Wednesday’s column is a grab bag of items involving newspaper typos, misspelled balloons, a local connection to the Golden Globes, a stopover at a bookstore and a funny freeway-adjacent acronym.
Is it time for my annual countdown of the Top 10 Weird Local News Stories of the Year, expanded for the first time to the Inland Empire? It is, and it’s Sunday’s column.
The Inland Empire used to have a lot of drive-in theaters, most of which faded out in the 1970s and ’80s, although a few are hanging in there. I write about some of those fondly remembered theaters in my Sunday column.
In a tradition, I offer a recap of the local elections, but this time from all around the Inland Empire, in Friday’s column.
I’d been struck by a comment Fred Claire, the former Pomona newspaperman and Dodger general manager, had made to me in our interview in July, namely, that he’d decided that the upcoming baseball season, in whatever form it took, would be legitimate and that whoever won the World Series would have a legitimate win. His old team won, as it turned out. I followed up with him Friday. Also: “I Love L.A.” was not always accepted as an anthem and a Chino astrologer says the stars bode ill for Tuesday’s election. Uh-oh. All this in Sunday’s column.
Rounding up reader comment on columns as far back as (yikes!) June, I present a range of tidbits concerning miniature golf, radio station mascots, K-6 teachers, a popular tennis center and a Nordstrom snack, all in Friday’s column.
I write about a couple of April shopping trips to a supermarket, the first nerve-wracking, the second less so, in Sunday’s column, helped along with some reader comments. After a few non-coronavirus columns, it felt right to get back to a more personal essay on the subject. What have you thought of your shopping experiences?
I catch up on a couple of April topics — singing while handwashing, reading/subscribing to newspapers — while adding a skipped topic, the end of the “Kevin and Bean” radio show and its successor, once notorious for its bashing of the Inland Empire. That’s all in Friday’s column.
In one item, I write about the possibly permanent closing of the Mt. Baldy Trout Pools after decades of offering an easy way to catch a trout. In the second, I write about the mayor of Pomona and his wife having their first child during the pandemic. Those, plus a Valley Vignette (under a new name), make up Friday’s column.
In Wednesday’s column, I buy a mask, share what readers told me about how they got their masks, and google “neck gaiter.”