Oh, What a Year It Was

A look back on 2024 in words and pictures

Happy New Year!

Congratulations to us all. We made it another year. Let’s do it again.

The coming of a new year is a traditional time for looking back and looking forward, and today and next week we’re going to do a whole bunch of the former.

We have so many good photos to share from 2024 that we decided to chop up our year-end review into two parts, covering the first six months today and then finishing the second half of the year next week.

Even with all that, we had to leave some of our favorites out.

Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we? This column debuted in January 2024 under a different name. I struggled a little to find the right editorial approach until something happened early in the year, something shocking and sad.

Steve Glazer, seen here with a friend’s daughter at her birthday party, died in his truck outside his home in Homewood on the shores of Lake Tahoe, California, just shy of his 71st birthday. He was a friend of many, including me, and the piece I wrote about him, A Few of Steve’s Favorite Things, seemed to strike a chord among those who mourned his passing.

Just the other day, Clint Spesert talked about Steve in an email he sent to me. I’ve known Clint for many years; he and I grew up together. He and Steve were good buddies in high school who also saw each other a lot in Tahoe, where they both worked. Glazer ran a water company on the west shore of the lake, while Spesert pursued an equally intriguing occupation: dealing cards and working as a pit boss in the casinos in Tahoe and Reno.

As an aside, Clint hit the jackpot at the 2001 Hayward High class reunion. He went solo and as he puts it, “locked eyes” with a former classmate across the room, Karla Birchfield. He found his way very quickly over to her and things did not slow down from there. He and Karla, a registered nurse who teaches a nursing class at a college in Reno, are now celebrating their 20th year of marriage.

Congrats, you two! That’s a good way to start the new year, with a story like that.

Anyway, back to our mutual friend.

“Your stories about life and experiences of those you have met and interacted with have made me feel much closer to my past and friends from Hayward,” Clint wrote. “I really enjoyed your story about Steve Glazer as he was one of the few I saw regularly. We’d get together and play golf and afterwards spend a few hours over dinner talking about all the things old friends talk about.”

Steve died in March, and not long after that I changed the name of this column to Tilting West. The response to his piece gave me the confidence to write more personally, focus more on the places I love, California and the American West, and describe some of the things I was seeing and experiencing while out on the road, such as this flash of celestial fire in the night skies above San Diego—

Not a comet with a glowing tail, nor an alien spaceship, nor a mysterious drone, it was a Space X rocket launch that took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base located up the coast near Santa Barbara. Its mission was to release mini-satellites on behalf of Starlink. Both Starlink and Space X are Elon Musk companies.

This spectacular sight occurred on the same Southwest trip in which, just by happenstance, I caught another rare and amazing look at a different world: endangered California condors, in the wild, having a family picnic under the Navajo Bridge on the Colorado River.

Thanks to a friendly Peregrine Fund field biologist who was observing the condors from the bridge, I was able to peer through his spotting scope and see what could not be seen with the naked eye: those giant, almost prehistoric-looking and very shy black birds.

April’s Tracking the Wild Condors of Grand Canyon Country became a widely viewed piece, as did a series of three articles in which I dug deep into boyhood trauma and told the story of the 1971 Hayward High Tournament of Champions basketball team, of which I was a part—

The seniors on that team: Rear from left, Joe Rucker, Kevin Nelson, Jay Hughes. Front from left, Calvin Goward, Donnie Schroer, Mark Cooley.

Adam Bellow, Saul’s son and a writer himself, said that the best use of writing is personal. This was certainly the case for me here. Writing this series, which began in late April with The Public School Boys of Hayward, allowed me to wrestle down some old ghosts that have haunted me my whole life.

The head coach and inspirational leader of that team was Joe Fuccy, who over the years has become a good friend. A Burden Shared is a Burden Lifted, the last piece in the series, focused on him, and it was by far the most popular.

Joe is long retired and lives with his wife Marti in Brentwood. Here he is, at a book party of mine in 2004. That’s my brother Dave Nelson on the left and late family friend Jack Woodruff in the middle.

It’s a tired cliché I suppose, but that doesn’t make it any less true: Friends are one of the great gifts of life.

I am doubly fortunate in that like Clint Spesert, many friends and readers of this column—who become instant friends!—send me emails and texts and make comments in the Comments section about stories that appear here.

One talented friend, Gary Horstkorta, an accomplished automotive writer, has contributed three articles to Tilting West. His first, Cruising Livermore’s Hills on a Ducati Scrambler, debuted in May, followed by first-person tales about a flight he took on an historic World War II aircraft and a top-down road trip with his wife to Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton in his beloved Mazda Miata MX5 GT.

Another talented contributor to the site is a “next level food person” by the name of Jennifer Nelson whose tasty piece, A Food Lover’s First Taste of New Orleans, described a lunchtime feast at a restaurant called Pêche in the Warehouse District of the city.

Beginning, as she wrote, with “three starters: a bowl of earthy, smoky seafood gumbo and a dish of hushpuppies, also called fried bread, and an appetizer of tuna crudo with salted egg, cucumber, cilantro and sesame…”

They were followed by “the shockingly delicious jumbo shrimp entrée with braised eggplant, corn and tomato, and a side of field peas with bacon and green onions that should be in the New Orleans Food Hall of Fame. No such place? Well, there should be.”

“The field peas,” she added, “were a revelation, resembling baby lima beans and not the green English peas we were accustomed to, flavored by bacon that was cured on site. We couldn’t possibly eat dessert after that, but we enjoyed the giant piece key lime pie later that night.”

We introduced various “themed” features in the first half of the year, and when we did readers got into the spirit of the thing and contributed. For “Simple Pleasures Are The Best,” Katie Lynn of Campbell, California confessed that she loves a good nap in the morning while Trevor Croghan, who lives near Seattle, starts his day with a very pleasureful blast of caffeine.

“I'm a grind/pour-over/Chemex guy,” he relates. “The smell and taste of freshly ground, high quality coffee is incredible, but it's the ritual that I love the most. I have two young kids and a demanding job. Being the first one up in my house and going through the steps of my coffee process is a great way to enjoy some stillness and a simple pleasure before the chaos begins."

My confession that I hated my middle name of Lynn gave birth to another feature, “Middle Name Stories.” This in turn prompted other brave readers—Jeff Robert Brinkhaus, Bob Ronald Newlon, and Dennis Richard Carmo, among them—to reveal their middle monickers and admit they weren’t too keen on them either.

Some stories pop up when you least expect it. In a piece in May about hometowns, Thoughts on Finding a Home, I made a passing reference to East Hills Market and thought no more about it.

What did I know? That aside produced a flood of memories from others who had fond recollections of the store, a neighborhood landmark for those who grew up in that part of Hayward in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The market, which is now more or less a fast food place, was owned and operated by brothers Joe and Eddie Jang and their families—

Joe Jang with his family, in the 1960s.

The story about the Jangs resonated in such a way that two readers whose roots are in southern California—Leyna Bernstein, formerly of Laguna Beach, and Dan Crouch, from Santa Paula—said that it reminded them of the neighborhood market and butcher shop where so many people in their communities came together, traded news of the day, and shopped at when they were growing up.

Dan even dug up a 1968 photo from his old high school yearbook of Mitch’s Market, as everyone called it, with owner Mitch Yamamoto and his son Dean Yamamoto. “Mitch Yamamoto was famous in Santa Paula for his community involvement and generosity,” wrote Dan. “A lot of Santa Paulans remember Mitch and his family—truly remarkable people.”

Next week we’ll finish up our journey backward into the past and peer into our crystal ball to see what 2025 might bring for Tilting West. As always thank you for reading, subscribing, and for being a friend of this column.