By By ADRIAN FLORIDO

As the 2007 San Diego wildfires raged, Howard White cooped himself up in his La Jolla home and, with the help of the 85-foot metal antenna in his front yard, directed a corps of local ham radio operators who canvassed East and North County, receivers in hand.

Requests came in for information on closed routes, stranded equipment and people stuck in their homes. White transmitted the requests to ham volunteers stationed at the Salvation Army, Red Cross and the County's Office of Emergency Services, who passed the information onto responders. "That antenna," White said of the structure he built in 2005, "saved lives."

When he erected it, that antenna also riled residents of White's picturesque hillside neighborhood, where houses have sweeping ocean views. They appealed to the city to do something about the wiry antenna, which is 25 feet tall when not in use and 85 feet when it is. Since then, the city has been drafting San Diego's first height restrictions on amateur radio antennas.

The amendments to the city's development code would limit amateur radio antennas to being 35 percent above a building's height and no taller than 70 feet. In coastal neighborhoods like La Jolla, to protect scenic views, they would be limited to 30 feet. The ordinance would not immediately target existing structures.

White and thousands of self-described "hams" across the city say the restrictions, which will come before the city's planning commission in February or March and the City Council later, would endanger their ability to communicate effectively. The ordinance, they argue, would also violate state and federal laws that recognize ham radio's role in emergency response and require cities to adequately accommodate ham communication.

But the city says it is pursuing the ordinance to balance the needs of ham operators licensed by the Federal Communications Commission with the concerns of residents who oppose the sometimes imposing structures in their neighborhoods.

"The city contains areas of special character where a proposed antenna has the potential for negative impacts," Lynda Pfeifer, a spokeswoman for the city's Development Services Department, said in an e-mail.

But the height restrictions, ham operators said, ignore the physics behind amateur radio antennas, which become more effective the higher they reach. With his 85-foot antenna, for example, White was able to coordinate rescues for responders in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The key to ham's success when all else fails, White said, is its reach and its scattered network of antennas across the world.

"We need the height to have a great view for local communications," said Gordon Schlesinger, a local ham who has a 45-foot antenna in the backyard of his College Area home. "The restrictions would make it impossible for us to contact other stations at greater distance in the county because the antennas would be generally out of sight."

Ham radio antennas have been the object of litigation nationwide for decades. The cases often pit residents who think the antennas are eyesores against radio operators who argue that federal and state law comes down on their side.

Federal law has long protected amateur non-commercial radio communication because hams provide the country with a trained community of radio operators during times of crisis. In 2003, the California legislature passed a law requiring cities to reasonably accommodate amateur radio.

The city of San Diego hasn't restricted antenna heights previously, recognizing the state and federal laws would preempt a local ordinance. The proposed height amendments would try to work around the federal and state laws by requiring a special permit process for new antennas that exceeded the height limits -- instead of banning them outright. If the City Council adopts the new rules, new antennas would need to be presented to a community planning group and approved by city staff before they could be erected in certain neighborhoods.

The permitting process, hams said, will be costly and deter future radio operators from taking up the task of emergency response that has proved critical in earlier emergencies.

Many hams are technology gurus or trained engineers -- some, like White, hold doctorates -- who find glee in delving into the formulas of radio physics. Day-to-day, they call in traffic accidents they encounter while driving or chat with other hams. But when emergencies strike, they emerge from relative obscurity and descend on disaster zones with expert speed.

When the 2003 Cedar Fire overwhelmed local cell phone networks and caused failure of firefighter and other first responders' radio signals, ham operators were among the few who remained online. They again contributed in 2007.

"They were here and they were mainly working on in-county communications, finding shelter locations and other facility tasks," said Yvette Urrea Moe, a spokeswoman for the county's Office of Emergency Services, which coordinated fire response.

In recent years, emergency responders, including the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, have incorporated amateur radio operators into their community emergency response plans.

The San Diego DX Club, one of the county's largest organizations of amateur radio operators, is gearing up to fight the ordinance, raising money for potential litigation from the more than 8,000 hams countywide, and the more than 610,000 across the nation.

"The city, it seems, wants to go beyond its citizens' interests to foist under the guise of simple aesthetics something that could end up costing us so much," said Felix Tinkov, the group's attorney.

Please contact Adrian Florido directly at adrian.florido@voiceofsandiego.org and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/adrianflorido.

By By ADRIAN FLORIDO

Six stories up, a boy no older than 10 sat on the window ledge of a Gaslamp office building, his back facing the open air. The window was clamped down on his thighs. A pedestrian below might have been forgiven for alerting the police.

But it was just Guy Matsuda, cleaning the windows. On the other side, his dad held onto his dangling feet.

"He would say, 'Look, the windows are dirty. I'll sit you here, and close the window on your legs. Then you clean it. I'll hold you,'" Matsuda, now 48, said. "Can you believe that?"

It was just the sort of stunt his father would pull without a second thought. It was practical, after all, but it also raised eyebrows. Kazuo "Matt" Matsuda loved pranks, his son said.

They provided brief glimpses into Matsuda's humorous side, which on occasion shone through the otherwise stern concentration with which he approached his life and work on that sixth floor. Matsuda was a talented jeweler who for almost 50 years designed and repaired necklaces, rings and pendants for a broad San Diego clientele. His company, Matt Jewelers, was respected among San Diego's community of jewelers for the quality of its work as much as for the personal integrity of its namesake, his son said.

Matsuda died at his Serra Mesa home Dec. 6 from complications from pneumonia, his son said. He was 88.

Matsuda arrived in San Diego by way of Gila River, Ariz. where he and his Japanese-American family were interned by the American government during World War II. He was allowed to leave for a job in Chicago, where he learned his trade before moving to San Diego in 1955. In 1957, he opened Matt Jewelers in a Gaslamp office building, and in the 1980s was the first retail jeweler to move into the Jewelry Exchange building that still stands at 6th Avenue and E Street.

Kazuo Matsuda was born in Hemet, Calif. on Nov. 29, 1921, to Jiroichi and Misugi Matsuda, Japanese immigrants. His family worked as farmers in the San Fernando Valley.

At the outbreak of World War II, his family was forced to sell its belongings and sent to an internment camp southeast of Phoenix, along with thousands of other Japanese-American families who were detained over government concerns that they would collaborate with the U.S.'s newest war enemy, even if they, like Matsuda, were American born.

"All of a sudden, to all of their friends, they were the enemy," his son said, "and they couldn't figure it out."

A provision of the government's internment policy allowed camp residents to seek jobs in the country's interior, where there was no coastal threat.

Matsuda secured a job in Chicago, and saw it as his ticket out. He boarded a bus that drove him across the South and through the Midwest. On the way, his son said, he was astounded when African-Americans who boarded the same bus were forced to the back.

"It was his first exposure to that kind of discrimination," his son said. He somehow differentiated their treatment from his own. "It was a pride thing, a typical Japanese pride thing, but he always said the government put them in the camp to protect them, and that's all he would say."

When he arrived in Chicago, he skipped out on the job he'd arranged, and instead enrolled in a trade school, aspiring first to be a hair stylist. But the classes were full. So were the watchmaking courses. He settled for a course in jewelry design, and after graduating worked as a platinum smith for a local company. Chicagoans had trouble pronouncing his first name, Kazuo, so his friends called him Matt because of the alliteration with Matsuda. It stuck.

It was in Chicago that the clean cut, bespectacled 20-something met Frances Nakayama, a young woman who, they soon discovered, had been interned at the same Arizona camp Matsuda had just left. They married in 1948.

Wanting to escape the Midwest, they moved back to California, but avoided Los Angeles because, their son said, they wanted to start a life separate from their existing families'. He worked for Benjamin Jewelers, a large local company, before leaving to start his own business.

He involved his entire family. His wife kept the books and his four children helped around the office.

They did trade work. Large jewelry companies whose clients needed repair work passed the broken pieces on to Matsuda. He fixed them, for a fee, and sent them back to the company, which charged its customers more. "He was such a hard worker," his son said.

His partnership with his wife ideally suited the business. She was logical and straight-headed, the business head. He was the artisan. She disciplined the children, and he pampered them, with gifts and trips to Disneyland. He felt guilty, his son said, for the amount of time his work demanded.

When Guy, his second son, reached adulthood and joined his father in the business, he encouraged him to transition to retail and sales, where there was more profit to be made.

They moved to the Jewelry Exchange Building downtown and opened a more visible store. His biggest customers were Portuguese and Italian fishing boat owners and Mexican high society, who would cross the border into San Diego. His son remembers fishermen and wealthy Mexicans coming into his store with bags of cash asking for custom designs.

The industry was dominated by respect then, his son said. If a customer came to him citing a friend's prices, he wouldn't undercut it. "He would say, 'Go back to them, they're good people,'" his son said.

But the jewelry business changed in the mid-80s, as the global economy suffered. The Mexican peso devalued severely. Tuna fishermen sold their boats as labor costs and other circumstances forced the industry overseas. Jewelry competed with other gift goods.

"Before, whenever you bought your girlfriend a significant present, it was jewelry," Matsuda said. "But we started competing with vacations, and cars, and all sorts of other things."

In 2000, seeking more visibility, Matsuda and his son opened a store in Little Italy.

"Right after, Sept. 11 happened, and we never recovered from that," Guy Matsuda said. They closed the store in 2005, and his father retired.

In his retirement, Matsuda took more time to enjoy his hobbies. He watched sports religiously, and practiced his golf swing on his front lawn. He had a brown belt in judo. When his family took him to Las Vegas, he disappeared the moment he stepped into a casino, not to be seen by them until early morning. He could gamble for hours.

"But he always told me, very typically Japanese, 'Don't complain if you lose,'" his son said. "You come to have fun, and if you can't lose money, you have no business being here."

Matt Jewelers continues as a design company out of his son's Eastlake home. Guy Matsuda still designs jewelry by hand, something fewer and fewer people do these days, he said.

"Real true artisans in the industry are a dying breed," his son said. "My dad was one of them."

Please contact Adrian Florido directly at adrian.florido@voiceofsandiego.org and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/adrianflorido.

By By KELLY THORNTON

The stillness of the morning was interrupted only by the sound of uneven, labored breathing, and Tom Baker climbed into his wife's bed and cradled her in his arms, knowing these would be the final moments of their love story.

As she drifted away, memories came rushing to his mind -- their 1995 wedding on the rocks at La Jolla Cove, long walks in their El Cajon neighborhood, a cruise through the Panama Canal, another in the French Polynesian Islands. And then the terrible diagnosis just days before: An obscure and fatal brain disorder, sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, so rare there's literally a one-in-a-million chance of getting it.

Doctors have no way to test for it, usually aren't able to diagnose it until days before death, and nobody knows how it's contracted.

Like Carol Baker, most patients suffer for months with unanswered questions, uneducated doctors, fears that the condition is contagious or genetic and frightening symptoms that quickly progress -- memory loss, dementia, an unsteady gait, hallucinations and sudden jerking movements.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD, has some high-profile relatives: The human form of Mad Cow Disease and Alzheimer's. In all cases, normal proteins known as prions mutate into shapes that then attack cells in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls movement.

Despite strides in research, CJD is still an enigma.

CJD Researchers, who are greatly outnumbered by those for better-known diseases, are eager to quash fears by noting that CJD is not communicable. But they also point out that the disease does pose a public health problem because there is so little awareness, few research dollars and so little knowledge about how it is contracted.

"It's under investigation and we don't really understand the primary cause of the disease," said Dr. Jiri Safar, internationally renowned neuroscientist and biochemist and co-director of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center in Cleveland. "We know how it evolves and how it destroys the brain but we don't know the triggering elements."

Doctors in California are required to report all cases of CJD to the local public health department, not because it is communicable but because it is unusual and of unknown cause. The office looks at the victim's age, gender, race, ethnicity and zip code to detect trends that could help identify causes. And, they interview the victim's family to find out if genetics played a role.

In San Diego County, with a population of more than 3 million, there have been between two and five CJD deaths reported annually since 2000, said Dr. Michele Ginsberg, clinical director of community epidemiology for Public Health Services, in the Health and Human Services Agency for the County of San Diego.

It is so rare, and so misunderstood, that various doctors initially told Carol -- whose first symptom was feeling off balance -- that she had an inner ear problem, or that she just needed to relax, that stress was causing her symptoms.

When one of numerous doctors, neurologist Charles Smith of Scripps Clinic La Jolla, finally diagnosed CJD in June following three agonizing months of rapid deterioration, Tom actually felt relieved to know the reason for his wife's suffering. But there were, and still are, too many questions remaining.

"I asked him, where did it come from? I want to know more," Tom recalled recently. "He said there is no answer."

So Carol Baker, born in Rochester, N.Y. on July 7, 1945, a San Diego County public health nurse to foster kids, with a life enriched by a happy marriage, children and grandchildren, many friends and a deep devotion to God, died July 9 of what was -- and still is -- a mystery illness. She was 64.

'There Is So Little Known'

Carol's family members and friends were confused by the diagnosis, said her youngest daughter, 35-year-old Rebecca Nordquist. The doctor had mentioned Mad Cow disease. Was it Mad Cow? Was it contagious? Was it inherited?

"Through this experience we found that there is so little known about the disease, and all of my friends and family had so many unanswered questions," Nordquist said. "To me it was torture for three or four months not knowing what was happening."

CJD has three forms: The kind Carol had, sporadic CJD; the kind that is genetic; and the kind people have come to know as Mad Cow, technically called "variant" CJD, which is contracted through consumption of tainted beef or through transplant of tainted organs. Dr. Smith assured Carol's family members they were not in danger of contracting Carol's disease.

Eighty-five percent of reported CJD cases are sporadic like Baker; 14 percent are genetic, and less than 1 percent are the Mad Cow form. There have been no known cases of the Mad Cow type in the United States since August 2005.

Diagnosis is usually accomplished through the process of eliminating other diseases such as cancer.

Carol had symptoms for three months before diagnosis, and she died 13 days after that. Researchers are trying to develop a test that would help with diagnosis long before symptoms show up, in hopes that early diagnosis could slow the progression or eventually lead to a cure.

'I Feel Like I'm Going In All Different Directions'

In early April, Carol just felt awkward, unbalanced. On walks, which she did often with coworkers at lunchtime or with her husband after work, she would veer to one side, occasionally leaning into her exercise partner.

Doctors told Carol it was migraines or she was working too hard and needed to eliminate stress. Symptoms worsened rapidly, and Carol stopped working in mid-May.

By the time she went to Dr. Smith, who had just moved to San Diego from the Bronx in New York, she was desperate for answers, and desperate for someone to recognize something serious was happening. He assured the couple he would figure out the mystery.

At home, each day it was getting worse. "I feel like I'm going in all different directions," she told Tom. They got a wheelchair. Tom carried her up the stairs for showers. She lost her short-term memory. Not long after that she was bedridden. Tests continued. Still no answers.

Her memory was spotty, which was hard on everyone, Carol's daughter said. "There's no pattern to it. She would forget something that would happen 30 minutes ago, but she would remember details from three years ago, four years ago, 30 years ago. It was just bizarre."

Mystery Solved, Sort Of

Dr. Smith said he began to suspect CJD about a month after first seeing Carol, after ruling out drug abuse and cancer, but he didn't tell her. It was the progressive problem with her gait and the way her eyes darted in all directions that tipped him. He quietly sent spinal fluid to the National Prion Surveillance Center for assessment.

The family knew only that Smith had ordered rare blood tests and the samples had to be sent to out-of-town labs. The weeks-long waiting was excruciating and symptoms worsened each day.

Smith called a meeting with the Bakers June 26 at Scripps Green Hospital.

The doctor had diagnosed just one other case in 30 years. Delivering the news to the Bakers was wrenching. "It's like one of those things where you feel like you should have a shot first. It's terrible."

Looking back on that day, Tom said, as odd as it sounds, it was a relief to finally know what they were dealing with, and that someone finally recognized and validated what they were going through. The Bakers were grateful to Smith and embraced him.

The next day, Carol received close friends at her home and laughed and cried with them. Tom went to church Sunday the 28th and shared the diagnosis with the congregation.

"I got up in church and told the congregation, 'It is under the heading of Mad Cow disease, and most people die within 7 months, and we are already at 3 months, and all of them pass away within a year. Pray for us."

That night, Carol could not close her eyes. Could not stop talking. And at 3 a.m. Monday, she did not recognize her husband and started screaming. "I mean, screaming," Tom recalled. Carol got on the phone with Nordquist, her daughter in Texas, and claimed Tom was attacking her. He kept his distance, worried that the daughter would think it was true.

It was a wrenching ordeal. Paramedics arrived and put Carol in restraints. Nordquist came home from Texas to help care for her mother. Her siblings, Laurie Nordquist Scribellito and Matthew Nordquist, shared grief and offered support, too.

Carol was in the hospital a few days, and by the following weekend, Tom said, his wife "had lost all contact with people, very rarely responding to anything or anyone." The week after that, her legs started jumping, flinching uncontrollably.

In the end they could do nothing but give her morphine.

Those final weeks were agonizing for the family. The screaming incident had been almost too much to bear for Tom.

When she was all but gone, he was beside her hospital bed, provided by hospice, in their El Cajon condominium.

"I climbed up in bed with her. I saw that on a movie. There's an old movie -- you can see through the window of the medical ward, he just crawled up in bed with his wife. I decided that's where I was going to be. I climbed up and held her, I didn't let anyone else in."

That's when the memories flooded his mind.

"Her breathing was real slow. I knew it was over and I just held her as she passed away. I knew the Lord had come and taken her."

(Correction: The original version of this story stated that Carol Baker received her diagnosis 10 days before she died in one part of the story. It later stated the correct number, which was 13 days. We regret the error.)

Please contact Kelly Thornton directly at kellythornton7407@yahoo.com.

By By ADRIAN FLORIDO

The sign on the City Heights temple's front wall has seen better days. "CHINESE RIEN SHIP ASSOCIATION," it reads in large, once-bright, red letters.

On the first day of the lunar month, worshippers start arriving shortly after 9 a.m. Many of them, too, have seen better days. Most are old, some are frail. Many arrive alone. They step inside and sit at plastic fold-up tables. They sip sweet bean soup out of Styrofoam cups. They chat in shaky voices.

They walk up to the altar stations and kneel to pray before Buddhist statues. For family back home. For good, or at least better, health. For fortune. They light sticks of incense and waft them gently, then prop them in gilded pots filled with ashes of prayers that came before. Then they repose, for a moment, in the fragrance of the lingering cloud. This small, tucked away corner of City Heights will be the final resting place for many of them.

They've been coming here to pray at least twice a month since 1982. The Chinese Friendship Association has been a place of worship, social convergence, and mutual assistance for hundreds, perhaps thousands of San Diego's Southeast Asian refugees.

The association's temple is the second oldest Buddhist temple in the neighborhood, founded by immigrants who fled the wars of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, settled in San Diego, and found few Buddhist temples.

As the community has evolved, so has the temple. Once a local institution that helped transition new refugees into American life, it has, more recently, taken on the role of helping them transition into the next life.

In a modest room behind the elaborately adorned hall of worship, you'll find the temple's newest addition: a granite altar bearing a statue of Buddhism's goddess of Earth, and below it, four rows of mailbox-sized compartments awaiting the cremated remains of the 48 people who will, someday, be entombed there.

"Our people wanted this," Ming Lau, the temple's president said of its roughly 200 members as he pulled open one of the varnished wood doors covering the miniature chambers. "A lot of our people, they don't like to be buried at cemeteries here. They go there and they feel different."

As the oldest among this refugee community's first generation reach their twilight, the need for culturally appropriate burial space has been a growing concern, Lau said.

To address it, the temple dipped into its moderate donation-only budget to install the cabinet-resembling columbarium. Still unfinished, it has received decorative adornments as the temple's resources have permitted, but Lau said its members takes pride that it is one of the few -- if not the only -- spaces exclusively for Buddhist burial in San Diego. They have been eager to sign up for slots.

The temple once had more than 800 members who paid $10 each time one died, the collection serving as a sort of self-procured life insurance for a community unprepared for death in the United States. The inexpensive niches mean the $5,000 to $6,000 the temple will give each of their families once they've departed will go further in covering funeral expenses. They'll no longer have to buy a plot in a cemetery.

Four members have died this month; just 200 remain. The temple, which continues cutting the checks at a significant loss, has stopped accepting new participants. Not enough people want to participate to allow the program to sustain itself.

For Lau, the conundrum is clear. "When we came, we didn't know what was life insurance," he said. "That is why we did this. Today, life insurance is very easy. Everybody buys it."

The challenges reflect the divergent realities facing the temple's Asian immigrant community.

On one hand, the temple, in its new role as final resting place for many of its worshippers, has become a powerful embodiment of community cohesion. On the other, its younger members, upwardly mobile over the generations, have depended less on its services and left it strained to provide for those who, in old age, need it most.

They still come from across the county, especially in times of need.

Julie Lam was laid off from her job as an accountant two months ago. Since then, she has driven to City Heights from her North County home regularly, to pray for good fortune as she looks for work and, between prayers, use the temple's fax machine to submit job applications.

"A lot of people have lost their jobs," Lam said. "So they come here."

The statue to which worshipers pray for good fortune, propped off to the side of the temple's main room, has received a lot more attention in recent months, said Dung Vuong, a temple volunteer. A few weeks ago a rumor circulated among members that elsewhere, a devout Buddhist down on his luck prayed before it so intently that a figure carved from valuable jade appeared to him. The Chinese Friendship Association saw a temporary spike in attendance.

Though its numbers are scarcer these days, the temple still relishes in smaller triumphs.

It has never had a resident monk, but two months ago, one of its devotees invited the Venerable Xian Zhong, who led a meditation class she attended, to perform the Buddhist chanting ceremony there.

Now, on the 1st and 15th of each lunar month, when Buddhists celebrate the start and end of the moon's cycle, the building resonates with the chants of a real monk, instead of a crackled recording.

As its members grow older still, Lau said he dreams of building a larger temple, with space where the old can live, complete with gardens where they'll tend the vegetables they grew as farmers before leaving their counties in haste, many on rickety boats and separated from their families.

"That would be nice," Lau said. "I would love to build it, because someday I will be old too."

Please contact Adrian Florido directly at adrian.florido@voiceofsandiego.org and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/adrianflorido.