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The Old Man and the City

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Editor’s Note: Bob wrote this article on October 30 and intended to finish it while in Sant Joan, Mallorca, where he unexpectedly died. Nat Krieger, a dear friend of Bob and SDFP contributor himself, was able to find the article on Bob’s computer and sent it to us, at Deb Dorn’s request. We are publishing it posthumously.

By Bob Dorn

The old man used to ride his wobbly old bike every day up to the market on Park Boulevard where he preferred to shop. On his way north he would dismount as he approached the Georgia Street overpass of University Avenue because the climb was steep enough to make him uncomfortable. In fact, he not very stable on the machine under any conditions, and it looked nearly as old as him and seemed to weigh half as much as he did. On his way back the filled-up basket of the bike rattled loudly, which alerted the few people along the way getting out of or into their cars.

On some days the people recognized him and waved, some pointing their thumbs upward toward the sky because they knew he would pretend to think they meant something was up there and he would look up at the morning clouds as if he were following their directions. They always laughed at that. Others would aim their garden hoses at him so they could share a different laugh.   [Read more…]

The Ups and The Downs | My Reporter’s Life, Part Three

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By the late 1970s, I was brought back into the newsroom to do general assignment reporting, a kind of sideways move. I could handle breaking stuff, and innocent features (like my seven-day case of hiccups) but the editors might have figured I offered too much trouble on the beats — police, higher education and investigations.

Once again on the day shift, I made it to journalism’s summa cum laude, or maybe just the magna version.

On September 25, 1978, a fully-loaded PSA liner crashed into a private Cessna in its approach path to Lindbergh Field, leaving 144 dead, most of them the airliner’s passengers. The first call sent all of us to the east windows of the Copley Building, where we could see the white smoke towering over North Park.

I forced myself to ask to go to the scene but the city editor told me to stay and take the reports from the staff sent to the scene, the two of them so horrified I recommended they do what I’d done at less bloody scenes: locate the fireman in a yellow hazard suit or a plainclothes suit and walk toward either or both, looking neither left nor right. They’d have the answers.   [Read more…]

Some Big Developments | My Reporter’s Life, Part Two

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I didn’t know that the police beat was one of the tests normally applied to newcomers until the San Diego Evening Tribune editors released me from it after six months and, to my surprise, had me cover the County Board of Supervisors.

Developers had been pumping out two-story stuccoes amidst the chapparaled and original Spanish land grants to the east and the north of the city. The collapse of C. Arnholt Smith’s US National Bank was at this time the largest bank failure in US history, so I was a bit surprised to be assigned to cover the Board of Supervisors; after having been in town only 12 months or so I figured I didn’t know f-all about the county.

The Union had a former Associated Press guy covering the Supervisors, a veteran not easily excited or cowed by the job, and he helped me out, as if I were his kid brother, maybe 15 years younger.

Don’t worry, he’d tell me, nothing really happens here. You’ll be fine. Something like that.   [Read more…]

Pain and Suffering at the SDPD | My Reporter’s Life, Part One

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I worked for the San Diego Evening Tribune for approximately eight years and 11 months.  I was just 13 months short of being vested in the retirement program when I quit. That’s okay.  

If I’d stayed on at the paper I might have gone fully crazy.  

I was 28 when the Trib hired me out of a small-town daily in New Jersey’s rural northwest. I think somewhere I still have a picture of myself at the Sussex County Fair — taken by the staff photographer who’d accompanied me — as I tried to milk a Holstein. Standard stuff for small-town dailies back then.

I asked the wise guy Italian Assistant Managing Editor named Larry Lusitana why he’d hired me, and he said: “We’ve had good luck with people from New Jersey.”  It was only after I’d left the paper that I found out Lusitana was from that state.   [Read more…]

Tales of the Deep State: No, You May Not

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Prologue: Somewhere in Guam, in a buried three-story titanium bunker, lies an electronic bunker, its first level a sprawling Virginia-style country interior, half-timbered and fitted out with beds and entertainment centers that accommodate some 45 Deep State technos.  

The next level, below, is the workstation with decks of receivers and senders, a 30-by-40 square foot, two-way screen connected to the White House by closed and backed up circuits. The command center is alongside a full commercial kitchen where sworn personnel can cook anything — from truffles and chocolate bits to roasted peacock — providing them with the comforts that compensate for the stress they breathe in like air. 

The third level is a subway station connected to a Marine helo pad 6 miles away used only by the Commander-in-Chief, who is a regular visitor. 

Deep State 1: “They’re calling us the deep state in the news now? You can even hear it on the floor of the House. Redbone (R-Georgia) just used the term today, on a junket to Kazakhstan. Him? That banana turned blotchy and sticky years ago; we gotta send some rockers and rollers to educate him.”   [Read more…]

Why Doesn’t POTUS Own A Dog?

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You’d think Trump would have one of the very best, most excellent dogs in the world, maybe one of those Afghans with hair like his own. Because dogs, unlike FBI directors, are known to be among the most loyal and subservient of animals.

Or … that he’d be attracted to pitbulls because everyone is afraid of them.

It remains a mystery, though, because POTUS doesn’t allow cameras in his living quarters, where all the cosmetic stuff is, along with the jacuzzi and his collection of golf balls from The Rich and Famous. Not even Breitbart News and FOX have stories on the subject of a missing White House dog.

So, we can’t even know why he doesn’t have a dog.   [Read more…]

The Old Fascist

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Not unlike the maddened men of German infamy
Sending millions to death chambers of Zyclon B
Our own Mad King reaches out with fattened arms
And declares all the desperate invading swarms.
Here at our sun-washed and hurricaned shores
Stands Lady Liberty with mighty torch unflamed
Mother of Exiles until the Mad King came,
To extinguish the lightning of her eternal flame.   [Read more…]

Manly Fear

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I have a pair of tan pants, made by … Dickies, an intriguingly long lasting brand name, perhaps because on one level it is a tad juvenile, but on another it’s very manly.

I’m no philologist but I think that’s one of the great attraction of words, their instability and ambivalence. Think about it: manly dickies? But of course.

It’s true these pants from Dickies are manly. They even have a slit pocket at the right thigh where a guy could put his money bag so that he’d notice if someone groped for it. Another manly thing is that they’ve lasted a very long time; I purchased them more than five years ago and they look today like they did when I first bought them down in National City.

Well, they’re still clean enough, except for a few pizza stains down around that lower thigh pocket. I can live with those stains because they have suffered so many washings that they long ago lost the brilliance of that blood-red tomato paste and have evolved into slightly darkened areas more the color of dirt, I’d say.

What causes me to bring all this up is, day after day the online version of The New York Times has displayed an ad urging me to buy (along with some other news sites) something called Pick Pocket-Proof Pants.   [Read more…]

The Third Conning | National Poetry Month

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Turning and turning over malls and freeways
The drones outrace their wireless signals;
Houses fall apart; grocery carts are filled with gear;
Mere starvation is loosed on half the world,
While others eat designer foods and
Protest they’re entitled to deny the real.   [Read more…]

Let’s Bring Back Dueling

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I saw and read a note to The New York Times the other day that set me to thinking of kinda complicated politics.

Well, that is what that newspaper likes to engage in, and so probably do they all. They’ll say, “If this, then that, and, pretty soon… The Apocalypse. On the other hand…,” they’ll say. So we end up back in the muddled middle, our fondest hopes for reason and enlightenment lost in the give and take back.

If you want to know what the news business stands for, play The National Anthem, or ask who’s interested in an interview with Donald Trump. Keep it simple.

Truth? Truth in the industry has become a now-and-then preoccupation, rising and falling as do other preoccupations, like getting people to read a story, or to consider buying all-electric, self-driving 2-ton cars that happen to be advertised as part of sports coverage.

Still, no one is as cynical as today’s out and out conservative, who believes in family values and then supports separating immigrants from their children. Or he’ll (usually it’s a he) advocate hard work after he’s invested in robot technology that eliminates jobs for humans, or he’ll recommend home schooling and send his own kids to prep schools and Yale.   [Read more…]

Remember. Again.

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I woke up to The New York Times headline on Tuesday, October 3: No Easy Answers After Las Vegas.

Yes, there are. 

Let’s not sell automatic rifles to anyone who goes to a gun show or a gun shop. F**k ’em. Let them manufacture their own, like the moonshiners during Prohibition did. Then they can strut and have movies and serials that can make them feel like they won the Civil War.

Maybe they’d even be arrested for possession of killing machinery.   [Read more…]

Running on Thoughts and Gasoline

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Heading west in my car on University Ave.
tuned in to 88.3
in the heart of North Park, just past the emptied dollar Arab store
(a “for lease” sign posted, probably another craft brewery in the making)
and approaching that no-name street,
I see an average American four-door has its wheel aggressively cranked
to enter my lane.

Driven by a greybeard waving two American Flags
— a big one on a post welded to the front right, and a small one on the left rear.
A TRUMP decal in white letters on a red background.
No blue in it.
Is that purposeful?
Does it mean blue states don’t count?   [Read more…]

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