REMEMBERING

William B. Enright, 94

March 7

In almost 30 years as a federal judge in San Diego, he delivered his reckoning dozens of times. He locked eyes on a defendant he was about to sentence and said: “Your worst fears have come to pass. Today is the day we settle accounts. The bill collector comes for you like he comes for me, like he comes for everyone else in this room.”

But Enright also understood justice as something more than just locking people up. He compiled a list of those he incarcerated and kept tabs on them, reducing sentences for good behavior when he thought it was appropriate.

Over the years, he handled several high-profile cases on the bench, including the J. David Dominelli fraud trial; a string of appeals by convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris; and a classaction suit against business giant C. Arnholt Smith following the 1973 collapse of United States National Bank.

The main conference room at the U.S. District Court downtown is named after him.

John Masson, 55

March 10

He served on the Escondido City Council since 2012.

“While there is much to say about all of the things Councilmember Masson was involved in and contributed to, I shall always remember his tremendous passion for all things Escondido, and his incredible support of city employees,” Escondido City Manager Jeff Epp said.

Masson was appointed to the council in 2012 and was then elected in November 2014 to represent District 2. He was re-elected in 2018. During his tenure, Masson served as deputy mayor, a representative on the Economic Development subcommittee of the City Council, a representative to the San Diego County Water Authority and as Escondido’s representative on the League of California Cities.

Margaret Burbidge, 100

April 5

The UC San Diego astronomer made landmark discoveries about the nature of stars, helped popularize the notion that humans are composed of stardust, and helped women find a home in science.

Her many accomplishments include becoming the first woman to serve as director of London’s Royal Greenwich Observatory.

“Lady Stardust,” as some people called her, also was part of the founding faculty at UC San Diego in the early 1960s and later contributed to the development of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Tom Missett, 79

April 8

The longtime newspaper publisher was one of North County’s most colorful and inf luential figures.

He was hired in 1967 as publisher of the Oceanside Blade-Tribune, which later became the BladeCitizen and eventually the North County Times. After 30 years at the helm, Missett retired in 1997.

Missett and his older brother, editor Bill Missett, ran the newspaper during a period of prosperity, when circulation and advertising increased, and Oceanside and the surrounding communities grew rapidly.

Together, the Missetts built the newspaper’s reputation for hardnosed reporting, focused on news and politics.

Dan Walters, 53 April 23

He was a Padres catcher in 1992 and ’93 and former San Diego police officer. He was shot and gravely injured in 2003. His death was considered a line-of-duty fatality.

Walters, who also played at Santana High, joined the Police Department in 1998, two years after his baseball career ended. Becoming a policeman was “something I have had in the back of my mind, even while playing,” Walters said in a 1999 interview with the Union-Tribune.

On Nov. 12, 2003, five years into his new profession, he was on patrol on 43rd Street when he came across officers who were responding to a domestic violence dispute.

When Walters exited his patrol car, the suspect immediately confronted him. As the two struggled, Walters was shot in the neck. Then a passing motorist struck him. He suffered two crushed cervical vertebrae.

Walters was left paralyzed and remained in a wheelchair until the time of his death.

Buddy Rabaya, 58

April 28

He was one of Santee’s most involved citizens.

The Santee Chamber of Commerce named him “2018 Citizen of the Year.” In 2015 he became a leader in the Santee Mobilehome Owners Action Committee, a group that lobbies for residents’ rights, including rent control.

He was instrumental in bringing a variety of programs to youths, families and seniors through the group. At Rabaya’s urging, the group has organized backpack giveaways for East County schoolchildren, brought holiday joy and companionship with a “SMOAC Elves Adopt-a-Senior” program, held Mother’s Day luncheons, gave away Easter baskets to needy families, and worked with several grocery stores and volunteer groups to bring a food pantry to Meadowbrook, one of the city’s mobile home communities.

Steve West, 68 May 11

He was a distinctive radio voice who came to San Diego by way of South London. It was a friendly, bloke-from-the-pub kind of voice, warm and conversational, but still British and therefore cool. The longtime local disc jockey was part of 91X’s original “Rock of the ’80s” on-air team.

“In a lot of ways, Steve was the signature voice of 91X at the time,” said disc jockey Bryan Schock, who began working with West when the radio station debuted in 1983.

“If you were in high school back then and listening to 91X, you’re beginning your life as a young adult, and there’s Steve. Then it’s the ’90s, and maybe you’ve come back to San Diego, and there was Steve. And in the 2000s, he’s still your guy. He didn’t talk at you, he talked with you. He made you feel like he was your friend.”

Joseph Yamada and Elizabeth Kikuchi, 90

May 11 and May 20, respectively

The two met as children at the World War II internment camp in Poston, Ariz.

After the war, they went to San Diego High School together, then UC Berkeley. They got married in the ’50s, raised a family, and left their marks on San Diego in landscape architecture and community service.

When they returned to San Diego from Berkeley, she became the first Asian teacher at San Diego High, and he worked for Harriett Wimmer, a pioneering landscape architect.

Yamada’s projects included designs for SeaWorld, UC San Diego, the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista and the parks along the Embarcadero.

Liz Yamada quit teaching to raise the couple’s three children, and when they were grown she worked as an administrator in her husband’s firm and eventually became a partner. She also wrote poetry and was active as a director on a variety of boards for local government agencies, colleges, museums and foundations.

Jordine Skoff Von Wantoch, 89 June 22

She was born a coal miner’s daughter, but with her hard work, perseverance and adventurous spirit, she rose to a top position in the Navy, forging a path like no other woman who came before her.

Von Wantoch spent 30 years in the Navy, attaining the rank of captain eight years before her retirement in 1986. But it was in 1970, when she became pregnant with her daughter, Lianh, that she become a boundary-breaker for all female officers who followed in her wake. Von Wantoch was the first female naval officer in the U.S. to be allowed to remain on active duty and complete a normal career while raising a child. This opened the door for a change in policy regarding women with children in the Navy.

Irene Perrariz Mena, 91 June 24

She is remembered as one of the voices who had defended the property that is now historic Chicano Park in Barrio Logan. Mena, of Mexican and Filipino descent, grew up in Barrio Logan. She was the former honorary grandmother of the local Brown Berets organization. A promoter of bilingual and Chicano education, she was also instrumental in the opening of the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego and was part of the Chicano Park Steering Committee.

Christian Ramirez, policy director with the Service Employees International Union, remembered Mena as a humble, committed woman who always pushed new generations to take the lead and stay in the fight for their rights.

“If you write the history of San Diego, you have to mention the contribution of Irene Mena, one of the undoubted pioneers of promoting culture and respect for the Latino community and the Chicano movement in particular. She is a heroine of our community.”

Robert Louis Matthews, 90

July 2

He was a lifelong educator, civil rights activist and icon in San Diego’s African American community. He was influential in the creation of the Jackie Robinson YMCA, the growth of the San Diego Community College system and of the Martin Luther King Jr. Parade.

Born in the small town of Tonganoxie, Kan., Matthews grew up seeing the injustices of racism and discrimination firsthand. He was the only African American in his class from grade school through high school. Matthews earned a master’s in childhood education from Columbia University.

In 1955, he and his wife, Ardelle, moved to San Diego. Initially he took a job as a teacher at Frontier Elementary School. Matthews went on to take several teaching and administrative assignments in the San Diego Unified School District over nearly three decades and became the second African American to be named principal in the district.

Flossie Wong-Staal, 73

July 8

She was a virologist who saved countless lives by helping identify the cause of AIDS and who transformed UC San Diego into one of the world’s leading research centers on the disease.

She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame last year with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and actress Jane Fonda.

“She was one of the giants in the fight against HIV/AIDS,” said Dr. David Brenner, vice chancellor of health sciences at UC San Diego. “She worked with Dr. Robert Gallo to make the fundamental insights that revealed the cause of AIDS, and which helped lead to the first drug therapies.”

Her research and influence was so great the Institute of Scientific Information named her the top woman scientist in the world in the 1980s.

E. Walter Miles, 86

July 8

He was a pioneering Black political science professor at San Diego State University. He saw the U.S. Constitution as a living thing that needed exercise now and then. So he was an activist as well as an academic.

Miles had a social-justice résumé that included desegregating restaurants in Indiana, boycotting businesses that discriminated in Texas, and pushing for equitable housing in North Carolina.

He came to SDSU in the mid-1960s, at the time the only Black professor on campus. He spent more than 30 years at the university, including a term as head of the political science department. He started public law classes that are still taught there.

He co-authored the textbook “Vital Issues of the Constitution” and was a contributor to “Great Cases of the Supreme Court,” which included looks at landmark decisions involving slavery, the right to vote, and freedom of expression.

In the community, he led San Diego chapters of the Urban League and the ACLU, and also served on the ACLU’s national board.

Morris Cerullo, 88

July 10

A famed and sometimes controversial televangelist who opened a $200 million Biblethemed attraction in Mission Valley last December.

At the time he told the UnionTribune that he hoped that his massive new Morris Cerullo Legacy International Center would ref lect his lifetime of service, both to his faith and to the millions of people he ministered to throughout his life.

“I’m 88 years of age, and my time on this Earth may not be very long,” Cerullo said. “I wanted to leave something that would be of value and speak to the principles I’ve upheld for the past 70 years. All I can tell you is that everybody is welcome at the Legacy Center. ... Our job is to love everybody and to love them sincerely but not hypocritically.”

Debora Lea Stolz, 65 July 12

She was a pillar in the local foster parent community and a longtime advocate for children.

She had been a foster parent for 36 years, personally taking in hundreds of children. For more than 20 years, she mentored and trained foster parents, adoptive parents and other caregivers through a Grossmont College program and was president of the San Diego County Foster Parent Association.

Her influence in that community is hard to overstate. Said foster parent advocate Patty Boles, a longtime friend: “If you are a foster adoptive parent in San Diego County you have been in a class taught by Debbie.”

Dolores Robledo, 90

July 14

Along with her husband, she co-founded one of the region’s first and most-beloved taco-shop chains, Roberto’s.

She worked hard in the family’s 77-store chain for more than 30 years to provide a better future for her 13 children.

The Robledos were an American-dream success story. Roberto and Dolores, whose nickname was “Lola,” both grew up in the tiny ranching village of San Juan del Salado in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí.

Pete de Jong, 93

July 15

For 70 years, the de Jong name has been associated with Hollandia Dairy in San Marcos. But for its co-founder, he preferred to be remembered for something else.

Jeanne de Haan, the eldest of de Jong ’s seven children, said her father’s true calling was sharing his Christian faith with others.

For more than a half-century, de Jong handled administrative, marketing and public relations work for the company. Although he retired in 2006, he still attended board meetings as recently as last fall.

De Jong served as president and a longtime member of the San Diego County Farm Bureau, was an elder in the Escondido United Reformed Church and served on the boards of Calvin Christian School and the Westminster Seminary. He served on the Christian Business Men’s Committee, the Oceanside Servicemen’s Center and Wednesday Night Evangelism.

Dave Schubert, 77

Aug. 6

A renowned cell biologist and Salk Institute researcher, whose research helped identify chemicals that can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s and related diseases.

In his more than five decades of work at Salk, Schubert became known for the development of novel screening techniques that allowed his team to identify naturally occurring chemicals that can slow or prevent the neurological damage that occurs in neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Rita O’Neil, 97

Aug. 17

She went into nursing right out of high school, expecting she would work in a hospital treating older people for the diseases of aging. Instead she wound up treating young people torn apart by bullets and bombs.

She spent months during World War II on a hospital train in Europe, where it sometimes fell to her to tell the injured they were about to lose a limb to amputation. She talked suicidal soldiers out of leaping from the moving cars.

She worked as a psychiatric nurse for San Diego County for about 15 years. She was also active with park and recreation planners in the community. She enjoyed swimming in the ocean and competed in the annual La Jolla Rough Water Swim well into her 70s.

Raj Barathur, 71

Aug. 20

He was the CEO of Escondidobased Cymbiotics Biopharma.

Barathur was a serial entrepreneur who co-founded several diagnostic genetic research organizations in California over the past 30 years. He also co-wrote the “The Black Book on Genetics,” published over 30 scientific articles and held four patents for topical compositions that helped the delivery of drugs through the skin of patients with diseases such as eczema and psoriasis.

Consuelo ‘Connie’ Puente Miller, 94

Aug. 29

She may be best known to San Diegans for the El Fandango Restaurant she owned and operated in Old Town for 30 years. But to her friends and family, she was beloved for her tireless support of local Mexican and Chicano communities and causes.

She was involved in the revitalization of Old Town in the 1980s, served as president of the Chicano Democratic Club, traveled frequently to Mexico with the Flying Samaritans and was an early supporter of local organizations such as Border Angels, House of Mexico and Centro Cultural de la Raza.

She was also an entrepreneur and a registered nurse. But her friend of 40 years, Rosalia Salinas, said Puente Miller’s guiding principle was honoring her Latina heritage.

“She was very strong in her sense of her Chicano and Mexican identity. That was really her hallmark. She wanted the community to feel as much pride as she did.”

David ‘Smokey’ Gaines, 80

Sept. 5

He was the San Diego State basketball coach from 1979 to 1987 and the first Black man to hold that position at an NCAA Division I program in California.

He was also a Harlem Globetrotter, an ABA basketball player, an NBA scout, an athletic director, a nightclub owner, a real estate investor, a comedian, a promoter and a single-digit handicap golfer.

Manuel ‘Memo’ Cavada, 76

Oct. 3

He was a photographer who could always be found carrying a camera around some of the most prominent Latino events in San Diego.

He operated a photo studio for more than 45 years, taught photography at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, advocated for alcohol-abuse prevention programs for youths, volunteered for countless organizations and served as the resident photographer at Sweetwater High School for more than three decades.

He captured the history of San Diego’s Latino community. He was often photographing events for Latino-led organizations and chambers of commerce. He also worked on a project documenting Mexico’s culture through a 10-year backpacking journey in the country.

Mario Molina, 77

Oct. 7

He was a UC San Diego researcher who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for helping discover that a class of household chemicals known as CFCs was destroying Earth’s ozone layer.

His work helped lead to the Montreal Protocol, a landmark treaty aimed at repairing damage to the atmosphere. He split his time between Mexico City and UC San Diego, where he joined the faculty in 2004, providing a boost to a school that was already a world power in atmospheric science.

“He was like a star around which planets circled,” said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla. “He was an attractor who helped bring a group of great scientists here. He had a sense of gravity, and gravitas.”

Jack White, 81

Oct. 30

He was one of San Diego’s most popular and enduring television news anchors from the late 1960s to the early 2000s.

He worked as a reporter and news anchor for nearly 35 years at KGTV’s Channel 10 News.

To viewers, White was the well-groomed and unflappable professional who could cover everything from a plane crash to a telethon to where to find the best bowl of chili in town.

To Channel 10 colleagues and friends, White was a kind man, an egoless mentor and a positive thinker whose spirits never f lagged, even after he was paralyzed from the waist down by a stroke in 2009.

JW August, a TV producer and editor who worked at Channel 10 from 1981 until White’s retirement in 2002, said that every time they went out together to shoot a live or taped segment, fans would approach White to shake his hand.

“He was the face of the news in town,” August said. “He was our lead anchor and he was a part of everyone’s lives.”

Clay Stefanki, 33

Nov. 5

He was an actor, singer and dancer known for his talent and his total commitment to the roles he played onstage at many San Diego County theaters.

Stanley Cohen, longtime stage manager at Moonlight Amphitheatre in Vista, said Stefanki was widely loved in the theater community.

“I could talk about his wonderful talent or how his work ethic was beyond reproach, but Clay was also such a genuinely sweet person, always dependable, conscientious and just a fantastic member of any company.”

Edward ‘Eddie B’ Borysewicz, 81

Nov. 16

He was a cycling coach who worked with riders such as Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong and in his later years with master cyclists in the San Diego area.

He was honored in 2004 with the Father of Modern American Cycling award.

Growing up in Poland, he won two national junior cycling titles but switched to coaching after suffering physical effects from intensive treatments for tuberculosis — which it was later determined he didn’t have.

He eventually moved to the United States and became a coach for U.S. national cycling teams. His team with LeMond, then a relative unknown, won the 1978 Junior World Championships in Washington, D.C., and he led the 1984 Olympic cycling team to nine medals in Los Angeles — the first the team had won since 1912.

Ernest ‘Mel’ Moore Jr., 91 Nov. 17

He was a Navy pilot who spent almost six years at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.” He was tortured and kept for months at a time in solitary confinement.

“They broke us again and again,” he said in an interview 18 months ago with oral historian Joe Ditler. “No words can describe that torture, or the pain we endured or succumbed to.”

Moore was released as part of Operation Homecoming on March 4, 1973. He was flown to Miramar Naval Air Station, where his family was waiting.

He stayed in the Navy for another five years, including a stint as commanding officer of the amphibious assault ship New Orleans, before retiring on Dec. 31, 1978.

In retirement, he developed a fascination for collectibles — antique marbles, cameos, Chinese snuff bottles — and was a voracious reader. “Right to the end, he was so interested in people, in history, in the decorative arts,” said his daughter, Michelle Moore. “In life, really.”

The Standard & Poor’s 500 inched up 0.1 percent, recovering some of its losses from a day earlier. It’s hovering within 0.1 percent of the record high it set on Monday. The Dow closed just above its own all-time high from Monday. Story, C4