My summer in Half Moon Bay

The unfathomable violence of a madman confounds memories of peace

I’m thinking of the summer I spent in Half Moon Bay.

I didn’t ever live there, but in 1988, I commuted from my temporary apartment in Stanford’s Escondido Village through the hills traversed by Highway 92 to my summer internship at the Half Moon Bay Review and Pescadero Pebble, as it was known then.

I had spent three years at Stanford and written a total of zero news stories, but for two months, I would be a haircut-challenged general assignment reporter at a newspaper that had a publisher, an editor-in-chief and one other full-time journalist.

Typically, I arrived in the mornings (very different from sports department hours) with no idea what I would be writing that day, except for a light drumbeat of features on members of the community.

Half Moon Bay was a small town, a quiet town, an escape that felt more residential than tourist trap. Most of my midday meals were the lunch special at Round Table Pizza, and I don’t think that I ever saw anything happening any time I walked there. This wasn’t Mayberry in that idiosyncratically placid way. It was just … placid.

To whatever extent citizenry had any latent hostility, at least in my experience, it would be unleashed in assembly halls over condo developments or fishing regulations.

One time, there was an uproar — a Page 1, banner-headline uproar. Half Moon Bay’s preeminent event — the biggest mass attraction of the year — was the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. And it was Jon Weisman who broke the news: