Road to his working place in the heart of Mira Mesa, took him through the Miralani Business Park along Trade Place, where for a mile one long warehouse abuts another. The route also took him past a lone, fenced wetland habitat, alien to such a locale, on Arjons Drive. It was a habitat he knew well. Riggan, who describes himself as "one of the gray-haired guys" in environmental consulting, had helped designate this 8.7-acre parcel above Carroll Canyon in 1977 as a preserve, for it was home, at the time, to three threatened species—the San Diego fairy shrimp (a crustacean), the button celery (also called coyote thistle), and the San Diego mesa mint—each of which have become federal-listed endangered species. (The plants are also state-listed.)

(San Diego Reader March 23, 2000)

Like many newly married couples, Cristen and Jeffry Hays wanted to get pregnant soon after their wedding in 1992, but felt it best to wait. They used birth control until Jeffry finished three years of chiropractic school, passed his preceptorship, and established a practice in San Diego. Then, in their mid-30s, with "it’s now or never" nagging them, they dropped their protective shields and went at it, a pleasure as often as it was a duty.

For a year, nothing happened. Something was wrong, and the Bakersfield natives suspected the problem was inside Cristen. An insulin-dependent diabetic since 12, Cristen wears an insulin pump, monitors her intake by pricking her finger and testing her blood-sugar level ten times a day, and lives at times emotionally weakened by the high maintenance her illness requires.

(Compiled Spring 2000)

(1)

Herb Caen, the great San Francisco Chronicle columnist for close to fifty years, liked to retell an anecdote about our society’s estimation of its teachers. It seems Caen was having lunch one day with his cronies at Enrico’s Coffee House when the great novelist John Steinbeck joined them. Steinbeck had just arrived in the city on his trip west, a journey which would form the basis for one of his most beloved books, Travels With Charley, a road-trip adventure story starring Steinbeck and his poodle companion.

"When Charley and I were driving through the redwood country," the famous author said, "I looked around till I found the largest redwood in the area—an absolute beauty, probably two thousand years old, a considerable tree before Christ was born. And then I let Charley out of the camper so he could go and pee on that tree. Now I ask you, gentlemen, what is left in life for that dog?"

There was a silence which brought nods to the sublime. Nothing could top such a holy moment for Charley or the group. Finally, an advertising executive at the table named Howard Gossage said, "He could always teach."