San Bernardino

San Bernardino is a city located in the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area (sometimes called the "Inland Empire"). It serves as the county seat of San Bernardino County, California, United States. As one of the Inland Empire's anchor cities, San Bernardino spans 81 square miles (210 km2) on the floor of the San Bernardino Valley and has a population of 209,924 as of the 2010 census. San Bernardino is the 17th-largest city in California and the 100th-largest city in the United States. San Bernardino is home to numerous diplomatic missions for the Inland Empire, being one of four cities in California with numerous consulates (the other three being Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco). The governments of Guatemala and Mexico have established their consulates in the downtown area of the city.

Links To Peel
In 1966, Peel along with his wife, Shirley Anne Milburn, moved from Oklahoma City to San Bernadino, where he worked for radio station KMEN. In Dallas and Oklahoma, John had relunctantly stuck to the playlist, playing popular tracks for screaming teeny boppers and Beatles fans. But at KMEN, he began to act like the broadcaster that British audiences would become familiar with, playing pretty much whatever he liked. San Bernadino's location helped; John was only 60 miles east of Los Angeles - an ideal location to check out gigs and hanging out with bands. He also discovered a band close to San Bernadino in the nearby town of Riverside, called the Misunderstood, who he supported even to the extent of inviting them to stay at his mother's house in London in 1967.

Peel's length in San Bernadino was shortened when he came under suspicion as an Englishman who displayed hippyish tendencies. The local sheriff's department pursued him and he was accused of drug use and of having sex with under-age girls (the Californian "groupies" of the time were often very young). Under pressure from these allegations, Peel decided to return to the UK - an abrupt end to his US career - taking the time out to permanently borrow a copy of the Turtles LP It Ain't Me Babe from the KMEN library (12 October 1999). (He may have left this, together with most of his record collection behind, in his haste to get out of California; in a 1969 Top Gear he mentions that he was due to be reunited with the collection, which was being held in Customs.) Peel later described the situation which led him to leave San Bernardino in a letter to International Times. The exact date of his departure is not known, but he was still contributing a column on the British pop scene to the KMEN station newspaper on 28 January 1967. He is still listed as host of the 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. show, so he may have compiled the column from reports he had read in the British pop weeklies. The last issue of the KMENtertainer in which he appears is dated 18 February 1967; later issues no longer include the British top ten. On his return to the UK Peel began the next stage of his career, as a DJ on the pirate ship Radio London, in early March.