After a three-day Labor Day weekend, I arrived at work Tuesday morning with a column due by lunchtime. Time to labor! Let me round up some partly completed items for your reading enjoyment.
Houston’s problem
After my partial column July 23 about going to an Astros game, I considered devoting a full column to Houston. But to my surprise, no former Houstonians in my readership spoke up. Maybe people move there, not away from there. So I’ll keep it brief.
Besides, Houston was a little disappointing, to be honest. I was there for baseball but assumed I could easily fill four days in our nation’s fourth-largest city. I did, but it was trickier than expected. Downtown, where I stayed, was absolutely dead on the weekend.
As in, zombie apocalypse dead. The streets were eerily deserted in broad daylight Saturday and Sunday. Nearly every business was closed. The library was closed Sunday. In walking a mile that morning, I saw six people and about the same number of moving vehicles. It’s definitely a weekdays-only downtown.
My friend Javier visited downtown Houston last year for an Astros game. He told me the other day that he and his friends were similarly perplexed. His verdict: “Houston is boring.” He was as surprised as I was.
As I do on vacations, I got around on public transit, walked a lot, sought out good food — including barbecue, breakfast tacos and Tex-Mex, the latter at Original Ninfa’s in the barrio — and made a beeline for art museums, bookstores and record stores.
One day I wore my T-shirt from Riverside’s The Cheech. This was appropriate when, at the Museum of Fine Arts, I encountered a large canvas by John Valadez, an L.A. painter whose work I know from the Riverside museum.
I took a selfie.
Killer protest
My columnist colleague over in Sports, Jim Alexander, called me a “brave man” for wearing a Dodger-style shirt from a Pomona coffeehouse to an Astros game. In an even more subtle protest in Houston, I made one purchase at Murder by the Book, a mystery-themed store.
It was a book by Raymond Chandler — one of L.A.’s most famous writers.
O’Day Short (cont’d)
My Aug. 6 column about the dedication in Fontana of O’Day Short Elementary, a name commemorating the racial violence against the Short family in 1945, brought positive emails. Two came from Temecula.
“As a retired teacher, it is wonderful to know that a student recognized a way to make a difference, and then did it!” Lynn Petroff writes of Cyrus Moss, 12, who had proposed the renaming. “Very proud of Cyrus, and very pleased that you wrote this fine article.”
“Thank you, and most of all, God bless you for writing about that ugly chapter in SoCal’s history,” writes Dain Gingerelli.
“It’s wonderful to see that Fontana finally honored the Short family with a gesture appropriate to the atrocity,” Bob Watson of Upland says. “Thank you for your part in publicizing a story which should never be forgotten.”
I was proud to do it.
Food for thought
My Aug. 8 item about the passing of Bill Elwell, who’d run Bill’s Burgers in Van Nuys for 60 years, noted how people tended to describe him as a grouch. I have no idea what he was like, as he made the food but didn’t interact with anyone during my one visit.
But his obituaries made me think about how we can be quick to label people who aren’t uniformly cheerful.
Men, it should be said, have it easier in that regard than women.
As a female friend reflects: “Reading your piece made me think about all the times we celebrate men who are curmudgeons or don’t talk or are no-nonsense or honest or don’t beat around the bush. Meanwhile,” she continues, “the only thing society manages to say about women like that is that they should smile more.”
Parachute, please!
My Aug. 3 column was about a downtown Pomona groundbreaking ceremony. While a local developer, Arteco Partners, originally intended to build the apartment complex in the 2000s, I wrote that the Great Recession meant that “their plans crashed.”
Straightforward, right? Not for Google’s AI function, which suggested I reword that line to say that Arteco’s “planes crashed.” Yikes!
IE is everywhere (cont’d)
Meeting up in the San Fernando Valley on Sunday with some former newsroom colleagues from Ontario, I wore my vintage Inland Valley Daily Bulletin T-shirt for old times’ sake. As three of us wrapped up happy hour at a steakhouse in distant Woodland Hills, the bartender brought our bill and remarked, “I see your shirt says ‘Daily Bulletin.’”
I braced myself for an amused “What’s a Daily Bulletin? Should I have heard of it?” But no.
“I went to Upland High,” the bartender said. “I acted in community theater at Gardiner Spring and the Grove Theatre. The Daily Bulletin used to review our plays.”
As with the Amtrak employee in Portland who saw my Pomona T-shirt and told me he grew up in San Bernardino, I am finding that an Inland Empire T-shirt can double as a calling card.
David Allen wears T-shirts Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.