Month: February 2015

Highlights of O.B.’s Historic Beach Cottages

OBceans Upset with Maroutis’ Arrest

Local Artist David Linton Passes

Two People Rescued by Lifeguards at Sunset Cliffs.

Famosa Slough and Mission Bay Wetlands Walk

Bossman Died of Natural Causes and Hodad’s Opened in 1973 – Not 1969

U-T San Diego Gives Hidden Props to OB Rag and Missed ‘the Roger Hedgecock Scandal’

Local Surf-Rock Legend Recorded on OB Pier

AND MORE – Come inside …

Try going to the Zion Market in Clairemont Mesa some day

By Judi Curry

As much as I hate to admit it, I have a birthday coming up at the end of the week. As a general rule I would just as soon forget the day and move right on to the next one.

Perhaps many of you know that I am a “host mother” to foreign language students in the US to hone their English skills. My latest student is the 413^th student I have housed since 1992, when my husband and I began this adventure. I have had students from all over the world—each one unique in their own way—and with the exception of only three students that I asked to have removed from my home, it has been a wonderful experience.

By Bill Adams / UrbDezine

My family will attest, I’m a San Diego Chargers football fan. During football season, not only is the TV tuned to Chargers games, but so are multiple strategically located radios around the yard, lest I miss any action while attending to a honey-do task or breaking up an argument between my children. Then there are the pre and post game shows, and wasted hours reading about the draft, trades, and other team side shows. Lest I forget to mention, I’m also a San Diego County resident – just outside the city’s boundaries.

However, the Chargers are one of several NFL teams, along with the St. Louis Rams and the Oakland Raiders, considered likely to move to another city unless they receive a new football stadium. The likely recipient city: Los Angeles.

The Platform Was a Guide to Making Ocean Beach a Citizens’ Paradise

Editor: The following is the 1976 campaign platform for the Ocean Beach Community Planning Group, the forerunner to today’s OB Planning Board. The OB CGP ran a slate of candidates for the May 4, 1976 election and won 8 of the 14 seats on OB’s very first Planning Board.

COMMUNITY PLANNING GROUP

CAMPAIGN PLATFORM

• Preamble

Recognizing that all communities have a right to self-determination, we believe that the Community Planning Board is a step toward community self-government.

With this in mind, we believe the Community Planning Board, once elected will have and exercise real decision-making power over the planning decisions that affect Ocean Beach. Planningis more than density limits, traffic designs or height limitations ….

by Ernie McCray

When I look back at my own little chapter of Black History, I feel grateful that I found a path that enabled me to survive a society that sought to deny me a life of dignity.

I, unknowingly, set out on this path on my first day of school, when my knuckles were, seemingly, knocked to kingdom come because I had dozed off, as if I had a choice in a room sizzling at 100 and some degrees with a fan (itself struggling to stay awake) blowing across a pail of water as though that could lower the temperature in that room to any degree. I swear I heard that fan wheeze. Talking, Tucson, Arizona, August or September of 1943.

I remember thinking, back then, as I looked at my hands, surprised to see my knuckles still there, “What the hell kind of welcome was that?” And I knew, as much as a five-year old can know such things, that someday I would be a teacher.

I would observe goings on in every school I ever attended, thinking of what I might have done differently if I had been the teacher. I’d imagine how I would have made lessons come alive, or more relevant to students’ lives.

By Steven Newcomb

Early this year, 2015, the Maritime Museum of San Diego is scheduled to launch a replica of the colonizing Spanish ship called “San Salvador” (“Holy Savior”). That was the ship which Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, in 1542, sailed into the Kumeyaay bay of the Kumeyaay Nation’s territory. As a result of that voyage, the society of the United States now typically calls that bay, and the city adjacent to it, by the Catholic name, “San Diego” (“Saint Diego”).

Cabrillo sailed up the Baja peninsula under a royal commission that the Spanish crown had granted to a vicious and deadly psychopath, a conquistador named Pedro Alvarado. The royal commission authorized Alvarado “to discover and conquer” places he was able to reach by sailing northward along the Baja peninsula. When Alvarado was killed in Guatemala, the Spanish viceroy charged Cabrillo with sailing north on the basis of that royal commission.

It is now clear, at least from a technical perspective, that we could eliminate fossil fuels over a period of 20 to 40 years. That’s if we went full steam ahead without being blocked by fossil fuel corporations, the politicians beholden to them and various other vested interests who stand to profit from the status quo.

In 2009 Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and Mark Delucchi, a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, came up with a detailed, groundbreaking road map for just how this could be accomplished.

In international news, the recent liberation of the Syrian city of Kobani from the control of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters by Syrian Kurd rebels was a little reported story which popped up briefly for its 15 minutes on the mainstream media roulette wheel of fame. Then it disappeared. But the under-reported little story – a story with a huge irony – deserves retelling.

The story – which can be pieced together from a number of media reports – involves the identity of the major fighting force that kicked ISIS out of Kobani, a city of 200,000 mainly ethnic Kurds in north Syria, a stone’s throw from the Turkish border.

It turns out it was a group of Syrian Kurd leftists who kicked ISIS’ ass, if you forgive the vernacular, after 4 months of intense house-to-house fighting, at times room-to-room, and pushed them out of the city entirely. It was the People’s Protection Units, a local leftist organization, and its affiliate, the Women’s Protection Units, that have collective command structures and believe in the equality of women, and – in fact – have numerous women commanders in the fighting units. (These are new wave Sixties leftists, not from the old school like China, Russia, North Korea.)

OB CDC Votes to End Its Involvement With OB Entryway Project

by Lois Lane

The OB Community Development Corporation (CDC) meets on the second Thursday of the month at 7:00 in the OB Rec Center, and February 12 was no different.

The Future Veterans’ Plaza

The primary focus of this meeting was the Veteran’s Plaza. This project was originally funded by the City of San Diego with $76,000 in 2014, but this money was de-allocated and the entire project must be funded with donations. No funds were included in the 2015 city budget.

After owning it for 28 years, the unidentified owner of the large apartment complex in the heart of Ocean Beach has decided to put the 22-unit complex up for sale. The apartments are prominently located at the corner of Bacon Street and Cape May Avenue, at 2051-59 Bacon Street. It’s on the market for a mere $4,199,000.

It’s an “old-school” 2-story type of apartment complex, as it’s been around for decades, and was always known as one of the inexpensive rental apartment buildings in that neck of the woods in OB.

By Kim McGinley

Friday, February 6th at 11:30 p.m. San Diego Activists, including representatives from The Ocean Beach Green Center, began gathering at the Old Town trolley station to hop on board a charter bus heading to California Governor Brown’s neighborhood in Oakland.

The goal was to encourage the Governor to be a “climate leader” …

...the insistence on what one might call “San Diego exceptionalism,” the notion that our city is somehow free of the same troubled history as the rest of the country, is at the heart of our city’s failure to truly serve the needs of all San Diegans.

By Jim Miller

Last week, the San Diego Free Press – [the online media partner of the OB Rag] posted a story about a new report released by the Equal Justice Institute (EJI) that notes how:

“Capital punishment and ongoing racial injustice in the United States are ‘direct descendants’ of lynching, charges a new study, which found that the pre-World War II practice of ‘racial terrorism’ has had a much more profound impact on race relations in America than previously acknowledged.”

This hidden history of racial terrorism in America is far more influential than many of us would prefer to acknowledge.