North County Times readers met many people with interesting stories in 2003 in our Features sections. We've checked back in with some to see what happened next. For more, see Page X-X.

The wildfires of October and the election of Arnold Schwarzenneger in place of recalled Gov. Gray Davis were the state's top news in 2003, but North County Times readers also met a variety of local residents with their own interesting stories this year.

Defiant congregation suing Catholic diocese

One of the most unlikely stories featured a priest from Peru and his congregation, who defied orders from the Diocese of San Diego and later sued the bishop, an action considered a first in the county.

The Rev. Abel Quispe leads the Centro Guadalupano congregation in Pauma Valley. The Catholic Diocese of San Diego wants to close the small church and move the congregation to Mission San Antonio de Pala, but Quispe, a Peruvian who speaks little English, refuses to leave.

About a month after the Sept. 8 article appeared, Quispe and the congregation filed suit against the diocese and Bishop Robert Brom. The suit claims the diocese libeled Quispe by distributing church fliers advising people not to attend his services because he was not recognized by the bishop, and that his sacraments were not valid. The suit also claims the diocese misappropriated property owned by the parishioners and encouraged discrimination against Quispe.

Since then, diocesan attorneys have filed a demurrer opposing the suit. Genaro Lara, a Centro Guadalupano congregation member and the attorney representing Quispe and the congregation, said he will file a response in late January, and a hearing before a judge is scheduled for Feb. 19.

Among the pivotal issues in the suit is ownership of the property. While congregation members raised money for the chapel more than 30 years ago, the diocese's name is on the deed.

"In my mind, it's illegal because it deprived the people of their land," Lara said. "Their name appears on the title, but what the bishop did on his own was convey all the property to himself. Nobody received any money. No one authorized the bishop to do that. We call that a fraudulent conveyance. That's a crime under RICO."

Rodrigo Valdivia, chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of San Diego, said earlier this year that the diocese ultimately may have to fence off the chapel to keep the congregation from meeting inside.

In the meantime, Lara said Quispe and the congregation are carrying on.

"He's doing OK," Lara said about Quispe. "He has his regular church services. The congregation put a roof over one of the areas, and they have repaired the building and are keeping up with their finances. They're doing OK."

Dog Songs musician redirects career

In June, readers met FedEx truck driver Kirk Olsen of Oceanside, who followed his dream and sank $12,000 into a self-produced CD of songs he wrote about dogs.

"Not a whole lot came of the article, but I did have a couple of radio interviews and I was shown by local television station KOCT," he said. The station still has not aired the piece, but Olsen did get invited to perform at the Carlsbad Village Fair summer series.

Olsen said only four Dog Songs CDs were sold immediately after the article, but the attention has encouraged him to redirect his energy toward his music.

"My wife got a job a couple of months ago, and I asked her if it would be OK if I went part time, and she said yeah," Olsen said.

With the New Year, Olsen has cut back his hours at FedEx to spend more time promoting his CD.

"I'm looking forward to a real big Dog Song year coming up," he said.

Olsen plans to study Internet marketing and Web design to bring more attention to his site, www.DogSongs.net. He's also going to record a new song, "I Got a Dog for Christmas and a Friend for Life," to be included as a bonus track on the CD, which he will re-release this year.

"My overall feeling is there's a place for dog songs," he said. "It's a timeless-type thing."

Giving Groves still growing

In September, the Faith and Values section featured the story of Lisa Luth-Pickard and Giving Groves, a project she started to glean crops that otherwise would be wasted. The food is given to the San Diego Food Bank.

Giving Groves is still growing, Luth-Pickard reports.

"To date, we have picked 13 groves and donated about 30,000 pounds of oranges," she said. Luth-Pickard said she received five more groves to glean after the September article appeared.

"Recently we won a runner-up prize in Dannon Company's Families Feeding America contest," she said. "It allowed us to give $2,000 to the San Diego Food Bank." The prize arrived after the October firestorm, "so the money was well used," she said.

Family still seeks medal for Midway code-breaker

The family of a former Vista man profiled in 2002 for his work in cracking a code that helped the Allies in the World War II battle of Midway is still hoping for a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal.

Jim Lasswell, son of the late Alva Lasswell, said he hopes to travel to Washington, D.C., to research documents that will help confirm the contributions of his father, who died in 1988.

Alva Lasswell is believed to have been on duty at Station Hypo, the Navy's code-breaking operation in Pearl Harbor, when a Japanese transmission was intercepted. That message alerted the Allies that Japan had planned to attack Midway. The tip led to a major defeat for the Japanese.

Seeking the posthumous award has meant dealing with military bureaucracies and gathering decades-old information. With more documents to uncover, Jim Lasswell said he still has to find the time to travel to Washington, D.C., to search through old records that could lead to the medal.

Congregation members transferred, deployed

The deployment of troops to Iraq this year affected the entire nation but was especially noticed in small towns with large military populations.

Grace Baptist Church in Fallbrook felt the effects of war. By April, when the church was featured on the Faith & Values pages, 17 men in the congregation had been sent overseas and two others were awaiting deployment. With one-third of the congregation overseas, Sunday church attendance dropped to 22, the Rev. Jack Hilliard said.

"All of them came back," Hilliard said last week about the deployed congregation members. "But since they've come back, most of them have been transferred to new duty stations."

Among the deployed congregation members was DeQuan Harrison, whose wife, Shavonne, was featured in the North County Times as part the paper's "Home Front" series on homes with family members overseas.

The family was reunited but since has moved to North Carolina, where Harrison was transferred.

With the congregation down during the war, Hilliard initiated a military-themed recruitment drive complete with dog tags and "executive orders" for congregation members to "invade" neighborhoods and drum up recruits. But the effort did not have a lasting effect on the congregation numbers.

"This is kind of a revolving ministry," Hilliard said. "We gain some, we lose some. We never seem to get ahead."

Not all of the congregation members who returned from Iraq were transferred to other cities, but Hilliard said those who stayed are preparing to return to Iraq.

Marines who were transferred to Camp Pendleton this year did add some new members to the congregation, but some of those are preparing to leave for Iraq, too, he said.

Surfing legend rides wave of new career

In May, the North County Times profiled surfer Linda Benson, a national champion as a teenager in 1959 and a dominant competitor throughout the 1960s.

The Encinitas native retired from competition in the 1970s but surfed in exotic locations around the world through her career as a flight attendant.

When she retired to Valley Center this year, Benson started SurfHer Surfing School for girls and women. She estimates between 100 and 150 students have gone through her school since June.

"I didn't think I'd have that many," she said, explaining that students began signing up for competing schools in January.

Switching from working as a flight attendant to running her own business was a new experience for Benson.

"There's lot to learn about the business," she said. "You can visualize everything, but when you get down to it, it takes a hands-on thing to really learn."

While new to the business, Benson said she thinks she may have gotten some customers because she was older than other instructors.

"I think because I'm a little bit older, I get a lot of people who probably wouldn't otherwise make a phone call" to a surfing school, she said. "I think they feel comfortable. I've had grandmothers taking lessons with granddaughters."

Despite the school's name, Benson also has taught boys and some dads who wanted to learn with their daughters.

Although Benson was routinely invited to surf classics and well-recognized for her career, which included surfing as a stand-in for Gidget in movies, she didn't get much media attention until last year.

After the North County Times article, Benson was featured in the San Diego Reader and in the national publications Travel Leisure Family magazine and Longboard Magazine.

"It's going very nicely," she said. "I'm having a great time planning next year's curriculum. But what I've really enjoyed is seeing people who really want to surf have a chance to live the dream."

Historic cemetery to get regular maintenance

In recognition of Veterans Day in November, the North County Times reported on Oceanview Cemetery, where veterans from as far back as the Civil War are buried.

Kristi Hawthorne of the Oceanside Historical Society was frustrated that the cemetery was in poor shape.

Girl Scouts and other volunteers cleaned the cemetery in the 1300 block of South Coast Highway in Oceanside before Veterans Day, but maintenance was minimal. The graveyard is owned by Eternal Hills Memorial Park in Oceanside, but when contacted in November, Eternal Hills General Manager Debra Kurtz said she thought it was owned by the city.

At the time, Kurtz said she wanted to fulfill any responsibility the Memorial Park had for the 1894 cemetery. Hawthorne said Kurtz is keeping her word.

"That lady really got on top of things," Hawthorne said. "Some great things have happened. This lady has been really, really super-nice and concerned about the cemetery. That article really put into motion a great and positive thing."

After meetings with Oceanside City Manager Steve Jepsen and City Councilwoman Esther Sanchez, Hawthorne said a maintenance plan is taking shape. The city will trim the trees in the cemetery, and Hawthorne said Eternal Hills agreed to almost everything on a wish list presented to them.

"They're going to paint the gate," Hawthorne said. "They're going to fix the front fence. They're going to put up some new signage. They're going to check the watering system and make sure it's being watered properly. They're going to upright the two headstones that were pushed or fell over. And they're going to start relocating and re-leveling all of the graves that have been covered over and overgrown."

The Oceanside City Council on Wednesday is scheduled to hear a presentation about the cemetery.

The Toy Man continues to heal

Since his profile appeared in the North County Times one year ago, Jeffrey "The Toy Man" Olsen of Vista has raised more toys for local needy and ill children. He's also feeling stronger and more alert himself.

"I'm doing better," said Olsen, 40. "I used to have more of a problem with sleeping disorder. The longer I go, the less I have a sleeping disorder, where I go five to seven days without having sleep. I used to get that all the time, and now I hardly ever get that."

The sleeping disorder he refers to is the lingering effect of anticonvulsive drugs, which he took for years after being misdiagnosed as epileptic in childhood. He took huge doses of medications for years before doctors discovered that he was not epileptic at all, he said. The drugs were too powerful for Olsen to quit immediately, he said, so he had to be weaned from them.

"Each year that goes by, I feel better and better healthwise," he said.

Even before his diagnosis was corrected, Olsen was thinking of others less fortunate. He began the Christmas Toy Drive for Disadvantaged Children 15 years ago to benefit various North County agencies.

The program usually brings toys to 2,000 to 3,000 children who are either needy or terminally ill. Toys were distributed earlier than normal last year because Olsen included families who had lost their homes or were displaced by the October wildfires.

"On the third day of the fire, we were going to Valley Center," he said. "We brought bags and bags and toys to help kids feel more at ease."

In 2003, Olsen received a Hope Award from Tri-City Hospital, which came with a $1,000 check to buy more toys. Among his other donations last year were $1,000 from Wells Fargo and $500 from J.C. Penney, his employer, which also donated 10,000 chocolate bars and $4,000 in toys. Drop-off boxes in the store brought in another $3,000 in toys.

"I ended up with $40,000 in toys this year," he said. "Last year was $32,500. Next year my goal is to try to get $45,000 in toys."

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at (760) 740-5410 or gwarth@nctimes.com.