One Last, Fond Look of Farewell at the Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Suddenly there’s no time.

There’s no time to write all the things in this column that I wanted to write or should have written.

I wanted to write more about San Diego’s poets and prizefighters and less about its politicians and public payrollers. I should have written more to praise good street cops and criticize bad ones.

I wanted to interview Joan Kroc and Francoise Gilot. I wanted to critique the artistry (none dare call it farce) of Over-the-Line on Fiesta Island. I wanted to meet Papa Shongo (the witch doctor) when the World Wrestling Federation next comes to the Sports Arena.

I should have done more to kick San Diego in the butt and pat it on the back (not necessarily at the same time).

I should have written about the “Green Fly” restaurant in Barrio Logan, the Blarney Stone Irish Pub in Clairemont and Johnny Rockets in Del Mar. After lots of on-site research, naturally.

It was at Johnny Rockets that I was first “noticed” from the photo at right. My wife asserts I was insufferable the rest of the day, but I deny it.

I should have written about poet Gary Snyder when he gave a reading in La Jolla to a few dozen poetry lovers (and unreconstructed beatniks) on the same night that San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium was the venue for the wares of Ice-T and Metallica.

The day it was announced that the San Diego County Edition would close, editor Dale Fetherling, in summing up the past 14 years, called San Diego “beguiling.”

I looked it up and found that beguiling covers a lot of good ground: charming, delightful, deceiving, alluring.

Not a bad word for this sunny city with its sometimes shady and self-absorbed people. I wrote 700 columns in four-plus years and felt I had only begun to poke and pester and discover.

I tried to cover the dreamers, the oddballs and the schemers who are San Diego but somehow never get into print. Plus a line or two (or several thousand) to shine some light on the private motives of public people.

I could go to the fights or the circus or test-drive a Bentley Continental R ($261,800 retail) or eat a corn dog at Sluggo’s and still tell my wife that I was working. I had an unlimited supply of tickets for all the best rides in town, journalistically speaking.

I interviewed poseurs, psychics, beauty queens, off-key songwriters, UFO believers, comics, writers, golfers, a madam and a Mongolian strongman. It was a privilege and a joy.

I’ll miss them all: the Elvis impersonator; the Elvis spotter; the “Beer Drinker’s Dream Diet” author; the Army reservist who was dying to fight Saddam but couldn’t beat the military bureaucracy; the comic book revolutionaries of Hillcrest; the Valley Center guy who wants to be the male Elvira; the developers who paved Carmel Mountain for a subdivision and dared call it “Walden Terrace” after Mr. Thoreau and his pond, and more and more.

It’s been a sad six weeks waiting for this final day, this final column. I’ve been rereading past columns; some stand the test of time, others make me wince.

Don’t ask me why, but I’ve been listening to a recording of “The Ballad of the A’s Bandit,” a paean to the celebrated San Diego bank robber. It’s the work of Hank Garfield of Vista; he sent me a cassette and I wrote about it.

I’ve also been listening to Patsy Cline’s “Rose of San Antonio.” An earlier version (by Bob Wills, I think) was my grandmother’s favorite song.

There’s a line in the song about the “broken song/empty words I know/still live in my heart all alone.”

I think my grandmother knew something about life.

‘Typhoid Mary,’ Meet ‘Layoff LePage’

The final words.

* Andrew LePage, 26, a journalism graduate of San Diego State, thinks the economy hates him.

He worked for the San Diego Tribune. It merged out of existence.

He worked for the Escondido Times-Advocate. He got laid off (along with a bunch of others).

He started working for the San Diego County Edition of The Times in October. Three weeks later, word came of the edition’s closure.

He’s being transferred to the Ventura County edition. Editors there hope he won’t bring his bad luck with him.

“We’re a bit concerned,” says one.

* Further proof that the Padres management doesn’t understand the press . . .

When it was learned that the San Diego edition was folding, a Padres executive invited Times baseball writer Bob Nightengale to lunch.

The exec said he hoped Nightengale would reveal his sources on the team that had given him a string of exclusives about feuds and trades and managerial firings.

Answer: Forget it. Only if spring training freezes over.