Column: Rite Aid closures a tough pill to swallow

Rite Aid is closing 22 stores in California, including seven in the IE. (Or eight, if Needles is IE.) Plus, the figure “$2.5 million” is repeatedly invoked at a San Bernardino council meeting, it’s my 27th anniversary at the newspaper, two chances are coming up to meet me for my 60th birthday, and a Riverside judge’s ruling in a high-profile vandalism case is unusual. All this is in my Sunday column.

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Column: 3 presidents, future or past, called IE home

Three U.S. presidents, future or past, called the Inland Empire home: LBJ, Eisenhower and Ford. Also: news that former Kmart and Sears stores in Riverside may be turned into apartments has me wondering what’s next; more about late newspaper owner Mel Hodell; two public appearances by me take place this week; and Twentynine Palms makes Westways. All this fills up my Wednesday column.

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Column: Desk-clearing items on transit, history, Beach Boys

For my last column of 2023, I present some items that hadn’t made previous columns this year: reader emails, observations and loose-end tying. (None of this was pre-written, alas, just notes or emails.) My theory was that a slow news week, and light readership week, was a good time to slip them into print before moving on. That’s my Sunday column. There will be more on Wednesday. Before then, though: Happy New Year!

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Column: More joy in the IE, as you share 2023 highlights

I asked for the best thing that happened to you in 2023 and got nearly 40 responses. A bunch of them were in my Sunday column. Wednesday’s column has most of the rest. (A few remain on the proverbial cutting-room floor, but only a few. It surprised me how many could be squeezed in.)

As a side note, due to Christmas falling on a Monday I had two columns, not one, due last Friday. Whew! I’m glad I had asked readers to help me out. Both columns were written more or less simultaneously, with a few of the items shifted between the two columns to balance them out.

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Column: What’s the best thing that happened to you in 2023?

I pose a question: What’s the best thing to happen to you this year? I’ll excerpt the best answers in an upcoming column. Also, a few items: I make a fellow journalist’s newsletter, a reader prefers us to the LA Times, I am recognized in an out-of-the-way place and a freeway sign makes me ponder.  My Sunday column is also my most casual column in some time, in part because almost the entirety of it was written Friday afternoon on deadline — yikes!

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Column: Her anti-warehouse art kindles reaction from Amazon

In an internal memo that leaked last week, Amazon said it would no longer donate to The Cheech in Riverside. That was due to a piece of anti-Amazon art displayed in the museum’s community gallery last spring and to the artist’s sentiments in an interview — with me. For my Wednesday column, I talk to Toni Sanchez about her art and her reaction to having drawn Amazon’s attention.

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Column: Citrus days weren’t postcard-perfect, new book argues

Historian Ben Jenkins of the University of La Verne has written the story of how railroads and citrus rose and fell in the Inland Empire from 1870 to 1950. “Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California” is the title. I read it and then talked to the IE native about a time often viewed through rose-colored (orange-colored?) glasses for my Wednesday column.

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