STORIES FROM THE PAST

50 years ago

If the 1969 Imperial Valley League football chase is a two-team race, someone better tell the Central High Spartans.

The Spartans seem to think it’s a one-team race and Coach Cal Jones’ defending champions are in the driver’s seat. The El Centro varsity holds down first place with a 3-0 record.

When a prep team has defensively weak ends, it can be a problem. If the opposition knows it, the result can be crippling.

This defensive weakness of the Brawley Wildcats was clearly visible Friday as Central roared into the northend and claimed a lopsided 32-6 victory from the home team.

In four quarters, Central, ran 24 plays to the outside. The Spartan runners picked up 155 yards on these attempts.

The 32-point Spartan total broke a long Brawley string. The Wildcats had not given up that many points in a league game since the same El Centro club defeated Brawley by a 45-6 count in 1949.

40 years ago

LOS ANGELES — Scientists already know that wood-frame houses are safer in earthquakes than mobile homes. And they hope a recent severe earthquake will tell them even more about how buildings react to earth movements — and help engineers reduce damage in the future.

“From a scientific viewpoint, this could be an extraordinarily earthquake,” said Robert A. Olson, executive director of the state Seismic Safety Commission. “It occurred in one of the most heavily instrumented areas in the country, if not the world.”

Data from scientific instruments scattered over California’s Imperial Valley could help explain why some buildings — such as the county’s six-story General Services Building — were wrecked in the Oct. 15 quake while others escaped with little or no damage.

While scientists say the readings made before, during and after the quake are not likely to produce dramatic breakthroughs in quake prediction, they may add important pieces to the prediction puzzle.

Olson said some of the most important results probably would come from instruments that measured the type and power of ground movements during the quake, which measured 6.5 on the Richter scale.

The Richter scale is a measure of ground motion as recorded on seismographs. Every increase of one number means a tenfold increase in magnitude. Thus a reading of 7.5 reflects an earthquake 10 times stronger than one of 6.5. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which occurred before the Richter scale was devised, has been estimated at 7.9 on the Richter scale.

30 years ago

Members of the Quechan Indian tribe near the southeast border of Imperial County are saddened and upset by a piece of graffiti profaning Mexico that has desecrated ancient ceremonial grounds.

Although the land near Pilot Knob is difficult to reach and has been posted with “closed” signs by the Bureau of Land Management, vandals raked “Mexico Eat S—-” in 10-foot-high letters near an ancient horse geoglyph, permanently scarring a landscape strewn with artifacts and traces of years of Indian history.