Posts by Mike McPhate

“Well, there he is, Jetman, flying into the stadium, no wires, no tricks, just as you see it. … What a beginning!” With the Olympics set to return to Los Angeles in 2028, organizers will be hard-pressed to top one of the most memorable moments from the opening of the 1984 Summer Games, when a man…

On his 27th birthday in 1973, John Francis, a devoted environmentalist living in Inverness, was tired of arguing with people about the dangers of pollution. So he decided to be silent for a day. He liked it. One day became two, then a year. Francis didn’t talk again for 17 years. In that time, he walked…

Antonio Coronel, one of Los Angeles’ most impressive former mayors, was born in Mexico City in 1817. He came to the frontier town of Los Angeles as a teenager during California’s Mexican period, working jobs as a schoolteacher, street commissioner, and justice of the peace. In the 1840s, he prospected for gold in the northern…

San Francisco once had a neighborhood cobbled together from old horsecars. In 1895, the Market Street Railway Company began selling its obsolete horse-drawn inventory, “$20 with seats, $10 without.” Within a few years, more than 100 horsecars and streetcars had been repurposed as housing for artists and low-income families along the dunes just south of…

When the photographer Bob Fitch was asked to take a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. lying in an open casket on April 9, 1968, he paused. Recalling the moment for an interviewer years later, Fitch choked up with emotion: “It was a tough decision to take that photo. It felt like blasphemy to put a camera in…

Fun fact: Before they were famous, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall were roommates in New York City in the 1960s, and they palled around with an acting school reject named Gene Hackman. Few would have guessed, least of all the men themselves, that they would each become giants of Hollywood. Hackman and Hoffman, both born…

For one beautiful day nearly 50 years ago, bicyclists had a freeway in San Diego all to themselves. Before opening a new section of Interstate 805 to vehicle traffic, highway officials invited bicyclists for a Community Cycle Day along 7 miles of roadway on March 19, 1972. According to news accounts from the time, they…

Oliver Sipple was an accidental hero. On a Monday afternoon in September 1975, he happened to be standing next to Sara Jane Moore, a would-be assassin, as she pulled a .38 revolver from her purse and pointed it at President Gerald Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. A Vietnam veteran, Sipple grabbed Moore’s arm…

John Wooden, the quintessential American coach, arrived at UC Los Angeles in 1948 to take over a little-known basketball program that played in a cramped gym. He left in 1975, having transformed the Bruins into a powerhouse with 10 national championships. Wooden was said to be as conversant in Shakespeare and the Bible as basketball,…

In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency announced a groundbreaking photo project designed as a “visual baseline” against which to measure progress on cleaning up our air, land, and water. Over the next six years, about 100 freelance photographers fanned out across all 50 states for the Documerica series, capturing the environmental toll of…

A century ago, astronomers believed the Milky Way was all there was to the universe. The Andromeda galaxy, while visible in the night sky, was thought to be a cauldron of birthing stars within the Milky Way. But Edwin Hubble wasn’t convinced. He and a small group of fellow astronomers hypothesized that Andromeda was its…

“Me and Bobby McGee,” a gentle tune about heartbreak on the road, was written for the voice of a male country singer. Its title character, Bobby, was inspired by a pretty young secretary in the music industry in Tennessee. The country crooner Roger Miller was the first to record the song in 1969. Roy Clark, Kenny Rogers,…

All of California’s Cook pines lean conspicuously in the same direction, as though buffeted by strong winds. The quirk of the otherwise unremarkable tree was discovered a some years ago by Matt Ritter, a botany professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He reached out to a colleague in Australia to ask about the Cook pines…

In a wooded ravine just south of San Francisco, a pair of stone pillars, 10 paces apart, commemorate the last notable American duel. U.S. Sen. David Broderick, a Democrat who made a fortune in Gold Rush San Francisco, was once friends with the Chief Justice of California, David Terry, but slavery tore them apart. Broderick opposed…

In 1903, Chiura Obata, then 17, left Japan for San Francisco to pursue a career as a painter. He met acclaim but also racial animus, as Japanese immigrants were denied entry to restaurants, barred from owning land, and forced behind barbed wire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Obata’s disappointment with the human world could help…

In the 1980s, a wave of Asian newcomers moved into a band of predominantly white bedroom communities in the San Gabriel Valley, a cultural transformation attributed in part to relaxed immigration laws and rising economic mobility. Once moribund business strips sprang to life with Filipino grocers, Vietnamese cafes, and Japanese bakeries. Sociologists declared Monterey Park the first…

Fun fact: There’s a footbridge across a busy road in Palm Springs that connects two parts of a nudist resort. Known as the Naked Bridge, it includes canvas panels to shield the prying eyes of motorists. News of its debut in 2003 became fodder for international headlines and jokes on late-night talk shows. Jay Leno…