Employees, band members, business associates, local boozers.
and former lovers gather in front of Winston’s after the funeral

(Originally published in the San Diego Reader 06/07/01)

“He turned a little rat hole into one of the most popular clubs in San Diego,” says sound engineer Brad Engstrom about Bill Winston, his former boss. Winston is the notorious entrepreneur who conceived, owned, and operated Winston’s Beach Club
in Ocean Beach. His other notable achievements include: Winston’s East (a now defunct club in Santee), Rumors (a coffee house/music venue on the corner of Newport Ave. and Bacon Street, The Sunset Cliffs Wellness Center , and furnished a respectable underdog candidacy for Congress in 1992.

In the early hours of April 4 — just after Winston was released from a two-week stint in jail — he headed directly to the nearest fix he could find. Despite all his hard work and good fortune, Bill Winston died of a heroin overdose at the age of 45.

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“Of all the bands who came through here says Doug Schultz, the former Director of Operations at 4th and B. “It was the guys in Ratt who had the biggest egos.”

Schultz, also known as “Dutch” is the only employee who has worked at 4th and B from its very first concert (Crosby, Stills and Nash) until it was recently acquired by House of Blues in August.

“I was first hired as a security guard. My job was the artist dressing room door. One year later I became Assistant Manager to Billy Bob (Bill Buhrkuhl). When Billy would go out on doctor related leaves, I would run the club . . . . Eventually I became responsible for all aspects of the business during the events.”

4th and B opened for business in 1995. They hosted approximately 1900 shows and almost 2 million people walked through those doors. Through it all there was Dutch. He gave me the rundown of the best and worst of the people, bands and events that rolled through there:

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OK, so it’s Easter Sunday morning, and I’m flipping through the dial desperately searching for something interesting to watch that doesn’t involve creepy old papabiles gesticulating their hands over golden artifacts while chanting something in mumbo-jumbonese. That’s when I tune to the KUSI Morning Show just in time to see journalist Doug Curlee reporting on Easter service at the Cabrillo Monument.
“The message was a simple one,” Curlee said about the Pastor’s sermon. “God’s love is always there waiting for us. We don’t even have to work that hard for it. Just think about that fact.”

Uh oh. Did he really just call God’s love a fact? I had to rewind my DVR to double-check, and, sure as shit don’t shop at Tiffany’s, there was Doug Curlee, a 40-year news veteran confirming the actual, factual existence of Thy Lord, Thy God and also, as matter of actual fact, confirming that Thy Lord, Thy God loves everybody.

How anyone could ever presume to know what is inside God’s mind is, to me, one of the higher mysteries of humanity. But to report this hocus pocus as fact, on a television news program, in the 21st freaking century, a good 30 years after Sidney Lumet gave us Network, and hundreds of years after, you know, reason was invented–well, holy crap, I never realized how pathetic the KUSI news division actually is.

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“… true, [the La Jolla seal rookery] attracts the tourists, but it’s tourists versus children here.”

—Tony Perry, L.A Times’ San Diego bureau chief, on KPBS’ Editors Roundtable

And here we have yet another example of ye olde “For the Children” fallacy.

If you’ve read this column before, you probably know there are few things in this universe I loathe more than when somebody argues from the “For the Children” (FTC) position. And though it seems—given that the Children’s Pool was donated to kids—that this debate might be one of the rare instances when it’s reasonable to make the FTC argument, it most certainly is not. (more…)