- Kurt Brown

When I went to the San Bernardino Arena for the first time in 1979, it looked like something that had traveled from a past era, shot through 1979’s portal, and plopped itself curbside in a growing industrial neighborhood. In actuality, the tiny 1,600 seat arena had stood there since the 1930s, and managed to stand up straight while all its surrounding neighbors fell to bulldozers and wrecking balls. The demolished buildings were replaced with industrial strip malls, scrap yards and 7-11s, and even some of those newbies were flattened while the creaky old San Bernardino Arena held tight. 

I was seventeen. On Sunday nights, my pal Sean Dubee and I would make the trek from our snooty Sunny Hills suburb in Fullerton to the arid but energetic city of San Bernardino. Somehow we managed to boost my Dad’s clunky ‘63 Comet to seventy-miles-per on the freeway, blaring Tom Waits and Rocky Horror tunes, downing McDonalds and swigging Slurpees, and the car dutifully rattled and chugged through numerous half-baked desert communities with billboards touting local bingo halls and bowling alleys.