Olden Days

Having lived in Southern California for all of my 69 years, I know that Column One (Dec. 5) is wrong about when our "golden way of life" ended. The beginning of the end of our golden way of life came when the first defense factories were built before Pearl Harbor. Until then, we Californians had the best infrastructure (including school system), the highest standard of living and the lowest cost of living in the country; we were a leader in generous and innovative social programs; we had a very low crime rate; we had plenty of room for people and wildlife; our lifestyle was relaxed and easy-paced.

Everywhere Carrie Bach looked, there was cause for hope or its opposite. People were getting better and people were dying. They were inching toward trust and hiding in hypodermics. They were filling the air with prayer and fouling it with crack vapor. They were reclaiming a place in the human race and fleeing deeper into narcotic netherworlds. There were blackout drunks now lucid and blackout drunks still landing themselves in the emergency room. In early 2009, the county's push to house skid row's 50 most hard-core homeless was entering its second year.

From "The America Play" (1993): THE FOUNDLING FATHER: Uh Hehm. The Death of Lincoln!: --.

McClatchy Co. did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act when it fired a Fresno Bee newspaper reporter with repetitive stress injuries, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. Because Jacalyn Thornton could still perform many "major life activities," two members of the three-judge panel on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's summary decision that she did not meet the ADA definition of disabled.

Here, in capsule form, are the events that will be highlighted today in Athens: Track and Field Far from Athens, in a pine-shaded valley tucked into a remote corner of Peloponnesus, an "endless mass of people," as the 2nd-century author Lucian put it, would gather every four years to celebrate the Olympic Games. Today, 2,780 years after the first olive wreaths were awarded the victors, the Games return to the ancient grounds at Olympia, where the men's and women's shotput will be contested.

*--* Rk School (Rec.

Pairing "Old Town" with "Irvine" seems more than a little oxymoronic. But believe it or not, there are buildings in this forward-thinking, tech-minded city that date to the olden days. You know, before Woodbridge. A few structures go back as far as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the surrounding acreage featured citrus groves, bean fields, grazing cattle and little else. Now those buildings, preserved as Old Town alongside the Santa Ana Freeway, are home to a hotel, post office, retailers, bars and restaurants.

Before children ever ran up their parents' phone bills calling 976 and 900 lines, there were other numbers they could call to hear fairy tales and fables. The Orange County Public Library's Dial-a-Story lines have been linking children with a world of fiction and fantasy via telephone lines since 1974. "It started with two or three English lines and one Spanish line," said Lynn Eisenhut, coordinator of children's services for the Orange County Library.