1985 Was a Year of Ups and Downs for San Diego County

The last North County coastal crop duster died. One of the first backcountry traveling saleswomen was buried in Oceanside. The only one-room schoolhouse in the county prepared to expand after 110 years.

There was talk of a water theme park facing Mission San Luis Rey, and of building a community center over the ruins of California’s first mission, San Diego de Alcala. Horton Plaza edged the homeless out of a longtime downtown hangout. They moved east. A new crowd moved in.

Shootings and arrests escalated along the Mexican border. Fire roared up through the canyons and devoured homes in Normal Heights. Police shootings continued to climb. Deaths on San Diego roads were up.

Perceptibly and imperceptibly, life in San Diego changed this year, the city’s population swelling toward the 1 million mark set for February, 1986. The past slid out of sight, the future loomed into view. Over and over, San Diego shed its skin.

Swarms of balloons kept drifting into the sky--50,000 for Horton Plaza, 50,001 for the state lottery, 5,000 for UC San Diego’s first quarter of a century. America’s Finest City, beamed officials. World Class City. Giant Step into the 21st Century.

Through it all, the mayor surfaced and resurfaced, like a marathon swimmer crossing the English Channel: trial, hung jury, new trial, conviction, vow to resign, request for a mistrial, retraction of vow, no mistrial, resignation, sentence.

Finally, reincarnation: Roger Hedgecock, radio talk-show host.

Everywhere, it seemed, there was growth.

Buoyed by falling interest rates and encouraging demographics, developers were building like mad. Forty thousand building permits were expected to be issued in the county by Dec. 31--a record, and a sign of economic vim.

Condominiums carpeted the Golden Triangle. Horton Plaza flung open its pastel gates to 70,000 first-day shoppers. Across Broadway, the U.S. Grant Hotel reopened after a four-year face lift. This time, men in white gloves were manning the doors.

Even the city limits bulged, for the first time since the 1960s. The city annexed 3,956 acres on Otay Mesa. Officials predicted 70,000 jobs for the area in the next 20 years. A new Otay Mesa border crossing opened.

There were, of course, reservations about all this growth, which found expression in the collective balk that was Proposition A. The managed growth initiative passed Nov. 5 by nearly 17,000 votes, demanding that 52,000 acres of the city be left alone until 1995. Developers had spent $600,000 to defeat it.

There were other efforts to manage the side-effects of progress--new laws limiting satellite dishes so they wouldn’t block the neighbors’ view and non-essential lighting so astronomers could still see the heavens. The San Diego City Council opted to protect the San Pasqual agricultural preserve from a proposed landing strip for ultralight aircraft.

The pace of life seemed to speed up. Even along the border in No Man’s Land, things grew more prickly. The U.S. Border Patrol reported narrowly missing its 1983 record number of arrests in the San Diego district. There were kidnapings, shootings, economic blackmail.

In February, U.S. Customs officials backed up border traffic for miles, meticulously checking every car, to pressure Mexican officials to solve the kidnaping of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was eventually found murdered. The wait to cross stretched as long as 7 1/2 hours; tourist traffic plummeted. Eventually Mexican officials brought charges against some drug traffickers.

In March, the United States closed nine border crossings on a tip that Mexican drug smugglers planned to kidnap an official. In April, a Border Patrol agent fired through the border fence at a rock-thrower, wounding a 12-year-old Mexican boy in the back.

In May, a suspected border bandit was shot in the forehead in an exchange of gunfire in a San Ysidro canyon. In June, Calexico police charged a Border Patrol agent with kidnaping a 14-year-old boy. In July, he pleaded guilty.

Five Border Patrol agents have been shot in the last 20 months.

“It’s a war zone down there,” said Border Patrol spokesman Gene Smithburg.

North of the border, the San Diego Police Department had its own problems with violence--illustrated in part by a Police Officers’ Assn. survey that gave San Diego the highest police-killing rate per capita of 51 large cities over the last 10 years.

On March 31, Officer Thomas Riggs was killed and Officer Donovan Jacobs and a civilian riding with Riggs were wounded in a disturbing incident on an Encanto street after Jacobs pulled over a van driven by 23-year-old Sagon Penn.

Some witnesses said Jacobs provoked Penn into a fight, taunting him with racial epithets before Penn grabbed the lawman’s gun and began firing. Penn awaits trial for murder.

Late May brought the shooting of Wayne Douglas Holden, a distraught 21-year-old UC San Diego student who went lurching through his father’s quiet San Carlos neighborhood wielding a kitchen knife while wearing only an overcoat.

Five police officers, guns drawn, trailed him through the winding streets until he crashed through the front window of a neighbor’s house. Then they shot him, they said, to protect the homeowner. His father sued for $1 million damages for the death of “my beloved son and best friend.”

Even Balboa Park, the lush heart of San Diego, became more of a public-safety concern after the fatal stabbing of Old Globe actor David Huffman. Huffman had chased a teen-ager into Palm Canyon after vacationers had discovered the boy breaking into their camper.

The 17-year-old illegal alien named Genaro Villanueva was convicted of first-degree murder in the Feb. 27 stabbing. During the investigation, police realized they had picked him up earlier that day for breaking into another vehicle. But they had let him go.

Summer came, bringing record-breaking heat that primed the most destructive fire in San Diego’s memory. More than 100 houses were destroyed or damaged in the June 30 Normal Heights blaze. Two hundred people were left homeless.

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome continued to scorch its own path through the county: The death toll topped 100 since 1981, and the number of diagnosed cases climbed toward 200. Meanwhile, San Diego became a port of call on the route to Tijuana for AIDS drugs.

In San Marcos, the high school found that 150 students had been pregnant during the previous school year--one in five girls. Elsewhere, high school girls tilted successfully for the right to participate in male sports.

Grossmont Union District trustees voted against allowing girls in certain contact sports, then changed their minds after a legal opinion. San Diego Unified voted to allow girl wrestlers. But a dissenting trustee voiced fears about facial scars from mat burns.

On the elemental front, clouds of aluminum-fiberglass particles twice fell from the heavens and knocked out power--courtesy of the U.S. Navy’s anti-radar drills. Crustaceans blanketed La Jolla beaches. Lake Murray reopened after eight years, its hydrilla weed mostly vanquished.

La Mesa cracked down on a Universal Life Church minister over his mission to make sex the featured attraction at his “church-operated health spa.” The county courthouse snack stand became the target of Bible group picketers over the 12 Playboy and 5 Penthouse magazines sold by a blind vendor.

Reverend Ike rolled his “1985 $ummer Tour” into town, reminding us that “Jesus rode on the Rolls-Royce of his day.” But San Diego’s own effervescent evangelist, the Rev. Terry Cole-Whittaker, departed to Hawaii after 10 years of teaching yuppies the divine right of prosperity.

C. Arnholt Smith, the former Mr. San Diego who had exercised that right, found himself in a county jail trimming rose bushes. Bernard Striar, whose investment fraud schemes spanned four decades, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

Federal prison opened its arms to other successful San Diegans as well, not the least of whom was J. David (Jerry) Dominelli. Dominelli, whose fraudulent investment firm led hundreds, including the mayor of San Diego, to disaster, was sentenced to 20 years.

J. David & Co. of La Jolla had counted among its 1,500 clients political, entertainment and sports figures. They had invested roughly $200 million, which Dominelli had spent on himself and recycled back to investors as phony profits.

“There must have been nights that you lay awake knowing that it would all come crumbling down and that someday you’d be facing a judge,” intoned the judge Dominelli was facing. Suffering from speech problems as a result of a stroke, Dominelli, 44, kept his silence.

The Navy, too, seemed rife with scams.

The Navy this year reopened an investigation into the disappearance of 31 bars of silver from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk when the Navy supply system filled bogus requisition orders. Then, one by one, the U.S. Attorney began charging members of a San Diego-based ring with shipping stolen F-14 fighter parts to Iran.

In July, a young whistle-blower, Petty Officer Robert Jackson, emerged with tales from the Kitty Hawk: Sailors routinely tossed everything from desks and radar equipment overboard instead of filling out the paper work needed to return surplus supplies.

In October, Jackson took his charges to a congressional subcommittee investigating Navy supply irregularities. By then, he had been discharged from the Navy and written up in People magazine. The subcommittee chairman praised him for “plugging away at a solid wall of apathy.” But the chief of naval operations said the Navy’s internal investigation had not substantiated seven of Jackson’s 11 allegations.

“I am not proud of our record,” Adm. James D. Watkins said. But he insisted that, while there were “individual and systematic shortcomings, we found absolutely no evidence of fraud or of any individual seeking personal monetary gain.”

Meanwhile, the Kitty Hawk disappeared on a six-month Pacific and Indian Ocean cruise. And life went on in San Diego.

Bruce Springsteen toured the world, becoming a pop cultural icon--but San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium turned down his offer to play there. Just months after the Tractor Pull and Mud Bog, stadium officials feared that the turf would suffer under festival seating.

Ellsworth Kelly, the respected minimalist sculptor, submitted a model for a two-part work for Embarcadero Park. Lop off half of it, city officials suggested, fearing transients would sleep there and kill the grass. Kelly initially agreed but ended up abandoning the project.

In San Ysidro, McDonald’s erected a new set of golden arches two blocks from the site of the 1984 massacre, the worst single-episode mass slaying in the country’s history. A television producer from Sherman Oaks turned up with plans for a four-hour massacre miniseries.

“See me as a friend,” he encouraged wary residents, and he hired the mass murderer’s widow as a consultant. He called Bill Kolender “the best police chief in America” and San Ysidro “not a sleazy little border town.” He insisted his film would be tasteful.

Residents and survivors didn’t buy it.

“Film it in Fresno,” suggested Mayor Hedgecock. NBC backed out.

History tossed people up out of the crowd, then watched them spin and disappear.

There was Johnny Massingale, the illiterate, penniless drifter from Kentucky who walked trembling from County Jail on Jan. 4, set free after 10 months behind bars on charges of two throat-slash slayings that prosecutors eventually concluded he did not commit.

There was Scarlett Marie Rogenkamp, a 38-year-old U.S. Air Force employee from Oceanside, who was shot to death Nov. 25 and thrown from a hijacked Egypt Air jetliner in Malta, the only American killed in the hijacking.

Richard Batiste spent two days stuck in the ventilation system of the Sumitomo Bank, allegedly hung up in a break-in attempt.

And Stanley Bohensky, a 35-year-old radiation testing engineer from Paradise Hills, lurched into the limelight of the mayor’s second trial by coming forward with his worries about jury tampering.

There were reasons to celebrate--and reasons to smirk.

UC San Diego became one of four National Science Foundation centers for the supercomputer, capable of handling a hundred million calculations a second. San Diego transformed a neglected jazz-age movie palace into the city’s first Symphony Hall.

The City Council made its TV debut on Cox Cable and Southwestern--”like watching grass grow,” said Councilman Bill Cleator. As an answer to the absence of public toilets downtown, a council committee briefly considered musical rest rooms.

City Councilman Uvaldo Martinez came under fire for whom he ate with and on whose tab. And the visitors bureau embarked on a billboard war for tourists with an aging steel town on the Monongahela River.

Through it all wove Roger Hedgecock, like a man on a board game tracing the route from Go to Finish. The first stop of the year was the witness stand in his first perjury and conspiracy trial. The last would be the studios of radio station KSDO.

In between, the first trial ended in a hung jury--hung by the qualms of a soft-spoken city sanitation worker, Leon Crowder, who arose before dawn the morning after to read the Old Testament and drink herbal tea before facing the storm he had created.

Then came new charges, word that the district attorney would try again, and failed attempts by well-placed movers and shakers to fashion a plea bargain. Oscar Goodman, the Las Vegas lawyer with a long list of Mafia clients, arrived to represent Hedgecock in his second trial.

Jury selection took much of August. Then the trial started, stretching into October. The prosecutor’s hemorrhoids caused a short delay, but the case went quickly. On Sept. 24, Goodman rested his case without calling a single witness.

Hedgecock was convicted Oct. 9 on 13 felony conspiracy and perjury counts charging that he accepted illegal campaign contributions. Two days later, he announced that he would resign in a week. When the week ended, he changed his mind.

For in the interim, two jurors had come forward with allegations of jury tampering by the bailiff who had overseen their sequestered deliberations at the Hanalei Hotel in Mission Valley. Goodman had moved for a mistrial, and the state attorney general had agreed to investigate.

Hedgecock went back to work.

But the attorney general found no cause for charging the bailiff, and Goodman’s efforts to remove Judge William L. Todd Jr. from the hearing on the mistrial motion failed. Todd refused to grant the mistrial, sentencing Hedgecock to one year in the custody of the county sheriff.

“We want Roger! We want Roger!” rang from the County Jail, said Sheriff John Duffy, figuring out how to handle Hedgecock if and when his appeals are exhausted. “The entire jail was kind of rocking with the chanting,” Duffy said. “That’s obviously a security problem.”

Just one week later, the 39-year-old former mayor announced at a press conference that his weekly talk and call-in radio show would debut Jan. 20. He would also begin working with the St. Vincent De Paul Center on building a downtown shelter for the homeless.

“I have no future political ambitions,” Hedgecock told reporters, signing off once and for all on a career in public life that he declared had become the city’s “longest-running political soap opera.”

Then he added, “But if people don’t forget who I am, that’s OK too.”