KPBS Midday Edition

New Book Profiles A Changing San Diego In The '60s and '70s

By Pat Finn / Producer , Mark Sauer / Host, The Roundtable

Published December 8, 2020 at 11:53 AM PST

This story was published more than 3 years ago.

Crowds gather at Horton Plaza as Senator John F. Kennedy gives a speech in front of the U.S. Grant Hotel during a campaign visit to San Diego on Nov. 2, 1960, six days before the election. In his speech, JFK said San Diego had twice as many unemployed as in 1959 and “the Republicans don’t care.”

New Book Profiles A Changing San Diego In The 60s and 70s

A city on the brink of change builds a university; bets on major league sports; hosts several prominent visitors and takes a pass at moving the airport, even after a horrific plane crash.

If anybody knows San Diego, it's Roger Showley.

A writer for The San Diego Union-Tribune for more than 40 years, Showley covered growth and development, including redevelopment and major public projects, planning, urban design, and historic preservation. If it was built or torn down, beautified or "uglified," destroyed or preserved in the city, he knew all about it.

After his retirement in 2018, Union-Tribune Editor Jeff Light asked Showley to work on a project with the paper and the San Diego History Center writing books about the city's history. The three produced so far chronicle San Diego's history from the 1800s to the 1970s.

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Showley joined KPBS Midday Edition Tuesday to talk about his latest edition to this library: "San Diego Memories III: A Time of Change — The 1960s and 1970s."

This book, like the other two, is filled with photos from the Union-Tribune archives. They offer a glimpse of a city trying to grow up, to become more than a Navy town.

"San Diego Memories III" is available at the San Diego History Center and from the publisher.

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Pat Finn

Pat Finn previously served as a producer for KPBS Midday Edition and KPBS Evening Edition. Finn began her career in broadcasting at KTLA and KCET in Los Angeles. In 1979 she became KPBS’ Public Information Director, then Director of Advertising and Promotion, Program Director, and Director of Broadcasting. She oversaw the station’s local and national productions, including the one-hour documentary Los Romeros: The Royal Family of the Guitar, and Child Protective Services, a one-hour look inside the San Diego County agency responsible for the welfare of at risk children. Both programs also aired on public television stations nationwide. Finn has earned honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

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Mark Sauer

A newspaperman for more than 30 years, Mark Sauer joined KPBS in October 2010 and previously served as the host of the KPBS Roundtable. He spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune after stints at The Houston Post and at two papers in his native Michigan. A features/human-interest writer in the UT's Currents section for many years, Mark also spent about a third of his UT career as an editor and reporter on the Metro Desk. He has covered a wide range of events: Wild fires in Southern California and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; Super Bowls and the World Series; foster care and child-abuse issues; the Roman Catholic Diocese's sexual-abuse scandal and bankruptcy; royal visits of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Diana; Republican and Democratic national conventions; high-profile criminal trials; and many other stories, from the silly to the sublime. Along the way, he interviewed everyone from presidents to pan-handlers. His work exposing the false accusations and prosecutions of several San Diegans for murder, rape and child abuse garnered Pulitzer Prize nominations and many regional and local journalism awards, including Best in the West, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism and several San Diego and California bar-association awards. Mark has a degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

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