Tom Blair: Forbes examines San Diego media

Tom Blair is an SDNN columnist.

ON THE SPOT: Chris Van Gorder is either in the right place at the right time, or he’s jinxed. The Scripps Health CEO was on a business flight to Atlanta last Friday when flight attendants issued an urgent page for a doctor. Van Gorder, a licensed emergency medical technician, came forward to take vital signs and administer oxygen to a passenger who’d fainted. By the time the plane landed, the patient was stabilized. But then, that’s routine stuff for Van Gorder. Earlier in June, he came to the aid of another passenger who’d passed out on a flight to Chicago. And last year, he helped save the life of San Diego civic leader Bob Payne, who suffered cardiac arrest while delivering the eulogy for a friend at a La Jolla church.

SAN DIEGO SHUFFLE: Tim Allen and George Lopez are scheduled to be in San Diego this summer for filming on Amigos, a movie comedy from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures. All about a pair of mismatched in-laws who find themselves with joint custody of their grandson and have to raise him together. Sounds like parenting, not comedy

. . . California homes take 5 of the 10 spots in “The Top Ten Real Estate Deals” Web site’s picks for coolest beach homes. In at No. 7:  a 9,320-square-foot modern manse on La Jolla Shore’s El Paseo Grande. Who could resist the $7 million savings–$18.8 million, marked down from $25.95 million? . . . On the subject of lists: Sempra Energy will be recognized by Black Enterprise magazine in its July issue as one of the “40 Best Companies for Diversity.” The list was pared down from 1,000 publicly traded U.S. companies and 50 global companies.

GOOD OLD DAYS: Bobbi Klelt, who may have a memory even longer than mine, checked in to say how much she enjoyed my reminiscence a few weeks back about the 1984 Padres and their World Series season. “We were living in Tierrasanta,” she says, “and when Steve Garvey hit his homer in the bottom of the 9^th against the Cubs to win the pennant, my teenage son Chris and I jumped in our car and sped to Jack Murphy Stadium.” They was fourth in line to buy tickets for the Series against the Detroit Tigers-and she recalls paying all of $25 apiece for two seats-”a stretch for us in those days,” says Klelt, whose loyalty to the Padres goes back a lot farther than that. She was once a personal secretary to team owner C. Arnholt Smith. And when Smith’s financial empire was collapsing in the early 1970s, and he had to sell the team, she was privy to the negotiations. Smith and Ray Kroc, who made his fortune selling hamburgers cheap at his McDonald’s chain, met over very a long lunch at the upscale Westgate Hotel. When the deal was finally sealed, Klelt says, Kroc had just one more question: “The price includes the bats and balls, right?”

OUTSIDE IN: The July13 issue of Forbes magazine is out with an inside look at San Diego’s new paradigm for daily news: “As a monopoly newspaper crumbles, unorthodox upstarts storm the marketplace. Welcome to the future of journalism,” says Forbes.  Comparing and contrasting the new San Diego News Network’s SDNN.com, VoiceofSanDiego.com and The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Web site SignonSanDiego.com, Forbes says, “If you want a glimpse of what local news may soon look like, head to San Diego. . . . All three are vying for the attention of 3 million San Diegans, an affluent population living in neatly landscaped suburbs and large beachfront properties.”

Tom Blair is an SDNN columnist.

Tags: 1984, Forbes, george lopez, Padres, ray kroc, scripps health, SDNN, steve garvey, tim allen

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