AV ATHLETICS:
Congratulations to the Boy’s Soccer Team! They took the win Friday night 3-1 against Mendocino!
PANTHER FLAG FOOTBALL
AV Junior High is attempting to start a flag football team - practices will be Monday, Wednesday and Thursday after school as part of the After School Program.
Please contact us if you would like your child to participate. This is open to boys and girls 6-8 grade.
Practices will start Wednesday 9/18
A BOONVILLE FAIRGOER WRITES:
My daughter took her hat off at the fair to go on a ride and somebody stole it from her right here in Boonville. If this hat appears at your house in the near future it's probably the hat that's been stolen from my daughter at the Boonville Fair today. Sad. Please return this hat if you find it. Private message me.
SMALL FIRE ON HOLMES RANCH, Saturday, September 12
First reported 3:30am. Response about 6:45am.
Vegetation Fire, approximately half-acre size, uphill
100-300* Block of Holmes Ranch Road, north of Philo
Fire on the hillside, powerlines down
Power Outage for approximately 18 units.
Fire extinguished before Noon, Saturday.
No reports of damage or injury.
ANDERSON VALLEY CASUAL GRAD GATHERING
Thank you, Palma Toohey for all the hard work you put out to make this event happen. Thank you to everyone who attended, honoring their RSVP and paying their $20 to support the cost of the food and venue. AV Panthers forever and always.
MARY PAT PALMER (Philo School of Herbal Energetics, Boonville)
My last Gladiola this year. They are so very beautiful and long lasting. Someone said they disliked them because they are funeral flowers. I'm pretty sure they were thinking of Calla Lillies. At any rate, I don't think I've ever met a flower I didn't like.
TRISH HOWARD-DEUBLER
Hello neighbors we have lived in Albion now for 2 years and come to know our neighborhood very well. Some have met our son JJ who is currently in the hospital again and has been here for the last 30 days. We are reaching out to see if you all could donate or share his go fund me as we work towards getting JJ back to home and enjoying the redwoods and beautiful town of Albion again. If you can donate we thank you. If you can share thank you.
JIM ROBERTS
Come Join Us Local’s Thursday Nights~
20% off on any Pinsa share for the table, hospitality workers get a free glass of wine.
We are pivoting on the dinner menu. We will be serving a true Pinsa Romano as our flour blend from Italy is in. The oldest flatbread dough recipe with the combination of wheat, rice and soy flours makes a lower calorie and more digestible crust. Order as an entree or as a shared starter for the table.
Also always expect a 5 hour slow cooked Bolognese or Short Rib Ragu to be on the menu, as well as an Umbrian Style Cacciatora.
Reservations on Tock!
MARIE THE MYSTERY WOMAN was so much the mystery it took some time to even discover her last name. Helme, Marie Helme. Marie was the older lady we recognized instantly in her identifying long black coat who lived in the Mannix Building, once the center of Boonville commerce and, in its day, an intriguing maze of upstairs apartments, in one of which Marie made her home. She and the Mannix Building are long gone, as is most of Anderson Valley’s vivid human tapestry of the 1960s and 70s, but Marie was something of a downtown fixture for more than twenty years, which is a long time in a transient little town in a transient time.
BEFORE Boonville, Marie lived in Ukiah. She was a hot lead typesetter and linotype operator from the old days of newspapers when typesetters plucked each letter of each word out of overhead cases containing all the letters of the alphabet in many typefaces and sizes to make every word that went onto every page of the newspaper when newspapers were composed by hand, one letter at a time.
WHEN the Ukiah paper went from hot lead to cold type technology, Marie moved to Boonville where Homer Mannix continued to produce his paper the old fashioned hot lead way — one letter, one word, one story, one page at a time. Without Marie Helme Homer’s handcrafted weekly would have been impossible, and Marie may well have been the last working hot lead typesetter in California, maybe the last one in the United States.
HOMER MANNIX worked out a deal with Marie where she would live upstairs in his eponymous Mannix Building and work downstairs every Tuesday where Homer’s Advertiser was put together on an antique hot lead linotype machine. On production day, from the service counter up front, you could make out a dim, wraith-like figure moving very fast from task to task amid the ancient wheezing and clanking print machinery. It was Marie in her long, black coat, fingers flying at hummingbird speed, blindly but unerringly plucking letters from their overhead cases, placing them exactly where they had to go to make a word, then a complete story, then a full page of stories.
BOONVILLE OLD TIMERS remember Marie as the thin, spry, tall-ish elderly woman who always wore that long, black dress coat even if it was a hundred degrees outside. Most locals knew she had some sort of function at Homer’s newspaper, although they didn’t know what that function was. And Marie wasn’t talking. The only people still with us who may have exchanged a word or two with this mysterious figure are Bill Mannix, Homer’s nephew, and Kathalene Kephart, Homer Mannix’s daughter.
FOR YEARS Marie, vivid in her inevitable black coat, was part of Boonville’s human panorama, as eccentric as the rambling, pre-code Mannix Building she lived in. She walked like a seabird, a few quick head-down steps, then a few more quick steps with her head up looking fast left and right, then head down again, gingerly but briskly making her way to the Boonville Lodge for her one half-beer a day, or the Horn of Zeese where she took most of her meals. She had no family that anybody knew of, no friends, belonged to no associations, and was never, ever seen at community events. But up close, Marie always looked amused, her eyes twinkling. She got along just fine outside the social ramble.
AT THE BOONVILLE LODGE, infamous on the Northcoast as a fightin’ bar, Marie would linger on her habitual stool at the end of the bar over her late-afternoon Miller’s — special ordered for her in half-bottles, for her only public appearance, but a daily one. Marie was locally famous for continuing to sip her half Miller’s the day a woman was shot to death a few stool’s down by a jealous husband. Marie had looked on impassively at the mayhem, finished up her drink and walked her blackbird’s walk on home to her front bedroom in the Mannix Building, bathroom down the hall. Nothing got in the way of Marie’s one daily beer, and the Lodge in those days could be an extremely distracting establishment, even before nightfall when it might become positively life-threatening.
THE OCCASIONAL afternoon mayhem didn’t seem to bother Marie. She was downing her daily mini-Miller’s the afternoon a little guy broke off a cue stick and stuck it deep in a big guy’s back. The matador ran for his life out the door of the bar right into the middle of 128, pivoted south and kept on running towards Cloverdale, the bull right behind him with the pool cue still sticking out of his back, blood running down into his Levis. Marie would be back the next afternoon right about four. If the venue got a little rough sometimes, so what? There she was at the bar every afternoon except paper day, the day her flying fingers worked their obsolete magic in Homer Mannix’s living history newspaper museum, Boonville, California.
MARIE spent her Boonville life in that austere room in the Mannix Building where she was the beneficiary of many kindnesses from the Mannix family. Homer’s wife Bea gave Marie clothes because Marie always refused the raises Homer tried to give her because she was afraid the extra money would reduce her pension and social security income. Which she hid away, it was said, somewhere in her sparse quarters.
HOMER’S HOT LEAD linotype operator had come to Ukiah from “somewhere back east” to work for the Ukiah Daily Journal until the Journal, and every other daily newspaper in the country, went to new print technologies in the early 1960s. And when Marie’s one-day-a-week job with Homer’s Advertiser ended with the sale of the paper and the technology upgrade that came with the new owners, Marie went on living in her room upstairs over the print shop, went on walking down the pitted margins of the long block from her lonely room to the Horn of Zeese for a bite to eat and, every afternoon, to the Boonville Lodge for her one half-beer.
MIKE MANNIX remembers Marie. “She was about the same age as the old linotype machine. I had the impression that she drank a lot. All week long nobody saw her, but she’d come down on paper night and work her miracle with that cranky old Merganthaler, c. 1898, and make it happen. Things would start sparking and arcing and jamming up, but she never lost her cool. She always wore that long, black coat. Homer would say to me, ‘Just stay away from it. She can make it happen.’ I remember her fingers flying in and out of the type boxes. When something happened, something went wrong, Marie would know just what to do. She didn’t seem to have a life other than those Tuesday production nights. Now that you mention it, she was dark like an Indian, with a sharp-featured, angular face.”
MARIE HAD ALWAYS intrigued me, too, but the one time I’d tried to talk to her in the Lodge she’d said, “Sorry, gotta go,” and got up and went. Someone told me that Marie was an Indian, not that that was a question I would have asked her. But she intrigued me. Who the heck was this person? I was hoping to get to know her a little bit so she’d volunteer some personal bona fides. Nope. Sorry, I gotta go, she’d said, making it clear that she’d be forever on the move if I intruded upon her again.
I KNEW an Indian from Covelo who’d been trained as a hot lead printer in an Indian school in the 1940s. He told me that Mendocino County Indians were frequently taken off to Indian schools up through the 1950s to get them out of their Indian-ness, which the government viewed as incompatible with consumer capitalism. The abductees, my Covelo friend told me, often took advantage of the Indian school’s vocational emphasis on the print technology of the times. I thought maybe Marie had learned her amazing trade at an Indian school.
NOT having seen Marie for some time, I asked Homer Mannix where she had gone. “A nephew came to get her,” Homer said, not elaborating as a man formed in a discreet time.
AND THEN, one of Marie’s nephews called. He’d seen the Marie speculations on the internet where even an old typesetter gets talked about. “Marie,” Mr. Helme began, “was my mother’s sister, an older sister, my aunt. She often visited us when I was a kid. She lived in Grand Rapids and we lived near Lansing. I don’t know how she learned hot lead typesetting. I remember going to stay with her in Grand Rapids when she worked at the Herald there. At that time she was on the night shift at the Grand Rapids paper. We’d sneak in to watch her run the linotype. My uncle had an old linotype at his paper in Weyland, the Weyland Globe, but I don’t think she learned on it.”
BEFORE she’d come west, Marie had suffered a nervous breakdown. She was confined to a mental hospital after running naked through the streets of Grand Rapids. When she’d regained her senses, Marie landed a hot lead job in Ukiah at the Ukiah Daily Journal. When the Journal phased out its hot lead presses, Marie came to Boonville and settled in at Homer Mannix’s Advertiser. She’d been married briefly in Grand Rapids to a man named Dominic Massera, with whom she bought a house and a 1951 Studebaker.
I mentioned that lots of people in Boonville assumed Marie was Native American. She had high cheekbones and, as people used to say in less sensitive times, she was “dark-complected.” And undoubtedly quite attractive as a young woman.
”But we’re Norwegian,” Mr. Helme said, laying to rest ethnic speculation. ”Funny you should say she looked like an Indian. Irvin, Marie’s brother, was a tall thin fellow also mistaken for Native American.”
Marie had left for California after her stay in the mental hospital, and the family had no contact with her. “We always thought she was so ashamed of her breakdown that she just wanted to start new somewhere else. But in Grand Rapids, when we were little kids, and she was our Aunt Marie, we loved Marie. We visited her often and we always got presents from her at Christmas. The presents were certainly surprising. One Christmas she sent us a live goose. Another year we got a cask of apricot liqueur complete with tiny cups. She sent my mother a beautiful tea trolley; another time she sent my mom a mangle, you know, that you use to iron clothes. That thing today would be a collector’s item. If Aunt Marie saw something she liked she’d buy it for us.”
Marie, her family remembers, after her marriage ended, was pretty much a recluse even in Grand Rapids, and she’d always been eccentric. “She had four large wooden crates with doors and hasps,” her nephew recalls, “that she kept right there in the front room of her studio apartment in Grand Rapids. It was always a mystery as to what was in them, and she’d just smile that smile of hers when we asked her.”
The family recalls Marie “taking up” with a man named Harold Steele, a railroad worker. “My mother,” Mr. Helme recalled, “always said he was a bum who only claimed he worked for the railroad, but Marie liked him and he was nice to us kids.”
With the passing of both the hot lead print process and Homer Mannix’s version of the Advertiser, Marie continued to live in the Mannix Building, and still made her way every afternoon to the Boonville Lodge for her one half-bottle of Miller’s, her high-stepping walk more tentative, her black hair gone gray. And then she was gone, and there was a sudden absence in the Boonville tapestry.
Homer Mannix had probably called the Helmes in Michigan. He would have said something like, “Marie is infirm. She really can’t take care of herself anymore. You’d better come out here and get her.” And the Helmes came out and got her, and Marie went home to die on December 16th, 1989. She was 91.
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