STORIES OF THE PAST

50 years ago

Brawley High School’s Wildcats, with a 7-2 record, battle Eisenhower’s Eagles of Rialto, near San Bernardino (5-2-2), in a Class AA first round pairing of the Southern CIF football playoffs tonight at 8 at Brawley’s Warne Field.

Coach Hal McNaughton’s Wildcats won the Imperial Valley League title by beating Central High in their final game for a 5-1 loop mark. The Wildcats depend on offensive power to win games.

The Eagles play a defensive game. Eisenhower opponents in Ivy League games scored only 19 points this year. The Ivy League champion Eagles had a 5-0-2 loop record.

40 years ago

Services are pending for Elmer W. Heald, a retired Superior Court judge for Imperial County, who died this morning in the Beverly Manor Convalescent Hospital in Escondido at the age of 90.

Heald came to the Valley in December 1919 and was elected district attorney for the county in 1926. He held that position for 17 years, until elevated to the Superior Court bench by Gov. Earl Warren in 1943.

Heald served on the bench until his retirement in 1962 and continued to hear cases after his official retirement.

30 years ago

Traveling motorists who have ever been in a disabled car — or ever been stranded, frightened and watched other drivers whiz past, or had suspicious characters stop to help — may be interested in some protection the El Centro Police Department has to offer.

It’s an emergency police signal banner bearing in large letters, “Please Call Police.”

Made of thick plastic, white and fluorescent orange in color and smaller than a driver’s windshield, it folds up for glove compartment storage.

The banner is placed on the inside rear window by peeling double-sided corner tapes. The driver can lock the doors and wait, windows rolled up, until help arrives. The banner is designed to discourage would-be robbers, rapists and kidnappers who see that police have been called.

20 years ago

CALEXICO — Relief best describes the reaction at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley campus, this morning to the abandonment of a plan to deny federally funded college financial aid to legal immigrants.

“This is great news,” Erendira Cruz, 28, of Calexico said this morning after hearing the plan had been nixed last week.

The proposal by Republicans in Congress would have affected at least 3,500 legal immigrants attending college in the Imperial Valley.