By By Neil Morgan

Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006 | As this hallowed stage of the Christmas season neared, my father would have been reading Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" aloud to the family. Instead of flicking on the "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," as I do these evenings, to be battered with yet another chapter in mankind's folly, my father called mother and us four children to take our places around a fireplace crackling as it flared with Southern pine.

In a powerful voice that would have awed Lionel Barrymore, he read a few pages from Dickens to us each night. On Christmas Eve, after the house grew quiet, he tacked quilts over the windows in his study, where Santa arrived, and joined my mother in stuffing stockings tied beside the children's beds. I believed in Santa Claus as long as I reasonably could, until quite late one Christmas Eve when, in the dark, I heard my father filling my stocking and decided it would not be fair to him or to me to open my eyes. My belief in seasonal magic has strengthened over years because I choose, for these brief days, to recognize only the decency in mankind.

I am astonished that my mail carrier continues to climb 17 steps to rap on my office door and shout a daily greeting. If the teenage helpers at Vons are as pleasant at home as they are on duty, their parents and mentors deserve the very brightest Christmas. I am cheered that our grandson Adam is flying home from Russia, after learning what it is like to spend a college term on the Irkutsk campus in Siberia. Once the temperature dips below zero for a week, he wrote, weathermen there no longer bother saying 'plus' or 'minus.'  However, if Adam switches my computer language over to Russian, as he did before he departed, I may lock up his Christmas presents.    

As it is a season of miracles, we begin to believe that the worst is over in our fraudulent City Hall humiliations, and even to dare for unselfish civility in Washington. It is a time to thank our police and fire protectors, our newspaper carriers, and the city people who may someday again sweep my street. At this generous season, I wish we were still exchanging Christmas music concerts with the talented musicians of Tijuana. And while we are dreaming of gifts, that those thousands of wasted man hours at our border could be put to work.   

And I wish a merry Christmas to the growing numbers of San Diegans who understand the urgency of a second daily media voice in this city, and who therefore support voiceofsandiego.org.  

There are thousands of happy Christmas stories in this city that we will never hear or know, but voiceofsandiego.org would welcome hearing yours. And as each of you goes about creating these untold stories, please know that each of us who loves this city is grateful too. 

By By Neil Morgan

Monday, April 16, 2007 | We San Diegans often seek ways to excuse ourselves for refusing to behave like the other kids. It's a pleasant game — the indulgence of forgiving ourselves because we are a 21st century city, inhabiting the edgy worlds of high-tech and higher-education.

Yet San Diego is also a soft-hearted, informal, Midwestern kind of town. The heart of San Diego still bounces around at the beach, not yet quite ready to commit for the future, nor to settle down for life.

So the longer we seek to explain the sudden thrusts and mood swings of this diverse and laidback city, the more difficult the task. It's awkward because most of us seem to like the way things are in San Diego. And most of us are old enough to feel a little spoiled. Is our city still at the awkward civic age of making excuses for our mistakes and then forgiving ourselves?

This easy mood has long been in style for our laidback city. It may continue for a long time, at least until the tax rate soars to pay off our mindlessness in the pension scandals. That's when the world had a glimpse of us as the rubes that we insist we are not.

At least we do seem to be outgrowing real estate scams, which long provided a lot of newspaper headlines and made some people think San Diegans were pigeons. Still, we have to be reminded too often to count our change, and not be so fast to open the front door to strangers.

Two hospitable families in my part of town were recently burgled that way. You can go too far with San Diego hospitality. While you are trying to find a chair for visitor No. 1 in your living room, his companion has swept through your house, filled his sack like Santa Claus and disappeared through the back yard.

If we complain too loudly about anything, even dumb decisions at City Hall for instance, some people feel quite free to ask that most unpleasant question: Why don't we just go live somewhere else?

Of course, that's the last resort, one that most San Diegans are determined to avoid. But the responsible way to survive in any place across the land is to call in the law when there's trouble … or, at the very least, to notify your City Council member.

Often, nothing less will help. I promise that going on a talk show, as a friend did last month to talk about rats in his garden, just doesn't get it done. All that did was kill off the audience for the poor talk show host, who obviously hadn't been in radio for very long.

I did a couple of pre-dawn interviews on television not long ago, and realized I wasn't hungry enough to be a successful author pitching his new book. Not even to talk up an early listener about my favorite new media, voiceofsandiego.org.

What we need to make San Diego a kinder, wiser city is pretty much straightforward. We need more volunteer workers in parts of town who don't have scenic views.

I wouldn't mind seeing Mayor Sanders and his City Hall people start a civic revival meeting. We need people and ideas to match our sunshine and sea, our aspirations and ambitions.

Planning for San Diego was once an important department at City Hall. But budgets got tight, and we don't hear so much about planning. Some City Hall people pass the buck: They say they are not getting clear directions from San Diegans about where and how this city should grow. If that's true, it's time for a civic revival meeting across San Diego.

San Diego has tended to spread wherever real estate developers care to take it. It took the Corky McMillin Cos. nearly a decade to get its hunk of the old Naval Training Center, and what happened then was more of the same old same. In any of those years, the city could have put together a non-profit plan for a harbor front park like Balboa Park. We all talked about it for a while and that was that.

The city itself needs to be the leader in land use. Instead, we seem oblivious when we turn away major national developers for a park project of that magnitude. It is sad when a company trades off gems of scarce urban land to an outside, for-profit company. We all would like to believe we have as much to do with land planning in San Diego as McMillin. Maybe he just tried harder. He made the profit. But must we allow profit to be a stronger motive in shaping our city than making it beautiful?

By By Neil Morgan

Tuesday, May 30, 2006 | When he first saw San Diego as a backwater port town more than a century ago, Joaquin Miller described our city as "born suddenly, as if shot from a gun." His glimpse of San Diego had been of Alonzo Horton's downtown blocks of empty real estate lots, their red flags flapping gently in the sea breeze despite rock-bottom prices.

Miller was the poet of the California gold fields, author of "Kit Carson's Ride," and an adventurer who drew scant public attention until he appeared in London wearing cowboy boots and sombrero.

It took the Gold Rush of 1849 to stir the world's first wide interest in California. Histories of San Diego, from Smythe to Pourade, lack the color and excitement of those blood, guts and gold histories of San Francisco and northern California. Upstate, it was gold that drew settlers. Aside from a tiny lode at Julian, our lure in San Diego was land.

Southern California lagged. San Diego was early in its discovery, but slow in settlement. Even Los Angeles, a straggler in the south, had identity crises, it lacked a natural harbor. So it was in San Francisco that Californians created the first great universities and pursued cultural arts. For many decades, the University of California meant only the Berkeley campus; when UCLA finally emerged, it was called the Southern Campus of UC.

Despite the soaring growth of Southern California, banks and corporate headquarters still cluster in San Francisco. In this long, long state, no one is startled by contrasts of every kind between north and south California.

San Francisco is closely linked to state government in nearby Sacramento. Its harbor is noted for both its shipping and its play town aura; its club life is legendary. We in the South celebrate the climate, while San Franciscans revel in the fogs that close off the Golden Gate and envelop its handsome bridges. And in San Diego, if such things occurred to us, it would be easy to form a cult of those who revere the artsy blue boomerang in the sky that is our Coronado Bridge.

It was not until World War II that San Diego emerged from the suburban shadow of Los Angeles. Like tens of thousands more who live now in San Diego, I first saw this city during that war.

That war precipitated the surge of in-migration that in 1960 led the governor of California to make an ungraceful salute to density. He urged Californians to blow their car horns and ring their church bells at 4 p.m. on the Sunday afternoon that the population of California would exceed that of New York to become the nation's most populous.

In the booster spirit of the era, that moment was viewed as an indisputable signal that the Golden State was indeed golden.

While the volume of that in-migration excited business interests, it also meant hasty and often sloppy subdivisions, and unanticipated traffic jams.

At a party on Point Loma, when I was a Navy ensign, recently arrived from North Carolina, a Convair aerospace employee introduced herself.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Brenda! We're in nose cones!"

Brenda was new in town too, just like everybody else I met. We all felt we were starting out even. Thousands of us anonymous young men and women jammed the sidewalks on weekends, swam at La Jolla Cove, and splurged after paydays in sailor joints or officers' clubs that pumped beer and pretended glitz.

After World War II, those of us who adopted sweet little sleepy San Diego found some others had stayed behind intending to make it a border metropolis. Here was a perfect port and climate, and there - down the beach - was Mexico.

As America's war shifted westward, San Diego harbor had afforded the shortest course to the Western Pacific and Japan; but in the postwar, an unprepared San Diego port authority lost valuable years in anticipating and planning the harbor as the city's front yard. A notable exception: It occurred to John Bates, a maverick port director, that it was unnecessary for dredge boats to continue hauling accumulating silt outside the harbor. Bates began piling it in what later became Shelter Island and Harbor Island.

For San Diego, the in-migration that began with World War II has never stopped. Old-line San Diegans later confessed that in World War II they had been alarmed by the throngs of military people and civilian aircraft workers stepping off trains each day at the foot of Broadway; they had hoped that after the war, we would all go away and leave them again in peace.

But then came wars in Korea, then Vietnam, with more tens of thousands arriving from every corner of America, passing through San Diego on their way to battle; and back home again, the lucky ones, to start life over and for their families to come live in San Diego. In this instance, we were not born suddenly, as the poet had said; but setting down new roots in California, many of us felt reborn.

So now here we all are. Most of us arrived in San Diego from small-town America. Many of us trace our roots to the South and Midwest. Some have done their best to make this city their real home. But an alarming number of San Diegans, in blissful detachment, sense no more civic responsibility than if they were enjoying a resort. We are still trying to get together with each other and understand who we are and what it is we've done, and haven't done, but should do.

For many of us in-migrants, the opportunities of San Diego and the wider world seem infinitely greater than those of an older America we left behind.

But what excites me more are the active questions:

What is it that we should be doing, now that we have settled in and plan to stay?

What should we understand better about our community and our border?

What might Mayor Jerry Sanders ask us as a community to do, to contribute to making ours a notable city? Has he thought about it?

What would the city's one newspaper like San Diego to become? Has it any idea?

If we want to be part of a brighter, better-managed city that knows who it is and where it's going, we can't go on waiting for the other guy. No one has said it better than President John Kennedy:

"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!"