STORIES FROM THE PAST
50 years ago
In the California Interscholastic Federation, Southern Section, golf tournament, the league champions advanced into the CIF, SS, tournament, and the top two golfers from each league take part in an individual championship tournament.
El Centro won the Imperial Valley League team championship and thus carries the hopes of local golf fans in the championship tournament.
But how do you decide which of the individual golfers should qualify for the individual tournament? The best way is to hold a golf tournament. That is what the IVL golf coaches decided. They picked their top three players and held a 54 hole tournament with each round played on a different course. The first round was held at the Imperial Valley Country Club golf course, the home of the El Centro Spartans. The second was played at Brawley’s Del Rio Country Club golf course and the final round was played at the International Golf and Country Club at Calexico.
El Centro’s Larry Cowne fired a hot 36 on the back nine at Calexico to come-from-behind to win the tournament by two shots over Calexico’s Frank Garcia.
40 years ago
Imperial County officials today vigorously disputed a San Diego graduate student’s claim that geothermal steam wells may poison the environment with arsenic and other toxic elements.
Public Works Director David Pierson contended the claim that geothermal wells are poisoning the environment is like “the fellow who is still claiming that the world is flat.”
“This guy is going for a doctorate, and he needs something that will get attention. He sure as hell got the media’s attention with this,” Pierson said.
Claims of environmental hazards were issued Wednesday by Meinrat Andreae, a graduate student at Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
30 years ago
Under the newly revised zoning ordinance, adult bookstores, massage parlors and other “adult entertainment establishments will be allowed only in areas zoned for industry and must be more than 1,000 feet from homes, schools and churches in El Centro.
Two of the areas in which they may be located include along Ross Avenue south of the city’s Industrial Park, and the north side of Commercial Avenue from Dogwood Road to Third Street.
The revised zoning ordinance the Planning Commission has been reviewing at public hearings the past three months — most recently this week — includes a section regulating “adult entertainment establishments.”
Included in this definition are: adult arcade, adult bookstore, adult cabaret, adult drive-in, adult mini-motion picture, adult model studio, adult motel, adult motion picture theater, body painting studio, massage parlor, sexual encounter establishment and “any other business which involves specified sexual activities or displays of specified anatomical areas.”