STORIES FROM THE PAST
50 years ago
Herb Koenig, Mayor of El Centro, was in satisfactory condition this morning at El Centro Community Hospital after he suffered a heart attack last night at a dinner in Brawley.
Koenig, with his wife, Jamie, were part of the El Centro delegation attending the quarterly meeting of the California League of cities, Imperial Valley chapter, at the Imperial Valley Inn.
The mayor’s wife and friends seated nearby frantically tried to revive Koenig after, according to a witness, “He suddenly turned white and slumped over.”
The attack occurred at about 8:45 p.m. and the meeting was immediately canceled.
Dr. Ben Yellen, who said this was one of the first league meetings he had been to “in a long time,” was on hand to provide emergency treatment both before the arrival and during application of the Brawley Fire Department resuscitator.
Koenig, seated near the head speaker’s table, received 800 pounds of oxygen without being moved from his chair until he was taken on a stretcher through the kitchen area to the ambulance.
40 years ago
As her successful Fiesta Tortilla business began to run itself, Marina MacPherson of Brawley found herself with more and more time on her hands.
So she did what any 20-year veteran of journalism would do.
She started her own newspaper.
It is called El Informador, and Mrs. MacPherson said it is “the first United States-produced newspaper designed for easy reading in Spanish by Mexican-Americans.”
Bilingual in Spanish and English, Mrs. MacPherson said her aim was to create a readable Spanish language newspaper which would be interesting to the Mexican-American.
The drawbacks to the newspaper already available in Spanish, she said, are the subject matter (they usually deal only with mainly local issues) and the writing style.
There is no norm for journalistic writing in Mexico, she said, because there have been few schools for it.
As a result, many articles are written in a lengthy form which begins with the background information with the important points of the story lost somewhere in the middle.
30 years ago
Representatives of the Imperial Irrigation District and the county Board of Supervisors Monday reached a tentative agreement on amending the proposed Salton Sea legislation by state Sen. Marian Bergeson, R-37th District, but area landowners refused to accept the change.
Under the proposed amendment the bill would absolve only the Imperial Irrigation District of liability for damage to the Salton Sea caused by state- ordered water conservation. In its original form, the bill would extend this protection from liability to all agencies holding contracts with the federal government for delivery of Colorado River water, including the Metropolitan Water District.
20 years ago
CALEXICO — The Calexico Planning Commission Monday rejected a proposal to build a 70-unit low- and moderate-income apartment complex adjacent to the Rancho Frontera subdivision.
Commissioners rejected the proposal by a 4-0 vote on the grounds it didn’t conform to the recommendations in the 1992 environmental impact report for that area.
Commissioner Arturo Selwick abstained.
While the report calls for one- and two-bedroom, garden-style apartments with covered parking, the $7.2 million project would have included two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments with no patios and half the parking slots covered.
Project developer Sam Jack said he would not appeal the decision to the City Council.
“It’s over,” he said following the vote.