Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

This is a story about when I was a young newspaper reporter.

This story starts when I'm a reporter out in the avocado hills of Fallbrook, California, which is, well, which was then.

It's more suburban than anything now.

It's still very pretty, but there's a country town is tucked under Camp Pendleton, the Marine Base, north of San Diego.

It's in the Santa Margarita Mountains as part of the Pacific Coast ranges. You know, they run from the Yukon to the Sierra Madre. That whole coast is

one chain of mountains. Fallbrook, even now, I was there not long ago, but in the 80s, 90s especially, it felt a long ways, you know, from anywhere.

It was like 25 minutes through farms and chaparral and whatever passed the mission, the San Luis Ray River from Oceanside.

So I worked at this daily newspaper and I could make it

from Fallbrook to Oceanside and 15 minutes late at night when the road was empty because you had to

go type your story in at the paper. We had this ancient newspaper computer system that we called mother.

And everybody called it mother, you know, sometimes with reverence,

sometimes like in agony as you see your text just disappearing.

It's like, ah!

And sometimes it's part of the popular two-word phrase.

It starts with mother.

And I'd race back and type my stories. I covered the planning division meetings. I covered the avocado festival, the Farm Bureau.

And we had the white Aryan resistance out there, too. We had Tom Metzker, who had war, the white Aryan resistance.

He lived there, riling up the skinheads. You know, I'd go interview him sometimes because he was

always in the news. He got beat up on Geraldo Rivera's show. Like, it was a talk show, you know,

and the skinhead start fighting

and banging chairs on each other's heads.

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