OB Rag

By Debbie L. Sklar / Special to the OB Rag

Before Jensen’s Finest Foods became a familiar grocery stop in Point Loma, the neighborhood market at Catalina Boulevard and Talbot Street was known as Food Basket.

A grocery store at 955 Catalina Blvd. has been part of the Peninsula’s commercial landscape since the 1950s, and its history reflects both the growth of suburban San Diego and the importance of neighborhood markets.

Editor Frank Gormlie recalled:

For years during the 50s and 60s, my family lived right across Catalina from the large Food Basket and the store dominated the little mall it sat in. It wasn’t our main shopping outlet because my mom had access to the Navy Exchange on 30th Street, but we used the cavernous Food Basket for everything else. I was usually sent on an errand on my own to buy something every week — and would use it as an excuse to go its bakery for a Bear Claw. In the 60s, it was the first store where I ever used a shopping cart and the first store where I tried riding a shopping cart down the aisle. (I got pretty good at it too!)

A 2016 account in the OB Rag reported that the grocery building was constructed in 1950. A 2010 city of San Diego planning report, however, dates the existing shopping center to 1953. The property’s leasing agent, Steve Avoyer, told the Peninsula Beacon in January 2016 that the location had been a grocery market since 1952. The dates are not necessarily contradictory: the building, shopping center, and beginning of grocery operations may reflect different milestones.

From SOHO November/December Newsletter 2026

We’re concluding SOHO’s 2026 Penning the Past series with historian and author Chris Wray, whose books have been perennial bestsellers in our museum shops, particularly at the Warner–Carrillo Ranch House.

Long before Interstate 8 existed, U.S. Highway 80 was the lifeline connecting San Diego with the mountains, desert, and the wider Southwest.

Join us for this final presentation of the year as Wray leads us on a journey along this legendary transcontinental highway, from downtown San Diego through the county’s backcountry and into the Imperial Valley. Drawing on historic photographs, maps, and extensive on-the-ground research, Wray will trace Highway 80’s diverse and changing routes and reveal how the road shaped the communities and landscapes along the way.

From early city streets and winding mountain grades to forgotten towns, scenic passes, and once-familiar roadside landmarks, Wray’s program explores a world of travel that largely disappeared with the arrival of the modern freeway system.

Editordude: Local shipbuilders are crafting together a replica of The Pilgrim, the ship author Richard Henry Dana made famous in his “Two Years Before the Mast.” Of course, his name is famous around the Peninsula as a local junior high school was named after him and every student encouraged to read the book. Dana also fought for the rights of seamen and to improve their conditions on board those ships in the early 19th century.

By Dan Plante / Fox5SanDiego / Nov. 7, 2026

With a mission to recreate an iconic slice of American history, master shipbuilders here in San Diego have reached an important milestone in their effort to bring back a tall ship from 1825 known as “The Pilgrim.” In the ship building business, they call this a ‘Rib Party.’

“Today, this is a ‘rib party’, which is the finishing of the frames that have gone into the boat. It really should be called a frame party. But in this case, it’s called a ‘rib party’ because it looks like a beached whale.  And they’ve got a lot of ribs,” says Brian Thomas, lead spokesperson and shipwright for The Pilgrim III project.

Using old-world craftsmanship and exotic wood from around the world, each and every piece of the Pilgrim III has been hand-carved, the way it used to be, with one big difference.

“We’re doing things the old school way, yes. However, we are using power tools, which they did not have.  But overall, we’re doing the same operations as they did in 1825,” says Thomas.

By Claire Trageser / Axios San Diego / Nov. 10, 2026

Organizers behind the push to recall Mayor Todd Gloria told Axios they’re fed up with trash fees, parking fees and other city issues.

Why it matters: Gloria now has to deal with a recall effort that will further question his leadership as he rounds the final two years of his term and thinks about what he might run for next.

Gloria won reelection in 2024 with 55% of the vote, but polling this year shows voters have increasingly soured on the city’s direction, and issues like parking, trash fees and closed bathrooms haven’t helped.
He didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.

The intrigue: The tipping point in the recall decision was Gloria’s support of an outsider over incumbent District 4 City Councilmember Henry Foster in last week’s election, recall organizer Kathleen Harmon told Axios. [Ed.: That “outsider” was Martha Abraham who won the election; she was endorsed by the OB Rag.]

Foster challenged the mayor, saying he should resign over a trash fees billing mistake. “He saw fit to go get an outsider to stand up against our councilman who has done an outstanding job of bringing resources into our community,” Harmon said.

The Next Left —
The movement has often seen its ideas flourish as its organizations withered. Will today’s resurgence follow the same course?

Jill Lepore / The New Yorker- Reader Supported News / Nov. 9, 2026

It was American socialism’s best year ever. In 1912, the Socialist Party of America tallied a hundred and twenty thousand members, and newsstands groaned under the weight of some three hundred socialist papers and magazines, including the Kansas-based Appeal to Reason, which had three-quarters of a million subscribers and was committed to the belief that “socialism is not just a theory—it is a destiny.”

Socialists were winning elections, carried to victory by voters furious at trusts and corporations and millionaires and oligarchs, whose monopoly on political power rested on a two-party system indifferent to labor’s demands and on a breathtakingly conservative Supreme Court. (In 1895, the Court declared a federal income tax to be unconstitutional; in 1905, it said the same of a law limiting the number of hours in a workday.) Year by year, socialists had gained strength. In 1910, the Milwaukee newspaperman Victor Berger, who had founded the Socialist Party with the Indiana railroad-union leader Eugene V. Debs, in 1901, became the first socialist elected to Congress: he vowed to abolish the Senate. In 1911, a socialist mayor was elected in Schenectady, New York. “We know that we cannot abolish the capitalist system in Schenectady,” he said at his inauguration. But “we can and will demonstrate to all the spirit of socialism and the application of socialist principles insofar as possible with the handicap of laws framed to establish and sustain capitalism.” (He pledged to lower trolley fares.)

In 1912, Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate for President and called for an end to “wage slavery.” Across a great striving land of fields of wheat and corn, and factories of steel and automobiles, and mines of coal and copper and iron, more than a thousand socialists held office, including fifty-six mayors (of cities as different as Berkeley, California, and Flint, Michigan), a hundred and sixty city councilmen, and a hundred and forty-five aldermen.

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Ballot measure’s apparent victory shows that voters are willing to reimagine public transportation in a post-pandemic world.

By Mariana Duran / Mother Jones / Nov. 4, 2026

In a huge win for public transit, voters in the San Francisco Bay Area appear to have approved a measure that will slightly increase the sales tax to fund transportation in the region over the next 14 years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The measure will allow transit agencies, including BART, to preserve their service and avoid deep cuts to stations and transit lines amid the end of emergency pandemic funds.

Unlike other ballot initiatives in the state, the Regional Transit Measure didn’t face a well-funded campaign advocating against it. But it presented voters with a big ask: to rethink their relationship to public transit dramatically, and shift to a system where all residents—not just riders—pay to keep their region connected.

The measure reflects a growing reality for many metropolitan public transit systems post-Covid, which have had to reimagine their funding models as ridership patterns have shifted and people’s lives have become more digital. It is especially salient in the Bay Area, where BART, the primary transit system connecting the region, had warned it could cease to exist if it continued to struggle financially.

In response, transit advocates and scholars say we need to figure out how to fund a system where high quality transit is accessible to everyone, even when it might not be profitable.

Veteran’s Day 2026 was the 100th anniversary of the old Highway 80 and a day to remember a road that once served as America’s principal southern transcontinental route.

On November 11, 1926, a new highway opened officially on a coast-to-coast route stretching from Savannah, Georgia, to San Diego, California. For decades, U.S. Highway 80 carried tourists, soldiers, salesmen, and families through north Louisiana, transforming businesses and communities along its path.

Before numbered highways, long-distance motorists followed named routes promoted by private associations. Promoters advertised the route as an all-weather highway, avoiding the snow and ice that could make northern routes difficult during winter. The promise was ambitious. Many sections remained unpaved, and rain could turn some roads into muddy obstacles.

The movement for better roads gained momentum as automobile ownership increased. In 1926, the American Association of State Highway Officials approved a national numbering system, replacing the confusing assortment of named trails with numbered routes marked by standardized highway shields.

U.S. 80 became one of the original highways in that system. Its first official listing measured 2,726 miles across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

For travelers, Highway 80 was more than a way to reach another state. It was often the main street of the towns along its path.

Restaurants and lodging establishments depended on the highway traffic. A family traveling from Georgia to California might spend money in one of the many small towns along the way without knowing anything about the town before arriving.

By Claire Trageser / Axios San Diego 

The share of San Diegans who think the city is on the wrong track has spiked since last year, according to a new poll.

The big picture: The poll, paid for by the city’s white collar union and obtained by Axios, puts some hard data behind just how unhappy people are with the city.

Zoom in: The San Diego Municipal Employees Association poll found 69% of respondents said the city is on the wrong track, up from 49% last September.

Just 19% said the city was going in the right direction, the lowest number since the union started polling on that question in 2020.

The fine print: They polled 410 people in a statistically balanced sample group, Ryan Clumpner, a political consultant who conducted the poll through his company Public Dynamics, told Axios.

The margin of error was 4.3%, he said.

by Katherine Doyle / Washington Post / Nov. 11, 2026

The White House, anticipating a surge of congressional oversight and legislative probes, has started staffing up its counsel’s office — with 15 additional hires so far — as it prepares to do legal battle.

Investigations are expected to ramp up aggressively in January.

“The last time around, Dems were very deliberate about pacing subpoenas,” said Brandon Rios, who was counsel to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. “This time, I’d be shocked if we don’t see them in January.”

“The investigations start now,” said Rios, who now co-leads the congressional investigations group at the law firm DLA Piper.

The aggressive pushback has already begun: On Wednesday, the White House released a letter from White House counsel Will Scharf accusing Democrats of making “abusive and capricious threats” that aim to “interfere with the lawful functioning of government.”

The letter to Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California), who is expected to chair the House Oversight Committee in the new Congress, made clear that the administration would resist congressional subpoenas on the grounds that they lack a “legitimate legislative purpose.” It went further to suggest that the administration might try to investigate the investigators, saying that “threats to executive branch officials” would go beyond Congress’s legitimate oversight role and “may cross the line into blatant criminality.”

by Noah Perkins / Times of San Diego / Nov. 6, 2026,

Carlotta Kloppenburg-Pruitt has a lot of history on The Point.

Point Loma Nazarene’s new women’s basketball head coach is following a path that started with Grandpa Bob Kloppenburg. He coached men’s basketball at California Western, once located on the Point Loma campus, for nearly 20 years, starting in 1958, and developed the SOS pressure defense there.

Years later, Kloppenburg-Pruitt played two seasons at Point Loma during its transition to NCAA Division II under Bill Westphal, whose brother, Paul, coached alongside Bob in the NBA with the Seattle SuperSonics.

“There was definitely some familiarity with our families,” Kloppenburg-Pruitt remembered. “Point Loma was my dream school out of high school. I just wasn’t good enough yet. I went to Ventura College for two years, got to play, learned a lot and got better. When it came time to go to the next level, Point Loma was the first one I reached out to. My visit was kind of a visit, but it was also kind of a tryout, and I probably had the best day of my life.”

From Save Our Heritage Organisation

We made our voices heard here in California. Now we need to make Congress listen.

Last week, SOHO members and supporters helped defeat Proposition 45, a measure that threatened California’s landmark environmental protections. Together, voters rejected it. Thank you! That’s what happens when people speak up, stand together, and refuse to accept the erosion of protections that safeguard our communities.

Now we face another extremely consequential fight and we urgently need your help again. It will only take a minute!

On Monday, November 9, the U.S. Senate voted 75–23 to advance S. 5653, the so-called Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA).

Despite the misleading title, this legislation contains provisions that would severely undermine Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act—the very law that gives Tribal Nations, local communities, and preservation advocates a meaningful voice when federally funded or permitted projects threaten historic and cultural resources.

This is not only an attack on preservation and conservation. It is an attack on the public’s right to have a say in what happens to our shared heritage. Section 106 is built on a fundamental principle: public input is essential to federal decision-making. BAAJA would weaken that requirement, making public participation discretionary rather than mandatory.