8/16 9:42am An unidentified 46-year old man piloting a white 2001 Dodge Van was arrested, cited and released for driving on a suspended license.

8/16 12:58pm A verbal dispute between a landlord and some tenants caused neighbors to think a fight was about to break out.

8/16 3:01pm Marijuana was found growing near mile­marker 7 off Highway 128 northwest of Navarro.

8/17 8:13pm Deputies stopped a pedestrian on Highway 128 in Philo for a little chat.

8/18 4:36pm A Philo resident spotted a trespasser at the Jim Ball winery in Philo.

8/19 9:32am A Boonville resident complained his medi­cal marijuana had been stolen. (Maybe the thief was in more pain. Ever think of that? Huh?)

8/19 6:36pm A passerby called from the Yorkville Mar­ket to say she thought another transient possessed a sus­piciously large amount of mari…er, medicine.

8/22 6:24pm A Boonville resident reported that his blue 1997 Volvo had been stolen, perhaps by a nostalgic hip­pie, from where he’d parked

it at the AV Market.

8/22 9:11pm A Navarro resident complained that another customer in the area of the Navarro Store was making too much noise.

8/23 12:56am Lance Konrad Fabian, 22, of Comptche, was booked into the Mendocino County Jail for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Fabian

Sporting a jaunty straw boater and pressed white shirt, his beard rivaling that of Uncle Whiskers himself, Bruce seems to have finally found his niche: while the AVA may never rival the New York Times in scope or influ­ence, it remains unquestionably the best newspaper of its kind in America if not the world. And what kind of newspaper is that? Trying to answer that question calls to mind what Bill Graham once said of the Grateful Dead: “It’s not just that they’re the best at what they do; they’re the only ones that do what they do.”

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7944/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/7042 http://theava.com/archives/7042#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:02:44 +0000 Bruce Anderson http://theava.com/?p=7042 You can be seven feet tall and known all over town, but if you die alone and nobody pays the San Francisco newspaper for an obituary even your mother won’t know that you’re gone.

It took almost three weeks for the news of the death of Charles Davis to get back to his mother, and another week to reach Boonville where he’d spent his happiest days.

Long before he was found dead of liver failure in his spartan Ellis Street room only days after his 50th birthday, Charles had cut himself off from everyone who’d ever cared about him. For reasons known only to himself he’d given up.

Charles was always called Charles. The racially freighted alternative was “Chuck” which, for a black man, was hardly a viable alternative to the regal “Charles,” and Charles he remained, and regal he was at his great height and graceful athletic bearing.

His premature death has shocked and saddened large numbers of people from San Francisco to Marin County to the Anderson Valley. Charles came to Boonville in 1972 when he was 12. He’d just turned 12, but he was already 6’4,” growing so fast he’d be walking along and he’d suddenly collapse, like a marionette whose strings had gone slack, his long legs independent of his command and control center. He wouldn’t cry but he’d make a lot of noise. You always knew when Charles was around.

Five years later, as a senior at Boonville High School, Charles was seven feet tall and still not quite in control of his distant limbs. But he was strong and getting stronger, a small boy rattling around in a great big body, almost a basketball player.

Abandoned by her husband, Charles’ mother had done the best she could with her outsized son, but every time Charles went outside into a San Francisco neighborhood where kids grew up fighting, the little tough guys would work him over just for the sport of beating up on a child twice their size. So mom kept Charles inside except for school, but when Charles went to school he’d have different kinds of trouble. A custodian once threatened to kill him, a threat the man memorialized in a written statement to the principal. “Either you get this kid out of here or I’m going to kill him.”

He could be irritating, highly irritating. When I first knew Charles, I thought of him as a kind of giant mosquito — omnipresent and as comprehensively annoying as a child could be. And he kept getting bigger and, for a while there, more annoying. I came to understand the custodian’s frustration.

The inflexible jargon of the helping professionals had described Charles as “unsocialized.” He wasn’t exactly that. I’d seen unsocialized children. They were feral, sometimes dangerous. Nobody had taught them anything. They just got bigger and crazier. Charles wasn’t crazy. His mother had taught him to care for himself and the basics of polite behavior. It was a combination of defeating circumstances that overwhelmed her. A big kid in a small apartment in a bad neighborhood and mom at work all day was too much for mom and the kid.

Charles always had an appealing side. He was never mean and he liked people. He soon learned in Boonville that to be around people he would have to behave in a more “age appropriate” manner, as the social workers said.

I took one look at him and saw basketball, maybe football, but for sure basketball. You can be age inappropriate all your days if you’re good at sports.

“I don’t wanna play basketball. It hurts,” Charles would say.

“You’re playing basketball whether you like it or not,” I’d say.

If you’re 6’6″ as a fourteen-year-old and anatomy is destiny, your destiny is the wonderful world of competitive athletics. It was this kid’s best shot, maybe his only shot.

There were days when I would have to stand outside the gym to make sure Charles stayed inside the gym.

In 1972, when Charles came to Boonville, the authorities were still sorting out the rolling social collapse that began in the middle 1960s. The Collapse instantly produced large numbers of dependent children, many of them crippled in whole new ways.

Until the middle 1950s there were orphanages and foster homes to accommodate normal young people whose parents were unable to care for them or had abandoned them. The crazy kids went to state hospitals, the dangerous ones to the California Youth Authority. There weren’t that many of either category through the 1950s, but by the end of the 1960s there were thousands in the Bay Area alone and millions of unsupervised federal dollars were quickly made available to put them somewhere, and here came the free enterprise scramble to get that money. The disturbed and the delinquent, right up to the magic age of 18, became portable money machines.

Among the Mendocino County entrepreneurs who’d converted troubled kids to cash was Jim Jones, but most of the rest of the wild child population passed alive through Mendocino’s ramshackle array of hurry-up “children’s facilities.”

Small fortunes were made.

The walking gold mines who produced the fortunes? A few got better, but for most it was too late.

Charles did pretty well for himself.

He played basketball for Boonville. All through his high school years Charles was growing into his strength. There were moments when he was unstoppable on the basketball court. He’d briefly catch fire and be way too much for high school players. Mostly, though, he could care less about sports. They were something other people wanted from him.

In the middle 1970s there was a famously anticipated high school match-up between Charles Davis, Boonville’s seven-footer, and Mendocino’s great all-round athlete, Dan Doubiago. Doubiago would go on to play Division One football and even some pro football. He was a very good high school basketball player. Big Charles Davis was the only kid in the county who might be able to stop Big Dan Doubiago. But Big Dan out-quicked Charles and out-stronged him — schooled Charles, as they say in sports world. Mendocino won going away.

Not that Charles cared. During time-outs he would be chatting with the cheerleaders or waving to the girls in the packed stands, paying no attention whatsoever to the game. His high school coach, Gene Waggoner, wouldn’t be the first coach frustrated with the big man.

And Charles got bigger and stronger, and he could run and he was as agile as a gymnast, he was as spectacular a natural athlete as any of the big man prodigies you pay $50 to see play at the Oakland Coliseum. Put a jock’s head on that body and the guy would have gone straight to the NBA. But Charles had no interest in basketball or any other sport. If everyone else was watching a ball game on television he’d demand, “I wanna watch Love Boat. Put on Days Of Our Lives.”

He never cared at all for basketball, but Charles loved Boonville. For years he came back for holidays and went around town looking up his old classmates.

After he left high school, Charles reluctantly joined the jock circuit. A junior college coach flew out from Mississippi and took Charles back with him to play basketball. Charles didn’t like Mississippi and, he complained, “The coach yells at me all the time.”

The basketball coach from Marin JC came to see Charles.

“Come down to Marin, Charles, and you can play for me.”

Charles played at Marin and the coach yelled at him non-stop.

From Marin, still not caring in the least for the game and, at age 21, never having shot so much as a single hoop on his own or in any other way worked on his game or lifted a single weight to make that big machine of a body even stronger, the coach at Cal Poly Pomona took Charles down to Cal Poly, one league down from big time college basketball. Room, board a phony campus job, basketball four hours a day.

The basketball coaches at Cal Poly yelled at Charles for a couple of years until Charles ran out of eligibility and came back to Northern California.

Someone was always feeding and housing the young man who hated to play basketball, feeding him and housing him so he could play basketball. The Chavez family took him in. Marin County’s famous basketball family made Charles their center in the Bay Area’s thriving, hyper-competitive basketball sub-culture, so competitive that many of its players have gone directly from the streets to the pros. They got Charles basketball jobs in the Philippines and in Mexico. In Mexico Charles said he got mugged by a dwarf. “He was small but he had a knife,” Charles explained. Charles earned his way into his middle twenties playing basketball.

And then he got a real job, a very good job with Levi Straus at Straus Plaza on the Embarcadero in San Francisco where he held down the shipping department and hugely benefited from the company’s profit-sharing plan. He didn’t have to play basketball anymore.

Charles worked with Levi Straus for nearly 15 years before the city began to pull him down. Or he pulled the city down on his own head. He’d always needed an anchor and here he was without an anchor in a city where anything goes, and Charles went straight for it and it killed him.

Charles didn’t come to Boonville as often as he had; we’d hear rumors that he wasn’t well, that he’d lost his job with Levi Straus, that he’d spent all his retirement savings in a month, that he was drinking heavily, that he had AIDS, that he beat AIDS but had ignored the doctors who told him his liver could no longer handle all the alcohol Charles was flushing through it, that he would die if he didn’t get sober and stay sober.

The last three years of his life, Charles had no fixed address. He didn’t call. He’d always called. We couldn’t find him. Someone said they’d seen him “standing in line at Tony’s,” meaning he’d been seen standing in the free lunch line at St. Anthony’s on Golden Gate. Charles still had friends, he still had his Boonville people. He still had his mother, now 80 and always a church lady. No sinner got past her door. But he didn’t call her, and he didn’t call Boonville. A niece, who Charles had never met, called Mrs. Davis to tell her that her son was dead, and Mrs. Davis called Boonville to tell us that he was dead. (Bruce Anderson)

Tom Smith

Tom Smith died late Monday afternoon at Memorial Hospital in Santa Rosa from the multiple injuries he’d suffered the previous Thursday in a collision on Highway 128.

His passing has shocked the Anderson Valley. He had been expected to survive.

The popular Valley resident was headed to his home on Gschwend Road, Navarro, about 7:30 last Thursday evening when a vehicle driven by Luis Alberto Guerra-Perez, 26, of Boonville, suddenly swerved from the oncoming lane into Smith’s 1994 Toyota pick-up.

Smith’s truck was so badly damaged it took rescue workers almost fifteen minutes to extract him from the wreckage. He was then airlifted to Santa Rosa for treatment of multiple injuries which, singly, were not life threatening but, cumulatively, took his life.

Smith, 62, often laughed at having survived serial catastrophes, beginning with the chronic hepatitis he’d fought since he was a young man. That condition would lead to two liver transplants. The Smiths, vacationing in Thailand, also survived the great Asian tsunami of 2004.

Guerra was uninjured by the collision but, from all accounts, he’d clearly been drinking and, an eyewitness said, “looked like he was in a state of shock.”

Abandoning his 1996 Ford Ranger at the scene, Guerra soon departed with a woman driving a white pick-up truck. Police have not released her name. Witnesses said she seemed to have been following Guerra when the accident occurred.

Unconfirmed rumors say that friends had urged Guerra not to leave a nearby social gathering in the alcohol-addled state he appeared to be in. Guerra, after the accident, was quickly identified and, within hours, had been uneventfully taken into custody at his Boonville home on Anderson Valley Way. He was booked into the County Jail on multiple charges related to driving under the influence. Guerra remains in jail. Late Tuesday afternoon his bail was raised to $150,000 in anticipation of the much more serious charge of vehicular manslaughter. Guerra is not known to have a criminal history. He is said to be distraught about the accident, which occurred in otherwise unimpaired driving conditions.

Tom Smith was well-known and highly regarded in the Anderson Valley. He’d served on the local school board and, almost single-handedly, had begun a high school soccer program. Anderson Valley’s teams, under Smith’s direction, frequently appeared in regional playoffs. The soccer pitch at the high school is named after him.

Mrs. Val Smith is a long-time teacher at the Anderson Valley Elementary School. She was with her husband of 30 years when he died Monday afternoon. The couple’s many friends have always remarked on how devoted the Smiths were to each other. The Smiths’ two sons, Olie, 28, and Jesse, 26, had traveled from out-of-state to be with their mother at the hospital. The Smiths will soon return to their Navarro home, but the family understandably prefers not to have visitors or calls at this terrible time, but well-wishers are welcome to reach them by e-mail at tom_val_smith@yahoo.com.

The lengthy interview with Tom Smith by Steve Sparks can be viewed on-line at avalleylife.wordpress.com.

It is anticipated that a memorial gathering will be held before the end of June.

Ron Guenther

Ronald Lee Guenther passed away on January 22, 2010 at home with his family by his side.

Ron was born April 3, 1938 in Los Angeles, California to Herman and Frieda (Klemme) Guenther. He began hiking the high Sierra Nevada mountain range in his teenage years.

Following in the footsteps of his inspiration, John Muir, Ron often carried nothing more than a small backpack and a rifle. Over the years, he extended his long, solitary hikes deep into Baja, Mexico and north into Oregon. He joined the Sierra Club when he was 18 and was an active member for 53 years.

Despite his additional interests in building and racing hot rods and his East Los Angeles gang membership, Ron graduated at the top of his class from Manual Arts High School in Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1956. He was accepted with scholarships into the University of California at Los Angeles physics program in 1957. At UCLA, he was a member of the Sigma Pi Sigma Physics Honor Society and president of the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity. His pledges in Phi Delta Theta were the UCLA Bruins football team members. Ron, however, was a long distance runner.

With his first son, Eric Warren Guenther, on the way and short of completing a master’s degree in atomic theory, Ron was recruited by Rockwell Atomics International to work as a physicist at one of its Santa Susana nuclear reactors to make plutonium for the country’s nuclear weapons. He became deeply disturbed by the earth-annihilating implications of his work, which was determining the failure point of the reactor. His supervisors ignored his repeated warnings of an impending disaster.

Ron was 24 years old when he suffered what is now understood as a first-break schizophrenia episode. Though he recovered, Ron struggled much of his life to conceal his recurring symptoms of schizophrenia by retreating into the wild until the symptoms abated. (In the mid-1990s, information was released revealing that the reactor Ron had warned about had indeed failed in 1964 and several times thereafter, releasing radioactive material throughout the Simi Valley per Ron’s warning.) Ron was divorced and unemployed when he took up residence in Venice Beach, California in the mid-‘60s.

In the Venice “Beat” community, Ron continued to run long distances on the Santa Monica beach and hike the mountains and deserts of the Southwest. He made a good living as a garage mechanic. Ron became very active in local politics, and was one of the founders of the California Peace and Freedom Party in 1967.

In 1968, Ron was a leader in organizing community demonstrations against the LAPD Metro Squad’s arrests of Venice Beach residents contrived to purge the area of “hippies.” The illegal arrests were backed by the LA City Council as an assist to would-be developers. By harassing the residents and forcing them to move, the low-income bohemian cottages could be purchased and demolished to build “new Miami” luxury-priced condominiums. Several attempts to build some of the high-rise buildings were halted by arson. The rebellion concluded with the LA City Council backing down and officially recognizing the Venice Beach Town Council as having a say in local land-use decisions.

At the same time, Ron was strong supporter of David Brower as executive director of Sierra Club and Brower’s efforts to reshape the Club from a purely recreational organization to an additional political focus on environmental conservation. However, Ron opposed Brower’s compromise in trading off the building of the Glen Canyon Dam to preserve Dinosaur National Monument on the upper Colorado River. There were several schemes to raze the dam shortly after it was built, including blowing it up using Ron’s expertise to build a small neutron bomb. While none of the Glen Canyon Dam destruction schemes came about, many of the activities of the time and the people involved were later memorialized in Edward Abbey’s classic novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang.”

When Ron moved to the Mendocino Coast in the early 1970’s, he continued acting on his strong belief in public participation in government decisions. He was particularly distressed at improperly regulated land divisions and development which, on the Mendocino Coast, meant the closing off of public views and access to the Pacific ocean. Today, much of the open space, and ocean access along the Mendocino Coast, can be attributed to Ron’s early efforts. Back then, almost all Mendocino ocean front parcels were subject to development plans. Ron meticulously, and often single-handedly derailed many developments by objecting to planning decision irregularities, thus preserving the opportunity for future community preservation efforts.

With boundless energy (usually sleeping in his car when he traveled up and down the state), Ron was active in the macro politics of state environmental legislation and policy-making. At home, he was busy with solitary activism, for example, shooting out “big purples,” as he called the large incandescent yard lights PG&E was installing for homeowners of beachfront properties along the GP Haul Road from 10 Mile River to Fort Bragg in the 1980s. Ron would regularly run the 10 miles along the beach at night, outraged that these yard lights blotted out the stars. The yard lights are now prohibited by law in the coastal zone.

Ron strongly believed that any and all efforts to halt environmental destruction were worthy of his support and time, from Dave Foreman and Mike Roselle’s Earth First! Road Show (which first publicized monkey wrenching in Northern California in the early 1980s), to working closely with the International Woodworkers of America union members, to preventing logger’s job loss through Louisiana-Pacific’s overharvesting of its Mendocino forest land.

Ron was a strategic participant in the passage and implementation of the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970, the Z’Berg-Nejedly Forest Practices Act of 1974, and the Coastal Act of 1976, the most progressive land-use laws in the nation. Sometimes, with the support of Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, and sometimes times raising funds, and hiring and training attorneys on his own, Ron created well-crafted public input over the lack of implementation of these laws. In doing so, he formed the legal basis for successful court review. He overturned many destructive local and state governmental land-use decisions more often than not with these lawsuits and in some instances created new state environmental protection law through the Appellate Court.

Ron helped form EPIC in Garberville, the Mendocino Environmental Center, the Redwood Chapter of the Sierra Club, Friends of Fort Bragg, Rural Institute, the Ocean Sanctuary Coalition, and many, many other neighborhood groups and single issue coalitions. He introduced the concepts, and patiently taught countless people the technical legal process and the value of citizen participation in government land-use decisions. Throughout the 1980s he wrote the “Coastal Waves” environmental education column for the Coast Peddler/Commentary newspaper. He was a prolific writer of letters to the editors of the county’s newspapers and continued this practice up until his death.

Ron had an astounding amount of “firsts” and credits to his name but always attributed his work to the collective “we” with the understanding that change for the better comes from building a shared movement. For example, in the early 1980s, Ron collected input from several environmental and fishing groups and Native American tribes to author and advocate for the first “Citizen’s Plan for the Mendocino National Forest,” which was adopted in its entirety by the US Forest Service. This Plan became the model for public participation, riparian salmon stream protection, Native American artifact preservation, endangered plant and animal habitat protection and selective logging forestry, all of which conservation groups are still striving for today in their own watersheds. His name does not appear on the Plan, but the roster of groups he corralled for the effort all recognize his pivotal work.

In the early days of Ron’s activism, he paid a heavy retaliatory price for his politics, but rarely shared what had happened to him in order not to frighten others away from “the cause.” Ron’s water supply was contaminated with a crank case dumped in it and the road into his property east of Fort Bragg was regularly strewn with roofing nails. He was arrested and jailed on phony charges with a falsified warrant created by a Fort Bragg City councilmember. He was shot at, run off the road, sued, investigated, targeted for traffic tickets, banned from the offices of the “Advocate News” and “Mendocino Beacon” newspapers, and regularly received death threats. He never backed down, and as time passed more people began to speak up, organize and participate in local government decisions. The “developer thugs,” as he called them, eventually faded away.

Ron loved Fort Bragg with an undying passion, and in return, after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, the community embraced him as he became more and more disabled. No longer able to run and hike long distances, Ron would walk all over Fort Bragg, later riding his bicycle when his legs no longer functioned. Ron often collapsed on the street, in Purity Market and in Rossi’s hardware store where compassionate friends and strangers would make him comfortable until his medications enabled him to walk again. He often lost his hat, his wallet, his keys in town and they were always returned.

Ron’s family deeply appreciates all the care and support he received over the years of his illness from the larger community, his friends, his doctors Larry Heiss and Peter Glusker, the members of the Parkinson’s Support Group, Mendocino County Adult Protective Services staff, and the In-Home Supportive Services program.

Ronald Guenther is survived by his sons, Eric and Lieben, his brother Steven Guenther, sister-in-law Jan and their sons Scott and Jeff, and Lieben’s mother, Roanne Withers. Ron has been cremated and a ceremony to scatter his ashes will be announced in the Spring. Ron’s very last effort just a few days before he passed was to painstakingly type a letter to the “Anderson Valley Advertiser.” In keeping with his thoughts, donations are suggested for the new on-line non-profit version of the “Anderson Valley Advertiser” at http://theava.com/donate.

It is with much disappointment, sadness and regret that Carroll Pratt and I, as owners of The Boonville Lodge, have been put into the position of having to inform the many people who have supported us over the past three years, along with the community that we had hoped to serve for many years to come, of the pending demise of The Boonville Lodge. This is as the direct result of what we believe to be the unreasonable and fraudulent actions of our landlord, Mr. Dave Johnson, who is asking for a rent increase of almost 100% at the commencement of our net lease option on February 1st, 2010. With this huge financial burden facing us, the likelihood of any future success at this location is virtually zero, despite the very solid progress as a going concern we have attained to this point. We are therefore being forced to close The Boonville Lodge on January 1, 2010.

This decision is made even more painful and upsetting because we employ 13 great people who have worked hard to make the bar a success and although, like everybody else, we have struggled with the economy, we felt very positively about our future success and the future of the only liquor bar/restaurant in town until the exorbitant rent demands were made on us. Now, because of Mr. Johnson’s failure to honor his agreements or his handshake, the future is dark at 14161 Highway 128, Boonville.

We originally pursued this endeavor with the idea that we would be keeping the liquor license here in the Valley, would be creating a place that the community as a whole could enjoy, and ultimately would provide a gathering place for the community. We have worked hard to reinvigorate The Lodge and at this point in time it exists as a source of pride for us personally and hopefully is seen as a place to go for a good meal and a drink for many people both from and beyond the Valley. If we had been able to stay on, perhaps a modest profit could have been made.

When we undertook the renovation of the Bar and Grill we met with Mr. Johnson to secure a long-term lease. The current lease had less than three years on it and, before deciding to invest countless hours and money into renovating the building and a business, we needed to be assured of his support. After shaking hands and coming to binding agreements that we had no reason to believe he wouldn’t honor, in good faith we began fulfilling our part of that agreement. On top of the agreed rent, we also began to pay him an additional $300 per month. By doing so we believed we could count on his support and he agreed to put this money back into the building as necessary. It would turn out to be the furthest thing from the truth, and as a consequence we are now being put into the position of losing everything that we have worked for.

We continued down our path to the goal we had set, investing thousands of dollars in time and money, all the while patiently waiting for his lawyer to draw up the lease and to begin the work needed on repairs to the main septic line as well as the serious and damaging leaks in the roof. More importantly, from a financial standpoint, we wanted him to remove his residential tenants off our power and propane grids. We continue to pay to pump the well to all of his residents, and all of the propane that fuels his residence next door occupied by a family of five.

We continued our appeal to him with numerous letters and still received no sign of relief. To this day we continue to be plagued by all of the small leaks and clogs that have become more damaging to our business operation as well as a monetary cost that have negatively impacted our bottom line while being unlawfully charged for his tenant’s utilities. He has not put any of the extra $300 per month paid to him into the building.

Over time it became all too apparent that he never intended to honor this part of the agreement. When we informed him that we would stop the additional payment he answered with a letter from an attorney threatening to have us evicted while denying he ever made such agreements. From that point on Mr. Johnson has made it all too clear by his actions that he wanted us out, and on many occasions to various people he has stated that he wanted us out and that he wouldn’t mind being a bar owner. His continuing adversarial behavior has made the situation virtually untenable, and that was before he came in with the totally unreasonable rent increase form $1500 to $3500!

He has told people that he wanted us out and then he spread rumors through his attorney that he could justify the extra money because he hadn’t increased the rent for a long time. however, the current lease payments, which still include the extra $300 per month, are virtually the same amount that the lease would be at this point if it had been raised to the Consumer Price Index for each of the years stipulated in the lease.

Now we must focus our energies on not only closing down a business we have worked so hard to build, but which also happens to be a Valley landmark with so many memories and stories to tell, but what we need to do, and what we can do, to move forward. Ultimately we hope in the end to do what best serves the community in which we live. We are open to listening to any and all other options, and ideas so feel free to contact us at 895-3823.

We painfully realize that this will affect all of us who live here in different ways, and for many different reasons. Some might be glad to see us go, some will care more than others, and some will just care less. But in the end we want to thank you all for the good times we’ve shared and the stories that you’ve told.

We hope to see you all sooner rather than later, and we will miss what we have shared.

Thanks for the support.

Thomas Towey and Carroll Pratt
The Boonville Lodge

The AV Grange Mart is a winter farmers’ market that began last year to fill the gap when the Boonville Farmers’ Market is not in operation.  It is a combined project of the AV Grange and the AV Foodshed Group.  It is a chance for anyone to sell their product as long as it is homegrown or handmade.

Last year we had a variety of products from produce, eggs, goat cheese, fish and bakery to herbal skin care, herbal health care and crafts.  Most vendors are from the valley, but some come from inland, as well as the coast.  The stall fees of 7.5% of gross sales go to the Anderson Valley Grange for the use of the facility.

One thing that makes it difficult for some people to remember is that it is on Sundays instead of Saturdays, like Boonville market.  As a reminder, there is a round Grange Mart sign now hanging under the AV Grange sign.  The time is one hour later than last year – 1 pm to 3pm.

The Grange Mart should be bigger and better in its second year.  Hope to see you there – Sundays 1 – 3 at the Philo Grange.  For more info you can call 895-2949.

On Friday (10/23) the first of two games in a week against perennial rivals Mendocino took place here in Boonville and it turned out to be one of the poor­est games of the season. AV played two different line-ups, mixing starters with bench players, but unlike against Geyserville a couple of weeks earlier this did not work and the result was a game with little flow and even less quality, although the Pan­thers did win 6-1. Gutierrez scored four more goals to push his season total to 52, and Rigo Guerrero and Elio Gonzales added the other two.

Closing out a hectic week of soccer was the huge Monday afternoon (10/26) game against a tough Roseland Prep team whom the Panthers had nar­rowly beaten 2-1 down in Santa Rosa a month or so ago. With the final game of the regular season being the return match against Mendocino on the coast this Friday (10/30), this Roseland game was the only remaining hurdle that could realistically prevent the Panthers from attaining a never before achieved Per­fect Season.

In all sports, the battles between evenly matched teams are often decided by one or more of the fol­lowing incidents — a sublime piece of skill, an unforced yet critical error, and a slice of whatever Lady Luck is serving up — a ‘Rule of Sports’ you might say. The Panther/Knights match-up certainly added credibility to this piece of sporting philosophy with all three playing their part on Monday after­noon. In the eight games played between the sides over the previous four years, AV had won seven and there had been one tie. The Panther wins had almost all been by a one-goal margin and in virtually every game one of the three factors mentioned above had played a significant role. Anyone with Roseland con­nections would certainly say Lady Luck had worn Panther black and gold on more than one occasion, although ‘sublime skill’ would be a Panther’s explana­tion. Either way, the Knights were perhaps due for a few things to go in their favor.

A fascinating first half saw the Panthers generally on top but Roseland were dangerous on the counter. Twice the Knights’ ’keeper pulled off fine saves but at the other end Pepe Virramontez headed a shot off his own line with Christian Mendoza in the Panther goal well beaten. In the 20th minute, the Panthers took a deserved lead when for the umpteenth time this season Omar Ferreyra set up Sergio Gutierrez to drive the ball low into the far corner of the oppo­nent’s goal. On the stroke of halftime they thought they had made it 2-0 when Omar blasted the ball into the net from close range only for a controversial offside decision to go against him. It was 1-0 to AV at the break, but should it have been 2?

The first minute of the second half saw that piece of ‘sublime skill’ when from fully 30 yards from goal a Roseland striker let fly with a shot that flew into the top corner of the Panther net to make it 1-1 but a few minutes later AV had regained the lead when once again the Omar to Sergio combo saw Gutierrez crash the ball into the goal from fifteen yards out. The lead was short-lived, however, when Lady Luck came to the Knights’ rescue as an attempted pass across the Panther goal turned fortuitously into a looping shot into the far corner of the net. It was 2-2.

In the 65th minute a pass across the Panther goal was misread (the critical error) by two AV defenders who each over-committed to the ball allowing a Knight forward to go by them both before slipping the ball past the defenseless Mendoza in the AV goal. Roseland was ahead 3-2. Despite several half-chances over the next 15 minutes for the Panthers the Knights scored again with a penalty kick follow­ing a poor tackle and foul by an AV defender. AV had lost 2-4 in a very well-played, close game that they could have won but which they ultimately lost to a fine team and, I would suggest, to a ‘Rule of Sports.’

The Panthers dreams of the ‘Perfect Season’ were smashed and the loss was very hard to take after a magnificent run of 17 wins in succession. They would have to pick themselves up and go out and hammer rivals Mendocino on Friday and then look forward positively to the play-offs. These will begin with a home game in Boonville at The Fairgrounds next Wednesday (11/4) at 7pm against a team to be announced. Your support would be much appreci­ated by the players and if it is anything like previous years the chants from the fans in the stands might even be worth a goal or two for the hometown boys.

Record (Won/Lost/Drawn): League 5-0-0; Over­all 17-1-0

The Zeni Ranch’s 100-year-old dry-farmed chest­nut trees are a testament to the sustainability of tree crops. Pick your own freshly fallen chestnuts off the ground. De-burring the chestnuts on the ground is easier with good boots, and gloves also help. To take some chestnuts home with you, the price per pound is $2.50 if you gather them or $3.50 from their stockpile.

The schedule:

10:30am-3:30pm. Chestnut gathering and tasting chestnuts roasted over an open fire

12:30-2pm. Potluck, music, show and tell of local self-sufficiency

2-3pm. Doug Mosel will share his experience with growing grain locally and grain co-ops

Please bring:

• Potluck dish made with as many locally-grown ingredients as possible (re-heating oven available)

• Plate, utensils, cup, and napkin

• Homemade wines are welcome for a taste off.

• Fruit, nut, or vegetable harvests to show and tell. There will be demonstration tables set up.

• Labeled de-leafed cuttings of hard-to-root plants like mulberry, apricot, prune, European plum, cherry, or other plants/cuttings to share. This is the best sea­son to start cuttings with minimal equipment.

The Zeni Ranch is at mile marker 15.6 on Fish Rock Road (County Highway 122). From Coast Highway 1, junction of Fish Rock (5 miles north of Gualala), go 15.5 miles east. From Highway 128 and Fish Rock Road the junction is at marker 36.56, about 7.7 miles east of the Highway 256/128 junction, or 4.7 miles west of Yorkville, then drive 13 miles on Fish Rock Road to marker 15.6. Using odometer and mile markers, it’s an easy and enjoyable slow drive through a most beautiful and very remote part of the county.

For more information call: Mark Albert 462-7843, Barbara/Rob Goodell 895-3897, Jane Zeni 895-2309, or Linda Zeni 884-4208.

Mark your calendars for the 2010 Winter Abun­dance scion and seed exchange at Anderson Valley High School domes on Saturday, January 30, 2010. To be added to our mailing list, please call Mark Albert to give him your email (preferably) or your mailing address.

Mr. Riede was wid­owed and had no chil­dren. His two cousins, John Joseph Glaser of Cobourg Ontario and Felix Robert Gumbinger of Port Hope Ontario are his only living relatives.

His memorial service was held at Chapel by the Sea in Fort Bragg last Friday, October 30.

During World War II, while his father served in New Guinea, his mother shared accommodations with her sister, Anna Glaser, and her son, John. After the war, in 1946 when Mr. Riede was 16, the Riede family moved to California. Alphons’ father, although a brilliant wood sculptor, opened the Dutch Garden Restaurant with Katie in Goleta to make ends meet. In 1949, Mr. Riede graduated from high school and went on to major in music composition and piano at Santa Barbara State College (now UC Santa Barbara).

In 1952 he was drafted into the US Army and was stationed in Europe during the Korean War. Some­time after his return home he took a trip to Finland to learn all he could about his favorite composer, Sibelius. Still later, he had a small apartment in Santa Barbara and worked there as a postman. By that time he had amassed a substantial LP collection of classical music and this collection was to grow throughout his life, a life of classical music appreciation.

Mr. Riede moved to Mendocino in 1970 where he opened Alphonso’s and was a local merchant (records and tobacco) for 33 years. For a few years he operated a mail order business offering classical music LPs of exceptional quality accompanied with his incisive commentary. He also piped his classical music to the welcoming shops nearby.

He married Nancy Ann Yolles there but sadly, due to failing health, she died prematurely. They had no children. In 2003 Alphons retired comfortably with his dog Bailey and cat Fred in Fort Bragg surrounded in the warmth of his enormous collection of classical music recordings, his collection of paintings and with a number of his father’s carvings.

Alphons died after a long period of declining health. He will be missed dearly by his many friends and by his devoted caregiver, Patricia Darland. ¥¥