San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman must be star-crossed. As a Cleveland native and football fanatic she was devastated when the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore in 1996 due to an outdated stadium. Now her San Diego Chargers have left to become the Los Angeles Chargers.
Cleveland built a new stadium and the Browns resumed there. Nevertheless, Zimmerman is getting plenty of ribbing. She just laughs good-naturedly when friends tell her they hope she doesn’t move to their city.
With reactions unpredictable, police cars were stationed outside the La Jolla home of Chargers owner Dean Spanos Thursday after the team’s departure was announced.
Meanwhile, Dean and wife, Susie, have chosen Newport Beach as their new home base while their team is headquartered 32 miles north at Stub Hub Center.
Chargers postscript: No sooner had KUSI morning newscasters speculated about the fate of Qualcomm Stadium without the Chargers than a commercial popped on. It hyped a giant used car sale taking place in the stadium parking lot over the next four days. (But that’s not the only stadium event. Electronics gear also is being accepted for recycling.)
Meanwhile, the huge Chargers billboard remained in place Friday over the back of the Qualcomm Stadium scoreboard. Half of it depicts a Charger bolt and says: “Keeping the Tradition in San Diego.” The other half exhorts: “Go Chargers.”
Even as Target, sporting goods stores and other vendors slashed prices on Chargers paraphernalia by as much as 70 percent and sometimes more, charitable agencies such as the Alpha Project serving the homeless, urged fans to donate their unwanted jerseys to the needy.
Second Act: Ben Vereen fans got extra bang for their buck Thursday evening when Liza Minnelli was in the audience singing along with some of his tunes from her seat in the Poway Center for the Performing Arts.
Vereen, a longtime friend of the actress, performed his one-man show of mostly Broadway tunes with Poway’s Westfield High School orchestra.
Before the 7:30 p.m. curtain, Vereen gathered the 47 student musicians and his three back-up players in a circle backstage. They held hands as he gave a prayerful pep talk about performing as one.
“It was a very teachable moment,” said Jeri Webb, leader of the high school orchestra.
“It was a blast,” Vereen told her after the show. The entertainer, who received standing ovations after both first and second acts, has long championed music education in schools and wellness through the arts. He says he wants to perform with the students again.
Mad dog Mattis: Just before congressional hearings convened Thursday on the nomination of retired Marine Gen. James Mattis’ for Secretary of Defense, San Diego Congressman Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, weighed in online.
Hunter blasted a new report by the Center for Investigative Reporting questioning whether Mattis had committed war crimes in Fallujah, Iraq, in April 2004.
Referring to U.S. involvement there in 2004, not as a policing action but “the largest urban battle since Vietnam,” Hunter noted in a media statement Wednesday: “Just to question whether Mattis committed war crimes in Iraq is absurd. This was real war. Mattis’ job was to kill America’s enemies and bring home America’s sons and daughters.”
“I was there — as an artillery officer,” the Congressman emphasized in an online post.
Hunter, who fought for the U.S. 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines in Fallujah, told me in a phone interview that he recalled a couple of personal exchanges with Mattis. In 2003, he was a lieutenant when Mattis chastised him for not retaliating more strongly after an enemy ambush on Hunter’s convoy as it headed north from Kuwait. On a less serious note, he said Mattis once informed him he needed to do more push-ups.
On Friday, the former Camp Pendleton commander got the congressional support needed to become Secretary of Defense after both houses backed one-time waiver of a provision that would have prohibited him from taking over the Defense Department less than seven years after his retirement from active duty in 2013.
Quote of note: An unattributed quip making the rounds in wake of the newly published Trump rumors: “Barack Obama is America’s first black male president, and Donald Trump is America’s first black-mailed president.”
Memorable moments: San Diego cardiologist Jeffrey Gorwit says my column mention of a Rancho Santa Fe couple’s donation of physicist Hans Bethe’s former Los Alamos, N.M., home to the historical society there, triggered a flashback.
While a student at Cornell University, he took a class taught by Professor Bethe. During one lecture in 1967, a fellow walked in and interrupted Bethe’s talk by whispering in his ear. The visitor then turned to the class and announced that Bethe had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, says Gorwit.
“That was 50 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday.”
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