We weren't the Brady Bunch nor were we the Waltons. Altogether there were six Wyatt siblings. My half-brother Fred Beerman Wyatt passed away last week. Family and friends – in the best Wyatt tradition – said good-bye Monday with laughter and smiles filling a packed funeral home chapel. Tears are rare at family funerals that my cousin Larry Wyatt once jokingly referred to as Wyatt family reunions. Monday was no different. It's not that the ...
Much ado – and appropriately so – is made about Manteca's peace officers and firefighters.
Communication – or lack thereof – is a many splendid thing. I decided to get the ears clipped a day earlier than the usual at Scores. It meant someone different would be cutting my hair. She asked how I usually had it cut. I said "short" and mentioned that the person who normally cuts my hair does what I thought she called a "two " on top and a "one" on the side with a ...
If you doubt there is a difference between Manteca and Berkeley, here it is – one can no longer hold a parade in Berkeley if you toss candy to kids.
I confess. The first three days I was in Manteca I pronounced Ripon - "Rip-pon." It took longer for me to shake the other no-no of native vernacular, the incorrect pronunciation of the word "almond." The right way, of course, is "amund"' I resisted going native until I ended up living nine months in the middle of an almond orchard on North Ripon Road. It was there that I truly appreciated the joke about the ...
Measure M – no pun intended – is saving Manteca's bacon. The extra half cent sales tax we all pay when we shop in town is paying the salaries and benefits of 11 of Manteca's 72 officers. Another two officers are paid with interest from a public safety endowment fund set up with fees paid by new home builders. Should the worse happen – Manteca losing 15 police officers to budget layoffs plus the state ...
The temperatures are still popping up into the 90s yet there are signs that summer is drawing to a close.
I'm not looking forward to moving. I've been living in same duplex for over 10 years. This was where my son and I called home, and where we accumulated plenty of memories. I once broke a bedroom window of this place with a plastic golf ball, using a driver off the backyard lawn. But when I asked Josh, who was about 4 at the time and witnessed the mishap, to take the blame, he was ...
I will never get used to people using Blue Tooth. I realized this a few months ago as I was jogging down Woodward Avenue. About a block away was a young man standing on the edge of the sidewalk wildly waving his arms about. There was no one around save for an occasional passing car. As I got closer he started pacing back and forth while his hand movements became more erratic. I was getting ...
The passing of each month makes the sales tax deals that brought The Promenade Shops at Orchard Valley plus Costco to Manteca seem even shrewder moves.
Every government action has an unintended reaction. Case in point is the Cash for Clunkers program. It's been good for the new auto industry but it has hurt used car lots with a 20 percent hit in sales volume on top of sales that were off already by 30 percent. Economists are also predicting that given the retraction in new car sales for the past two years plus the Cash for Clunkers effort that the ...
Tevanie Deanne Lantz by all accounts was a good person and a good mom. That description fights aptly with the impression I got from the handful of times our paths crossed as Tevanie was good friends with my step-daughter Heather. Tevanie was murdered in the predawn of a July morning from multiple stab wounds in her own front yard in Manteca as she tried to flee her attacker. The man accused of killing Tevani was ...
My first and only visit to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame took place in the early 1990s.
It's clear that California is such a bad credit risk that not even Cash Call.com – the payday loan servcie with sky high interest rates that Gary Coleman, one of Arnold's former 1,001 opponents in the recall election, serves as a pitchman – will loan Sacramento money.
It's time for all of us to grow up especially folks who believe that new housing construction must stop as society somehow has an obligation to prop up the presumed value of their homes.
Get ready for the invasion of the Barneys.
The annual network list of canceled primetime shows cannot be pleasing to the progressives who measure shows based on their cultural and political usefulness. "TV Will Be a Lot Less Gay Next Year," the commissars complained at Slate.com. They counted 11 canceled shows that featured regular gay characters.
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