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National Geographic : 1989 Aug
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fool them by turning on special greenhouse lights for 15 minutes an hour during the middle of each night from September to May. They need a longer night to bud and flower." L THOUSANDS of adopted San Diegans, I was in Navy uniform when I first saw the city. It was 1944, and camouflage covered the Consolidated-Vultee Air craft Company, where B-24 Liberator bomb ers rolled off assembly lines. San Diego was a city of fewer than 300,000 then, swollen by the coming and going of what seemed like a mil lion sailors and marines. "San Diego has never been afraid to be called a Navy town," says Rear Adm. John W. Adams, who oversees San Diego's vast complex of Navy and Marine Corps bases. The military is a mainstay of the economy. Some 140,000 military people are on active duty in San Diego, and about 40,000 have re tired here. They receive close to four billion dollars in pay and retirement benefits each year. San Diego is home port for a hundred Navy vessels-among them cruisers, nuclear submarines, and the aircraft carriers Ranger, Constellation, and Independence, each a wa terborne community of 5,000 people. These ships patrol waters as distant as the Indian Ocean off eastern Africa. In addition some 700 military aircraft are based in San Diego. One night I watched young Navy pilots practice landings on the San Diego - Where Two CaliforniasMeet MARRIAGE OFCONVENIENCE, the relation ship between the two largestcities on the U. S. - Mexico borderis nurtured by meetings between San Diego MayorMau reen O'Connorand FedericoValdes Marti nez, her Tijuanacounterpart.About half of Tijuana's450 or so maquitadoras foreign-ownedfactories, like Sanyo's TV assembly plant (top)-have offices in San Diego County. Disparitiesin wealth be tween the two cities can hardlyfail to cre ate tensions. Foryears now, raw sewage from Tijuanahas been polluting the waters off ImperialBeach. 193
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