Category: History

Originally posted May 9, 2009

It’s readily apparent that at least in one little corner of Ocean Beach, the recession hasn’t really hit – the corner of Newport Ave and Bacon Street, you see the lines end of people waiting to get into Hodad’s – OB’s famous hamburger joint.

It’s 12:30 lunch time, and the crowd waits patiently to sit down and chomp into the delicious drippy, beef and bun wonder named by CNN as one of the top five burgers in the nation. …

Over forty people were in Collier Park Sunday, joining the potluck picnic commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Collier Park Riot of 1971. We have written about this, go here for our earlier post.

With Dave Rice’s mastery of the grill, with Patty’s awesome potato salad, Frank’s popular chicken, Doug’s savory deviled eggs, and everybody’s elses food and drink, the picnic god shined the sun on the gathering that lasted happily into the late afternoon.

What an extraordinary weekend! It ended Sunday with a picnic in Collier Park where some of us personally remembered and…

Monday, March 28th, is the 40th anniversary of the Collier Park Riot. On Sunday, March 27th, the OB Rag is having a commemorative picnic at the park, located in northeast Ocean Beach at the intersection of Greene Street and Soto Street, a block north of Voltaire. It will begin at noon – and weather permitting – and will be a celebration of OB, its history, Collier Park itself, and anything else that seems appropriate.

“My girls, my pretty ones, going down through the air. They hit the sidewalk spread out and still.”
~Triangle Shirtwaist Company Assistant cashier Joseph Flecher

At quitting time on a Saturday one hundred years ago, a fire began on the eighth floor and raged through the ninth and tenth floor of the Asch building in New York City where 500 workers, mostly immigrant teenage girls were trapped in their Triangle Shirtwaist Company workrooms. One of the ninth floor exit doors had been locked, the fire escape collapsed, and the elevator, filled beyond capacity with fleeing workers, stopped working. The tragedy was compounded because the Fire Department ladders only reached to the sixth floor, and their safety nets deployed to catch the falling bodies broke under the weight. Yet the fire was quickly brought under control and within a half hour it was all over.

by Jeoffry Gordon, MD, MPH

Our country is at the edge of a precarious cliff that presents the biggest danger to the survival of our democracy than anything since the Civil War…….Or like Wiley Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons – we may have run off the precipice already – but it just has not yet sunk in. The problem is one of domestic social justice and economics.

By E.A. Barrera / Originally Published on March 17, 2011

“We may now imbibe freely of the contents of bottles and forthright books”

Morris L. Ernst, Co-Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. December 11, 1933.

The same week this country ended Prohibition, America opened the doors to let people legally read James Joyce’s Ulysses. With St. Patrick’s Day once more at hand, the greatest of 20th Century novels and the author whose genius gave us at look into our own daily souls, deserves a brief remembrance.

Ulysses is the story of a working man named Leopold Bloom during a single day of his life. Making his way through the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904, Bloom’s day is an adaptation of the story of Odysseus trying to get home, from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey.

This originally appeared in the March 8 issue of City Times

“The Irish are the blacks of Europe,” says the band manager in “The Commitments,” the 1991 movie about his quest to put together a soul act in pale, white Dublin. “Say it loud — I’m black and I’m proud.”

Noel Ignatiev, a Massachusetts College of Art history professor and controversial scholar of American race relations, uses that classic line to kick off “How the Irish Became White.” The 1995 book offers an in-depth analysis of America’s assimilation of the millions of Irish who emigrated in the 1800s.

When Tanja Winter – the matriarch of  San Diego’s progressive community – was 12 years old, she watched as German Nazis…

A little while ago I read a book by longtime Tucson Citizen sportswriter, Steve Rivera: The University of Arizona Basketball Vault, the History of the Wildcats.

What a nice trip down memory lane the book was for me as I’ve followed Wildcat basketball since the 40’s. And, never in my wildest dreams, did I ever think the program would evolve to what it is today although the school had a couple of pretty good teams in my childhood.

Sitting with thoughts dancing in my mind about all the hope that I had recently seen rise in Cairo, I looked online for an image to match how I felt inside and a picture of a rich yellow sun rising or setting in a reddish orange sky caught the attention of my eyes and I literally found myself mesmerized by its beauty.

7:55 pm PST: We will be signing off now as Ed Shultz – who deserves a lot of props for…