Column: From giant pandas to big-hearted readers, retiring columnist says thanks for the San Diego memories

Hello, and welcome to my goodbye column. I’m not crying! You’re crying! Oh, wait. It’s me. It’s definitely me.

After 37 years, I am retiring from the job that I have been doing for more than half of my life. This is one of the last columns I will be writing for the San Diego Union-Tribune, and believe me when I tell you that I never thought there would be a first. Mostly because there was no way I was going to live here.

I began my career at the San Diego Union in March of 1985, but my relationship with this city dates back to the hot August day in 1977 when I started my freshman year at San Diego State University. The day this small-town bookworm looked around the massive campus just off the roaring Interstate 8, the campus whose student population was almost as big as her hometown’s, and said to herself, “Well, this was a mistake.”

Oh, Karla. So young, yet so fatalistic.

As it turned out, the big, intimidating campus was the place I found the opinionated Daily Aztec journalists and music-obsessed KCR disc-jockeys who would become my friends. It was also the place that nurtured the writing passion that became my career. And the sprawling, freeway-centric town that I was pretty sure would have no room for a small fry like me?

It became home.

According to our newspaper database, I have racked up more than 5,000 bylines since 1985. Some of them were attached to big stories, like the #MeToo-prescient Bob Filner scandal and the 2015 drought. Some were in the service of the small stuff. Kitten kindergarten at the San Diego Humane Society. A grease-stained round-up of Del Mar Fair food. The Cardiff Kook’s many costume changes.

Some were about small things that were actually big things. New condor chicks hatching at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. Middle-schoolers minding their manners at Mr. Benjamin’s Cotillion. Ricochet the surf-therapy dog healing all kinds of wounds, one wave at a time.

But what they all had in common — the silly stories, the think pieces, the three-hankie columns — was that they were slices of San Diego life, in all of its rich, often-underestimated glory.

My young snap-judgment self was wrong about San Diego being too big to navigate and too amorphous to ever understand. And thanks to nearly four decades of priceless people, grant adventures and passionate readers, I have had the time of my life finding out just how wrong I was.

My first regular byline was on the Public Eye column, a daily round-up of entertainment news and gossip, along with bits of local color. And as I shared my snarky twentysomething opinions on Michael Jackson’s exploits, the scourge of yuppies and all things “Moonlighting,” I also learned that there were a lot of good sports out there in Reader Land.

For example, remember “Amerika,” the 1987 ABC miniseries about life in the United States after a bloodless takeover by the Soviet Union? Me, neither. But I do remember the enthusiastic write-in response to my Pub Eye query, “Would you rather watch ‘Amerika’ or clean out the cat box?” You voted overwhelmingly for Team Kitty Litter, but I felt like the biggest winner of all because when I put out the call to join me in some pop-culture eye-rolling, you were there.

You have always been there.

That was certainly true as I moved into writing features and columns aimed at the San Diego zeitgeist. There were serious stories marking the deaths of such longtime local media figures as veteran disc-jockey Steve West, KPBS pioneer Gloria Penner and TV newsman Larry Himmel,each loss bringing a flood of memories from readers who had made them a part of their lives.

There was the global mourning over the loss of Nola, the San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s endangered northern white rhino, whose death in 2015 reduced the world’s total population of northern white rhinos to three. (It is now down to two.) Nola belonged to animal lovers everywhere, but she lived with us.

There were commiserating columns about the shuttering of the beloved Ken Cinema, the end of Tower Records and Borders Books and Music, and the final days of free parking at the Horton Plaza mall. Back when there was a Horton Plaza mall.

There was the emotionally draining process of breaking up with the Chargers, which had all the mood-swinging drama of a Taylor Swift song but took its sweet time getting to the part where we made peace with never, ever, ever getting back together.

Then came the pandemic, and the spirit-lifting stories that emerged from the quarantine fog.

The outpouring of support for our independent bookstores. The super-human efforts of libraries, community groups and arts organizations to provide shut-in San Diegans with story-times, Zoom guitar lessons and sustaining food deliveries. The generous folks who donated what they could, from books and art supplies to canned goods and ukuleles.

Sometimes our losses were heartbreaking. Sometimes they were bittersweet. Sometimes, they were civic versions of the paper cut. Irritating today, mostly forgotten about tomorrow. But when we went through them together, we created a little safe space for crying, reminiscing or venting. We weren’t always OK, but we were never alone.

And then there were the seriously great times when I had the good fortune of celebrating in print the people, places and rituals that make San Diegans love San Diego.

Holiday ice-skating by the sea at the Hotel del Coronado. Ziplining at the San Diego Safari Park. Whale-watching, grunion-running and tidepool-exploring with the experts at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps. The sonorous voice and gravity-defying hair of night-club hypnotist Dr. Michael Dean. The remarkable parenting skills of Bai Yun, the San Diego Zoo’s prolific giant panda mother.

Comic-Con fan-demonium. Pannikin coffee. Mira Mesa on the Fourth of July. The Del Mar Fair before the crowds descend. Balboa Park any time.

I arrived in San Diego as an overwhelmed 18-year-old with a stomach full of butterflies and one foot out the door. I leave The San Diego Union-Tribune as an eternally grateful 63-year-old who will always be all in for this city, this newspaper and its readers. Thank you for taking the time to send me a kind email or bless me with the perfect quote. Most of all, thank you for giving me awesome stories to write just by being your amazing selves.

It’s been a privilege and a pleasure, San Diego. Now, could you do me one last solid and pass the Kleenex?

Karla Peterson’s review of the highlights from her years on the entertainment beat runs in Sunday’s Arts+Culture section.