THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Reader June 2, 2010)

When Ginger Bass filed for divorce from her husband Frank in November 2007, she hoped he would not contest the dissolution. She offered to buy out his interest in their Lakeside home so both could move on. For months, Frank stayed in their home. It ­wasn’t until the following April that he left and roomed with a buddy, who, after three days, asked him to go. Frank moved into a cheap motel, but he said it was “killing” him. Soon he was back, pleading with Ginger not to divorce him. He broke down and cried like a baby. He said ­he’d change. He said he was depressed and ­couldn’t live without her. He told her he wanted to return to their first love, trapshooting, which had brought them into marriage eight years before. And he said he was sorry about the other women. He promised that phase was ­over.

But if there was one thing that stuck in ­Ginger’s craw, it was the women. She was so embarrassed by his cheating — and his roughing her up when she complained about it — that very few friends or family members knew. Into the first several months of 2008, while their divorce proceeded, Frank was still in the Lakeside house, forcing her to have sex with him and believing this would win her back. As often as he got his way, Ginger got hers, which was to fight him off and flee the ­house.

(San Diego Reader March 31, 2010)

For more than a decade now, we’ve been hearing that kids are no longer interested in learning music. The dire news has been propelled by a host of competing myths. Parents, who run the TV every night, seldom play music in the home or support their children with private lessons to learn an instrument. Kids, for their part, are enchanted by the music on their I-pods, CD players, and I-phones. They download and share tunes as habitually as they drain Big Gulps from 7 Eleven. Abuzz with their devices, they experience music like it’s the weather—from outside, seldom inside.

(San Diego Reader December 30, 2009)

At the Bayside Community Center in Linda Vista, things are humming along as they have since the center was founded in 1932 as a settlement house for families of Italian and Portuguese fishermen. Having moved up the hill from Little Italy, Bayside still programs activities for kids, teens, seniors, people with disabilities, and new immigrants. Bayside’s service community is San Diego’s most diverse: Hmong, Hispanics, Somalis, African-Americans, Mixtec Indians, and whites populate the hill, many living in World War II–era housing projects. The center’s main role is helping recent arrivals who are socially and geographically marginalized.

(San Diego Reader November 4, 2009)

If ever there were a San Diego Charger whose postcareer success has matched his years spent on the field, it’s the great Ron Mix. Mix’s glory years came in the 1960s, when the Chargers were in the American Football League. Back in the day, Mix was listed at 6’ 4” and 250 pounds, known as a weight lifter long before football players commonly pumped iron, and nicknamed the “Intellectual Assassin.” On the field, he achieved something that’s never been equaled: in ten seasons, he had two holding calls against him. Off the field, he blazed a trail by becoming one of the few players to earn a law degree—he graduated from the University of San Diego law school in 1969—and one of the very few who got the degree during his career, not after he hung up his cleats.

(San Diego Reader September 2, 2009)

(San Diego Reader June 24, 2009)

Many of us watched the Chargers’ season-ending run this past winter and, amid the cheers and groans, saw a 30-second TV ad starring LaDainian Tomlinson. Well-dressed and calm, he’s holding a postgame news conference.

A reporter asks, “L.T., what got you the win today?”

“There’s three things you got to have to be successful,” L.T. says. “There’s planning, teamwork, and constant communication.”

Cut to designers huddling over architectural plans.

(San Diego Reader February 18, 2009)

In October 2007, Michael Varga, a police officer assigned to the Chula Vista Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit, began interviewing women about the abortions they had received at a local clinic, Clinica Medica para la Mujer de Hoy. The storefront clinic, with its dull turquoise awning, was located on Broadway, next door to Plaza’s Mexican Food. Its windows were blacked out and the image of a stylish woman was drawn onto one pane. For years, the clinic had targeted Spanish-speaking women with low-cost terminations of their pregnancies. Varga was investigating Bertha Pinedo Bugarin, a layperson who was purportedly the owner/manager of the Chula Vista clinic as well as five other medical offices in Los Angeles and Orange counties, each specializing in cash-only abortions. Months earlier, the Health Authority Law Enforcement Task Force in Los Angeles had begun its inquiry into Bugarin’s operation. It had obtained a search warrant, and among the patient records it seized were 56 from clients who had “received medical services, generally abortions,” at the Chula Vista clinic, according to a declaration Varga made to the San Diego Superior Court. The task force had turned these records over to Varga.