STORIES FROM THE PAST
50 years ago
Ben Johnston, managing editor of the Imperial Valley Press, today accepted the top national award for community service rendered by a newspaper. The award was given to the Imperial Valley Press at the National Newspaper Association’s 1967 Better Newspaper Contest in Richmond, Va.
The first-place award was presented for the Press disclosure and coverage of the trucking scandal in Imperial County.
Staffer Mike James uncovered the story and was responsible for the original reporting of it and the subsequent stories that followed.
Johnston, when accepting the award today, gave high praise to James.
“Speeding dirt trucks, the appearance in our community of men reputed to be member of the Mafia, and rumors that all was not well with construction of a segment of Interstate 8 freeway spurred our investigation and resulted in our biggest news stories of 1966,” Johnston said. “We are proud of staffer Mike James for his hard work and long hours of preparation and the stories that followed.”
40 years ago
Their concern for their bikes cost them their lives, according to Ralph Schoonmaker, the pilot who found one biker alive Monday and the bodies of two more Thursday in Baja California.
“I could have found those bikes in two hours,” he said today “but they had covered them with brush and cactus.”
Schoonmaker, an El Centro volunteer with the DeAnza Search and Rescue unit, kept flying every day although by Tuesday he knew it was a “body search.”
He was averaging three hours sleep a day because he works every night as the shift supervisor at the Imperial Irrigation District steam plant.
The bikers, Frank Clausen, 30, a Los Angeles policeman, and Sten Morris, 14, died in the small dry valley and the boy’s father, Robert Morris, 41, was rescued Monday.
30 years ago
After a 10-year battle an appellate court has decided in favor of Imperial County’s right to eliminate a commercial water pumping operation in Ocotillo.
The right of a San Diego developer to pump water from his Ocotillo well was argued once all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court when the federal court decided Imperial County was interfering with international trade when it banned pumping water for sale to Mexico.
Deputy County Counsel John Lendermn, who argued the newer case before the appellate court, said Developer Donald C. McDougal’s Ocotillo operation was “so outrageous” the county had to take action.
“This is retirement community. Most of the residents have worked all of their lives. Some of them are from Los Angeles and they get a little piece of property in a retirement community that is shattered by the lines of diesel trucks lining up while they pump water, hour after hour.”
Supervisor Val Blume said she was so pleased by the court’s decision, she had called a meeting for 6:30 p.m. Friday in Ocotillo to announce the decision and introduce Lenderman to residents. “He really worked hard in this one,” Blueme said.
20 years ago
Slowly but surely a panel of Imperial Valley farmers is moving toward a consensus community position on how to conserve water for transfer to San Diego.
The Imperial Irrigation District’s water conservation advisory board, now meeting weekly, plunged Thursday into the fiery issue of on-farm allocations and raised the possibility of pilot programs to test which allocation method works best.
Imperial Valley farmers get their water by calling the district and ordering what they need. An on-farm allocation system would assign a set amount of water to each piece of farmland.