Mount Soledad

60-plus years of doing phenomenal things for people living in San Diego County, uh, whether it's financial literacy, it's working with the homeless, Alzheimer's, food insecurity, arts, uh, these folks, if it's a big cause, you know, they're gonna be there with you shoulder-to-shoulder.

Always a great day when our very cool and critically important, uh, friends from Mount Soledad National Veterans Memorial are in the house.

And Neil O'Connell, executive director, is with his colleague Trevor Westman-Lavelle, marketing and communications director.

Always great to see, uh, you two, Neil and Trevor.

Um, says a lot about both of you and the cultures that you, uh, emit from, uh, the, you know, memorial is, is terrific.

But Neil, let's, uh, y- get right to the mission of, uh, what you folks do.

Well, w- we're looking at about 72 years of honoring, preserving the legacy of our veterans, honor above all, at the beautiful, uh, top of the hill at Mount Soledad in La Jolla, California, overlooking our beautiful city.

And the way we do, do this is through our beautiful 18 walls with over 7,800 plaques that tell the story of men and women who have served our country, uh, from every generation.

And I don't even know if insurance covers it.

if you live at the beach like insurance does not cover a landslide and I know that personally from having been up lived up on Mount Soledad where we had where we had a slide up there so you may be thinking I saw a lot of comments over the weekend from people that were like oh you know what this is what happens when you live at the beach like no sympathy for anybody you know this is I've lived in San Diego for many many years I've never seen anything like this have you seen anything like that what we've seen up in in Long Beach I mean, in the past

there has been some crazy stuff along the shore, but not recently.

So this makes me scared with the El Nino stuff that's coming.

Wow.

And I remember he was living near our house or whatever, and he drove this car down the Mount Soledad mountain, and it weighed more than this whole restaurant, and it-

[laughs]

The brakes went out.

Oh, we'll get, we'll get to that.

Mount Soledad.

Uh, no, Soledad was, was the first day, was, was Wednesday.

Um, that's one with the memorials.

No, the one, the one with the lighthouse that we went up to.

So by the time, you know, Chris picked us up at the airport and we started kind of all looking together, "Okay, where do, where do we wanna start?" Chris was like, "Well, how about with the webcam? [laughs]" I'm like, "How about that? [laughs] Sounds good." Oh, yeah, and so I see you're scrolling through some pictures.

You had the...

You got Mount Soledad coming up there.

I just finished up my college education, uh, getting a suntan, looking for suntan women.

Uh, I mean, life was great, you know? And, um, in addition to selling t-shirts, I was also doing a bit of painting and, uh, I was riding a motorcycle down to Mount Soledad here in La Jolla.

big steep grade and I'm coming around the corner and I get plowed over.

And, you know, I grew up in socialized medicine.

... th- there are so many cool things, it's really hard to say.

Um, um, Mount Soledad has been my favorite places in San Diego, which is La Jolla area.

Uh, was that the memorial? Uh-

Yes, I know.

So there's 40 different areas in San Diego County that are what we call Hall of Fame areas.

Okay.

And so, like, if you go to Mount Soledad, or not Mount Soledad.

Example, Mount, uh, Woodson, where the, uh, potato chip rock is, that's a famous sort of rock that's a real thin little thing that looks like-