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Michael Fitzgerald
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- Two brave lives teach us to cherish every breath
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Darwinism at Ground Zero
A Stockton couple is the centerpiece of a money story in today’s New York Times. The story’s about the hard tax hit suffered by couples who lose their second home.
Two years ago, Lilia Garcia and her husband, Jesus, bought their dream house in Linden, Calif., for $535,000 and financed it in part by taking out [...]
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New criminal mastermind: The I-5 Siphoner
We ran a story this week about a new crime: gas-tank punching, done by gas thieves. As it happens, I had first-hand experience of a related crime, siphoning, just this weekend.
I borrowed a pickup truck from a friend. I needed it because I was cleaning out a garage.
My friend warned me her son often [...]
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Another Who Finds Beauty in Urban Stockton
Speaking of beauty in Stockton, which we were in this column about the Beautiful Stockton Photography Contest, another brilliant artist who captures beauty in unexpected places is Gill Dellinger.
A professor emeritus retired from University of the Pacific, Dellinger has picked some of Stockton’s grittiest locations as his subjects: the railroad crossing on North West [...]
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It’s raining bicycles
Saturday’s story about a newly emancipated foster kid who has to walk–or run–to work at 3:30 every morning, brought a call from Doctor Joseph Wilson.
“I want to give a bike to the boy,” he said in a message. He added later, when we spole, “It seemed like he was helping himself. He got a job. He’s [...]
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Party and preserve beautiful land
This is the late environmentalist Waldo Holt (right). For information on the conservancy created in his memory, click here.
This is the party his friends and admirers are throwing to help the county buy wilderness and preserve it. You can read about it in today’s column.
And this is the land. Strikingly beautiful.
Here [...]
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Why I show up to work on time and never complain
Articles like this, in which a former local newspaper employee finds herself a client of the Emergency Food Bank. Yikes.
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Mayoral candidate escorts murder suspect to cops
Today’s paper reports that a 24-year-old man turned himself in Monday in connection with Saturday’s murder of El Capitan Circle resident Erica Orsino, 20. What it doesn’t say is who accompanied Andrew Bruce Thompson III to his rendezvous with justice.
Ralph Lee White.
The mayoral candidate says he was in Los Angeles late Saturday or early Sunday [...]
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Business unfriendly? Yep. Good? You betcha.
The bad news: tiny dust particles that abound the the Valley prematurely kill 24,000 Californians a year. The good news: thanks to regulation, the amount of PM 2.5 is down 45 percent. A health hazard that annually kills more Californians than AIDS, homicides and traffic accidents combined is being tamed. So is Big Ag and [...]
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Looking for beauty in Stockton’s downtown
Here’s photographer Steve Mullens: “I was intending to take dusk photos of the neon-lit buildings. While waiting for the “Blue Hour” where light from the sky and the neon signs balance the best, I’ll usually wander the vicinity looking for other shots to take.”
“I liked this view because the building is so symmetrical and the [...]
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Collecting Stocktons: Yobs running wild