It has been a very interesting project indeed and one warmly received by subject and reader alike. Every single person I have interviewed has either shaken my hand or given me a hug at the interview’s conclusion, yet the majority, when initially approached by me, would ask, “Why would anyone want to read about me?” or “My life has not been that exciting,” or something to that effect. This, I pointed out to them, is not at all true. Everyone has a story and this has been emphasized every week to me in person and undoubtedly to the very supportive readership of the column. Besides that, these interviews are not only providing people with a way to learn a little more about their neighbors and/or friends, but they also give the reader an insight to the Valley, its character, and its uniqueness.

Many, many people have told me how much they enjoy reading the interviews and getting to know someone a little more than they normally would by simply chatting briefly at the Post Office or in the local store. Bruce Anderson, the AVA editor, perhaps put it best when he wrote, “Steve is introducing the Valley to itself.” That is my reward for doing this, along with the sharing of any fresh insights to the Valley’s history, its present, and the future.

Anyway, after much deliberation, I have decided to take a break from conducting and writing the interviews. I have done 146 in the last 155 weeks. I feel a little jaded and in need of re-charging my batteries. I have a list of over 100 more Valley folks whom I have not got to, and there are no doubt others who I have not written down as potential candidates, but for now that is all I can do.

I wish to thank the many people far and wide who have sent comments regarding either their pleasure at reading about people they had lost touch with or other positive remarks about the interviews. I should like to express my gratitude to those in the local community both for their supportive remarks to me personally and for their many messages of encouragement upon reading these small windows into the Valley’s community from week to week. Most of all, I wish to thank the 146 interviewees to-date who have shared their stories with me and whose interesting and informative tales have provided so many of the AVA’s readers with a wide variety of the “lives and times” of Valley folks.

Finally, I would like to express my appreciation for the support of the AVA’s Bruce Anderson and Mark Scaramella throughout this project to-date.

To read the stories of Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. On this website they are listed under ‘Select Category,’ in alphabetical order of first names.

Here is a complete list of the interviewees, in the order they appeared in the AVA.

1. Emil Rossi, 2. Captain Rainbow, 3. Amy Bloyd, 4. Gloria Ross, 5. Carroll Pratt, 6. Billy Owens, 7. Mary Aigner, 8. Eva Holcomb, 9. Buckhorn Bob Wright, 10. Lauren Keating, 11. Jerry Cox, 12. Joyce Murray, 13. Alicia Garcia, 14. Danny Kuny, 15. Ted Bennett, 16. Eileen Pronsolino, 17. Bruce Hering, 18. Freda Fox, 19. Tom Smith, 20. Vince Ballew, 21. Helen Papke, 22. Johnny Schmitt, 23. Benna Kolinsky, 24. Mitchell Holman, 25. Rod Basehore, 26. Dick Sand, 27. Mike Shapiro, 28. Val Muchowski, 29. David Norfleet, 30. John Hanes, 31. Barbara Goodell, 32. Ernie Pardini, 33. Milla Handley, 34. Cyndee Hollinger, 35. Kevin Burke, 36. Don Shanley, 37. Kirk Wilder, 38. Rodolfo Ibarra, 39. Hayes Brennan, 40. Barbara Lamb, 41. Mary O’Brien, 42. Ross Murray, 43. Alice Fashauer, 44. Guido Pronsolino, 45. Bobbie Peterson, 46. Christine Clark, 47. Peter C. Boudoures, 48. Larry Smith, 49. Elwin Maxey, 50. Doug Read, 51. Uncle Donn Jaekle, 52. Gloria Abbott, 53. Bob Mathias, 54. Kay Clark, 55. Pat Hulbert, 56. Bud Johnson, 57. Bo Hiatt, 58. Judy Long, 59. Bob Nimmons, 60. Tom Towey, 61. Jill Derwinski, 62. Andrea La Campagne, 63. Fred Wooley, 64. Wallen Summers, 65. Bill Holcomb, 66. June Lemons, 67. Leslie Hummel, 68. Butch Paula, 69. Via Keller, 70. Kurt Schoeneman, 71. Bruce McEwen, 72. James Gowan, 73. Tom English, 74. Sheila Hibbs, 75. Tom McFadden, 76. Cheryl Schrader, 77. Mark Fontaine, 78. Patty Liddy, 79. Karen Ottoboni, 80. Dave Evans, 81. Jim Clow, 82. George Bennett, 83. Tex Sawyer, 84. Efren Mendoza, 85. Loretta Houck, 86. Mary Pat Palmer, 87. Charlie Hochberg, 88. Pilar Echeverria, 89. Susan Spencer, 90. Mike Crutcher, 91. Elaine Busse, 92. Lee Serrie, 93. Betsy Taylor, 94. Doug Johnson, 95. Mike Reeves, 96. Harold Perry, 97. James Dean, 98. Bruce Patterson, 99. Dick Browning, 100. Mark Scaramella, 101. Kent Rogers, 102, Allan Green, 103. Jim Nickless, 104. Bill Kimberlin, 105. Maria Goodwin, 106. Diane Heron, 107. Tim Bates, 108. Gene Herr, 109. Michael Hubbert, 110. Muriel Ellis, 111. Tom Rodrigues, 112. Rene Auberjonois, 113. David Eyster (DA), 114. Bill & Gail Meyer, 115. Sandy Creque, 116. Kelley Hiatt, 117. Bill Harper, 118. Judith Dolan, 119. Wes Smoot, 120. Nadia Berrigan, 121. Stephen Sparks, 122. Maire Palme, 123. Heidi Knott, 124. Tom Allman (Sheriff), 125. Fred Martin, 126. Ben Van Zandt, 127. John Leal, 128. Jim Hill, 129. Ellen Ingram, 130. Manuel Soto, 131. Beverly Dutra, 132. Antoinette von Grone, 133. Clyde Price Jr, 134. Florianne Weyrich, 135. Deanna Apfel, 136. Jose Luis Orozco, 137. Keith Martin, 138. Bob Klindt, 139. Beverley Bennett, 140. Linda Boudoures, 141. Bullet / Dep. Walker, 142. Lanny Parker, 143. John Scharff., 144. Eva Johnson, 145. Susan Newstead, 146. Terry Ryder, 147. ???????.

Terry was born in Santa Monica, southern California to parents Muriel Berg and William Ellis. Her great grandparents on the Berg side were immigrants from Sweden and her great grandfather was a skilled carpenter who made pattern makers. Her grandfather was a banker for the Federal Reserve Bank where he spent his entire career, from sixteen to sixty-five. The Berg’s had settled in Pennsylvania where her grandfather was born before moving to El Paso, Texas where her mother, Muriel, was born and grew up. Muriel married in 1942 but lost her husband, who was in the Army Air Corps, when he was shot down and presumed dead over the Pacific towards the end of the Second World War. Vowing to ‘pick up the pieces and carry on’, Muriel moved to Inglewood, California, in October 1945, staying with a cousin there, and renting a space where she opened a small photography studio. She met and fell in love with the landlord’s son, William, and they were married in 1948, living in West Los Angeles.

The Ellis family is of English/Scottish descent. Terry’s great grandmother and her family were involved in the Oklahoma land rush and she married a much older man who owned various saloons. “My grandfather grew up in and around saloons but he became a pharmacist and owned several drugstores in the town of Henrietta, in the Texas panhandle — oil country. He followed the oil rush, opening drugstores for the prospectors as they moved around. My father grew up in Henrietta during the depression and saw his father lose all of his stores except one. He had debts and kept that one open to pay those off while my grandmother left Texas with my Dad and his two sisters. She took them to Hollywood to get them into the movie business, where my father and one of his sisters became extras in various movies, including some ‘Little Rascals’ films. My father was in ‘Gone with the Wind’ as a wounded soldier! My grandmother was a stage mother and an extra into her seventies, mainly in westerns for which she had many of her own costumes. My aunt stayed in the business as a dancer and was a contract performer for MGM, or maybe it was 20th Century Fox studios, and appeared in a number of films, a couple with Judy Garland, but my father had little interest or ambition in the film business after those earlier years.”

After the war, and clearing his debts, Terry’s paternal grandfather, William Ellis, re-joined the family in California where he bought and fixed up small properties. In one of these, his tenant was a photography studio owned by Terry’s mother, who began to date Ellis’ son, William Jr, and in 1948 the young couple were married. Terry was born in 1950, with brother Dirk coming along nine years later.

Terry’s father was involved in the vast construction of tract housing n southern California at that time, where he became the General Superintendent of Building. ‘My mother was a homemaker and I remember living in several different houses and apartments before, when I was seven, we bought a house in West LA for $13K in a very middle-class area. This was halfway between Santa Monica and Westwood, real suburbia where the houses were all of different designs. I was a very social kid and had many friends in the neighborhood, always playing outside. We had complete freedom and rode our bikes everywhere; it was idyllic. I would use the very good bus system to go by myself to Westwood Village, downtown Santa Monica, or the beach. I walked to elementary school and had a ton of friends at Junior High.”

Entering high school, most of Terry’s friends went to Venice High but Terry went to University High, near to UCLA. “There were a lot of rich kids there, from affluent Bel Air and other such neighborhoods. It was a big culture shock to me. However, a few of my friends from earlier went there too and I met Japanese and Mexican kids for the first time. The diversity at the school was new to me but it did lead to polarization between the rich and poorer kids. I was in the middle and there were not many of us. I must say that overall I hated high school and was a B-student. I only really enjoyed the arts classes and enjoyed doing projects connected to that, making things, crafting – pottery, jewelry-making, three-dimensional art.”

Terry’s parents, particularly her father who was always very curious about other cultures, wanted to expose Terry and her brother to the many outlets that Los Angeles offered. “We were taken to various events, theatre, fiestas, music and I had taken guitar lessons at elementary school. I graduated in 1968 and was aware of the political upheavals of the time but was not particularly politically oriented. I wanted to go to UCLA but my grades were not good enough so I went to San Fernando Valley State for one year and then to Long Beach State for my second year. They had a great art department, I lived in the dorm, and it was all that I wanted college to be. It was a great time to be that age. I was not a hippy but the cultural explosion and the music was all so new. I saw Jefferson Airplane in concert and many people that I knew were hitchhiking to San Francisco to check out that scene and become flower children, although I did not do that.”

For a couple of years Terry’s life was “art, art, art.” Then she went to Cal State, LA, and studied Early Childhood Education, something she thought she’d enjoy but after just one semester she dropped out. “It was 1970 and I was given the opportunity to go to visit my mother’s brother in Cuba where he was working as a contractor for the navy, running the post-exchange at the Guantanamo Bay naval base. It was a two-week visit but I had a great time, scuba diving, getting a tropical island experience, and making family connections. I also met a man there, Michael Fisher, who was nine years older and worked at the post-exchange. He pursued me and on my return he sent me a ticket to fly to New York City to meet him and decided he was going to marry me. We met up and it was a great romance, all very impetuous. He wined and dined me and I was very impressed and after one week there we got engaged! We returned to our lives and he called me constantly from Cuba. Meanwhile, I went to Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena to take more classes in Early Childhood Education.”

Despite initial reluctance by her father to accept the relationship, he saw Terry was serious about Michael and accepted it, and the couple were married in 1971 in her parents’ back yard. Michael continued to work for the company that ran post-exchanges and he and Terry chose to move to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut where Michael worked at such a facility. “It was close to New York and we were excited to enjoy east coast ‘stuff’, plus Michael was near to his family in New Jersey. I had worked as a junior clerk in the public library as a teenager and now found a job in the children’s section of the New London library. We settled into being newly weds and I really liked my job and continued my studies at Connecticut College, still thinking about getting a degree. However, I went to a puppetry workshop run by Margaret Rose, who had created the Howdy Doody puppet, and I started to make puppets and doing that with the kids at the library. I had a set of my own puppets, made for me as a child by my mother.”

After a time both Terry and Michael left their jobs and moved to Long Branch, New Jersey, near to Asbury Park, and Terry got a job at the Long Branch library, again in the children’s room. However, things were not working out between the couple and they broke up by mutual agreement and Terry left the library to do puppet shows full-time at the brand new Great Adventure Park in New Jersey. She was one of many variety acts, doing six ‘Punch and Judy’ puppet shows a day. In late 1973, she visited family in California and “found that there was lots of puppet action in L.A. I stayed and worked for a well-known puppeteer, Tony Urbano, building puppets for him for a time. For the 1974 summer season, I got a job for the Ringling Brothers at their Circus World near Orlando and that fall I went to Clown College in Venice, Florida. I had wanted to learn some clown comedy that I could apply to puppetry and while I was not a good clown I did graduate from the college but became a good puppeteer instead. Had I been offered a clown contract, I would have certainly accepted it — traveling on a circus train as a clown — who wouldn’t do that?”

Terry returned to LA and turned her creative skills to making dolls and selling them at art fairs in southern California. One of the dolls was bought by the craft editor of ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ magazine who then asked Terry to do a pattern and make a prototype to publish in the magazine. “I did that and realized I could sell more. The editor bought almost of all of them —a goose, a rabbit, and a lion that was presented to David Letterman in his show, and some stuffed animals. Suddenly I was making some money from doing a hobby — it was an exciting and lucrative time.” During this time, Terry was also building puppets for puppeteers and doing one-person shows in schools, churches, and shopping malls.

By 1977, Terry had had enough of LA and moved to San Francisco. “I thought that perhaps northern California might be more my cup of tea — it was. I arrived in the City at a time when the disco scene and the gay movement were both making the headlines. The following year the gay politician Harvey Milk was murdered, along with Mayor Moscone, by fellow city supervisor Dan White. I had met all three in the months prior to that — the two politicians at a fundraiser and White when I bought a baked potato from him at his stall! It was a very exciting time in SF, particularly in the arts. For a couple of years I did full-time puppet stuff at schools as part of a project funded by the federal government, living in the Mission District for much of that time.”

In 1980, Terry was recruited to teach and perform shows in Alaska. “There was lots of oil money there and artists were moving up as part of an effort to enrich the school programs. I went for a couple of brief visits and liked it. I saw a ton of opportunity there and moved up for a couple of years, booking myself through the Arts Alaska agency and traveling all over the state on bush planes to do shows. It was a big adventure but after two years that was enough.”

Terry returned to the Bay Area in 1982. She had been studying Buddhism in Alaska, after attending a meditation retreat in Berkeley prior to leaving, and on her return she moved to Berkeley in the East Bay where she worked for a Buddhist printing and publishing company while she took classes in Buddhism. She was there for ten years during which time she met fellow Buddhist, Brian McSweeney at the company, and they were married in 1986. In the late eighties they left their job and moved to Santa Rosa and began to foster children in the juvenile justice system. They had six boys who would live with them and attended the Family Life Center School in Petaluma.

Terry and Brian mutually agreed to end their marriage in 1992 and “I began my ten-year ‘business phase.’ I sold graphic design services for a small advertising agency in North Beach in SF. I got the taste of making money for the first time and ate at the top restaurants and lived the high life of the City. I made the most money I’d ever made but it was the least rewarding period of my life. I was once handed a check for $10K in commissions and I asked myself ‘Am I happy? No.’ Money cannot buy happiness; it can buy a hell of a lot of convenience though.”

“During that time, in the early nineties, I came up to Anderson Valley and as I drove along Hwy 128 for the first time I had a ‘funny’ feeling about where I was going. It was like the ‘yellow-brick road,’ so pretty, so interesting. I knew I would be coming back here; I had a very specific take on Anderson Valley. I rented out a cabin here with a client and came up at weekends from the City. She eventually backed out and I took it over by myself. For two-and-a-half years I was a businessperson during the week and up here virtually every weekend. I hated going back to the City but eventually I found myself becoming a real hermit, holed up in the cabin alone every weekend. I felt that was unhealthy so I decided to let it go.”

For a time, Terry sold advertising for the East Bay Express in Berkeley but when that was sold to a larger syndicate things changed and she wanted to move on. She was offered a job at The Bohemian in Santa Rosa, another liberal alternative newspaper. “I decided I would take the job if I could find a place to live in Anderson Valley. I fortunately hooked up with John and Dee Pickus who had property on Big Oaks Drive in Yorkville and I moved into the little house there, commuting to Santa Rosa. After a year of that I could not see the point of living in the Valley if I was always in Santa Rosa so I quit the job and started to get work in the Valley’s wine industry.”

Terry worked in the tasting rooms at various wineries, including Christine Woods, Greenwood Ridge, Maple Creek, briefly at Standish and a little at Philo Ridge. She also worked at Lauren’s Restaurant in Boonville and at the Wellspring Resort in Philo, ultimately working in hospitality for several years. “I particularly loved the Wellspring job, where I did catering, housing, and was also the office assistant. One day I was in Ukiah and decided to check out the Sun House at the Grace Hudson Museum. While there I saw an old puppet-collecting friend, Alan Cook, who was installing a puppet exhibit at the museum. He introduced me to the curator, Marvin Schenck and we ended up at the Schenk house where I met Marvin’s wife, Colleen. One thing led to another and I ended up getting a job as her assistant in her job as Community Liaison Officer for the schools in Anderson Valley. I cut back on the hours at whichever winery I was at and eventually quit those jobs all together.”

Terry’s job with Colleen continues and sees her at both the elementary and junior/high schools, most of her time spent assisting Colleen with various prevention programs funded by federal grants. An extension of this is the Community Action Committee that rises up to help on any number of Valley issues such as ensuring the Valley maintains its two sheriff deputies and working with the Unity Club on getting the new police dog, Bullet. Terry also writes a weekly column in the AVA newspaper called ‘School News’ covering school activities and connected updates.

“Before answering your questions that I know are coming, I want to mention a few people specifically. First my boyfriend, Bob Sites, who would be highly disappointed if I didn’t mention him! We met at the weekly Trivia Quiz when it was held at The Highpockety Ox, now called The Buckhorn. I thought he was a quirky individual and set my cap for him. I think he was oblivious for a long time but I finally penetrated that and we started going out in 2006 and now live together in a house on the Pickus property next to that first one I moved into ten years ago. We love our neighborhood and our neighbors. Then there is Allan Green, owner of the Greenwood Ridge Winery — one of the most generous people I have met in my whole life. Terry McMillan at Wellspring, who taught me more about how to treat people than anyone. Lauren Keating, of Lauren’s Restaurant — a force of nature — they don’t make people like her anymore. And finally Colleen Schenck who has the patience of a saint and we are a good complement to each other.”

I asked Terry for a verbal image of her father. “He died about six years ago of congestive heart failure. He was very creative but an artist who never found his medium. As a parent he was very involved and gave us lots of guidance in his own way.” And her mother Muriel (who incidentally is one of the best players at the weekly General Knowledge and Trivia Quiz held at Lauren’s Restaurant every Thursday evening). ‘I am so grateful that I got her for a mother. She is brave and bold, smart as a whip, and very loving. At the Quiz, she is much more competitive than me.”

And what about Anderson Valley? “I came for the beauty and found so many people who enrich our lives. By comparison, there is nothing to whine about compared to other situations I’ve been in. It would be petty to complain.”

What about various Valley issues?

The wineries and their impact? “Well, they keep the land in agriculture. I have worked for many of them and they have all been very good to me.”

KZYX radio? “They serve a great purpose and in their manager, Mary Aigner, they have someone who is pretty amazing.”

The AVA? “I love the AVA and Bruce Anderson and Mark Scaramella are unique individuals. However, I must say I dislike their criticism of ‘School News’ and the school system.”

The school system? “I’m a huge booster for the school. I am in the position to know many teachers who are extremely bright and committed. The proof is in the pudding. Check out the comparative test scores.”

Changes in the Valley in recent years? “Boonville is very different and looks more upscale these days. It is very pleasant but I am sorry some of the salt-of-the-earth people cannot afford to live here anymore. That goes for the young families too and that is very disappointing; an aging population is very sad to me.”

Marijuana in Anderson Valley? “There is so much grown here apparently and it always surprises me that I don’t smell it more. So much is invisible to me. People are more discreet than I would have expected. My job in prevention makes me very aware that developing brains, those under twenty-five years old, are very negatively affected by marijuana.”

I posed a few questions to Terry.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “The scenery of Anderson Valley; when Bob Sites is funny or makes me laugh.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Super loud noises; people being uncivil to each other.”

Sound or noise you love? “Bird’s singing; coffee percolating.”

Sound or noise you hate? “Leaf blows; the heavy bass sound on boom boxes.”

Favorite food or meal? “Roast chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, and a nice glass of Greenwood Ridge merlot.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “My Dad. I miss him.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “My cats; my family photographs; family jewelry.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “The film would be ‘Apocalypse Now,’ or maybe ‘Moonstruck,’ or perhaps even ‘Bridget Jones Diary’; the book would be ‘Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx; and the song, ‘Over the Rainbow’ by Judy Garland.”

Favorite hobby? “Currently it’s learning to play the accordion. In the past it was making stained-glass and I hope to go back to that when I retire.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “Hospital nurse, but I was too poor in the sciences to do that. Or a schoolteacher. That would be a rewarding career.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “A bookkeeper. I don’t like numbers.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I was 15 and went to the movies with Peter. It was not a stellar moment.”

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “May be to have studied harder when I was at high school so I would have gone to a better college straight out of school.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “It’s too hard to pick just one.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “Of having stuck with anything that was hard without quitting. I believe it’s important not to quit.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “My creativity and resilience.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Welcome. We are glad to have you.”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com.

Susan was born in Boonville, Missouri — strange but true! Her parents were Hurst John and Martha Bates. The Bates side of the family was a mix of English/Irish/French/German and they had settled in Churdan, Iowa sometime in the mid-1800’s. Her grandfather was the comptroller for Kemper Military School in Boonville and her mother, the younger of two sisters, attended Stephens College for two years and then finished at University of Minnesota where she obtained a degree in Architecture.

The John’s were Welsh/Dutch who settled in Tennessee but left there for Missouri during the Civil War. Susan’s great Grandfather was a prisoner-of-war and vowed that he was ever free again he would start a church. He was and he did, opening the Broadway Baptist Church in Maries County, Missouri where the family cemetery was set-up. Susan’s father was born in 1911, the youngest of six, with four brothers and a sister. He went to college for a time but left and worked in an architect’s office and earned his qualifications through hands-on experience. It was there, at the office in Columbia, Missouri that he met Martha and they were married.

Susan was born first with a brother coming along a year later. He would suffer from severe cerebral palsy all of his life before dying in 2001 at 53. She also has a sister and another brother. “We grew up in Columbia, a sizeable town of about 36,000-plus back then and the home of the University of Missouri. Both sides of my family had religious backgrounds and we went to a Baptist church most of the time I was growing up. My mother kept on with that church the rest of her life while my father was more of an ‘explorer’ in religious and spiritual terms, searching for something that would embody his views. He read an article in Life magazine once about Albert Schweitzer, the German theologian, philosopher and medical missionary, and was so taken by the man’s thoughts that he went to visit him — and ended up designing Schweitzer’s kitchen! He found that he and Schweitzer could communicate without a common language. My father was a very unusual person — people found him to be either wonderful and amazing or crazy. As a father he was somewhat difficult.”

The family lived in an area of Columbia that her father was somewhat instrumental in building. When Susan was born they lived in a house that her mother had helped design, then when the family got too large they moved across town to an ex-tavern for a year and then back to the original neighborhood — into a 1872 house right behind their first home. Her father re-modeled it, despite the fact that he said ‘architects should never solely design their own houses — they should get another opinion too.’ “He was very serious about his architecture projects, interviewing clients for hours to really know family dynamics and what they might want.”

Susan attended the local public school where she was not a particularly social child. “I was close to my siblings and also played with the two girls who lived next door who were close in age to me and my sister. I did like the outdoors and loved climbing in the trees in our yard especially one particular bald cypress tree that was great for climbing and a catalpa that was shaped just right for playing imaginary games. I was fairly shy in my early teens but I enjoyed school pretty much.”

Towards the end of her 8th grade year, because of her father’s position on the board of Kemper Military School, he was asked to find a new headmaster for their school. “As part of his search he visited a Kent School in Connecticut and decided that would be a good school for me to attend for my high school years. I took and passed the tests, had an interview, and was accepted. It was an all-girls boarding school up a mountain although there was also the boys’ section — about 4 miles away, down at the bottom. It was an Episcopal prep school and I enjoyed it. I was not terribly homesick although I was close to my mother and there was some sadness when I left. There was tension at home between my parents and I believe my father wanted to get me away from my mother’s influence and to get a new perspective.”

Susan’s favorite activity at school was theatre, which she really enjoyed, not acting but getting involved with various activities backstage. ‘I also liked the way some of the teachers at that school really made you think about things in different ways. I was not involved in any sports but somehow I became the cheerleader — yes, the cheerleader — there had never been any girls doing that before at the boys’ school football games, boys only, and I had to dress like the boys. Cheerleading was not considered ‘proper’ behavior for young ladies. I got to do it because I had a loud voice.”

Susan graduated in 1965 and had always expected she would go to college. “My mother had graduated from college and I was looking forward to it. However, my Dad wanted me to return home to look after my younger siblings, as he did not think my mother was doing a good job. He said I could go to one of the local colleges, Stephen’s College, and live at home.”

Susan attended Stephen’s College for two years and got an associate Arts degree, focusing on interior design, then theater, and film. At that point she felt she really needed to get away from home and her father, through his various contacts, arranged for her to work at the bookstore in Boulder, next to the campus of the University of Colorado. “He was a powerful presence in my life and it then took me many years to come out from under his shadow after he died. He was very unusual. He had a list of ten questions that he would put to anyone he found himself talking with — wherever that might be. On of them was ‘Do you do what you want to do every minute of every day?’ He himself would answer ‘Yes — you make the decision to do that.’ Another was ‘Do women rule the world?’ He would say ‘Yes — lock, stock, and barrel. Women rule by assignment.’ He would hand it to the person he was talking with to fill out and then get into a discussion about it. My mother took him to see a psychiatrist once and he was very proud to prove that he was sound of mind, although he remained mad at her for the rest of his life about that.”

“In the 60s, the hippy years when people were searching for something spiritual to follow, there were groups of people who thought he was ‘Christ-like’ because of the things he would talk about with authority. Sometimes I felt like he had ruined my life. Yet I was the one in the family he would talk to about all of his ideas and he wanted me to be a certain way, which didn’t feel like my way. Conversely, after he died, I also felt he was one person who knew what I was trying to do with my life. I have had a spiritual bent since my early teen years and took college courses comparing different religions. I could have stayed at Stephen’s College but in 1967 I accepted the chance to move away. I had some interest in politics growing up and by the late 60s was very interested but I never really got actually involved with any of the movements of the time.”

In early 1968 Susan decided that she would like to go to University of Denver to study radio, television, and film. She enrolled in summer school thinking that she was accepted but found out that she would have to wait until sometime in the fall session to know if she was accepted in the Radio TV Film Department and there was no guarantee. “I was annoyed and decided to join some friends of mine who were living in Central City up in the mountains at a short-lived hippy commune. That was fun for a time and whilst I was there a fellow by the name of John Newstead arrived to hang out for a while before continuing on to southern California. He had been mining near to Steamboat Springs but while he was there the U.S. Coast Guard called him up for active duty. We got married that December, a very small ceremony for close friends — and my Dad came too! He was very happy; he had always wanted me to get married. After that we moved out to Norfolk, Virginia and John was supposed to move on from there and catch a boat to the war in Vietnam.”

However, John’s mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and he and Susan had visited her at Christmas. “John’s family had decided that nobody was allowed to talk to her about dying. They were trying to protect her, but to me that was awful. I would never want anyone to do that to me and may be part of the reason I now work with Hospice. Anyway, one of John’s superior officers became aware of this situation and took him off the list for Vietnam and he assumed local Coast Guard duties. A short time later we found out I was pregnant and that seemed to lift John’s mother and she lived longer than expected, hoping to see that grandchild but unfortunately she passed in the June of 1969, before our son was born in September — Jason John Newstead, which he changed to John ‘Johnny’ Edward Newstead III in 2nd grade, and much later he became Bones when he took a semester off of college for a three month Outward Bound trip.”

John was in the Coast Guard for a year or so and then the family decided to head for California. However, they stopped in Missouri on the way, where Susan’s father had some farmland in Boone County. “For one reason or another we stayed on the land where there was a cabin for us to live in. John found various farm-work jobs in the area and I was a homemaker, although I did work for my father as an architectural drafter in Columbia on occasion for a few years and my mother would baby-sit Jason. We got forty acres of the property from my folks and built a house in 1973, the same year our daughter Miel was born. We’d visit John’s father and family in Riverside, California quite often, including family gatherings in the summer when they would rent a beach house in Newport Beach. John started working on the river as a deckhand on towboats that pushed long strings of barges up and down various rivers in the Midwest — the Mississippi, the Ohio, and Illinois. He worked his way up to captain so he was usually gone for a month and then home for a month — a situation that lasted for 20 years.”

John’s job was well-paying and therefore Susan felt she could spend more time at home raising the two children so she quit working for her father and took classes at Stephen’s College in her efforts to learn more about “what made a home a healthy environment to live in. I didn’t get very far! However, I was working with group of folks on city planning and was introduced to some people who were putting together a series on the local community radio station on ‘Columbia in the Year 2000’. I was invited to help create a series of produced pieces which led into broadcast discussions and I fell in love with doing volunteer production work for them.”

Meanwhile Susan’s spiritual exploration continued and she discovered Findhorn in the north of Scotland — a community working with nature, not so much a commune as a spiritual community. Findhorn has no formal doctrine or creed and offers a range of workshops, programs and events in the environment of a working eco-village. The programs are intended to give participants practical experience of how to apply spiritual values in daily life. Susan visited Findhorn for a month following her father death in February 1979. “He had Legionnaires disease and wouldn’t go to a doctor until he was actually dying because he did not respect medical science. He thought he knew better. Just like with his ten questions — he would listen to the answers and then say, ‘Well that’s all very well but the correct answers are…’ He was very charismatic and won many people over.”

Susan made good friends with people at Findhorn and kept in touch with them but she returned and went on with her life in Missouri, deciding to get more involved with the radio station and soon, as well as production work, she had her own music show, called ‘Joy.’ “I played any sort of music that I thought fitted that description. I became KOPN’s production manager and we were one of two public radio stations in town — the other one featured National Public Radio (NPR) programming; we were the ‘imagination station’.”

By 1986, Susan was the radio station’s General Manager. “John was still on the boats and our son Bones had graduated high school and was attending UC Santa Barbara studying electrical engineering, telling us he would not be coming back to live in Missouri. By the time Miel was looking at UC Santa Cruz in1990, we knew she would probably have similar thoughts. As a result we began to have serious thoughts about moving out this way to live. The main criteria in our search were for a place where I could have a job in public radio and if possible somewhere in northern California.”

“Around 1990, I came out to San Francisco for a convention of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and as part of the trip I came up to Anderson Valley to help this new radio station, run by Sean Donovan, on a fundraiser workshop. It seemed like a lovely place to live, and we had grown to love living in the rural area outside of Columbia, so when Sean told me he would be leaving and that the General Manager’s position would be opening up I decided to apply. In January 1991 I came out for an interview and got the job. John and I drove out here and were fortunate that Jan Wax said I could live in her daughter’s yurt on her property on Holmes Ranch. I took over from temporary manager Johnnie Bazzano, starting at KZYX&Z on March 1st.”

After a few months of looking, Susan and John bought a house at the edge of town in Boonville and John continued to work his ‘month on, month off’ schedule. Susan was General Manager at KZYX&Z here in the Valley for two years and “that was enough, although I continued to do a show after that on which I played swing music. In 1993, I found a part-time job with ‘New Dimensions’, a spirituality-based weekly radio show out of Ukiah that was broadcast on stations all over the country and even in Australia and elsewhere. Michael Toms was their main interviewer and I was the distribution person and worked from home in Boonville. I also worked for ‘New Dimensions’ on a series of programs about healing. I did another tape for the Institute of Noetic Sciences, co-founded in 1973 by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, about their 20 years of research into spontaneous healing.”

“I had done a series of short produced pieces on traditional artists of Missouri when I was the General Manager back there at KOPN and so I started working with a group of people from Hoopa in Humboldt County on a documentary radio series about the Native Indians of California. I worked on that for six years with Joe Orozsco, Peggy Berryhill, and Rhoby Cook, doing interviews and production and in the end I had done five of the thirteen half hours that were distributed to public radio stations around the US in 2000 by NPR.”

Susan joined the AV Ambulance volunteers and was at the same time involved with her energy healing studies — “I was told by my healing teacher that ‘we were not emergency care workers’ so there was certainly some irony there. I had not been on the ambulance crew that long when the manager quit and I was asked to take that position and then John, who was also on the ambulance and fire department here in the Valley, finally quit the towboat job and started a small trucking company with Roy Laird and George Castagnola.”

Back in 1984, after it was decided that her mother could no longer handle him, Susan helped her mother find a place for her brother to live in Sacramento. “I visited him there often after I moved out here and brought him home with me for visits. I had suffered a small heart attack in February 2000 as a result of taking too much migraine medication — something I’ve dealt with all my life. Around that time we moved to a house on Estate Court by the airport in Boonville and when my brother got really sick in 2001 he came to stay with us there until he moved to a place in Willits which he enjoyed for a time before getting sepsis and dying in 2001. I had resigned as manager of the ambulance by then and was doing a little energy healing for a few people. I wish I could have done more for him and helped in his healing.”

John bought out his partners and later sold his trucking company to AV Brewery owner Ken Allen. In 2000, Susan started to work part-time for Bones as technical support for his software company and when she left the ambulance management she stayed on as an EMT for a time. In the late 90s, Susan became interested in the Bôn Religion of Tibet, with its emphasis on respect for nature and the healing of physical and environmental as well as spiritual afflictions. In 2002 she visited the monastery in northern India that is the religion’s base which has a school for higher learning for monks and one for nuns and which also cares for and educates over 500 Bon children whose parents have died or are very poor. She wanted to make a pilgrimage to various sacred Bôn sites and learn about where they are. She returned in 2003 and then in 2005 went to Tibet for that pilgrimage for two months. “I visited several really wonderful places and made a 165-mile trek with Tibetans around a lake on foot for eleven days with donkeys carrying our belongings, all above a 15,000 feet elevation — certainly one of the highlights of my life. Afterward I put together a database for The Bon Foundation here in the US and then joined the Board, eventually becoming their Administrator.”

Susan and John split up in 2006 after 38 years together. Susan moved to a house she designed on Bones and Holly’s property in Rancho Navarro. Bones and Holly live just up the hill with their boys Kai and Max. Bones is CFO and developer for a successful software company and his wife Holly is a sign language interpreter, and when they are not doing that they are often involved with their Mendocino Center for Circus Arts. Susan’s daughter Miel lives in Philo and works for Bones too — “she is my direct boss!”

These days, Susan continues to work for her son and tries to visit India every year as part of her administration work for the Bôn Foundation. She has been doing hospice work in the Valley and Ukiah since 1993, both with Hospice of Ukiah and Phoenix Hospice, and is a member of the AV Lions Club.

I asked her for a verbal image of her father. “Very charismatic. He had a lot of ideas that he wasn’t sure people were ready to accept. He was not an easy father to have.” And her mother? “She was a caring person and even though she had Alzheimer’s when she died, a part of such sufferers continues and her caring side went on to the end.”

I asked Susan what she liked most about the Valley. “Living in the redwoods; the wide range of people.”

The wineries? “Well, they have had quite an effect. I don’t drink wine but many people do and they have given a lot of people work.”

The AVA? “After many negative comments about the radio station I avoided it for many years. Maybe this will make me come back to reading it again.”

KZYX radio? “I like it although I don’t listen that much. There are some really good programs but I don’t miss the job I had there.”

Changes in the Valley? “There are many more wineries and that was probably inevitable. There is less logging which is probably good as more sustainable practices were needed.”

Marijuana? It has become an income source for many but if other people are affected this is not good.”

I posed a few questions to Susan.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Working with hospice and doing spiritual care.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? — “People who treat others badly in any manner whatsoever.”

Sound or noise you love? “Music that lifts the spirits — it can be anything — rock, dance music from around the world, new age music.”

Sound or noise you hate? “The traffic in Boonville was bad. Here it is quiet. The heater coming on irritates me!”

Favorite food or meal? “Brown rice; veggies from my garden.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Rachel Naomi Remen — one of the earliest pioneers in the mind/body holistic health movement and the first to recognize the role of the spirit in health and the recovery from illness. She is Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program and has cared for people with cancer and their families for many years.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “My three Tibetan Thangka’s — art works; a collage I did of my brother; and a painting by Rachel Lahn, a local artist.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “The book would be ‘Apprenticed to Spirit’ by the spiritual teacher David Spangler; a song is Chris Williamson’s ‘Waterfall’; and a film, maybe ‘Gandhi,’ I guess.”

Favorite hobby? “Gardening.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “A medical doctor.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “A janitorial worker.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I was 15 and we went to a dance.”

Is there something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “That is difficult. [Long pause…] No. There are lots of things that I wish I had done better but maybe I couldn’t have done. It’s best to let it be.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “The walk around the lake in Tibet.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “My kids. I have been very lucky. It’s them, not necessarily me.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “That I have tried to bring as much goodwill into the world as I can through my work for the Foundation and with hospice. That I try to make good connections with people in the spirit of goodwill.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “As I said, there are lots of things I could have done better. If he said ‘Welcome, you did a good job’ then maybe I did one or two things well.”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Terry Ryder.

Eva was born in the town of Biggs in Butte County, California, in the Sacramento Valley. Her parents were Fred Abreu and Emma Rose. “My father was born in 1901, his parents having both come over to the States in the late 1800’s from the Portuguese Azores Islands — one from Pico, the other from Fayal. Actually my grandfather did not come of his own free will. He was shanghaied off the island as a boy and forced onto a whaling ship where he worked as a cabin boy. At some point they sailed into San Francisco Bay where he jumped ship. Some years later, he met and married my grandmother. It was an arranged marriage that resulted when she was sent over from the Azores by her father, something he did with his other daughters when they became 18 too. My father was the middle child — he had two older sisters and two younger brothers. My mother was born in Ukiah in 1895. The family had been in the US for several generations, settling mostly in the mid-west. They eventually moved out to California and homesteaded on what is now Low Gap Road in Ukiah. They traded this home for the stage stop and post office in Ukiah, owned by a Mr. Snuffin, who has a road named after him there, and my grandfather became the postmaster.”

Eva’s paternal grandfather was a carpenter at the Hearst Castle and the family lived in the East Bay. Her father vividly remembered the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fires that he watched from across the Bay as the city burned. “At some point, when my father was a teenager, they moved to the Sacramento Valley, to the Willows area near to Chico. Meanwhile, my mother’s parents were divorced and her father, the former postmaster, took her and her two sisters and moved from Ukiah to Eureka in the far north of the State. My mother and one sister married two brothers but mother’s marriage did not work out and she left town, with her young daughter Georgia, finding a job as a cook for a work crew back in Willows. She met my Dad and they were married in February 1922 and my brother Fred was born two years later. Then there followed us five girls — Mabel, Freda, Emagene, Ethel, and me in 1934. We’re all still alive and kicking!”

The family settled three miles outside the town of Biggs and three miles from the town of Gridley, living on farming land. “My father mostly worked for other people, driving a dump truck, hauling gravel, and working with team horses. It was the time of the Depression with many things bought and sold by the barter system and we were also fortunate to have his brothers and sisters as we all helped each other with food and supplies as we had the most kids in our family we got the most generous share. Like many immigrants at that time particularly, we were very proud people and did not accept charity easily. It was said that my Dad would prefer to dig a ditch for you rather than accept something for nothing. It was the time of President Roosevelt’s ‘chicken in every pot’ plan for the poor but my family would rather do something and be paid for it rather than accept the handout.”

“Where we lived it was mainly white families, some Portuguese, and one Mexican family. My Dad was racially prejudiced but my mother, a very big influence on me, brought us up to not be like that — she always said there was good and bad in all. I did feel a little of the prejudice though — we were half-white and half-Portuguese and it was the Portuguese who we lived around who would make the racist comments. All the races worked in the fields picking fruit alongside the many migrant workers from the southwest. I went to Biggs Elementary School where my friends in1st grade were Eva Bower and a prissy little boy called Buddy Streeter. Being a real tomboy, and the devil, I’d chase him down and kiss him!”

Eva grew up in a mixed race home but the American influence was stronger overall. ‘I could speak Portuguese back then and we did have Portuguese influences with some of the food and always had wine with our meals, watered down for the kids, but my mother was the strong influence and she was American. We entertained ourselves and helped with some of the chores like the cooking and I learned many farm skills such as chopping the heads off chickens and then picking and cleaning them, chopping wood, making fires, milking cows. My brother Fred worked with my Dad, when he wasn’t picking on us girls.”

In August 1943 the family moved to Anderson Valley. “My mother’s brother was living here and building the mill that was on Hibbert Lane near to the Pronsolino home, south of Yorkville. His wife couldn’t read or write, or drive, and my mother had gone out there to help him with some things when he became ill. She loved it and the climate here proved to be very good for her health, which was never good. After her brother got better, she came back to Biggs but decided that for her own health we would have to move from the area because there was so much field burning in the Sacramento Valley at that time. So we headed out here and lived in a house near to the corner of Highway 128 and Mountain View Road, rented to us by Harwood Junes’ mother, Grandma June, who took the ‘risk’ at a time when many people were prejudiced and would not rent to immigrants like us. My older siblings attended the high school and junior high and I went to the elementary school which was then at the Veterans Building, and later to the Little Red Schoolhouse, now the museum, near to where the elementary school is now.”

The Second World War was raging and as a result there were few men around. “Mrs. Zigler would come to the schoolhouse at 7am and build a fire to warm the building up and at lunch-times the students would do any necessary janitorial work. Our bathrooms were only slightly better than outhouses. I was shocked having come from a modern school with a janitor, a furnace, a cafeteria, and decent bathrooms. The school bus here had seats that ran along the side of the vehicle, front to back, rather than from side to side with an aisle. The kids would slide up and down when breaking and accelerating. I was certainly very sad to leave my friends and my school to come to this place where most people did not want us and which seemed so far behind in many ways.”

“My brother was 19 but because he suffered from a double hernia he was classed 4F and could not serve in the military. He had to deal with many comments and innuendos about that. We had lived three miles from the school in Biggs and would walk one way and pay 10¢ for the bus back. We would often go to the movies in town too. Here I was suddenly 21 miles from the nearest town, Ukiah, and because the road was just dirt and gravel, and very narrow so you had to wait as cars maneuvered past each other, it would take well over an hour to get to town. It was not paved until the logging boom after the war. Speaking of the war, the newsreels told of the Japanese concentration camps where they would torture prisoners of war. We were now fairly close the coast and supposedly there were Japanese submarines lurking in the ocean out there. With my wild and vivid 10-year old’s imagination, I thought the Japanese would land and capture us and then torture me by poking bamboo slivers under my fingernails! It was a tough time for me. I kept asking myself ‘Why are we here? Why? Why?’ I thought it was hell on earth!”

Eva also found herself a year ahead in terms of schooling. The teacher, Blanche Brown — “a wonderful teacher” — would not move kids up a class. “I therefore became very lazy and was an average student after moving. I did not like some of the teachers who were prejudiced against us newcomers. I played basketball and baseball where I played third base or in the outfield because I had the hardest throw. Not as hard as Arthur Knight, though. He hit me with a baseball once so I know! I was a tomboy throughout my childhood and always enjoyed sports and being outdoors.”

Following the War, the logging boom kicked in and many folks from the southwest moved up to the timberlands of northern California for work. “In 7th and 8th grade we suddenly had well over twenty kids in each grade — all in the same school room — I don’t know how we all fitted in. In 1947 I started at the high school and was joined by many kids from Arkansas and Oklahoma. I felt close to their community because I knew what they were going through as immigrants to the community. The Valley was a wild place at that time — every night was Saturday night in Boonville, with the three bars all packed full of many folks who loved to drink. The three main ones were The Boonville Lodge, Weiss’s Valley Inn, and The Track Inn. We moved to Navarro for a year and rented a place there but then returned to Boonville where my parents bought their first house — behind where the Hanes Gallery now is, in the middle of town.”

“Despite all these wild men from Arkansas and Oklahoma out on the streets at night, I didn’t worry about anything. The town was hopping but they did their fighting and carousing at the bars and never bothered us teenage girls. In fact, more often than not they were very polite, with a ‘Yes, Ma’am’ and ‘No, Ma’am’ if you spoke to them. These rough and tough guys lived very sparsely and most of them were really good people, although of course they had a fierce rivalry with the young men of the Valley who had grown up here, fighting guys like Jack and Delmar June. Fortunately the local girls generally stayed with the local boys. My mother was shocked that women went to bars at all. She occasionally drank a small glass of red wine at the most and continued to take us to Sunday school. She was very reserved and was a powerful influence on us girls. We were well behaved most of the time but I remember once I skipped class with Lovella Canevari and another girl and we were sent to the school office where the Principal, Denny Willis (Beth Tuttle’s brother), told us off. I sniggered and then really got it. He made me cry but I think he then felt bad because I was a good kid most of the time.”

Eva, who since her sophomore year had been dating a young man by the name of Floyd Johnson, who was two years her senior, graduated in 1951 in a class that included people such as Edith Hiatt, Tom Burger, Virgil Senn, Julia Pinoli, John Childers, Laura Foster, and Barbara Fashauer. The Johnsons had been in the Valley for a couple of generations and young Floyd worked for his uncle on the Johnson Ranch at the corner of Highway 128 and Highway 253 on the outskirts of Boonville. He left there and worked on the Bradford Ranch for a time before he and Eva were married in April 1953. They lived with his mother and stepfather in Boonville at the two-storey house where Eva’s grandson J.R. and his wife Kati now live, opposite the Farrer Building in downtown Boonville. Floyd was drafted into the army in August 1953, towards the end of the Korean War, and he was sent to Fort Ord then Fort Lewis but the war came to an end and he was discharged.

“Not long after Floyd’s discharge from the army, we moved on to the Johnson Ranch. It was Dec. 12th, 1954, and we lived in the house on the property where Floyd was born. I’ve been here ever since, apart from a ninth-month period when we moved up to the Palmer House on top of the hill during the winter of terrible flooding in 1963/64. We ran sheep and drove a truck hauling livestock, hay, and feed and started our family. Janese was born in April 1955 and then Gary in November 1958. Floyd worked the ranch and I raised the kids and ‘held down the fort’ as Floyd would say. We became good friends with Donald and Donna Pardini and Bob and Barbara Canevari and ever since high school we would go to many gatherings at my mother-in-law’s with our friends, where we’d play poker, dice, and other card games. Gambling was frowned upon by some but at least the parents would know where their kids were!”

“At that time there was a bunch of us parents with little kids and we all gathered and ate Donald’s wonderful spaghetti with everyone bringing a dish. We would also go out dancing — at The Grange Hall in the Valley but also in Ft. Bragg, Cloverdale, and Ukiah, with Jim and Bernice Clow and Austin and Sylvia Hulbert. Jim was a guitarist and singer of tongue twisters! I loved to dance and had learned how to by going to the Portuguese fiestas. Janese was a school cheerleader and Donna Pardini and I were room mothers helping at the school for Gary and Donna’s daughter Julie all the way through their school years. Gary was a baseball and football player and Julie was ‘his’ cheerleader. I did the books for the ranch and often helped with the sheep and cattle. Many was the time we had to bring them in when it was dark, although Floyd had dogs, one great one called Tip. He was also on the School board for 17 years and I could not help but get involved in all of that. When Janese was in the 6th grade, in 1966, I remember she came home one day and said she did not like her new teacher. I said give him a week or so but then she said she still didn’t like him. He was a fake and tried to ‘buy’ loyalty and friendship, she said. It was Jim Jones, later of People’s Temple fame, who taught at the school for a couple of years until the School board, thanks to the insistence of Floyd and Paul Titus, finally got rid of him in 1968. We all know what happened ten years after that.”

“Of course, as many people know, the Valley has had far more than it’s fair share of bad guys. Charles Manson lived down there on Gschwend Road with his gang and all their girls and at some point gave an Arkie schoolboy some LSD. The boy’s father formed a vigilante force of local guys and went down there — he was so mad he probably would have killed Manson that day but he wasn’t there and never came back, fleeing the Valley after his place had been destroyed. This is a remote area where people can come and hideout. The mass murderers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng ran the Philo Motel here, now the Anderson Valley Inn run by Bob and Lydia, Lake’s wife worked at the Elementary School and they had a hot tub where they would invite teachers to join them. There was the child kidnapper, Tree Frog Johnson and that guy who kidnapped and abused those young boys Steven Stayner and Timmy White, and others I cannot recall now.”

In 1967, Eva and Floyd, with their friends Donald and Donna Pardini, bought the Redwood Drive-In. “I was over-ruled on that! It was a diner without the mini-mart and gas pumps that are there now. We bought it from ‘Twink’ Charles, Chili Bates, and Bob Rawles and basically it was Donna and I who ran it for twelve years. We had good staff — Bea Coffman, Bev McGimsey, Ruby Rosenthal, and there were always some high school girls working there part-time too, plus Janese and two of the Pardini kids — Ernie and Julie. It was a lot of work and we always just got by — not unlike ranching! We sold it to Karen Ottoboni in 1979 after Donna became sick but I was ready to leave anyway. I took a little time off before getting a job as a nutrition aid at the Elementary School — helping in the cookery classes and teaching the kids about nutrition. I was there for a couple of years before leaving and concentrating on helping Floyd with the ranch over the next decade.”

On Jan 12th, 1992, Floyd passed at the age of 61. “On New Year’s Eve he had a serious coughing fit. He had been a big smoker but had quit five years earlier. He had said ‘if I die from it, I die from it.” I thought it was pneumonia but it was congestive heart failure which led to a heart attack a week or two later. It was a genetic condition and he had very high cholesterol. He had had a stroke four years earlier on New Year’s Eve when he was out on the ranch with Gary. He told Gary that if he had to die there and then, ‘What better place to go?’ He pulled through on that occasion but it left half his body numb. To look at him you’d think he was fine but after that day he said it felt like he was always ‘almost out of the effects of a Novocain injection, but not quite.’ Floyd was gone but, as you have to do, I ‘tied a knot in the rope and carried on.’ I was not going to put the ranch on the market. It has been in the family for about 100 years. Sure, there have been times when I’ve said to my son, ‘What the hell are we doing here, Gary?’ but selling it is not an option. Floyd was a very capable person, and could have done so many other things but at the end of the day he said he had always wanted a ranch and that he’d done what he wanted to do. He was a real hands-on person who only regretted not going to college because it may have helped him with some business skills, not in any other qualifications. He loved ranching and he loved farming and got to do both for virtually his whole life.”

Following Floyd’s passing, and with Gary running the ranch on a day-to-day basis, along with his wife Wanda and also Janese and her husband David Summit, Eva took a job with ‘Mysteries by Mail’ through Soda Creek Press — selling mystery and romance books over the phone. She did this for five years part-time during which time she was a constant baby-sitter and cook. ‘I believe that if people work for you then you feed them as well as play them.” Following her stint at the bookselling, in 1997, Eva became the Executive Director for the AV Senior Center. “I enjoyed that but eventually I was burned out and it became too much, so I resigned. I also knew many of the seniors who passed and that was difficult to constantly deal with.”

In 2004, Eva noticed an ad in the AVA newspaper for tasting room help at Roederer Winery. “I applied and Sharon Sullivan hired me. I had been there just a couple of days when someone left at their ‘sister’ winery, Scharffenberger in Philo and I was asked to help out there for a time. By coincidence, the tasting room was in a house where I’d been many years earlier — for Floyd’s aunt and uncle’s Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1954. It was like I was coming home! They asked me if I wanted to go back to Roederer and I said ‘No, thank you’ and have been at Scharffenberger ever since. I like it very much, meeting new people everyday, and I get to talk about the Valley history with the visitors.”

As for family, Eva has Gary and Wanda’s two children as her grandkids — J.R., who as mentioned earlier is married to Kati, and Nichole, who married a young local man Derek Wyant earlier this year at a wonderful event on the Johnson Ranch, and two more, Laura and Lane, who are Janese and David’s children. The ranch is 1800 acres with cattle and about three hundred sheep which Gary works, when he is not being one of just two County Trappers, with help from the family too.

I asked Eva for a verbal image of her father. “I remember him teaching us how to play cards, and cooking his delicious eggs with onion dish. He was a very hard worker, and a hard drinker. He was gone often when we were kids, often in the woods. He was ambidextrous, able to pitch a baseball equally well with either arm.” And her mother? “Her health was not good and she was ill a lot. She taught all of us girls how to sew, embroider but I had no patience with much of that stuff. She felt it was important for us to go to Sunday school for religious training and education in general. She had a beautiful voice and loved to dance.”

I also asked Eva for her thoughts on various Valley issues and institutions.

The Wineries? “I’d rather see them than houses and people. As for the ponds they have, were it not for them we’d have floods as we used to have, which most people here today have never experienced.”

KZYX radio? “I don’t listen — I can’t get it at the house.”

The AVA? “I read it sometimes. I believe it used to be so negative that it turned me off. There was a lot of B.S. that was unnecessary and sometimes cruel.”

The schools? “Why did they let the Elementary School get into the current state of disrepair?”

Changes in the Valley? “Well I was glad that the marijuana dispensary idea went away. That young woman should do such a thing in her own backyard. If the federal government says it is illegal then the State should follow suit. And I hate all these big fences around town. We all know what is behind there and nothing is done about it. Medical marijuana? We can all have a bad back but some of us have consciences.”

Tourism? “Good and bad. The Valley is not too accessible and so there are limits to it getting too many visitors and I am glad for that.”

I posed a few open questions to Eva.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing, spiritually, emotionally? “The sunshine; looking outside and seeing the livestock on the ranch.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “The smell from the brewery across the road.”

Sound or noise you love? “Birds singing.”

Sound or noise you hate? “Trucks using their noisy jake-brakes at 4am in the morning as they pass the house.”

Favorite food? “Spaghetti dinner with good friends.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, for a conversation, who would that person be? “Floyd.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “Well, I went through this once and went for Floyd’s gun collection, my Dachshund dog, Czena, and family photographs.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “The film would be ‘Gone with the Wind,’ the song ‘Goodbye my Friend’ by Linda Ronstadt, and the book — ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.”

Favorite hobby? “Reading — mainly mysteries and romance, which I had to do as part of that job.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “A trapeze artist in a circus.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “Someone who had to empty the chamber pots of a bed-ridden person.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I was 13. His name was Oscar Price from Navarro and he was a year older. He came to see me and we held hands.”

Something you’d do differently if you could do it over again? “Probably not.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “I’ve had too many to pick just one.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “My family, the kids, the grandkids.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “That I am dependable, hard-working, and a pain-in-the-neck!”

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Welcome! Step right up, young lady. You deserve to be here!”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Susan Newstead.

John was born in 1951 in Paterson, New Jersey to parents George Scharffenberger and Marion Nelson. The Scharffenbergers were from the Catholic Bavarian region of Germany and it was John’s great, great grandfather who had fled their homeland in the 1860s during the Franco-Prussian war, and moved to the United States, settling in the New York City area. “He was drafted into the Union army towards the end of the Civil War and then married my great, great grandmother, half American Indian, half English, and they settled in the rural area outside the city. My grandfather was a skilled lithographer and my father grew up in a working class family in Hollis, New York, which is where JFK airport is now situated on Long Island. It was an open area with small farms — they had fruit trees and my dad kept bees. My grandfather died when my father was 10 and he was raised by his mother with help from relatives, who also helped send him through college.”

The Nelsons were Swedish who, along with many other Scandinavians, came to the States in the 1880’s following two years of failed harvests in their homeland. “Many of them settled in Minnesota and that region of the US but they settled in New Jersey, where there was work in the many textile factories that were opening at that time and it was a bustling place. My grandfather was a seaman in the merchant marines who joined the Navy and was in China during the twenties. He later served in the Navy during World War II.”

George Scharffenberger graduated with a business degree from Columbia University and then lived in northern New Jersey where he had found work in the booming telecom industry of the day. He met a secretary, Marion Nelson, and they were married in 1948, living initially in the densely populated and industrial Patterson, where John was born, one of six children. “We were brought up Catholic but by the age of seven I was suspicious of the stuff the nuns taught at Sunday school and decided to take it all with a grain of salt.”

When John was three, the family moved to Wyckoff, New Jersey, which was real suburbia. “The neighborhood was mostly made up of Catholic families with lots of kids. With Mom at home raising the family, my Dad was moving up at the telecom company and by the time I was nine, in 4th-grade, he had become very successful and was offered a job with a high tech company in California — Litton Industries. We moved out to southern California and that was a real wrench for me. I had to leave my many friends in the neighborhood where we lived and where I was always hanging at their houses. I was a very social kid.”

The family moved to Woodland Hills, to the lot where the factory to be run by George Scharffenberger was situated. This was rented from Warner Brothers film studios, and the house where the Scharffenberger’s lived had been the ranch home of the Warner family. “We were in this huge house on two thousand acres and so I went from being very social with lots of friends in the urban suburbs to hanging out with my brothers and sisters, in our family ‘pack’ in the countryside for a few years. However, when I was twelve, my parents bought ten acres in a ‘horsey’ part of Los Angeles — Rolling Hills, and I went to junior high and high school there. It was the suburbs again but spread out and a nice place to live. My father had started out with nothing and now he was very prominent in his industry — the developing space and aeronautics field and LA was the ‘capital’ of this new industry.”

“The public education in Rolling Hills was very good, as good as it got anywhere in the 60s, I believe. However, I did not like school and had become less social than in my earlier years. I was a crappy student with lots of Bs, although I guess I did like history, geography and literature. I think I perhaps had a learning disability. I was on the tennis team and joined the film club where the ‘radical’ kids hung out. I was on the student council and was in charge of the morning announcements. The national anthem was played every day but on one occasion I played Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. A right wing teacher physically threatened me after that. The next week I played the Jose Feliciano version of the national anthem and was relieved of the ‘job.’ I had various paying jobs as a teenager, such as gardening, fence building, and painting, which I liked. My mother was still making us go to Mass and take catechism but the perk of this was that, at 16, I got a job as the driver for the local Monsignor, a senior Priest. That was fun and sometimes I’d drive him, in my mother’s station wagon, to meet with his girlfriend at a fancy hotel in Beverley Hills!”

In June 1969, John graduated and in the fall went to college at U.C. Santa Barbara studying for an Economics degree. “I dropped right in with the student radicals and was soon involved in the protests of the day — just some stupid kid suddenly hanging around with these serious radicals. My roommate was one of the Santa Barbara Twenty who were charged with burning down the Bank of America in town and made the national news. The police came to our house and pulled me out of bed and dragged me downstairs naked, thinking I was him. Another good friend, Suzy Fong, was arrested and I ran the committee to raise money for her bail. Needless to say, I was doing badly with my studies, spending lots of time on the beach — surfing, partying, taking drugs, as well as attending the protests. I headed out to attend the Altamont Music festival that fall but the traffic was so bad that we couldn’t get there and I spent the weekend in Berkeley. That was something else and I thought ‘Damn, this is where I want to be!’ It was more urban and exciting and I decided to move there and change my studies.”

John was accepted into the landscape architecture program and lived in an apartment with friends. “I realized that I really wanted to go ‘back to the land’ with my studies, something I had always been into. Meanwhile, my friend Suzy now lived on an anarchist commune and I’d stay there sometimes. They were really nice people but years later they were the ones who formed the Symbionese Liberation Army, who would go on to rob banks, commit murder, and kidnap Patty Hearst. It was a time of great change for me, I was ‘coming out’ and being exposed to other cultures for the first time in my life — black people, Jews, etc, etc. I decided to work as well as attend school so I got a job at the Botanical Gardens where I met many ‘crazy’ and fun older women gardeners who taught me so much. Then in my second year I got a job as live-in gardener at a home in the Berkeley hills which had a big community garden and I got to work with many eco-gardeners.”

John realized that his coursework as a Landscape Architecture student was not really teaching him about what he wanted to know so he arranged his courses around his own ‘personal’ major, combining classes in soil science, forestry, botany, ecology, the relationship between plants and mankind, and the interaction between agricultural systems and nature. It is taught now as Agricultural Geography at UCLA, where Jared Diamond, who wrote ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel,’ is the main professor.

Meanwhile, some of his ‘radical’ friends from high school were studying under Alan Chadwick, a bio-dynamic gardener, teaching this, then new, system of looking at the natural world and growing plants, at UC Santa Cruz “This went way beyond organic gardening as it attempted to understand the whole natural system and was then a somewhat subversive type of gardening which has now become much more mainstream.”

“My ideas about farming began to form when I rode a bicycle over a thousand miles in Europe when I was 15 and was taken by the beauty of the small-scale farming there. Vineyards were my favorite because they were so beautiful and could be planted on variable topography along with other crops. My friends from Santa Cruz and I started to plan a small farm in the same style, using the things we had learned from Chadwick — we could grow pot and make enough money to start a winery”

The first step was to getting this started was to look for a place and John and a friend came up to Anderson Valley in 1971. “Husch Winery had just started, Edmeades too. Tony Husch showed us a property on Greenwood Road that is now Greenwood Ridge Winery. It was perfect for us, but it was taken off the market when we showed some serious interest. Anyway, it was back to the drawing board so the project was put aside, but I was certainly now aware of the Valley as a beautiful place to live and farm. My father had tried his hand at running a dairy farm in New Jersey when just out of college. He almost went bankrupt and went to work to pay his debts off. He kept the land and rented it out. Now that we were on the west coast he asked me about the farming possibilities in northern California. From my experience of trying to start the little farm with my friends, I knew that Napa was too expensive and crowded but Mendocino was far enough away to not be a commuter place and still reasonably priced.”

While his father continued to encourage John to keep looking for the ‘right spot’, John stuck at his studies, including summer school in UC Santa Cruz for chemistry and physics. There were lots of opportunities to work in the anti-war movement and John volunteered to participate in those pursuits in Ukiah, Mendocino and Fort Bragg. On top of all that, some weekends were spent in Santa Cruz working on garden projects.

Dr. Russell Lee, who had started the first community health clinic in the States, had bought 40,000 acres all over Mendocino County and Sonoma. Some thought him a socialist, he was wealthy and a devoted gardener and beekeeper. John had looked at one of the ranches in Sonoma, met Dr Lee, and the two had got along well. “Russell was very happy to talk to anyone who had a passion for the land and growing like I did. By my senior year I really had decided that I wanted to work in the wine world and he said he’d hire me after I graduated to do an inventory of all his properties in terms of what would grow well and where.” Meanwhile John began to take viticulture related classes at UC Davis and worked at Stony Hill winery in Napa. “They were innovative, being the first American winery to put chardonnay in French oak barrels, planting on hillsides so that there was no frost damage, and doing a minimal treatment of the grapes with a light touch and few chemicals. They were also devoted Democrats, causing a stir when they refused to sell wine to Richard Nixon!”

John graduated in June 1973 with a degree in Biogeography and was hired by Russell Lee. However, Lee suffered from a stroke not long afterwards and the Lee family decided to sell the properties. “I found a job at the Souverain winery in Geyserville, and was staying on Lee’s property in Cloverdale. A month later my father called and told me he’d sold his property in New Jersey and, to avoid taxes, we needed to buy something within sixty days. A few days later I passed a sign on the highway for a ranch that was for sale near to Ukiah. I checked it out and it was perfect. It cost about the same as the property had sold for in Jersey and so he bought it and hired me, on a salary of $12K a year with a truck and house, to develop the ranch. I did not even know how to change the oil in my truck when I started but now began to run a two thousand acre ranch. Over the next 12 years, I dove into the project, hands on, building fences, planting vineyards, reforesting, and doing most of the mechanical work. It was a 25-minute drive to Ukiah so I was stuck with a lot of challenges to fix things and figure stuff out alone. I had a guy advising me on some of the vineyard stuff for the first year, but found that my study of horticulture proved to be more helpful than anything else I’d done.”

Over the previous years, John had dated several girls but had always known that he really liked guys better. “I was a bit of an anomaly being a gay redneck — there were few professional farmers who were gay — at least that I knew. I began to develop a social life in the San Francisco area and spent free time there when I could get away.”

“In 1979, I was at a wedding in Ukiah and the American champagne served was horrible yet the French ‘bubblies’ were great. ‘Why is there such a difference?’ I wondered. My studies taught me to look for factors of geography and it occurred to me that the Anderson Valley had summers as cold as in Champagne, France and maybe should be producing like the French. I decided that I’d like to try to make something like Champagne over there some day.”

During this time he bought a little farm in Ukiah but ran into trouble and couldn’t keep up the payments so he sold it for a surprise profit of $100K. “I now thought that I had what I needed to make begin my ‘champagne’ project was to go to the ‘experts.’ I traveled to France with a winemaker friend and visited twenty or so wineries in Champagne and talked to anyone I could find who knew anything about the process. On our return, I rented an inexpensive steel building in Ukiah, and began to fit it out with the equipment for production. We were on a shoestring budget, so we fabricated things and bought a lot of used tanks and pumps. In 1981 I made a deal with Valley Foothills vineyard in Anderson Valley to buy Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes and began production. By 1983 we came up with a bottle of sparkling wine that was drinkable, made from the 1981 crop — a year before Roederer.”

“We struggled along, but I was able to hire some top people, including Tex Sawyer and between us we figured it all out and by 1987 we were making pretty decent stuff… What I hadn’t counted on was that about twenty other people had similar ideas at the same time and many of these were larger established French wineries that had deep pockets and existing marketing channels. I decided to spend all of my time working at the winery so, I sold the equity I had in my Dad’s ranch back to him and bought an old house on Anderson Valley Way just north of Boonville, near to the elementary school. I needed a place to show the wine and this was a beautiful house. I planted a great garden and I really got into the hospitality aspect of the business and put on wine lunches and parties for wine buyers. It was a success and I was soon one of the largest buyer of grapes in the Valley.”

Despite the success, money was always tight and by 1989 investors were needed. “With more that a little luck, I was invited to a lunch that John Fetzer was giving for some French people. It turns out that they owned the Pommery and Lanson Champagne houses. My sparkling wine was served at lunch and they were impressed. They visited my modest facility in Ukiah and brought up the idea of us working together. I couldn’t believe my ears, but over the next few weeks we developed a plan to expand Scharffenberger Cellars, buy vineyards, build a winery and expand. The French guys were from what is now called Danone Company, who produced Evian water, Danone yoghurt, etc. I found the sheep farm that is now the home of Scharffenberger and began what became the most fun project of my life. I was very lucky. I was working with lovely people who wanted to do everything right and they had the funds to make everything happen. We did make a mistake once when we unknowingly pumped water out of a well, which was 100 yards away from the Indian Creek. We stopped as soon as we found out that the pumping was reducing its flow. To make sure that the mistake never happened again, we pulled out the pump and gave the water rights there to the AV Land Trust. We planted about 18,000 trees on the overgrazed lands above the vineyards and it is a great pleasure to see 20-foot tall trees growing in canyons that had been barren when we started.”

John built a lovely winery and grapes that did well in the local climate. “Together with the knowledge brought in by Tex Sawyer and Tom Hartlip, this led to increasingly better wine being produced. Many of our Mexican workers were with us for many years and we had a very nice continuity. We had a grand opening in 1991 on my 40th Birthday by which time I had learned a lot about the process myself and I was very aware of being careful about the pressing and the handling of the grapes. We had a very successful few years.”

By 1991, Danone was changing their focus and sold their champagne holdings to Louis Vuitton, the luxury goods company. This company did not see Scharffenberger as a good fit but for a time made it work. However, by 1995 John had had enough. “They were difficult to work with and I sold my shares back to them and I decided to quit my job. They changed the name to Pacific Echo and basically ruined the business. The company was bought by Roederer and has been brought back to life with most of the original employees.”

In 1996, John moved from his house in Boonville to the property in Philo where he continues to live. Looking for other agricultural projects he became involved in areas other than grapes, including planning a sparkling cider like the “scrumpy” of England that would save the waste of hundreds of tons of apples and pears that were growing around the county. In 1996, a good friend of his, Robert Steinberg, had an idea about making top quality chocolate. “I was asked to come up with the business plan and with another friend we started Scharffenberger chocolate. We rented a building in South San Francisco and began to scrounge up the needed equipment much as I had done with my first winery. We employed similar tasting assessments as I’d done with the sparkling wine and by 1998 we came up with a blend we liked. Fortunately we ended up with a good product before my savings ran out.”

“We found investors who liked the product and soon the consumers did too. We basically re-wrote the book on American Chocolate. There had been no new chocolate manufacturers started in the US, since the forties. Despite his terminal illness, Robert remained a great analyst of flavor and design. I was more pro-active, working full time and spending lots of energy. We worked very well together and we were both equally as important for the company’s success.”.. They opened a factory in Berkeley and “did it right. “We paid our staff well and had a wonderful team. Within a year we were in People Magazine, were written about in the New York Times, and appeared on Martha Stewart’s show. It all became very big and soon I was doing public presentations all over the place. Robert and I became the go-to guys for anyone writing about chocolate and we shared our information freely. If one “googled” the word chocolate in 2001 Scharffen Berger would be the first, and usually 4 of the 10 results worldwide. “To find the right beans to make the chocolate we had to visit all of our cacao suppliers and that meant visiting twenty-eight countries around the world, such as Guatemala, Venezuela, Ecuador, Ghana, Vietnam, etc, etc — all very different with a wide range of agricultural practices of which I wanted to be aware. We discovered that “fair trade” was a sham in the chocolate world and paid over double what most “fair trade” chocolate makers paid their growers.”

Meanwhile, John built a beautiful rammed-earth home in Philo and would spend two days up here and five in the Bay Area every week. “Around 2005, Hershey’s showed up and offered to buy the business. We said ‘No.’ They doubled their offer and Robert and other investors said ‘Yes’ but I said ‘No’ again. Hershey’s doubled their offer again. I loved our company, but people had invested and wanted returns on that so in 2005 I agreed to sell. The Hershey Trust, an organization that helps under-privileged kids now runs it but I still consult with Scharffen Berger and began a project to grow both cacao and mahogany together in Guatemala. In the end I finally realized that I really don’t like the tropics! So I now help some small companies in the Bay Area and spend five days a week in Anderson Valley.”

John is now working on a blog that provides information on the three million small farmers of cacao around the world, articulating the agricultural and economic differences between them. 85% of all cacao is produced on family farms of less than eight acres, vastly different from coffee, tea and most other commercial crops. “Hopefully spreading ‘best practice’ information will eventually lead to better farm incomes — even the poorest farmers that I have met have some access to the Internet.”

One of the practices that he is focused on is the abuse of child labor in Africa. When traveling in Vietnam he noticed short trees that were carefully pruned and produced large crops. The trees in Africa are unpruned and twice as tall. “This means that children have to be used to climb the trees to pick the fruit, many times carrying machetes. During harvest, they are taken out of school by their families and put to work. If the Vietnamese method of training was employed, adults could pick the fruit easily without any children helping. The Gates Foundation is running a project with 25 cooperatives using my specifications and we will know in a year of so if we can get the results that we are hoping for. I have also been working as an advisor with small food companies to continue my interest in the food business and I’m currently working on a sauerkraut project. Other than that I am on various boards — the UC Berkeley Foundation, the UC College of Natural Resources, the Botanical Garden in Berkeley, but I try to be up here for five days and elsewhere just two.”

I asked John for a verbal image of his father. “Tough love. Very loving and generous with a tough edge. He was the bear you approached carefully.” And your mother? “We were never very friendly but now she is the best friend I have. She is wonderful.”

John remains very busy with his various projects and social life. “ I am lucky to have an evening free and alone here and have more going on than I can deal with sometimes. However, I originally came here to grow things and I still do so that’s why I stay here. The Valley is a beautiful place and I love this area although it does get a little hot in the summer.”

I asked John for his responses to various Valley issues.

The wineries? “I don’t know why anyone would move here without a passion for food, farming and forestry — maybe some have come to hide from the world and it may be these people who seem to object to any kind of change. With a few exceptions, traditional agriculture was dying out here; the wine business is keeping agriculture vibrant. It is exciting to see all kinds of new food production follow it. This place would just be a suburb of Ukiah without farming.”

The AVA? “Great literature. I wish there was more journalism, although I do think the local coverage is getting better.”

KZYX radio? “It gives people with too much time on their hands something to complain about though I’m glad it no longer plays all that Celtic music. It was a struggle to get started and I feel lucky to have it in our community.”

The school system? “I don’t know much about it but I believe that it is doing a pretty good job.”

Marijuana? “Been there, done that. I am bored talking about it.”

The Health Center? “I support it.”

The Elder Home? “Good idea but nobody seems to know what has happened with it.”

I posed a few questions to John.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “The autumn colors.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Too many days of rain in succession.”

Sound or noise do you love? “Kids playing. I have lots of friends with kids.”

Sound or noise do you hate? “A single dog barking.”

Favorite food or meal? “The hot turkey sandwich at Lauren’s Restaurant — simple but delicious… Oh, and I must add a hot fudge sundae with toasted walnuts.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Walt Whitman.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “My dogs and my computer.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “Well the music would be Handel’s opera Aria’s. The film ‘Paisan’ directed by Rossellini, with Fellini also involved; and a book would be ‘The History of the World in 10½ Chapters’ by Julian Barnes — it’s very funny and very good.”

What scares you? “I’m not afraid of much. That is kind of a problem. Maybe of somebody veering into me on Highway 128.”

Favorite hobby? “I’m crazy about growing things.”

Profession other than your own would you like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “A civil engineer — building stuff.”

Profession would you not like to do? ‘There are loads of those. Let’s go with a job at the DMV.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I was 15, she was 16 and she could drive. That was Denise Dorr and we went grunion hunting on the beach, which was just an excuse for taking a girl to the beach.”

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “Perhaps I should have gone to university back east — that may have broadened my horizons earlier.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “The Santa Clara Pop Festival of 1968 — it was the dry run for Woodstock with many of the same acts. It was the first time that I felt like I was in charge of my own destiny.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “Making a chocolate that was delicious, and enough of it so that people around the world could enjoy it. And my garden here in Philo — something I am very proud of.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “I am tall! Also my curiosity — I have more than most people and it gets me into trouble, but at the same time it has helped me do everything I’ve done.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Well it would be great if he just said ‘Welcome, would you like a hot fudge sundae?’ Actually, when I was still around the nuns as a child, one of them told me that heaven was all the strawberry ice cream I could eat. Well, I hated strawberry ice cream so I never wanted to go to heaven. Meanwhile, as you can tell, ice cream generally is very important to me.”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com . Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Long-Time Valley resident, Eva Johnson.

Lanny was born in 1935 to parents Sam and Rose. Both were Russian immigrants. His grandfather was from Odessa, in what is now southern Ukraine, and he ran a quarry there so his father grew up very proficient with work horses, receiving only a 3rd-grade education which meant he could read and write and not much more.

In 1902, with the possibility of military service facing him, Lanny’s father came to the US as a 19-year old because ‘I wasn’t good enough to get more education from the Tsar but I was good enough to die for him.’ He came through Ellis Island and settled in Boston. “My father was uneducated and had no training or skills. Many Jews back then went into the garment trade but he became a laundryman at a hospital. He married and had five kids but then his wife died.”

Rose grew up on the Russian/Polish border in a Jewish ghetto — she did not speak Russian, only Yiddish. “They were ‘persona non grata’ and she was not allowed to go to school, although she was very bright and her father taught her arithmetic. She worked in a bakery and was married at eighteen. In 1913, when she was four months pregnant, she and her husband came to the U.S. and settled in Boston. However, when the baby boy was just eight days old the father died of pneumonia — for lack of a penicillin shot. So now she was a single mother who spoke no English and had no money. For a couple of years, she had a candy store. She lived in the back. She met and married a widower and they had two daughters. When her son was eleven and the girls eight and six, husband #2 died of food poisoning. Now she had another candy store and they were living above it.”

Meanwhile, Sam, who had the five children, was looking for a wife. In 1927, a matchmaker put him in touch with Rose and the three of them sat down over a cup of tea and arranged the marriage. “It was strictly a marriage of convenience and was certainly not the ‘Brady Bunch’! There were eight kids and it was not at all easy. They rented the two top floors of a triple-decker building in the Dorchester district of Boston – all the kids were on the 3rd floor and the parents on the 2nd and the candy store on the 1st. Then in 1935 I came along. My parents were fifty-seven and forty-three — I was definitely an ‘oops’ baby. At birth I was an uncle to my eleven-year-old niece — my father’s eldest daughter’s child. My Dad’s kids had all left home and my mother’s children were 21, 18, and 16 when I arrived.”

Dorchester was a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood with a small enclave of Jews. “It was a great neighborhood and I grew up a real city kid. We had a gas-lighted lamppost right outside and when we weren’t playing around on the front porch we played night ball while the girls played hopscotch or jumped rope. Everybody knew everyone else and I was a very social kid. I was also a couple of years younger than most of the other kids around and this together with the fact that I had much older siblings meant that I grew up very quickly… A very significant event happened when I was around four years old. My Uncle Jack’s wife died and his two daughters came to live with us. That was fairly typical. One of them, the eight year old, had already decided she wanted to be a teacher and would come home from school every day and need a pupil to ‘play’ with — that was me. I was soon reading, writing, and doing arithmetic at four. It meant that when I was in kindergarten I was bored as I’d already done what we were being taught. I was reading Robert Louis Stevenson while the other kids read Dick and Jane. Anyway, by the 6th grade, it was suggested that I apply to go to the Boston Latin School — the oldest school in the country, founded in 1635, before Harvard even. It was free to Boston residents and so I took a test and was accepted to this very exclusive school along with 1200 other kids from all over the city. It was very tough and I was one of only 200 of those who graduated six years later. It changed my entire life.”

During his time at the Latin School, Lanny studied years of Latin, French, German, English Literature, Math, Physics, etc, etc. He played sports, mainly baseball, but for a local club, not for the school, something he now regrets. “I remember the journey so vividly. I would go by myself as a twelve year old, catch a streetcar, then the train at an elevated station, then a bus, before passing by Harvard Medical School, to Avenue Louis Pasteur and the school — an institution that was attended by six of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, including John Hancock, (although Benjamin Franklin had flunked out). It had a very impressive history and list of alumni, including two Presidents.”

Lanny still hung out with his local friends but made many new ones at his school. “I met many friends through playing baseball and that also exposed me to different cultures for the first time. At home we always had many very animated conversations about religion, the Red Sox, World War II and politics. I also made a third set of friends whom I saw every summer. From 1946 my sisters rented beach houses on the ocean in Winthrop for the summer. I would go along as the baby-sitter for my nieces and nephews and get to play baseball there too. Another summer perk came from a distant uncle’s construction company. They had built Fenway Park in 1912 and they had a lifelong box next to the Red Sox dugout. Eight seats! Thus began a lifelong, heartbreaking relationship. Ah! 2004! “

“While at school I did just about every crappy job from delivering chickens, to packing maternity clothes at a garment factory — (yes, I was in obstetrics at an early age), to working at a furrier, to driving a truck delivering cement and gravel. I did get some pocket money from this but some also went to the family.”

Latin School prepared all its pupils for college. Brandeis, which accepted me, was a new school of about 1000 students and they gave me a full-ride scholarship. In my senior year at high school, my father died. He was seventy-four and I loved him so much. I’m glad he knew I was going to college; first in my family.”

Lanny had planned to live at the college but following his father’s passing he decided to stay at home with his mother and commute the hour plus each way in his 1941 $200 Plymouth — “it was five gallons of recycled oil for every one gallon of gas.” Then in his freshman year of college his mother had a heart attack and died at sixty-one. “I was all alone. My sisters had to shut down the house and everything seemed to just disappear; no mementos were left of my parents. Even my $35 catcher’s mitt disappeared. However, I now have the candlesticks my mother brought over from Russia. I inherited $1000 from insurance and continued my studies but I slipped badly as I started to drink heavily and party and was soon a C or even a D student. Losing my mother really hit me hard and I was trying to numb my feelings. I couldn’t even say the words, ‘mother’, ‘father’, and ‘death’. I couldn’t say them until I was forty years old. I was cutting many classes. At the end of my sophomore year I was informed that my scholarship could not be renewed as my grades were not good enough. It was agreed that I would stay in the dorm and consider that as a loan. Tuition was to come out of my “inheritance” and summer jobs. It was a last chance. That first semester in my junior year I took organic chemistry so that I might ultimately get into grad school. I loved it and soon my grades were back to A’s, I stopped drinking, and began to date a steady girlfriend. I went from two years on the shit list to two years on the Dean’s list.”

Lanny’s scholarship was reinstated and in 1957 he graduated, with former President Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt as the speakers for his class graduation. He decided he did not want to get a PhD in organic chemistry as this would involve too much time confined to the laboratory. Instead, medical school was his preference and he was accepted at the University of Vermont in Burlington. “This had a small town atmosphere and I was ready to leave Boston. In my senior year, in February 1957, I married my steady girlfriend, a psychology graduate from Brandeis who became an elementary school teacher. We had a son three years later — Doug, being born in 1960.”

Lanny graduated from medical school in 1961 and went to Northwestern University at the Evanston, Illinois, campus to do his internship. Daughter Pam was born in 1962 and the young family lived in a small apartment, borrowing money in the form of a student loan to supplement Lanny’s $162.26 a month salary. “A year later, after completing my internship, I began a four-year residency in OB-Gyn back in Vermont and in our second year back there our third child, Melissa was born. By 1966, at the age of 31 all I had done was go to school.”

Now the Vietnam War was really having an impact and Lanny’s student deferment was done. In the summer of 1966 he was drafted and stationed at the 8th Air Force SAC headquarters in Spokane, Washington where “I delivered babies, did other gynecological surgery and stamped out gonorrhea for two years at the air base.”

As this period of military service was winding down, Lanny spotted an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine for a position as Chief of the OB-Gyn Department and Head of the residency program at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. “I flew down to Oakland on a medevac plane, along with many wounded and maimed soldiers from the war — one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. I took the job and we moved to Walnut Creek in the East Bay. I was there for three years before opening my private practice. A few years later, I received a call from some faculty I knew at UCSF who had the idea of starting a program that would turn nurses into nurse practitioners in the area of family planning. This was not agreeable to the majority of OB-Gyns who did not want nurses (women) doing a gynecologists (man’s) job, but I thought it would be a great idea, so I became the medical director of this program at the UCSF School of Nursing. The program was so successful that it led to the establishment at UC of many nurse practitioner programs now available in all specialties. There was also a growing demand for home births. So subsequently I introduced the ‘Alternative Birth Center’ (ABC) that was a room which looked like a bedroom but was in the hospital near to the necessary equipment in case of an emergency. Safer! There was also opposition to the ABC, the second one in the Bay area. This was the beginning of family and kids watching and assisting in the births of their children/siblings and was a fabulous move. The C-section rate amongst my ABC patients was just 2%, which is phenomenal. Other doctors were not sure about it as they did not want to be watched and needed to be in control of the situation.”

OB-Gyn was very hard work with long hours. In 1980 he and his wife were divorced. In 1981 he met a woman by the name of Sandy when they were on a hospital manager’s retreat in Yosemite. She was the manager of Health Information at Eden Hospital where Lanny was now the President of the Medical Staff. “There was a little flirting, I suppose, but then I just did not see her around for about six months. Then one evening our paths crossed at a “local watering hole”, we went for nachos together in Jack London Square in Oakland, and the rest is history. We fell in love with each other, and with Kauai, on Sandy’s first trip to the islands. We bought a house together in Orinda, and shortly after we were married in Lihue in January 1986.” Over time the workload took its toll on Lanny and at the age of 50, in 1985, he had a heart attack. “My friends joked about the ‘physical exertions’ that might be affected by the big difference in my age and Sandy’s age. I said ‘Well, if she dies, she dies’!… And then I had my second heart attack. That was a life-changer.”

Lanny realized that he had been very fortunate to survive  about 50% of people die with each heart attack. “I thought ‘How can I die, I really haven’t lived yet?’ I had been working all of the time. I met with my partner and asked if he wanted to take over the practice, which was huge by this time. He said he would and I sold him everything — even my stethoscope!”

Lanny now embarked on his second avocation — home design. “I took a drafting course at UC Berkeley. I began to help people remodel their homes. I had always liked thinking about designing and planning and even though I had no license I found work. It was fun and brought in some income.”

By about 1988/89, Lanny and Sandy decided they wanted to buy a second property. “We looked from Carmel all the way up to the Lost Coast. We wanted beach property and soon fell in love with the Mendocino Coast. However, after many visits when we’d stay at the Albion River Inn we realized the weather out there was not to our liking. We would drive through Anderson Valley to and from the coast and we stopped in Boonville. It was sunny and warm as we walked around. We had lunch at the ‘Smiling Deer’ (now Lauren’s) and decided to look around the area. We had three offers turned down before finding this place, forty acres with nothing on it apart from the original sheep barn. We bought in 1990. After a couple of years, I really started to wonder why we’d bought the property — perhaps I was a city boy after all. However, Sandy is a country girl who loves horses so I decided to persevere and we built a small guest house. This led to a larger building — the design of which had been in my head since college. We’d come up most weekends and then we stayed here for the summer with the horse and dog. That was it. I decided I was not going back! It really did happen that suddenly. I fell in love with something that I didn’t even know existed.”

Sandy returned to Orinda as she had to complete her teaching commitment at Chabot College, but by 1994 they were both living in the Valley. For his first two years up here Lanny awarded himself the ‘Hermit of the Year’ prize — “I basically just contemplated my navel. I was what Bruce Anderson at the AVA calls a ‘hill muffin,’ but I had earned my right to do that.” Sandy was now teaching at Santa Rosa Junior College where there became an opening to teach a couple classes — medical terminology and pathophysiology. Lanny took the job and for the next seventeen years worked there two days a week. “I loved the teaching but then the politics, the administration, the money I saw being wasted, the commute, were all too much and I resigned — that was this past May.”

In the mid-90s it came to Lanny’s attention that only six out of 30 in the senior class went to college from the Anderson Valley High School. “I volunteered in the AVID program to help these kids get into college, many struggled with the language. I could relate to that given my parents’ background and I became a tutor and mentor. Now nearly all of the kids go to college. I was invited to join the AV Education Foundation (AVEF) Board. We find fun ways to raise money, then use the money to fund student scholarships and internships and myriads of enrichment experiences for students.”

A whole social life developed from Lanny’s involvement with the AVEF and it did not take long for Lanny and Sandy to not miss the city life. “We seem to have a full social calendar; there is so much going on here. Everyone is here because they want to be here. This is a real community. It is an unexpected joy over and over again. At my granddaughter’s school the motto is ‘The first third of your life is spent learning; the second third spent earning; and the final third is spent giving back.’ That is my story — after spending so much of my early life hearing the alternative mantra — ‘You’re born, life sucks, and then you die.’ “

I asked Lanny about his religious upbringing. “I was sent to Hebrew School at the age of seven. That led to my early decision to become an atheist. There are three Jewish groups — Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed. We were the unofficial fourth group — the Food Jews. Yes, my folks did two days of Rosh Hashanah and a day for Yom Kippur, but that was it — we were three-day Jews and did not go to Temple. However, I was bar mitzvah’d so I did comply and fulfilled my obligation. Done!”

What is a verbal image of your father? “He always dressed immaculately, with suits pressed and shirts ironed by himself. He was only 5’ 6” but very strong. He was old so he couldn’t play sports with me but we did go fishing and horseback riding a few times. We would spend time together in his basement workshop. He’d collect pieces of old wood and remove the nails. He taught me to straighten them out for reuse. I guess you could say we are what America is supposed to be all about — in one generation I went from straightening nails to performing microsurgery on fallopian tubes. And he taught me everything one needs to know about economics — whether you are rich or poor, it’s good to have money.”

And your mother? “She was quite a gal. I was so lucky. She would put her hand under my chin, look at me with love in her eyes, just stare at me, and then give my chin a little squeeze. She had no rules but we followed them anyway! We knew what was expected of us. She was a real character with many friends. A heart of gold and very loyal. Simple yet intelligent with street smarts. She was a good cook with a limited repertoire of dishes. We may have been very poor, but I never went to bed hungry.”

And what family do you now have? “Well Doug is in Washington DC with his wife and two kids, Maddy and Andrew; Pam is in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and three children, Alison (my oldest grandchild at 23), Ryan, and Evan; and Melissa is in Leesberg, Virginia, with her husband and their three, Alex, Samantha, and the youngest of all, Brooklyn who is 9. The three oldest have graduated from college — NYU, Boston, and Colorado — and all have got jobs!”

I asked Lanny for his brief responses to various Valley issues.

The wineries and their impact? “Well they do provide jobs and the vineyards enhance the landscape. I do like seeing the few apple trees that are left. There seems to be an increase in the amount of large corporate money coming into our valley; I prefer the locally owned, community oriented wineries.”

KZYX radio? I am not a big listener but do enjoy Jimmy Humble’s show, W Dan’s, and Trading Times. I miss Garrison Keillor”…

The AVA?  “In the last couple of years it seems to be more of a community newspaper and the Valley People and Turkey Vulture columns are interesting to me. It is considered one of the top alternative papers in the country and is used as a case study in universities as such.”

The school system? “Well, we’re doing very well there and I get irritated with the ‘white flight’ that some parents have undertaken. Students get a very good education from a young, energetic faculty. I do think that we need to teach both English and Spanish as a second language.”

Marijuana? — “This is a drug that should be legalized and researched more and more. Eventually it will be, of course, and will greatly help with so many ailments and symptoms. Booze is legal and marijuana isn’t?”

I posed a few questions to Lanny.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Good food, good conversation, good friends.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Bigoted people.”

Sound or noise do you love? “Kids laughing — I’m a sucker for kids. I wanted to be a pediatrician but when a kid died I couldn’t handle it.”

Sound or noise do you hate? The sound of bagpipes and the accordion. Screeching brakes.”

Favorite food or meal? “Crab — even though I grew up on lobster living in Boston.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “My parents — Sam and Rose — here for dinner tonight.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “Sandy and the pets, photograph albums and my important documents.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? — “The song would be Peggy Lee’s ‘Is that all there is?’; the movie would be ‘Fever Pitch’ about the Red Sox winning the World Series — I have kept count and I’ve seen it 28 times; and a book would be The Celestine Prophecy.”

Favorite hobby? — “Cooking and gardening.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance? “An architect.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “A politician.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I was 14, Elaine 13. We went to the movies — I met her inside. We dated for six years and fumbled our way through the mysteries of puberty.”

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “I wished I’d played more baseball.”

Domething that you are really proud of and why? “I felt I owed something for my parent’s healthcare and believe I paid it back by starting the first abortion clinic in the East Bay in 1971, stopping people from killing themselves by undergoing illegal and unsafe ones… I made clinics humane… Plus the Nurse Practitioner program and the Alternative Birth Center.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “My reliability. If I agree to do something, I’ll do it.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Wrong again, Lanny. But you got it right anyhow!”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be John Scharffenberger of wine and chocolate fame.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove ‘over the hill’ to Ukiah and headed for the County Sheriff Department’s training center on Low Gap Road. As I pulled into the parking lot primarily used for holding impounded vehicles that are there either as a result of drug seizures or as part of an ongoing crime investigation, waiting there for me was Anderson Valley’s Mendocino County Deputy Sheriff Craig Walker, standing alongside his Sheriff’s K-9 Unit vehicle.

I had spoken to Craig off-duty a few days earlier over a beer and some chicken wings at The Buckhorn, Boonville and he informed me that he and the long-awaited Valley police dog were in daily training in various training centers around the area — Willits, Napa, and occasionally Ukiah. With my lifelong interest in dogs, specifically border collies of which I have six, coupled with my regular ‘gig’ doing the Valley Folks interviews, I thought this might be a unique opportunity to combine the two. At the same time, this would provide the many people who contributed towards getting the dog in the first place with some updated information, as the dog’s arrival on the Valley scene is imminent. Craig arranged the whole thing with the trainer, and a couple of phone calls later here we were on a warm, yet windy Thursday afternoon in Ukiah.

The trainer’s name is Chip Johnson and he has been doing this for 24 years, since he was 16 years old in fact. He had grown up in Marin, lived in Willits for many years and was currently back in Marin, although has plans to once again return to Mendocino County. He trains dogs for assignment to a number of law enforcement agencies all over this region, including Napa and Sonoma counties, San Francisco, up to and including Oregon, and the CHP. On this particular day, another sheriff’s deputy, Brian Smith from Lane County, Oregon, was being trained with his dog but they stood aside as Bullet was brought out from the side of Craig’s vehicle.

Bullet is a somewhat skinny. (He is being worked a lot at this point and has boundless energy that burns off more calories than can be replaced it seems), 18-month old Belgian Sheep Dog, or Belgian Malinois, brought over from Holland by Chip about three months ago. Chip gets all of his dogs from Europe where the breeding of these dogs is done at a very high level and he went over to get a few dogs but came back with just two on this most recent trip, one of which was Bullet.

The dogs have been completely checked-out for all health issues, including rigorous examination of joints, elbows and hips, before coming here. “We love this breed for this kind of work,” said Chip. “They can have a working life of 12-13 years whereas many German Shepherds, while they are great dogs for doing this also, tend to have a working life of seven to eight years. The Malinois are the perfect size to be picked up by their handlers, while still being able to attack their enemies, and their shorter coats and fair and neutral colors make them less prone to heatstroke. Bullet has tons of energy — the breed generally does, but he is particularly active and really wants to work. His training will be for about five weeks here to get the initial accreditation and we are about halfway through that with him and Craig. They are doing very well.”

We walked over toward a number of cars in the lot and Craig was instructed by Chip to walk over to one of them and let Bullet sniff around. Actually, it was Bullet who led Craig as he pulled and pulled to get to the rear of the car. He sniffed the trunk and back tires and went around to the right side and then the hood and front. When he reached the driver’s side door he clearly had smelled something as he sniffed and sniffed at the crack between the door and the front end. Craig still had him on the leash but now instructed him to sit. “Halt,” he said with a strange accent. Bullet sat down immediately and stared at the crack.

Apparently Bullet had worked briefly in Belgium and had been taught using some local words or dialect. He will respond to ‘halt’ for ‘sit’; ‘los’ for ‘drop’; ‘blithe’ for stay; and ‘ney’ for ‘no’. Craig seems to have these in his repertoire already and Bullet responds well most of the time, even if a couple of instructions do have to be repeated to enforce the command.

Upon opening the door Craig produced a small package — I assumed it contained some sort of illegal drug — and immediately rewarded Bullet with a piece of fabric, actually a piece of a small wallet. Bullet grabbed this and shook his head with it in his mouth. He was very happy. Apparently this is his favorite toy and he loves to play tug with it. On this occasion it turned out that he had found a small amount of cocaine but he is also trained to sniff out methamphetamine, heroine and, of course, marijuana.

We walked a little further into the lot and Craig was instructed to walk Bullet towards a huge raised-up truck. Chip informed us that this had been seized in a recent drug bust and when pulled over the driver had offered the cop $10,000 and the keys for the truck to let him go. Needless to say the guy is in jail and the truck was sitting here. Bullet led Craig around the truck and Craig opened the door at one point. Bullet immediately leaped about five feet in the air and jumped inside to check it out. After also leaping into the bed of the truck he eventually stopped at the side of the vehicle where a small compartment was situated. He sniffed and stared and would not move on. Bullet knew that there was something he was supposed to find in there and he was telling Craig that.

However, he would not sit upon command and Chip insisted that Craig got him to do this before going on with the search. “We want him to be obsessed with finding the drugs but he should also know when he needs to sit and ultimately Craig must be in control. Bullet is being taught a ‘passive alert’ method in which he should sit and stare at the place where he believes the drugs to be. We have been asked to do this instead of the active alert style where the dog frantically scratches at the vehicle or whatever.” Bullet sat and watched intently as the compartment was opened. Sure enough, inside was a small bag of marijuana and Bullet celebrated with leaps and lots of tail-wagging and was rewarded with his ‘piece of fabric’ toy. Chip and Craig made a fuss of him and Deputy Smith and I were encouraged to do so too. Bullet was only too happy to have all of us telling him what a ‘good boy’ he was.

The third test was for Craig and Bullet to enter another area with several cars and assorted bins and containers. They were not told in what direction to go. Chip, Deputy Smith, and I watched as Craig and Bullet worked around the vehicles etc. After about two minutes, Bullet seemed to become fixated with an area next to a large container where there were a couple of bins also. However, he was not sure about exactly where he wanted to stop and sniff further. It was a windy afternoon and suddenly a gust blew a small bag off the top of the container. Bullet pounced on it immediately. This was the marijuana that Chip had hidden up there. “He is still learning but he definitely was in the vicinity of where this was before the wind blew it off. This would be a situation where the handler has to work out the wind direction and then point the dog into it from downwind. Bullet would have got even closer and may well have found the bag before it blew off. He is coming along very well.”

A dog that is trained to be so obsessed with his work does not care about being around people or food when there is a job to do. This is certainly the case with many border collies if there are sheep to be herded. Similarly, Chip informed me that I could try to feed Bullet steaks or sausages to tempt him away from the work at hand and he would ignore them until the job was done and he had been called off. “He is only looking for drugs at that point. Bullet is very active, strong, friendly, protective, hard-working, a great jumper, and enjoys being challenged with new tasks. However, once the job is done, he is very affectionate with people, adults and kids, and is also easy-going around other dogs. His overall boisterousness comes with still being a puppy — he’s like a 16-year-old teenager who thinks he can do everything and have fun all the time. He may seem a little out of control at times at this stage of his training but he is very smart and is going to make a great police dog.”

We now moved on to the other aspect of training that Bullet and Craig have been working on over the past few weeks — the ‘bite’, necessary for patrol work and when a suspect needs to be apprehended. Trainer Chip put on a padded arm protector and stood about 30 feet from Craig and Bullet. Craig was instructed to go into his ‘warning speech’ — “Sheriff’s Department Canine Unit — give up! I’m sending the dog!” At that point he released Bullet who was on the ‘suspect’ in a flash, grabbing his left arm and hanging on until told to let go. This was repeated a few times, and each time Bullet was there on the arm immediately, even when the ‘suspect’ was on top of a vehicle, Bullet leaped up there and did his job. Chip explained that the dog will generally grab any part of the suspect but most go for the left arm having been trained that way. Some will bite the other side of the suspect and work their way around, biting the neck and back before holding on to the left arm. They are utterly fearless and pay little regard to any danger they may be in. Earlier this year, Dutch, arguably the department’s best dog, was stabbed in the throat when tackling a suspect and nearly died. He survived and went on to play an important role in the recent manhunt for murderer Aaron Bassler in the woods around Fort Bragg.

Bullet’s training session was complete for now and Craig put him inside the K-9 vehicle where he sat quietly and content with some water as Craig and I continued our conversation.

Deputy Walker was in law enforcement for ten years in the East Bay, initially at UC Berkeley and then the police departments of Oakland and San Leandro, before taking a 13-year sabbatical from police work during which time he graduated with a political science degree from UC Berkeley and spent several years in the world of finance. Then almost exactly three years ago, in the fall of 2008, he returned. “I was ready for police work again but in a very different environment. I was hired essentially as the resident deputy for Anderson Valley. I spent a few months on duty in Ukiah, where with increased exposure to crime, I could get back to scratch more quickly than in the Valley following my long lay-off. Not long after that, Sheriff Tom Allman suggested the dog idea. He likes his resident deputies, if they wish, to have dogs. I am certainly a dog person and have been around dogs all of my life and at the time of my hiring I had two at home.”

The money needed for a dog to be trained and maintained was an issue but it was here where the community of Anderson Valley stepped in. Under the leadership of Beverly Dutro and others in the Unity Club, the planning and fund-raising began. “If there is one person who should be singled out it would be Bev Dutra, although obviously many others helped too, including Colleen Schenk and the Community Action Coalition and the AV Elementary School which did a fund raiser specifically to get a bullet/stab proof dog vest. Also, Omar Ferreyra, a high school senior, decided to raise money for the dog as his Senior project and that was a big financial success.”

The amount needed to buy the dog, train him, and provide him with the vest, was $12,850, more than half of which would have to come from the community — a demanding task given the current economy. Nevertheless, over a period of less than three months in the spring of 2010, the local community came together and raised an amazing $8,700, with a further $7,000 coming from the Sheriff’s drug forfeiture finds, as promised. Add to this the $4,500 from out-of-Valley donors for a grand total of $20,200. Bullet’s purchase, together with his training and the vest, cost $7,000, leaving $13,200. At this point there is $8,700 in a special trust account for Deputy Walker to use for dog-related expenses such as housing, advanced training, and equipment. The remaining $4,500 is in an account for any major medical expenses that may be incurred. The AV Unity Club oversees all of these funds.

Unfortunately, after the fundraising had been completed, the Sheriff’s budget problems became significantly more acute and for the next one-and-a-half years this severely impacted the plans for the dog. However, the money that had been raised was held in a separate account by the Unity Club, specifically for this project, ensuring that this is where it would go at some point. “About six months ago, Chip had gone to Europe to get a dog for us and I had even started training with the dog he brought back, but the budget issues got significantly worse and so we had to stop the project and that dog went to the CHP.”

“Earlier this summer, I had actually received a lay-off notice as things seemed irreversible in terms of cutbacks in our department. As many people will remember this was a big topic of conversations over several weeks, in and around the Valley. In fact, with money being so tight, for a short time we were not even allowed to drive around the Valley. There was talk of disbanding the whole Canine corps and it was not even clear that the deputy positions themselves were safe so a new dog was certainly out of the question. Then, not long after my notice, and over a relatively very short period of time, Sheriff Allman seemingly ‘pulled a rabbit out of his hat’ as it were. Not only was I staying but the dog was going to ‘hired’ too!”

In August of this year, Craig received notice that the dog assignment was to proceed and Chip went to Europe and came back with Bullet. It was decided that unlike many police dogs, he would be a dual-purpose dog — one that is trained both for detection and patrol work — hence both the drug-sniffing and also the ‘bite training’ as this would be far more useful in Anderson Valley than one or the other. Finally, about a month ago, Craig met Bullet for the first time.

“For about three weeks now he has been living with me at home in the Valley with my wife Marissa and our two dogs — Jessie a two year old female pit-mix, and Grant, an eight year old border collie. Bullet and Jessie get on well but Grant isn’t too happy with this annoying ‘teenager’ romping around everywhere. It is a work-in-progress. We have used some of the funds to build a dog-run for him behind out house and he seems to be settling down well overall.”

Craig and I walked over to his vehicle and opened the side door to Bullet’s ‘personal space’ inside. With its metal walls and limited size, it wasn’t exactly ‘cozy’ but Bullet is probably the last one to care about that and he was very calm — a marked difference to how he had been when working earlier. He was very affectionate, nudging his master as soon as the stroking stopped, and staring at Craig with love in his eyes.

“We will complete the training in the next few weeks and then have to pass a test to get our initial certification. After that he will be in the field with me but there will also be some fairly intense training for a further nine months during which time we will meet with the rest of the canine corps every other week. There are six dogs currently working in the County, including Deputy Squires’ dog, Brick, also in Anderson Valley of course. On top of this we’ll do various extra sessions with Chip, but much will also be learned on the job. I think an analogy would be that he is just like a young deputy, fresh out of the academy, who has to learn in the real world.”

The first official public appearance in the Valley for Craig and ‘our’ Bullet will probably be at the Elementary School in January when they hope to put on some sort of demonstration for all to see. No doubt that will be an event many Valley folks will look forward to attending as, for the first time, the community gets to meet its new Best Friend.

Dogs —

“They are your best friend, your partner, your defender, and they will always be happy to see you. You are their life, their love, their leader. They will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of their heart.”
* * *

I posed a few questions to my guest. Some from television’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton.”

1. What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “When I have the scent of some illegal substance and feel myself getting closer and closer to its whereabouts — now that’s a ‘rush’, I can tell you!”

2. What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “When the ‘bad guy’ resorts to using some sort of weapon and then I have to get a little bit extra nasty myself to make sure I come out on top. I’m a very nice friendly dog but some people just really annoy me.”

3. What words, sound or noise do you love? “When we have a suspect who will not surrender and my partner Craig announces ‘Canine corps — we’re releasing the dog.’ That’s a magical moment for sure.”

4. What words, sound or noise do you hate? “The words ‘No more work today, Bullet’ — that’s always a real bummer!”

5. What is your favorite food or meal? “A human arm — just joking. A t-bone steak, medium rare, with a bowl of fresh, cold water.”

6. If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation over dinner, who would that person be? “I cannot choose just one. Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, and Eddie from the TV show ‘Frasier’ — now that would be a great dinner party.”

7. If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “Craig and the family; my bulletproof vest that the kids at the Elementary School raised money for; and my ‘toy’.”

8. What scares you? “Nothing.”

9. Do you have a favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “My favorite film is ‘Old Yeller’, or the more modern movie ‘K-9’ featuring James Belushi. As for a song, it has to be ‘Who let the dogs out?’ The book would be ‘Call of the Wild,’ Jack London’s masterpiece.”

10. What is your favorite hobby? “Hanging out with Craig, having a couple of beers, watching a game, you know, regular guy stuff.”

11. What profession other than your own would you like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “Sheep herder or a guide dog for the blind.”

12. What profession would you not like to do? “Fox-hunting. I like foxes.”

13. Tell me about a memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “Meeting Craig for the first time, training with him, and realizing we were going to work together for many years. He is a great guy and a very good Deputy Sheriff.”

14. What is something that you are really proud of and why? “That I am about to be sworn in as the Anderson Valley’s Sheriff’s Office Canine Corps. The local community got together to make sure this could happen and I hope I can repay them.”

15. What is your favorite thing about yourself? “That I am a very loyal and get along with everyone who is law-abiding, whether two-legged or four-legged.”

16. Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Great job, Bullet — you did your very best to protect and serve your community.”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Retired Gynecologist and leading member of the AV Education Foundation, Lanny Parker.

Linda was born in 1950 in Marion, Ohio to parents Philip Warden Kline Jr. and Elizabeth Preston. The Kline’s had come over from the Netherlands in 1701 and settled amongst the Pennsylvania Dutch community of Lancaster, PA. Later the family moved to Fairborn, PA, where Linda’s grandparents were born and raised. Her grandfather worked in Pittsburgh for National Cash Register and met her grandmother at a church picnic. Linda’s father was born in Pittsburgh in 1920 and when he was ten the family moved to Glen Falls in the state of New York, where he later attended the prestigious RPI Engineering College, from where he graduated in 1942. At that point he joined the US Navy as a navigator from 1943-45. In 1947 he met Elizabeth on a blind date in Dayton, Ohio.

The Preston’s came from England in 1910 and settled in Dayton, where Linda’s grandparents had eight children, her mother Elizabeth being born in 1920. After her father died when Elizabeth was just sixteen, she put herself through school in the evenings and worked as an executive secretary in the daytime. She married Linda’s father in 1949, and following Linda they had twin daughters, Ann and Bev, in 1953. “We are all close and the twins, who were born 14 minutes apart, now live 14 minutes-drive apart!”

The family lived in Galion, Ohio, a town about the size of Cloverdale with a few thousand people, somewhat rural back then, where her father had a job with a power equipment company. “ My mother was a full-time Mom but also threw herself into our activities. She was the President of the Parents Teachers Association and the Brownie Pack Leader. I was a good student but very shy — hard to believe, I know. It is hard to explain but I was, yet I found myself driven to push myself forward. After I’d had my first tap dance lesson, the next day at school I was dancing in front of the class! I was shy but wanted to do that very much. I was social and had many friends but I was pretty quiet in the group and was not comfortable with people beyond my close friends. I was always outside playing — swimming, on my bicycle, skating. We lived on a cul-de-sac in a three-bedroom house with no fences between the houses on the street so we could just play all along the street behind the houses, which all had quite big yards back there. It was typical mid-America of the fifties; very ‘Leave it to Beaver.’ My Dad was called Ward too, thankfully my mother was not named June!”

In 1960, when Linda was ten years old her father took a job with Lockheed in the Santa Clara Valley of northern California and the family moved out West. “I was told that we were moving to a valley surrounded by wonderful mountains and the teacher took me around the school to say ‘goodbye’ to everyone which made me feel special. I was not upset to be moving and my parents certainly made it sound very exciting to be moving to California. We moved into a new house, again on a cul-de-sac — it was $20K for a three-bedroom. It was a safe neighborhood and I was soon bike riding and swimming with new friends who I had no problem in finding, one in particular, Peggy, who still is like a sister to me.”

Linda joined the girl scouts and was on the school swimming team, and then in 6th grade her ‘acting career’ began. “My classmates wrote plays and always cast me in lead roles. I was still shy in some ways but I really wanted to do it. It was great fun and wonderful that the teachers allowed us to do it. I also became the secretary on the student council. However, it was not until 1964, when I was in Junior High, that my life really began. I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show! Then they came to the U.S. and I went to see them at the Cow Palace, south of San Francisco, after writing off for tickets — $12.50 each. I was ‘scarred’ for life. I was the biggest Beatle fan and I loved Paul McCartney. I was luckier than most because I had a cousin in England, Susan Haynes, and I would write to her about them and she’d send me Beatle magazines. I joined the fan club and have kept everything I had from them very carefully. I saw them at 14 and cried and then again at 15 when I just screamed. I had matured! My Dad drove me to the concert and sat in the parking lot for the entire show. He also drove me to the mall when their records came out. I had to have them the first day. Then my Mom and I would sit and listen to try to figure out the lyrics. She was worried about me going to see their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966 and I was not allowed to go. I have seen Paul McCartney three times now, once with my son Jack who I told I was taking to the dentist! He had a great time too. I still have all of the Beatle albums and my Beatle boots. I must have seen ‘the film ‘Hard Day’s Night about 20 times. I went everyday when it first came out, and ‘Help!’ about ten times. I even have copies of the scripts from the fan club. Yes, I was a major Beatlemaniac!”

Linda attended Fremont High School in Sunnyvale. She was a track team sprinter and also played basketball, which in those days was not taken very seriously. “They called it ‘powder puff’. I was a good student, enjoying PE, English, and typing and shorthand — who knew how useful that would become! I was also involved in some comedy skits but did no real acting during those years. I was still a little shy. I did all my chores at home with my Dad. My sisters did theirs with Mom. I would help with the yard work and hang around with Dad. I always had a job to earn extra pocket money, starting a baby-sitting service when I was 12. I had the neighborhood covered. Then at sixteen I worked for the Park and Recreation in Sunnyvale as a swimming pool attendant. I also sold Beatle bubble gum cards. I would buy a whole box, add those I needed to my collection, and then sell the rest to friends at school to cover my costs. “

Six months before graduation, Linda’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Around that time her father was laid off at the age of 48. “Everything changed. After graduation, I decided to stay at home and initially got a part-time job as a receptionist at a department store, while going to De Anza College. However, this changed when I found out I needed to work more. I became a part-time student and worked full-time at the store. My Mother passed on August 2nd, 1972. My Dad took a sales job with a plumbing & heating company and never did get back to engineering. My Mom said it was good for him to be out with people and to overcome his shyness. He was a wonderful handyman and mechanic, self-taught, and I don’t think we ever hired anyone to do any work for us. In 1973 he re-married, Sharon, and we three girls moved out to explore the world.”

Linda had been a PE major at college but never really used it. “I kept the secretarial job and lived in various places in the area between Los Gatos and Burlingame, on the Peninsular and south Bay. I had boyfriends and several close girlfriends, who I am still in touch with. We loved going to live music concerts, hanging out on Santa Cruz beach, and particularly skiing. We’d mainly go to Sugar Bowl in the Lake Tahoe area and work checking tickets in the morning to get a full-day skiing pass. We’d be there most weekends, renting a cabin for the season.”

Linda led this lifestyle for four years until, in the fall of 1976, when she was twenty-six, she met Jim Boudoures through mutual friends. “He lived in Philo, California, a place I’d never heard of! We began a long distance relationship that went on for two years. The first time I came up here, in early 1977, I actually ended up in Alexander Valley! I finally found this road and thought ‘Where am I? I’d never been anywhere without streetlights!’ We split weekends between here and my place but over time I was coming here more and more. I was so amazed and impressed with Jim’s parents. I thought it was a very special family right from the start and I immediately thought the world would not be the same without these people. Jim’s father, Pete, passed away a year ago and I was right. He was the center of the family. In April 1978 Jim asked ‘when are you going to marry me?’! I said ‘You don’t say, when, you ask, ‘Will you?’ He then asked, ‘Will you?’ and I said, ‘When?’ We were married a year later on April 7th, 1979.”

Jim took a trailer down to Sunnyvale and moved Linda up to the Valley and they lived on the Boudoures Ranch following a honeymoon in Hawaii. Jim was the owner of Philo Saw Works, a chain saw shop on the property that eventually expanded into a construction company. Linda was a homemaker for a year until doing some substitute teaching at the school and for the County at schools such as Bachman Hill and Clear Water. She was the secretary at Bachman Hill before becoming pregnant and having first child, Pete in 1984.

In 1980, Linda began to socialize more in the Valley and joined the Unity Club when such women as Madge Gibson, Virginias McConnell, Beth Tuttle, and Joan Bloyd were members and later she was invited to join the ICW (Independent Career Women) by Eileen Pronsolino. “I told her I didn’t have a specific ‘career’ and she said that was OK. As a young mother I joined a group called ‘Gymboree’ in Ukiah where I met Marti Bradford, among others, at that playgroup for kids. Jack was born in 1986 and then Mollie in 1989. I was all about motherhood for many years and was Vice President of the PTA for six years when the kids were at the Elementary School. In the early nineties I even helped Tom Smith sign up kids for the soccer program he was starting and my kids all played for a time. I later taught PE at the high school for five years.”

“Then in 1994, Pete fell in love with basketball and I was instrumental in bringing Camp Coleman, a basketball course, to the Valley in 1996, which I continued to do for ten years, one of the things I am most proud of. I had been sent by Bill Dawson, who had started PE at the Elementary School, to a P.E. workshop at Cal Poly; Palmer Toohey came too. It was there that I approached the basketball coach, Samuel Coleman (later Kazembe Ajamu, his African name) about bringing his camp to the Valley. He agreed and he and his wife and daughter, plus the coaches, all stayed at our house. This 2-day camp for 6-18 year-olds took place every year in November just before basketball season and we’d get fifty to sixty kids attending. It was always a really fun weekend for the kids and also the coaches who stayed with us. Another very exciting thing for me was when Gail Meyer, Susan McClure and I started the AV Mother’s Comedy Troupe in 1990 and for ten years we appeared at the Valley’s annual Variety Show. That was so much fun. I finally got to perform — my dream had come true!”

In 1980, Linda started teaching aerobic classes at the old Grange building and conducted two a week for 15 years. Then she took four years off until starting the ‘Young at Heart’ senior women’s stretching and strengthening exercise class that has been going since 1999 and still goes strong today. “We have performed at the Variety show and our group consists of women from their fifties to their nineties: Freda Fox is 93. Other core members are Jeannie Nickless, Sandra Nimmons, Donna Reilly, Gwen Smith, and Linda Brennan. The social part of our gatherings is as important as the exercise and we do a ‘walk talk’ around the Grange Hall in the middle of the session. The classes are one hour long and are every Tuesday and Thursday from 8.30am to 9.30am.”

Apart from that, Linda has now joined the Valley’s Senior Center Board — ‘they are my peeps!’ and keeps in touch with many of her old friends. “I have always made time to stay in touch with friends. Five of my girlfriends and I will be celebrating turning sixty by meeting in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks and sharing a suite at The Bellagio Hotel and Resort. I have known Janice since I was 10 years old and Cindy and I have been best friends since we were 13 years old. Vickie, Mary, and Cyndie have been my friends since high school. Six sixty year olds at the Bellagio. Can you imagine? Jim continues to own and run the business, 35 years now, and he employs around ten to twelve guys. He has also raised over $20K for the high school sports boosters. Oh, and I must mention our dog Gus who passed away this past week at 15. He was such a big part of our lives here. We got him for Mollie on her 8th birthday and he went to work with Jim every day. We all miss him so much.”

I asked Linda for a verbal image of her father. “Well, he is in his nineties, living in Oroville near Chico, CA. and has been with Sharon for 38 years now. When I think of him I would describe him as gentle, kind, quiet, friendly, responsible, proud, clever, funny and extremely hand. There is nothing he can’t build or fix. He is physically very well and has never been in a hospital.” And her mother? “I would say a very caring, smart, confident woman. A leader, artistic, fun, and attractive with an amazing sense of style. She made most of our clothes growing up. She was very involved in our lives and always there for us but allowed us a degree of freedom to make our own decisions.”

“I’m very proud of my family. Jim’s family spent several summers on Lake Tahoe when he was growing up and when our kids were all under 10, we rented a house on the north shore of Lake Tahoe for 2 weeks during the summer. This began a family tradition for 17 years. Every year it was a different house and we invited family and friends to join us and have so many great memories. This is something we would like to continue and hope that our children and their children will do the same. Pete, now 27, returned to the Valley two years ago and is working with his dad and brother on the Philo Saw Works crew. They have been learning to build since they were kids. Pete is also now building his own home on our property and has been in a serious relationship with Megan Marie Oropeza for two years. He continues to play basketball on a recreation league team and travels to tournaments in California, Arizona, and Florida.”

“Jack (25) has returned to the Valley after attending SF State for five years. He and his girlfriend Mimi Mendoza are expecting a baby boy in January. Jim and I are looking forward to becoming grandparents and my Dad will be a great grandfather for the first time. Mollie (23) is studying kinesiology (the scientific study of human movement) and enjoying her job at Lululemon Athletica in San Jose’s Santana Row. She works out with a trainer and loves taking kick-boxing and cross-fit classes, and various forms of yoga. All three of the kids were fortunate to spend two weeks in Greece in 2010 and visited the town where their great grandparents were born. For the first time in their lives they didn’t have to explain how to pronounce ‘Boudoures’!”

‘I love the sense of community here in Anderson Valley. Everyone is looking out for each other and is prepared to take care of each other. I do think some of the small town gossip is a negative aspect of Valley life but it’s part of living in a close-knit community that is so great in so many ways.”

I asked Linda for her brief responses to various Valley talking points and issues.

The wineries and their impact? “I like the fact that they provide so many jobs but wonder how they can continue to all be supported and these jobs maintained. There may be too many at this point but I do love the wines we have here. They are of a very high quality.”

KZYX radio? “Jim loves the Terry Gross interviews but I generally find myself listening to sports radio — KNBR from San Francisco.”

The School System? “My kids received a quality education and feel their teachers gave them that and great support to achieve it.”

The Elder Home? “I support the idea and hope some day it will be available to our seniors.”

Changes in the Valley? — “Not all positive. There has been a big influx of people in recent years and tourist traffic seems to have really increased. However, we have to grow, it is the way it is. I am a positive person and look at it that way — as somebody once said, ‘The only thing constant in life is change’.”

I posed a few questions to my guest. Some from TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton.”

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Seniors — for their wisdom and stories, and kids for their energy. I have a few B.F.F.’s (Best Friends Forever) who are kids — Marlen and Brianna Ferreyra and the Teague twins, Heather and Chelsea.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Racism or any kind of prejudice… Rude people. ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ are words that aren’t used enough these days.”

Sound or noise you love? “Children’s laughter; rain on the roof; The Beatles.”

Sound or noise you hate? “Sirens; gun shots; foul language.”

Favorite food or meal? “Grilled salmon, roasted Yukon Gold potatoes, asparagus, chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, and a glass of local pinot noir.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would it be? “Paul McCartney. If a 2nd person could be there it’d be Oprah Winfrey, who loves Paul too. Maybe the basketball player Michael Jordan would be on my B-list.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “My Beatle collection; family photos; and my mother’s handkerchief collection.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “The film would have to be ‘Hard Day’s Night’; the song ‘In my Life’ by the Beatles; and a book ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.”

Favorite hobby? “I love taking photographs and making collages with them. I also love to look for furniture, china, and other treasures at flea markets or thrift stores. I prefer things that are made well and have a sense of history, rather than something new.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? — “A stand-up comedienne or actress. Perhaps even a private detective?”

Profession you’d not like to do? “A prison guard.”

Age when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “At 14 I went on a date to a teen club dance with Peter Louis Kaupert. He now lives in Santa Cruz and has twelve kids. I’m glad I never married him!!”

Something you’d do differently if you could do it over? “I wished I had been more focused in school and college. I wish I had finished what I started sometimes.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget? “The happiest time of my life was raising our kids — all the sports and activities. I miss those crazy, busy years… Beatlemania was ‘fab’ too of course — yeah yeah yeah!”

Favorite thing about yourself? “My sense of humor. Being a positive person in most situations.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “If he said ‘Oh, this is going to be fun’ that would be great.”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. (For the next two weeks, the interviews will adopt a different theme. I shall be interviewing the five candidates for the three open positions on the AV School Board and asking each of them for their opinions and thoughts on some of the issues they will face if they are successful in the upcoming election. Their answers and comments to the first half of those questions will appear next week, on October 26th, with the rest to follow in the November 2nd issue, just 6 days before the Nov. 8 election.)

In 1983, after completing her associate arts degree at City College, Beverley went to SF State to get a BA in Women’s Studies and Psychology, during which time she supported herself with a job as a 411 operator with Pacific Bell telephone. She and Monika, who had been together since 1984, briefly lived together in a one-bedroom apartment on Guerrero Street before moving to 15th and Castro, to the downstairs apartment in a huge Victorian house. “This was the mid-80s and the AIDS epidemic was really starting to hit The City. We seemed to be always visiting friends in the hospital, going to a funeral, to the hospital again, a funeral, the hospital, a memorial… It went on and on. We lost many friends and walking around the Castro district you’d see so many people with sunken cheeks, gray-colored skin; 20-year olds in wheelchairs. You were not sure if you knew them or not. Often you did — they had changed so much, so quickly. It was devastating and every day, all day, it was the main topic of discussion. We couldn’t do it anymore and around 1989 we decided to get away. Monika’s ex-husband, a gay guy, owned a resort on Key West with his lover, and we moved there to get away from all the sadness.”

Beverley got a job supervising the cleaning crews and maids at a resort that had over 200 rooms, and “worked my arse off. It was long hours during the tourist season then not much to do at the other times of the year. Monika was a bartender/hostess at a five-star restaurant. A couple of years later, just three months after Monika had visited her in Germany, her mother passed away and left her with some money. We had had it with Key West by that time and three years after leaving we moved back to San Francisco, buying a new car for the road trip. Key West did not offer much to us other than steady work and lots of alcohol, and the fact that we lived in a house in Old Town. We had missed our friends and ‘family’ in SF — our home.”

In 1993, after briefly staying with a friend, they moved back into the house on 15th and Castro and it was a case of ‘did we actually ever leave?’ Beverley started a job for a non-profit – The Progress Foundation, which found temporary housing for the mentally ill. “They would need housing for 60 days before going to an independent living situation. By this time, the ‘cocktail’ to offset the AIDS virus had been found. “You would see people and say, ‘Oh my God, you’re still alive!’ People were still dying but less of them. We were able to buy a condo and moved out of the house. We also traveled a lot during that time – around California, to Europe, and Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and often to England and Germany of course. One of our things to do on our travels was to check out local real estate offices. We were on one of our trips, this time in the town of Mendocino, when we saw a Bed and Breakfast business available in Anderson Valley. We did not know where Philo was but decided to go by there on the way back to the City. It was closed but we looked around through the windows anyway. A week later Monika asked me what I thought. I had not really thought that much about it. I liked SF but I had to admit it I was growing out of it. I didn’t want to ‘play’ that much anymore. Anyway, a month later we met the owner, the recently widowed Jill Crane (now Derwinski) and made an offer that was accepted. I would run the Inn and Monika could continue her work from home as a travel agent. Our favorite thing to do was to have friends for dinner so this was something like that. Monika had always cooked and I did the grunt stuff. I loved it. Anyway, we had also just got Rupert, an Airedale/Border Collie mix, as we were leaving the City, so there was no turning back and we left and moved into the log cabin behind the Inn in the spring of 2001.”

Jill stayed for a short time to teach them the ropes. Beverley loved it and really enjoyed meeting the guests but, after a year, Monika lost her job and they decided she would run the Inn and Beverley would get a job elsewhere. “We kind of reversed roles. Monika flourished at the inn-keeping and I got a job with the County Mental Health Department. It all went well for a few years but we found the Inn to be very time-consuming and left us little time to ourselves for long periods but then nothing much to do at other times. It was not enjoyable anymore; we wanted to enjoy visiting friends and were unable to get away when we wanted. After five or six years I told Monika we had to stop. She agreed and we closed the Inn with great sorrow because we still enjoyed big parts of it. We moved into the main house and rented out the log cabin, where we’ve been very lucky with getting good tenants.”

Today, Beverley continues to work for the mental Health Department while Monika has worked at a few different wineries in the Valley such as Husch, Brutacao, Claudia Springs, and now Bink Winery in the Madrones complex just south of Philo. “I have been at my job for ten years now and really enjoy the actual job a lot. I love working with the mentally ill and their families and seeing progress being made; I am very passionate about it. However, I do not like the department ‘politics’ and the effects that and the county government has had on our daily work. It seems as if we have less and less to offer. It’s getting very bad. My mother passed in 2006 and that was very, very hard on me and particularly my Dad. He wanted to stay in their house in London but just could not cope alone. He came to visit us here for two months but then went back. He was there for a year and not doing well. Eventually the family there said he had to move. He was living in one room and surviving on Chinese takeout food. He came to stay here with us in Philo and has been here for three-and-a-half years now. Socially, I like to hang out with friends here in the Valley and have dinner parties; I enjoy the Quiz at Lauren’s most weeks, go to Mosswood Market for my coffee and The Buckhorn for my beer, and we like to go for walks with Rupert and Karla, our German short-haired pointer/lab mix.”

I asked Beverley for a brief verbal image of her father. “A devoted and good husband. A polite Englishman.” And her mother? “A fabulous human being who, once people met her, they never forgot. She sparkled and glowed and was a great Mum.”

Her responses to various Valley talking points?

The wineries and their impact? “Well they are certainly good for jobs and they do make some great wines, but I think we have enough of them now.”

The AVA? “I love it and read it every week. It is good to know what is going on and what the community is talking about. I like the Sheriff’s log, the local news, Valley People, and what is happening at Turkey Vulture’s Three-Dot Lounge.”

KZYX radio? “I don’t listen a lot although it is often on at home as Monika listens. I do like Fred Wooley’s show on Sundays.”

The school system? “I know that some of my friends who are parents say it is horrible and others say it is marvelous. It’s probably somewhere in-between.”

The marijuana issue? “The whole issue is a huge pink elephant in the county, a serious problem. I see the effects in my work every day as it really impacts young people. We need to address this problem because, whatever you may hear, we are not doing so at the moment. Those for and against the legalization of marijuana all seem to be avoiding the big picture.”

The AV Elder Home? “Nobody knows anything about what is going on there — that’s what I know!”.

The Health Center? “It’s marvelous that they got the grant money. However, there are some issues I have with the administration side there. Some people never get their bills and others are not even billed in the first place.”

Law and order in the Valley? “Well we definitely need two deputy sheriffs. We are isolated here and protection is needed. It seems that it’s just ‘politics’ that are the reason for this whole subject being up for so much debate.”

Changes in the Valley? “In my ten years I like what has happened. The small changes have been good for the community overall. Many of the people who have moved here are like Monika and me. They love it here and respect it. Also, these people are not running away from somewhere else as much as perhaps some of those who came 40 years or so ago were; they are coming here more because they choose to and not so much because they really want to leave where they were.”

I posed a few questions to my guest, some from a questionnaire featured on TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton” and some I came up with myself.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “My family of Monika and our dogs and cats.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Negative people.”

What sound or noise do you love? “The birds in the trees through the sound of silence.”

What sound or noise do you hate? “The revving up of motorcycles. I used to have a bike and there is no need to do that.”

What is your favorite food or meal? “Chicken curry and biryani rice.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Gandhi..There were two sides to him — his famous side and the one that led him to sleep with many of his young female followers. I’d like to talk about them both with him.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “My passport, some family photos, and my mother’s jewelry.”

What scares you? “What we are doing to the planet. And possible Republican Presidential nominee, Rick Perry!”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “A book would be ‘A Fine Balance’ by Rohinton Mistry about the changes in Indian society from independence in 1947 to the Emergency of the late 70s. A film would be ‘The Usual Suspects’ or ‘Fight Club’; and a song: ‘Brown Sugar’ by The Rolling Stones.”

Do you subscribe to any publications or newspapers? ‘Mother Jones,’ ‘Dog Fancy,’ and ‘The Sun’ — a magazine of short stories every month. Monika and I fight over who gets to read it first.”

Favorite hobby? “Drinking beer and watching movies.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance? “A dancer on Broadway.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “Anything to do with bodily fluids.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “When I was 11, Rossini Rossi came to my house and we watched television and listened to records. She was the one that got away!”

Is there something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “No. Sure I was devastated when my mother passed away but I am who I am because of what has happened to me and I accept that.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “My school years at SF State were very memorable. Oh, and the trip to India with my Monika and my parents in the late 90s. That was very special.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “Having come from the beginning of my life to where I am now is something I am proud of, my journey so far.”

What is your favorite thing about yourself? “My ability to make friends and draw people in. Hopefully I have some of my mother’s qualities in that way.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Well it would be good if She said, ‘Well done! I know you had lots of fun; let’s have some more’.”

If you would like to read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Linda Boudoures.

As George was growing up, a girl of his age called Sheila Osbourn had become a neighborhood friend. The families were friends and they grew up playing with each other with Sheila later attending a girls’ school in the Himalayan Mountains near George’s all-boys school. In his late teens, George asked Sheila out on a date. According to George, “She had many boyfriends and I thought I had no chance but she said ‘Yes’! Her mother, Biddie, did not approve of my drinking and I’d sometimes pick Sheila up when I was half drunk so eventually Sheila gave me an ultimatum to ‘smarten up.’ I said I’d try and gradually I changed. I stopped drinking, told my friends I was happier being like this, and became a good boy. From that day on Sheila and I were never separated. Our relationship was simple — very sweet; very, very loving, and it grew stronger every day.”

The Osbourn family was also British and grandfather John Osbourn left England and became a structural engineer in India, where among his projects was the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta — the busiest bridge in the world with more than half a million pedestrians crossing every day. He married Beverley’s grandmother when she was just 15. “He had money and my great grandmother encouraged my grandmother to marry him because of that. However, after two years and the birth of my mother, she left him because of the abuse that came as a result of his alcoholism. My grandmother had a good time before beginning back-to-back long-term relationships with very wealthy men. This allowed my mother to attend finishing school, have her clothes hand made, be driven by a chauffeur, and, because of the gentlemen’s wealth, have bodyguards.”

“Both the Bennetts and Osbourns were families of the Raj with servants. With India changing so much after partition in 1947, and horrible scenes that followed, they all knew they would leave one day. To stay, you would have to be Indian, follow the Hindu religion, wear saris, and adapt Indian customs. We were British, Catholic, and would never fit in.”

George moved out of his family home and lived with Sheila’s family — “where they could keep an eye on me.” They dated for a year or so before getting engaged, which was sealed with a kiss at the cinema, and then saved money for a year to buy a wedding ring. They were married in 1950 and moved into a rented one-bedroom apartment and Beverley was born a year later. “I grew up with my closest friends at school being Portuguese and Dutch Jews, who together with the Brits had been very influential in India to that point. My Dad was an engineer with an air-conditioning company and Mum worked as a telephone operator, although she really didn’t have to and played most of the time. She did attend secretarial school and shorthand and typing because she thought that was the independent thing to do. However, she knew her mother had plenty of money and privilege if times got hard. My paternal grandmother, Adeline, thought that the Osbourns were snobs and that their coloring was ‘too dark’ for us to be associated with. Conversely, Winnie, my maternal grandmother, thought the Bennett’s were socially beneath them and had no money. She really spoiled me and my mother and made sure I had the right nannies.”

Despite the available privileges, Beverley grew up in an average middle class apartment but when her grandmother wanted to see her she would be picked up in their own rickshaw or chauffeur driven car and taken to the movies, or to her Indian dance lessons, or to hang out at her grandmothers where there were many servants inside a large compound with many bodyguards. “Tailors and cobblers would come to the house and measure us for clothes and shoes, returning later the same day with the finished products — of a very high quality, I should add. My parents did have a nanny for me and also had a cook but it was not like my grandmother’s home. I attended a Catholic nursery school and was not a nice child, being thoroughly spoilt by my grandmother. I remember I got perfectly good nannies fired just because I could. My friends were mainly my cousins and any others that I had were picked for me.”

Beverley’s father’s family had left India before partition and by 1955 her father was strongly encouraged to join them in London. “India had changed so much in those years. India wanted to be India with as little to remind them of colonial rule as possible. A form of racism against the former rulers was everywhere and my father would never be allowed to get a decent job. There was nothing for him in India anymore. He went to England and stayed with his parents in Edmonton, north London. My mother and I stayed for a few months as they kept refusing our passport application. Eventually my grandmother Winnie went to the passport office. She presented the official with a rolled up newspaper and suggested he read it. She had figured it out and had put a load of cash inside the paper. We got our passports. She was very, very upset at our departure. I was the apple of her eye, but staying was not an option. We could not take any money with us out of India, and my mother wore as much of her jewelry on her hands, feet and neck as she could. After making a few visits to Britain, Winnie did eventually come and live with us in London in 1968 — when her wealthy consorts died she had nothing. She even worked as a secretary for a time! She died in 1984.”

Meanwhile, Beverley was now in London, wandering, “What did you do to me?” She and her parents lived in the attic at her father’s parents’ home along with various other aunts, uncles, and cousins. “It was damp and cold. I was told to no longer speak any of the languages I knew — Hindi, Urdu, Tamil — just English, and I had no nannies. I was very miserable. My mother literally couldn’t boil an egg — she never had to cook. There was no chauffeur, just these big crowded red vehicles called buses! People did not know what to make of me and my mother and our dark skin. On top of all that my grandmother Adeline was an abusive tyrant to me. I hardly saw my grandfather although I do remember him rolling cigarettes with one hand, his very red hair, and him brewing his tea at night for drinking the next morning. It must have been like mud.”

Beverley’s father got a job in a factory while her mother became a secretary at the Norwegian Consulate. “I went to a local school, St Edmund’s Catholic, where I was the only ‘Wog’! — Western Oriental Gentleman was the normal explanation for this term — one that was very prevalent during the 50s, 60s and 70s. It was a derogatory term for people from most of the British colonies. Later two cousins came over from India who were as dark as me so I was not the only one anymore. I was a very social child and made friends at school — including Rossina Rossi. Her family owned a café (diner) and she was my first crush when I was 11, or maybe it was the food at her parent’s café — it’s was all a bit of a blur at that age!”

In 1963, Beverley started at Sir Thomas More Grammar School, a mixed gender school that required a school uniform. “I was always getting into trouble by ‘fashionizing’ my uniform. I was pretty good at my studies but in my situation, further education was not an option — it was to be a job at 16 and marriage not long after. My first job was as an operator with the national telephone company, run by the Government Post Office Department. I worked in the seedy district of Soho, which was a big eye-opener at the time, with its adult clubs, cinemas, strippers, and prostitutes. My cousin Jackie, who is five years older than me, led my social life and she’d get me into pubs at 16. (The drinking age was, and is, 18 in the UK.). They were not strict with ID’s and we’d also go to dances and a blues club called the Ferry Pub where I saw Elton John, Long John Baldry and others in their early days. I even saw The Dave Clark Five before they became big in England. One of them cleaned my Mum’s office!”

During these first few years in England, Beverley also traveled abroad with her cousin Jackie, mainly in Western Europe, but at 19 her mother told her that she had a friend in America whom she could stay with. “I didn’t care where I went as long as I had somewhere cheap to stay. I had not really thought about the States until my mother mentioned her friend who lived in San Francisco. I did not know much about it when I arrived in the Haight Asbury district in 1971. The relics of the summer of love were still around — burned out hippies not knowing what to do. I stayed for three weeks and my Mum’s friend, Chita, said I was welcome to come back anytime. She even said I could work for her at the nanny service she did out of her house.”

“After I returned to London I realized that I wanted an adventure and to stay in the States for an extended time. My Dad couldn’t understand why and we argued a lot about it. But my mind was made up. The UK had changed and racism was on the rise with the arrival of many West Indians, Pakistanis and Indians in recent years. Two months later I was back in the US to stay, living on Cole Street in SF. It all just fell into place. I was extremely lucky.”

Beverley moved into the house on Cole Street and started work. “From having had a nanny years before, I now became one! I found it very easy and there were two great things about living on Cole Street — Maude’s lesbian bar and Bradley’s Corner gay men’s bar. I was ‘out’ in the UK to most people, but not my parents. The scenes I had already experienced were quite scary — ‘maybe I’m not gay’, I sometimes thought. Maude’s was one of the only two real lesbian bars in the City at the time — 1971; the other was Peg’s Place. I was into clothes and dressed quite differently to most people, certainly compared to most dykes with their plaid shirts and jeans. They did not like me in Maude’s because of this, and maybe my accent too, I don’t really know. Anyway, on only my third time there a woman chased me out with a pool cue in her hand. I ran over to Bradley’s where they bought me a drink and were very friendly. That became my bar of choice and they showed me the ropes and even found me women! I did go back to Maude’s a couple of times but they ignored me when I ordered drinks so that was that for the next few years.”

By the mid-70s, after a few years of the dating game, Beverley started a serious relationship with Jean Bowker, a woman 20 years older who was a stewardess with Unite Airlines. They were together for a number of years. “I would still visit the UK once a year and my parents began to visit me in SF. I had started studying psychology at City College, while continuing the nanny job, and I moved in with Jean at Page and Stanyan Streets. When we broke up I enjoyed a couple of years as a bachelorette when I was a very happy camper, always out in the ‘scene,’ with many dates, before starting another serious relationship, this time with Nancy Keller. I also left the nanny job and worked for an answering service for various businesses in the Castro district. After Nancy and I broke up, I went back to the party lifestyle once more and really experienced life with a whole range of drugs, women, and a crazy social scene of clubs, music, and parties.”

Around 1983, Beverley was at Maude’s when she was offered a drink by a woman that she refused. The woman was quite upset at the snub and continued to pursue Beverley for the next year. “I don’t remember this, but apparently I ignored her and then, a year later, this same woman ignored me at a club one night. I did not recognize her. She told me about the incident at Maude’s but I did not remember. Anyway she did not want to know me at that point but now I was interested and so I bribed her friend to get me her number. It was Monika Fuchs, a German woman, the original lipstick lesbian. She went to Germany for a trip the next day but I did not know this and called the number hundreds of times. I broke her answering machine. Eventually, after she returned, she agreed to meet me for coffee at Café Flore. She made me wait for 40 minutes and then wanted champagne, not coffee. I did not have enough money on me so I suggested we went somewhere else — where I knew the bartender and would get the drinks free. We had a good time and Monika and I have not been apart since — that’s 27 years and counting.”

Part Two of Beverley’s interview will appear next week.

Bob was born in 1945 in Bozeman, Montana, at the nearest hospital to where the family lived in the small town of Big Timber. His father, Hank was from a German/Danish family from the Schleswieg-Holstein region between those countries who came over to the States and had settled in Iowa and Nebraska in the 1850’s. Bob’s grandparents, William and Henrietta, settled in Big Springs, Nebraska where William became a bank teller. They had six children and Bob’s father was the youngest of the four boys. “They grew up during the Depression and were very close. I have been around them and they are a bunch of goofy guys, always laughing together, with many memories of their antics growing up.”

Bob’s mother, Carol Ankeny, was from a primarily French family who had come over before the Revolutionary War. Some were ‘Daughters of the Republic and one was a French officer who fought the British in that war. “My maternal grandfather was in farming and always with plans to get rich. He lost everything in the Depression and then decided to look into the oil business, driving around Colorado and Nebraska and wherever he saw wildcatters drilling he would check it out and perhaps invest. He never quite found a good one and the best he ever got was some mineral rights on some properties… That side of the family was strict Presbyterians, very formal — very different to the Klindt’s. My mother was very matronly and became a teacher in Big Springs. My father went to pharmacy school in Reno, Nevada and became a pharmacist in Big Springs where my parents met and were married in 1939.”

First son Jan was born in 1941, by which time they had moved to Wyoming, and then after the move to Montana, along came Bob in ’45, sister Mary Ann in 1949, and Tom in 1950. “My father had some conflict in Wyoming when his local competition claimed his pharmacy credentials were not valid there so he opened a store on the Lodge Grass Indian Reservation, where drugs were sometimes secured by livestock as collateral until money could be found… After a pharmacy in Big Timber closed down, my parents got a loan from my maternal grandfather and opened a new pharmacy there. My Dad was the new business guy in a very close-knit community and it was hard to get accepted for a time. He overcame this by working 14 hours a day and always being available, day or night, for both his customers and their animals, if they needed drugs. He eventually joined the city council and was on the school board.”

“We went to church every Sunday with my mother. My Dad did not go but never discouraged us form going. He worked all the time. I went to the kindergarten there and some of them are still friends. It was the same gang of kids all the way through school, up to an including Sweet Grass High School — home of The Sheepherders! Yes, we had a mascot who was a shepherd with a corncob pipe in his mouth. That has caused some problems for some people in recent times. The town of Big Timber had about 1500 people, and the whole county, which was pretty big, had only 2500. Our high school was about 200 kids… I have many very positive memories of growing up there. Football was my sport at school when I would be a ‘nice guy turned angry’. I played full back and linebacker on defense and was the team captain. Academically I was pretty good, B average — it was a tough school, with the parents of many of the kids being well-educated from back east. The community was primarily of Norwegian descent, farmers and ranchers and in a beautiful spot with the Crazy Mountains to the north and Yellowstone to the south. Personally I was never into horse-riding or cattle work, I was a town kid although I did enjoy hunting for deer for a few years.”

“I starting mowing people’s lawns when I was about 12 or 13 and would drive the mower in the car trunk to my jobs. I also helped people to get the hay in at harvest time but thought there had to be an easier way to earn money so I did some house painting and went on to do that for two summers at high school and for two more when I went to college… Big Timber also hosted a rodeo every year — the biggest one-day rodeo in the northwest, with parades, a dance, and rodeo. It was a big deal in town and Gene Autry attended along with the top riders from around the country. They would set up ‘The Longest Bar in the World’ — four blocks long! Beer drinking with friends was a big part of my life in Montana; camping and drinking beer. We’d hunt for deer but the whole thing was more about being with buddies and drinking beer together. Later I decided that hunting wasn’t really a sport and turned to fishing — I wished I’d found that earlier.”

Bob’s high school years occurred during some turbulent times in this country and they played a big part in his life at that time. I was very interested in the civil rights movement despite only ever seeing one black person in Montana. Even though I had grown up there my opinions were different to those of many of my friends. I was amazed at some of their attitudes. Sometimes it seemed like it was me against the class and I was called ‘nigger-lover’ but it never went any further than that. I studied the topic at home a lot and was influenced by my parents and the liberal church that we were now going to — a congregational church that became the United Church of Christ, with young ministers, liberal thinkers on civil rights issues. It was a broad-minded church and open to discussion to their beliefs. I once gave a sermon about the church’s role in civil rights — it received a polite response.”

Bob graduated high school in 1968. It was expected that he would go to college and he went to the University of Montana. His older brother had gone to the campus, to the engineering and ‘cow college’ in Bozeman. “I did not know what I wanted to do except that I wanted to get away and did so, to the liberal arts school in Missoula, Montana. I took a double major in Economics and Political Science but was more into partying than anything else when I was at college. I was arrested for being drunk in public just two weeks into my first semester and my friends and I soon took full advantage of 10-cent beer Mondays at the pizza parlor, and nickel beer Thursdays somewhere else. I joined a fraternity, which made the drinking even more acceptable. I did o.k. in the first year but gradually my grades declined. My Dad had become mayor of Big Timber to collect the $100 month stipend that went towards my college payments. There was lots going on politically but my interest had faded a bit and I was not really involved anymore. It was a waste of time in many ways and I missed many classes but I did study the books and somehow I maintained adequate grades.”

As graduation approached, Bob still had no idea what he wanted to do. He had worked part-time at a paper mill in his last two years at university and knew he wanted to get out of Montana and experience more of the world. “A buddy and I planned to go to New York City but he backed out at the last minute. I graduated in 1968 and, despite knowing I’d flunk the physical if I was drafted because of a heart issue, I still did not apply for any jobs. Instead I borrowed some money and headed to San Jose, California where another buddy from the fraternity lived. I drove out there and turned up at his parent’s house to find out that he had left to go to the University of Texas. They invited me in and I stayed with them for a few weeks anyway.”

Because of his heart issue, Bob failed a few physicals for jobs he applied for until one accepted him — a finance company in East San Jose. For a time he became a debt collector and ‘Repo’ man! In November 1968, Bob started a new job in social work for the Santa Clara County Social Services, earning $600 a month. “I started working with people I had been collecting money from! I had no experience and received little training but soon settled right in and made great friends in the department. We were like a family and I stayed there for 15 years.”

During those years, Bob resumed some of the political activism of his earlier years. He was involved with Cesar Chavez’ United Farm Workers Union and their boycott of Safeway; he was part of the ‘Free Angela Davis’ movement that worked to secure the release of the civil rights activist; took part in anti-war marches; and became a union steward in the Social Services Employees Union. “Our union was very well organized and we won in two cases against the State that followed strikes along with nurses and transport workers.”

Bob stared to date neighbor Val and, following the birth of daughter Nichole, they were married in 1972 and lived in an apartment before buying a house in East San Jose. “I liked it there, there is much more to it than the appearance. My activism dropped off after getting married but I kept in touch with many people from that and my work during that time.”

In the seventies, Bob had taken up the hobby of beer making which moved on to wine making. “With Val, I made apricot wine and blackberry wine and in 1973 at the Home Winemakers Competition we won blue ribbons and the apricot wine won Best Fruit Wine in Show. We did it again the following year but it wasn’t very good. Over the next few years, we would get friends together and pick grapes and make wine in our garage and by the late 70’s I began to look for abandoned vineyards. We got hold of some very good grapes in the early 80’s as the hobby became more serious and we would always have five or six barrels in the garage. Then in 1983 Val and I were divorced but I maintained visitation rights to my barrels for a time!”

Now that Bob was single and, having been laid off following governor Reagan’s cutbacks, he made plans with a friend to open a bistro but had no collateral so this was dropped and he came up with an idea for an antique business. This opened in 1984 as ‘Time Bandits’ and while “it never made any money to speak of, it did o.k., although it did mean that our house soon became filled up with all sorts of junk… Meanwhile I continued to look for a place to start my own winery.”

In 1985 Bob moved to a new job at the Santa Clara County Medical Center. “Governor Reagan had laid off many social workers but due to length of service some were eligible for rehire. I was one of those and joined a training class being taught by Claudia. We were a lazy group who didn’t make much effort while she tried very hard to help us. I liked her but thought she was just not interested in me. We would all play volleyball at lunchtime and one day she knocked me down after blocking my spike right back at me. She helped me up and pinched my ass as she did! I asked her out to a San Jose Earthquakes professional soccer match and afterwards we went to the Saddle Rock cowboy bar in downtown San Jose. We had a great time and she was not just my boring teacher anymore. However, she still did not show any real interests so I pursued her until she relented and we start to date regularly, and we were married in 1985.” Claudia and her two kids by previous relationship, Kevin and Kelly, moved in with Bob, and later Nichole joined them.

The search for a winery was still going on and in 1989 the ‘Time Bandits’ store was closed — “it had been a lot of fun but there was no money in it. That summer Claudia planned a getaway weekend for the two of us to some place called Boonville. I had never heard of it. We came up with two friends and went to the Buckhorn brewpub and had a great time, ending up with me singing on stage. The next day we took a look at this property, then owned by Milla Handley (Handley Cellars Winery) and Rex McClellan. It was twenty acres with a house and a 1000 gallon wine tank. We all loved it and decided we would go into this together. Three weeks later our house in San Jose was up for sale. Our offer was accepted in the fall of 1989. Our friends backed out of buying the property, which we did alone, but we formed a company with them in a winery business there, each couple investing $20 K in that. We stayed in San Jose in a rental house after our house was sold — the kids were still in high school there. We came up virtually every weekend for five years before moving here full-time in 1994. Nichole was out of school and the younger kids stayed with their father in San Jose — they didn’t want to move here.”

Moving up the Valley was a “no-brainer” for Bob — “I had always kept my small-town mentality, I guess. It was very different for Claudia — she was from a military family and had lived in Europe for a time also. She had been a manager and supervisor in social services at a hospital and was on a good salary. I got a job in social work with Child Protective Services based in Ukiah and found out at first hand that there were some crazy things that happen in this county — it’s another world here. I was with them for five years until 1999, and after being the social worker solely responsible for the coast from Westport down to Gualala when I started; by the time I left there were four social workers and several aides covering that area. It was probably the most important five years of my life. Wine is just wine. That work was very hard but very important and meaningful.”

Over the next few years it got to the point when doing the wine-making and the job became too much and in 1999, through total exhaustion, Bob decided he could not give enough time to the job and retired to concentrate on the wine making. “I still think about many of the kids and their families that I worked with in those days, particularly the reservation kids in Point Arena, many of whom were totally emotionally destroyed. I hope they have survived.”

Bob and Claudia soon made many friends in the Valley, in the wine-making business particularly — the Koblers at Lazy Creek, Alan Green at Greenwood Ridge, Phyllis at Pepperwood (now Esterlina), Pat Daniels and the Bennett’s at Navarro. “We have never had a huge social life here, mostly amongst the winery folks. We do attend many local events such as the beer festival, the Fair, various fundraisers. We have not had as many people over here as our house is not as nice as most of theirs — it is still a work in progress… We have always struggled financially here, ever since the beginning and we still are. We had a strained relationship with our partners and eventually bought them out. They were the marketing side and we are not very good at that unfortunately… Then there was a period of time when a movement began trying to stop wineries on this road and the rest of Holmes Ranch. It was frustrating but seems to have stopped at this point. We had a tasting room nearby at the Floodgate for a year or so then shared one with other wineries in Boonville for four years or so before returning to our own again in 2005 at the Floodgate. This has helped in some ways but does mean more costs. Small wineries are always going to struggle. I was a volunteer for the fire department for three years or so before my heart issues surfaced once more and I have had three major hospitalizations but feel ok now and hope to get lots of jobs done around here this year, ones that have been on hold for a long time.”

I asked Bob for a verbal image of his father. “Always working — either at the pharmacy or on the house or at meetings. We were not close and did not buddy- around but I had great respect for him and had no sense of alienation. My parents were very social and were at the center of the town’s community and progress. My Dad led groups to get lights for the sports fields, for cable television in town, for a sewage plant and landfill, when prior to that it was all dumped into the river.” And his mother? “Very patient and tolerant. She raised us and was a great cook — she told me about the birds and the bees.”

I asked Bob for the reasons he liked the Valley. “It is small like Big Timber. The sense of community.” And dislikes? “It is very isolated from many cultural events. The continued antagonism with some people on Holmes Ranch.”

What about Bob’s responses to various Valley issues?

The wineries and their impact? “They have had a positive impact in terms of providing jobs and income. It seems that young people were leaving but in recent years there has been a steady increase as they find work in tasting rooms. Tourism is about the same I would say but there are more wineries sharing that business now.”

KZYX radio? “I don’t listen that much.”

The school system? ‘It seems to be a decent school with dedicated teachers but…”

Marijuana and drugs in the Valley? “It has gotten out of hand. It seems to be a major talking point and the county’s reputation is centered on it. Lots of people seem to be sitting around most of the time and growing pot, seeing it as an easy way to make some money. I am not against it and legalization should happen. Methamphetamines are a different issue of course.”

I posed a few questions to Bob.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Enjoying the view from our deck with a glass of wine or beer. This is a beautiful place.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Having to worry about finances.”

Sound or noise you love? “The ‘cha-ching’ of a cash till! Making Zinfandel while listening to rock and roll, or Pinot Noir listening to jazz or classical music.”

Sound or noise you hate? “The humming of a computer. It reminds me I have things to do.”

Favorite food or meal? “Braised short ribs.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Cesar Chavez or Martin Luther King — people dedicated to their cause and struggle.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “My computer — my life is on there! Art work we have here, old family photographs.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? — “The movie would be ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolfe?’ with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I like challenging films like that; a book would be ‘Catch 22’ by Joseph Heller or ‘The Magus’ by John Fowles; a song — perhaps ‘Aquarius’ from Hair or Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco.’ I have lots of memories the late 60s of going to the Concerts in the Park. One of my favorite bands was ‘A Beautiful Day’ with Mitchell Holman, now a long-time Valley resident. I also had a crush on 1963 Playboy model Donna Ronne — another Valley resident in later years. I thought she was the perfect woman and there she was at a Valley pot luck one day, by that time working at the County Dump in the Valley.”

Favorite hobby? “Woodworking — I’m finally getting some done.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “An attorney. As a social worker I found myself often doing that sort of job.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “All day in an office.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “My first year in California. It was such a cultural shock and change.”

Something you’d do differently if you could do it over again? “I probably would not have started a winery of my own and stayed as a winemaker.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “The gratitude shown to me by the families who thanked me for the work I did that gave their kids a life.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “That I try to be open-minded to new ideas and people’s values.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what’d you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “You did alright. You had good values & tried to follow them.”

If you would like to read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Beverley Bennett.

Keith was born in Gridley, California, near Oroville, by Chico, to parents Kenneth ‘Red’ Martin and Lois Jones. The Joneses were German/English who had settled in the Carolinas in the late 1700s and were part of a farming community. His grandmother was English and grandfather an orphan who had left the region to work in the oilfields of Texas, where Keith’s mother was born.

“My father’s family is from a shady background and I don’t know much about them other than that they lived way back in the sticks in southern Arkansas. My grandfather was half-Cherokee, his mother was a squaw, which makes me one sixteenth Native American. My Dad was born in Texas, just over the border from Arkansas, and he worked in a lumber mill in Hot Springs, Arkansas.”

In the mid-30s, during the Depression, both families had moved up to California, as they followed wherever the work was in the agriculture industry, as so many people from Oklahoma (Okies) and Arkansas (Arkies) did at that time. “They were the Hispanic migrant workers of their time, going to wherever the work was, picking fruits and crops, all the way up to the Bakersfield and Fresno areas. My father’s family settled in Gridley, a farming community and County Fair town of perhaps 2000 people on Hwy 99, where my grandfather became the foreman on a large ranch. He had four sons and a daughter. My father was the oldest. The boys all went into the military in World War II, my father joining the Navy. The Jones family, who had left Arkansas in 1936, settled in Gridley in 1942, buying a small farm on the outskirts of town, between Gridley and Butte. My mother was the oldest of three girls and a boy.”

Keith’s father did not like agriculture work. He had been a diesel mechanic in the Navy but had always loved being a lumber guy and wanted to get back to the woods. He knew a family from Arkansas that had moved to Anderson Valley and acquired a mill across the highway from Jack’s Valley Store outside of Philo. They needed a truck driver and convinced him to come to the Valley. “My parents met in Gridley and were married in 1947. He was a hot-rod and motorcycle rider; she was still in high school and her family was not sure about her choice of husband. Anyway, later that year, my father, his father, and my mother’s father came out here together. My father and his father-in-law stayed, but my grandfather returned. He kept the ranch foreman job in Gridley for the rest of his life. I was born in 1948 but my father stayed in the Valley, driving trucks for various small mill companies. Then, when I was six months old, in early 1949, my mother and I came out here to join him in the log cabin he had on land way behind the Boonville Hotel, at Eason’s Trailer Park. There were several trailers and the one cabin, where we lived with no water or electricity.”

Keith’s grandmother joined the family and they all lived there for about three years. “During that time my Dad got re-acquainted with many people he had known in Arkansas. Most of the migrants here had come from the same area of Arkansas, just as most of the Mexican community have come from the same part of Mexico. News had spread back to Arkansas about all of the logging work and we had a cousin who owned a mill on Ornbaun Road. We were all connected but all broke! My family became acquainted with Cecil Charles, the grandfather of Bill and Norman Charles, great grandfather of Diana. He owned a large mill behind what is now the motel on the east side of the highway across from the Veterans Building. There were perhaps 15 houses there with a family in each and they all knew each other well. Cecil’s son was called ‘Twink’ and he became a very close friend of my Dad’s. It was Twink who called my Dad ‘Red’ because he would grow a beard around Fair time and it was red. As Cecil aged, Twink took over the business. With he and my father becoming such good friends, we moved on to the Charles property when I was about four years old.”

There was great demand for a good diesel mechanic and so Keith’s father quit truck driving and became Twink’s main guy, his Mr. Fix-it. “There was not much work for most people in the lumber industry during the winter months but my Dad never stopped and we did not see much of him. In those days, the early 50s when maybe the Valley had 1500 inhabitants, there were kids everywhere. Where there’s Arkies there’s kids! I spent hours and hours in the hills on the east side of the Valley and got to know the trails and creeks very well. I went to the schoolhouse at the Veterans Building for 1st grade, then the school in the Fairgrounds buildings for my 2nd grade. My 3rd and 4th grades were at the elementary school and my 5th and 6th in the building next door, the old high school building. My schoolmates included Charlie and Wayne Hiatt, the Tuttles, the Wellington kids, and Wayne Schoenahl, whose family had the apple orchards where Farrington Vines are now, just north out of Boonville, past the first bridge on the right over Anderson Creek. There were very few Hispanics here then, hardly any actually, and I think I only ever saw one black person — a cook at Weiss’s bar and restaurant. My 6th grade teacher was Jewish and that was unusual too.

“The Valley was still apples and sheep mainly, with very few vines. The bars and restaurants did well. Weiss’s, that was owned by old folks who were like my grandparents; The Boonville Lodge, a scene of many conflicts in the days of the early Okie and Arkie settlers; The Track Inn down the street, and the bar in the hotel. We didn’t go to any of these places that often, preferring to visit family in their homes, up and down the Valley, instead. I was not very good at school. I didn’t care about it until I had left. I would much rather be exploring the hills with the Rossi kids. We were always on their property, next door to the Charleses. I would help their family during the harvest of the hay and my Dad built the bridge to their house across the creek. He also helped put in the firewater pond on the property — used to spray the logs with water in the summer. For us it was a great big swimming hole.”

Keith had two brothers – Teryl born in 1952 (who died in a auto accident in 1972) and Scott born in 1957, and a sister, Helen, born in 1959. “This was a unique place in the 1950s because the poor roads kept it isolated and therefore resistant to change. It was paved only from the CDF station, just south of Boonville, to Flynn Creek Road. It was dirt road to the coast from there. The local people were expected to help with the road maintenance. The county didn’t do much. My Dad helped on that, both with the road to Cloverdale, Hwy 128, and to Ukiah, Hwy 253, which was also a dirt road before then, when it took an hour to get to Ukiah with so many bad potholes in the road. Boonville was really off the track back then and tourists had to make a big effort to get here. Hendy Woods was not a State Park, it was privately owned and you could drive in there from behind where the Farm Supply is now, across a ford over the river to where the parking lot for the park now is. The park is where the community used to meet for the July 4th Picnic. My parents both played music and would perform up and down the Valley at various places from Cloverdale to Navarro, often at Weiss’s. I have many fond memories of being there.”

Keith’s mother was a regular at the Valley’s Baptist Church, in the Fairground building, and then by the mid-50s on AV Way next to the Prather house. His father was a member of the Odd Fellows Men’s fellowship who met in the building behind the Ambulance building in town — the building that’s soon to become a medical marijuana dispensary. “He was President for a couple of years and would organize the July 4th Picnic and dinners at The Fairgrounds which the Odd Fellows would sponsor. My Dad still had his interest in hot rods and would build cars to race around the track at the Fairgrounds. It went outside the rodeo arena but is no longer there. I spent less time around town than many kids. I was a loner up in the hills, sometimes with Bill and Norman Charles. I would see my Dad maybe for an hour or so a day. He was always working. My mother raised us and she loved the outdoors and taught us a lot. She was our ‘teacher’ but was not very strict with us and, as we were in the town, we did not have many chores to do like some kids who lived on the farms and ranches.”

In 1960, the family went to Gridley for Thanksgiving, as they did most years. Both sides of the extended families still lived there and it was an occasion everybody looked forward to. They were gone for a couple of weeks or so and when they returned to the Valley the mills were closing everywhere. “It was incredible! Within a year most of them had gone! The Charles Mill closed up and my Dad had no job. His brother was in Sacramento, working for Aerojet General, in the new space-related industry and my Dad found work there and we moved to Folsom where I went to a new school, which I did not like at all. We moved to Orangevale after a couple of years where my parents bought a house and I attended Bello Visto High School, from which I graduated in 1966.”

Keith did not like his high school years. He was a “nerd” who was only really interested in science stuff — the space race was on! “I was an outsider but through my Dad I met a guy who worked at Aerojet who had worked with the German scientist, Werner Von Braun after his move to the States. I was only 15 but we started a ‘rocket club,’ building rockets in Sacramento and transporting them to Nevada and setting them off. We would go to the Black Rock Desert, where Burning Man Festival is held these days, and send these 15-foot rockets up into the sky. In 1964 we went to New Mexico and let off rockets and met with astronauts who were attending a conference, including Robert Goddard, a famous space and rocket engineer. I was only interested in this kind of stuff, or electronics at school. Then, in my senior year, I was to be the assistant to the audio-visual teacher but he died just a few weeks into the first semester and I got to run the small department with virtually no supervision. I got to build a lighting system for the drama department that was quite impressive. It was a big deal and made the local press.”

The local school district started a program for students gifted in certain areas and with Keith showing great promise in the new and relatively simple computer world, he was able to spend half of his senior year at school in one of these programs, thus skipping lots of the regular schooling which he did not enjoy anyway. “I was the teacher’s pet and I’d get to visit various company’s computer systems and check out their processes. I got to meet a professor at U.C. Davis who taught me a lot and when I graduated in 1966, the Bank of America asked him and others to ‘help this kid out.’ They sponsored me and I received an education sort of unofficially, by visiting places such as Pacific Telephone, IBM, and BofA, in the mornings after they had processed their data at night.”

After graduation, in 1966, Keith had returned to Anderson Valley and got a job at Philo Lumber for a year, pulling green chain — taking finished lumber off the conveyor belt. “That was dangerous work but it gives you great muscles! It was well paid too. Our whole family moved back and Dad went to work in the woods once more. We lived in the yellow house that is on the edge of Hendy Woods, owned by the Gowans, a family I had known fairly well. My Mom had worked in the apple sheds for Cecil Gowan and I had helped her when I was at school here. Later that year, I moved on to Hollow Tree Lumber Company off Fish Rock Road where I ran the log-kicker but I then had a 20-foot fall and had to quit the woods and returned to the Sacramento area.”

To earn a little money when not studying computers, Keith worked at Rico’s Pizza and by 1970 had become “their sort of adopted son.” He learned the business from Rico himself as they expanded into twelve pizzerias. His parents had moved to Placerville with his Dad once more working in the woods and when the opportunity came along to open a pizzeria nearby, in Camino, with Rico’s blessing, Keith was given the chance to run it. “That was good for a time but after visiting a friend of mine in the town of Helper, in southern Utah, I found that I really liked it there and, with Rico, we opened three restaurants in the area and moved there for a year or so. On our return to California, I moved in with Rico and his wife to their home in Eldorado Hills between Sacramento and Placerville and embarked on a series of restaurant ventures in the area. It was a crazy time and at one point, with Rico and his wife getting old, I was running four places.”

In 1972, he met Diana and they were married several months later. “She didn’t want to work and thought I was rich. Not true. She had to work with me. For two years we ran a restaurant in Chico before selling up and returning to Sacramento where she got a job as a legal secretary for the California Department of Justice and, after one last go in the restaurant business — at The Sutter Club in Folsom, a restaurant/theater venue for six months — I decided to go into the world of computers. In 1974 started my own programming business dealing with business payrolls. At some point I met a guy who had a telephone answering service for about 2000 doctors. We became partners and by 1978 had combined our businesses into a computerized answering service. I took over the retail part of the business. This was the time that Radio Shack’s computer line was starting up and small computers were being introduced and I specialized in networking these computers.”

Keith stayed in the computer business for about 20 years. When not working, he and Diana, who had son David in 1974, liked to camp and would often come to the Anderson Valley area to do so. “The Valley always kept drawing me back and we’d camp at Hendy Woods. The Valley was home.”

In 1985, his wife’s friend, who worked at a bank, told them of a restaurant that the bank had foreclosed on and they decided to take it over. “It was in Cameron Park, near the airport. It was a big operation, a classy restaurant/bar. We got it for $5K but it was a lot of work and we sold it a few months later. No more restaurants! I was strictly in the computer industry from then on, as a consultant contract programmer by 1990.

“A couple of years later, with my interests going one way and Diana’s the opposite, we divorced and I moved to downtown Sacramento, after always living in the suburbs. One of my clients was the title Company where Diana worked. I did a little work for them where I met Mike. He liked camping too and over the next few years, along with a group that grew to about 20 folks, we’d sometimes come to the Valley. In 2000, we were here and I told him how this was where I had grown up. In 2002 we were here once again and I noticed that the restaurant at The Boonville Lodge had closed. We checked it out and the owners, John and Candy, no longer wanted to run the restaurant part of the business. They just wanted the bar. It was a fantastic deal. I could not help myself and we opened Lumberjack Pizza a few months later. I wanted to do take-out only. That was enough for me and all that it was intended to be, but I just fell into the restaurant thing once again. We did not want to do six days a week, just three days of take-out. It did not turn out that way.”

“We lived on Ornbaun Road for a couple of years and then moved to John Scharffenberger’s property on Hwy 128 just north of Philo in a renovated 1947 apple dryer where we have been for seven years. It’s like living in a park and we love it there. We made a living at Lumberjack for a time but the real problem was that we did not have our own lease and when John and Candy sold the business the new owner, Tom Towey, wanted to have the restaurant to be part of his business. We had to get out.”

In 2006, Mike went to the AV Brewery and in February 2007 Keith to the AV Market general store in Boonville. “Mike did not like the restaurant business at all, and I was definitely done this time, or so I thought, once again. In early 2009, The Highpockety Ox, formerly The Buckhorn Saloon, closed after being unable to pay the high rent to the landlord Ken Allen, owner of the AV Brewery. Ken decided he wanted to open it once again. He had built the original brewery there and had run the brewpub in its early years of the late 80s and early 90s. He offered me 25% of the business if I ran it. I agreed, but had nothing on paper. There were many problems with the building, he hadn’t spent any money on it for years, and for a few months I fixed the place up, everything from the plumbing, to the heating and air-conditioning, to the flooring, and the beer system. We had an opening date set, May 10th, 2009 — Beer Festival weekend. I had even ordered the food. Then with one week to go Ken backed out and pulled the plug on the whole thing. I went to see him and he just said ‘No!’ I was left with nothing and just an hour or so later Ken was already walking through the building with a local real estate agent.”

Keith returned to his job at the AV Market. “I never really liked the business side of the restaurant business. My grandmother taught me how to cook and that is what I liked to do. I sat down one day and worked it out. I have been the owner or part-owner of 16 restaurants! Sixteen too many I sometimes think.”

I asked Keith for a verbal image of his father. “A stranger. He was always helping others, not us. It is a big regret of mine that I did not get to know him better, although we did get some time shared together in his later life. I have perhaps done the same thing with my own son, David, who is Chico with his mother and we are not in contact.” His mother? “A teacher. I learned a lot from her. Everything I like is thanks to my mother’s input. My love of music came from her mainly. I played the piano and learned the accordion when I was six. I still have one.”

What does Keith like most about the Valley? “I love the pace of the Valley – slow. And that you know everyone and that people care about each other. It is paradise” Dislikes? “The prejudice that still exists here, I’m sad to say.”

I asked Keith for his brief responses to various Valley issues.

The wineries and their impact? “Some good, some bad. I don’t like the absentee owners but have no problem with those who live here and contribute. If it wasn’t for the wineries this place would have dried up and blown away after the apples and sheep were done. I guess I view it as a necessary evil — the same way as I see the lumber industry. If done right it is fine, if not then that’s not good for the Valley.”

KZYX radio? “I haven’t listened for years.”

The AVA? “I read it every week. Bruce McEwen’s court reporting is the first thing I read.”

Marijuana? “I’m not going to judge. I couldn’t care less if they legalize it; they probably should. As for the new dispensary planned here in town, I think that is nuts. There is no money in it here and it’s a bad location they have chosen because of all the controversy being created.”

Changes in the Valley? “Well, fifty years on since I lived here growing up, I have to say I liked it more back then. It has sort of gone downhill but I am glad there are still some of the old families here.”

I posed a few questions to Keith.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “My dogs – Milo and Bo, a chihuahua/pug mix and a terrier/Jack Russell mix.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Noise.”

Sound or noise you love? “The wind blowing through the Redwood trees.”

Sound or noise do you hate? “Loud trucks or motorcycles. That reminds me — in the late fifties the Hell’s Angels came here two summers in a row and tried to take over the town.”

Favorite food or meal– “Prime rib. I ate it every night when I had that restaurant in Cameron Park!”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Robert Goddard, the pioneer of rocket science.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “A picture my grandmother painted on a piece of wood; my computer – too much stuff on there to lose; photos of growing up.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “A film would be ‘The Sound of Music’; the tune would be something by Beethoven; I don’t read much. My Dad was the reader. When he wasn’t working he would be reading. Perhaps a science fiction book by Ray Bradbury.”

Favorite hobby? “Now it is working with stained glass – making model ships primarily. It used to be science or music growing up. I did get a senior letter for football but I never liked sports.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “Probably something to do with the legal profession. I would like to have been a judge!”

Profession you’d not like to do? “Anything that involves manual labor.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “That would be with my wife to be when I was about 25. Before then I was too involved with my computers and nerdy stuff and those things didn’t match with dating.”

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “Everything! I wish I had known better certainly.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget? “The first time I flew a rocket that I had built.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “Well, maybe proud is not the right word but the smartest thing I ever did was to get married.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “That I am a ‘jack of all trades.’ That I am a loyal person.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Go and give it another try.”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives here. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Bob Klindt of Claudia Springs Winery.

Jose Luis was born August 1st, 1961, which means he recently celebrated his 50th birthday. His parents are Jose Orozco and Esther Espinosa and he is the oldest of seven kids — four boys and three girls, with one brother dying as a child. The Orozco family is originally from the Mexican state of Jalisco, a big family that has always been in the farming industry, mainly agriculture. The Espinosas are from La Laguneta in the state of Michoacan, where the majority of the Valley’s Mexican community are originally from. They too have a large family, many of whom live here in the Valley at this point. Jose Luis’ parents met and were married, settling in La Laguneta.

“La Laguneta is very rural, smaller than Boonville. When I was seven, my father wanted to get a better life. He was not a rich man and we moved to a large ranch of over 300 people called Arroyo Seco, near Puerto Vallarta, so that he could support the family better. My uncle lived there and he set this up for our family. I went to school there but I was a dummy and no good in school. Now I realize that education is important and if I had known that I would have tried harder. I played some football (soccer) at school and my parents made sure we went to church every Sunday. I still go now and believe strongly in God and the Virgin Mary. My Daddy was very strict. He tried to teach me to do my best and told me to be honest with people. I remember one day I took some chili peppers from a neighbor and my Daddy caught me. He took his belt to me and followed me back to the neighbor’s house and made me return them. It was a good lesson for me. I am strict with my kids too. My mother was more flexible. He is still alive in Mexico and he is still strong, working in the fields at 76 years old. My mother passed away a few years ago of throat cancer when she was 62. I still do bad things that I’m not supposed to do but I pray to God for forgiveness. I am honest but not perfect. I try to treat people good. That is my intention. Sometimes I make mistakes.”

Jose Luis grew up thinking that if he could get to America it would be a dream come true. His Uncle Carlos worked here in Anderson Valley for the Mailliard family on their large ranch outside of Yorkville and he suggested that Jose Luis came to work there. “I had always thought I wanted to come to America. I knew I would like it here and the system of government is better than in Mexico. There are problems here too, I know, but it is more honest here. I have always worked here — with my Uncle at first, then Bob Lawson’s Christmas trees, then Gowan’s Orchards, then Steve Williams Vineyard management, and now for V. Sattui Winery. But I am not here for the money only; I like it here in many other ways.”

“I worked in Puerto Vallarta as an office boy for an architect who worked from a hotel on the beach. I just did his errands. His name was Eduardo Del Rio and he was very good to me. Then in 1979, when I was 17, I left Puerto Vallarta with my family’s blessing and went to Tijuana on the border. On nine nights over the next two weeks I crossed the border. I went through tunnels, across the river, walking and running over the road. One time when I crossed the river I nearly drowned. I cannot swim and when I fell down I went under the water and could not get my breath. There was somebody next to me who pulled me up. I don’t know who it was, but I thank God someone was there — maybe an angel. Every time I was caught by the guards and dropped back inside Mexico. In those days they just did that, now they take people many, many miles back into the country and keep much better records of those they catch. Back then I came up with eight different names and they could not check things so well. There were no computers and fingerprinting was not done. On another night I was with my friend and we hid under bushes when the helicopters flew over and flashed their big lights down on all of the people crossing. They rounded everyone up except me. They were leaving the area and I was alone under the bush. I was very scared and stood up and shouted out to the border patrol guy, telling him I was there. They took me back to Mexico once again. I decided to give it one last time and that was the ninth. It was when I finally made it and I paid the coyote, the guy who leads us across and arranges the next step.”

Jose Luis arrived in San Ysidro, California and stayed in a motel briefly before going to Los Angeles where he was met by family members and driven up to Yorkville in Anderson Valley, where he was to live with is Uncle for a time, working there on the ranch. “I was very social in Mexico and had many friends. Now I have twice as many here. I like to be friends with people. If somebody does not like me then I will leave them alone. If somebody wants to be friends, then I open my hands to them.”

After leaving the job with his Uncle Carlos, Jose Luis worked felling trees for Lawson’s Christmas Trees in Yorkville, earning $2.35 hr and living in a cabin on the property. “He was a real good man — all of my bosses have been good guys. There were not many wineries back then in the early 80s — just Husch, Edmeades, Navarro, Lazy Creek, and some vines here in Boonville, just north of town, now owned by Roederer. After about three or four years I felt like I wanted a change and so I got a job with Gowan’s Orchards — mainly working with apple trees for $4.50 hr. I was there for 15 years. James Gowan was the boss and I was his right-hand man, always with him. I moved onto the Gowan property and lived there. I always have lived where I worked. I have been lucky that way. Jim was a very nice man to me. I cannot thank him enough. He died a few months ago and I hope God has him in a good place.”

In the early days of his time here, Jose Luis would sometimes go out and have a few beers in town after work at Mary Jane’s Cantina — now Lauren’s Restaurant. “The Boonville Lodge was just down the street and there sometimes fights in both places. I went to them both and in those days there were lots of people who were not friendly, but I got on with everybody and had no problems. There were some tough guys at The Lodge — Ernie and Tony Pardini were two of them but they were OK with me. We were all young guys and a little crazy. Sometimes a few American guys would go to Mary Jane’s but most times nothing happened. There are few troubles these days between the Mexicans and Americans.”

Like many in the Valley’s Mexican community, Jose Luis visits his home country over the Christmas period and one year he went with his friend Jose Mendoza to Guadalajara where the Mendoza family lived. He met Jose’s sister there — Maria Elena. “I saw her and really liked her but did not say anything. In 1990 she came to the US to see her family in Fort Bragg and I visited her there. I then sent her flowers through a friend of mine. She worked out who the flowers were from and I asked to her to go out with me. We started to see each other and I would drive to the coast to see her. I did that for one year — it was love, oh, yeah. We got married in 1991 and Jose Luis Jr. was born in 1992 and Analilia in 1996. We lived on Gowan’s property in a little trailer. Once I was married I pretty much stopped going to the bars. We needed money and my wife would be mad if I wasted it at the bar. She got a job in the cafeteria at the elementary School and we both worked hard to earn money to support our kids.”

After many years at Gowan’s, Jose Luis was injured and almost killed in an accident with some heavy machinery. “I badly mangled my lower arm and wrist. I continued to work one-handed and pushed myself but that was no good for me so in the end, around 1997, I decided to leave and I got a job with Steve Williams who managed some vineyards in the Valley. Grapes had taken over from apples and sheep and we worked all over the valley in different places, managing vineyards and ranches. One of those was the property owned by Erin Weintraub and Anne Bennett. In 2004 this was sold to V. Sattui Vineyard and they planted lots of new vines. After being with Steve Williams for six or seven years I moved here and became the vineyard manager for V. Sattui and have been here ever since.”

“I have tried to go to Mexico every year but have not been in the last two. I go to see my Daddy in Puerto Vallarta and also to La Laguneta. I work many hours and drink a few beers after work but I don’t go out much. I do go out sometimes — to the Redwood Drive-In or Mis Potrancas Mexican Restaurant next to The Lodge, or sometimes Alicia’s Restaurant. I also have been to the new Buckhorn and like it. I do like to watch the adult soccer league that is played every Sunday here. I go to see La Laguneta play and really enjoy that. They were doing good this year but have lost a few games now. If you are the coach you have to get the opinions of the players and make a good team spirit. One day I would like to coach La Laguneta and I would include every player’s opinions — that can be good sometimes. A good coach has to know futbol and the mind. We have our big rivals, Valladolid, here in the Valley and we have lost too many times to them in the last few years. They are really good and they bring in players from other places to play for them. That is not breaking the rules but they are already good without these guys. I look forward to one day beating Valladolid. We have to learn from our mistakes in the games against them. Many of these games are close but they always just beat us.”

I asked Jose Luis what he most liked about his life in the Valley. “I like everything about the Valley. The way people treat me, the schools, the roads, my friends and family here. I am the guy who is thankful for everything — thanks be to God. I go to Mass every Sunday at 4pm and sometimes to Confession. I try to not have any cares or worries about the world and my head says go to church and all will be well.”

What was an image Jose Luis has of his father? “A real tough man; a good man. He tried his best to make me a good man.” His mother? “She was always on my side.”

I now asked Jose Luis for his brief thoughts on various Valley talking points.

The wineries and their impact? “They are good for the economy of the Valley and bring in the tourists and their money. Most of them treat their workers well. Sometimes the workers are wrong — when they will not stop work in the hot sun. People think that the bosses are making them work but they are not. We are told we can go home in that kind of heat but the guys say ‘No’ — they want to work and get the money. It is a situation that is not good for them or the owners. The owners should force them to stop — some of the wineries are too ‘flexible’ about this and that is dangerous.”

The AVA? “I like it and read it. I like the local pages.”

KZYX radio? “I listen sometimes.”

The schools? “The schools are very good. The kids get a good service there. There are lots of people looking to solve the drug problems there. They seem to be doing a good job and the drug use is down but still a problem, I think.”

Drugs in the Valley? “Marijuana is a miracle cure for some people, for others it helps them relax. It is legal in some ways so if this is a free country and it makes you feel a little better then, as adults, you should be able to smoke a little. Kids start smoking it too early though and want to experiment at a young age and sometimes it leads to other drugs. I’m talking about the meth here, that is a dangerous thing and can ruin brains.”

I posed a few questions, some TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton” and some I came up with myself.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? — “I believe that if I am angry I must stop that feeling. I feel very comfortable in this world. I love life, everything about it.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? — “If somebody confronts me… Or if I wave at someone and they ignore me.”

sound or noise do you love? — “I love the sound of Mexican music… American country music too — Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.”

sound or noise do you hate? — “Loud music… Spinning tires and fast driving.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation over dinner, who would that person be? — “President Obama — my angel. I like him alot. I would cook dinner for him and share a few beers. I would enjoy that very much.”

What scares you? — “People with guns.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? — “My papers, family pictures…”

favorite film or book or one that has influenced you? — “The film by Mel Gibson — ‘The Passion of Christ’… I am not a reader — that is my daughter.”

favorite hobby? — “Movies and gardening.”

profession other than your own would you like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? — “Ever since I lived in Mexico I wanted to be a sheriff in this country, or a C.H.P. officer.”

profession would you not like to do? — “I hate spraying but it has to be done.”

13. How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I was twenty-two years old. We just hung out.”

something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “I used to smoke too much and wish I had cut back on that… I wish I had done more education and found something more productive for my mind.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. — “When my son was born — the first. Before he was born, I imagined how he would look and that is how he was.”

something that you are really proud of and why? — “My family… My brother-in-law, Jose Mendoza… My job and making sure the grapes are healthy…

favorite thing about yourself? — “There are some good things and some bad… I help people if they need help… If somebody is hungry I will feed them.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? — “I think he will say ‘Welcome.’ So may be ‘You have done bad things, Jose Luis, but I have the scales here and the good things you did are bigger and heavier — welcome.’ He will know — he knows everything.”

“I also want to say a big ‘Thank You’ to all the people who have helped me in my life and who like me. I will hope to do the same for you folks too. I am always going to try to do the best I can.”

To read the stories of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Keith Martin — A.V. born and bred, formerly of Lumberjack Pizza, now at the A.V. Market.

Deanna was born in Maryland. Her father’s family was of English/Scots heritage and had come to this country in the 1800’s. Deanna’s grandmother died when her father was very young and her grandfather remarried. Her father did not get along with his stepmother, so he left home in Ohio at the age of sixteen, never graduating high school, and joined the navy by lying about his age. Her Mother’s family was German/Austrian/Irish. They were farmers in Virginia and in the years before World War 1. Deanna’s mother grew up in Virginia where her father was the overseer of a large tobacco farm. “My grandfather saved his money and they moved to Pennsylvania where he bought a farm of his own, without my grandmother, seeing it. She said she would not move there because of the busy road, so he sold it for a profit. My mother was one of nine siblings – she had four older brothers and four younger ones. They said she had spoiled the perfect baseball team! And she did love baseball and was the only one with her own room as she was the only girl. There were always a ton of family and friends around and she always said she had a great upbringing despite not being close to her mother who doted on the boys.”

The farm was a busy place and the family all sat down to dinner together, often with workers and her brothers many friends. “My mother said there were frequently more than twenty people for the evening meal. It was a self-sufficient farm with everything from livestock of all kinds to fruit and vegetables, wheat, etc. It was in a small town near York, Pennsylvania, about the same size as Boonville. Our cousins owned a farm nearby and we were always around each other – our vacations were even spent on the farm when I was growing up and we rarely saw my father’s side of the family. ”

Deanna’s father had become an aircraft mechanic in Washington DC after his time in the navy. Her mother had been a dental assistant out of high school in Pennsylvania and then went to beauty school and a job as a hairdresser which she didn’t like so she moved on to work as a telephone operator for National Geographic. My parents met at a dance and started to date, with my father staying in the boys’ bedrooms when he visited the family farm. He had three jobs at one point —mechanic, parking garage attendant, handyman. They had talked about marriage but my grandmother was opposed to the marriage because she thought he would not be a good provider. My grandfather liked my Father. My Grandfather was a very sweet man and we all loved him very much. Anyway, my parents eloped and got married in 1938, and for a time they kept it a secret.”

After settling down in DC Dean and Reba started a family. They had three daughters Elizabeth (Betty), Dorothy (Dotty) and Deanna coming along after the war. “My mother was a ‘mom’ and Dad became a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. We moved to Pennsylvania, to Shiloh, a town near to Dover, when I was young and Dad got a better job as a car salesman. He was very funny and had a great sense of humor. His outgoing personality suited his job well… Then when I was three, we moved to Richmond, Virginia and Dad ran a pet store for a time before we moved again, to Maryland where he found work for the Navy Department. My mother was a bank teller when I was in fifth grade. My father finally got his GED as an adult and, now in his thirties, he became an accountant for the navy.”

The family lived in suburban Maryland, not far from Washington DC. “I bicycled to school and back, in fact I was always on my bike. I was a very social kid and there were many children my age in the neighborhood. We were always out playing and it was quite idyllic. Then, when I was about ten or eleven, two high school girls, both very popular girls in my sister’s class were murdered and their bodies found in the wooded section of the park we used to play in, not far from our house. It was the last day of school for them and they had been shot many times. This had a major impact on the whole neighborhood for a long time and I had a hard time staying at home alone. Actually, about five years ago, a classmate of the girls, who had been an outcast at school, confessed on his deathbed to their murders… After the murders, we were given a lot less freedom, particularly because no suspect was found. The park had been an important part of my life and now it was off limits. They cleared many of the trees and we weren’t allowed to go ice skating on the pond and school summer programs were cancelled there.”

Overall, Deanna had what was a life fairly typical of most white suburban families of the fifties era. “We sat down to dinner as a family every evening at 5:30pm and you could not be late for that. I enjoyed my elementary school and junior high years and did very well over that time. As a young teen, during the holidays and summers I was a candy-striper volunteer at a local hospital, among a number of other part-time jobs in department stores and five and dime stores. I had to clean house on Saturdays although this was not onerous. We expected to have to do our chores in those days. Dad had a quick temper so it was left to Mom to enforce the discipline and she would occasionally spank us if necessary. Then when I hit high school age I went a little crazy. In DC the drinking age was eighteen and we all had false ID’s at the age of 16 so we’d drive into the city, just twenty minutes away, and drink and smoke. My parents had only ever taken us to a restaurant occasionally and that would have been a Howard Johnson’s so it was great to go to an Italian restaurant, drink some wine and then head off to a bar for the rest of the evening… This behavior had its consequences and ultimately my grades were affected in a number of subjects, dropping from A’s to C’s. However, although my parents were disappointed, the end result was never in any real doubt and I graduated on schedule in 1964.”

Deanna’s parents had not graduated from high school and her one sister had done some time at the community college so there was no emphasis from the family to go on to university. However, Deanna enrolled at the University of Maryland to study business but after just one semester she dropped out. “Again my parents were disappointed and told me they were never paying again for me to go to college. I was just not ready for it. Not all kids are. National service of some kind would have served me better. I found a job as assistant to the bookkeeper in the office of a real estate developer in DC. I met her son who had graduated from the University of Maryland and would start medical school in the fall and we started to date. It soon got quite serious although his mother, the bookkeeper, stopped liking me when it did. I left the job, left the apartment I had with friends, and moved back in with my parents. I took some night classes in shorthand and typing while there. This led to me getting a job at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as an assistant to the treasurer. My boyfriend was now at the University of Maryland Medical School and we’d hang out with people, many of whom had college degrees, except me, so I took some more evening classes in liberal arts and math over the following couple of years. My parents moved to the suburbs between Washington and Baltimore and I would commute to work from their home until we got married in 1969 and bought a row house for $12,000 in Baltimore, right across from Johns Hopkins. We took a honeymoon month and traveled across the country and back, camping in the national parks. I had never been camping before; my family had never done that. As I said earlier, we stayed on the farm for our vacations. Visiting the farm was my summer vacation; farming is in my genes. Those were turbulent times in the US and yet I was not involved at all really. My parents were conservative and I wasn’t part of the anti-war movement, apart from being barricaded in at work one day by the protesting students.”

While in medical school, Deanna’s husband was safe from the draft but after graduating he was liable once again and so he took an internship with the Public Health Service, which was considered military service. He did an internship in Baltimore and a residency in San Francisco, part of which rotated through Tulane University. We had an opportunity to live in Alexandria, La., Columbus, Ga. and New Orleans, which was great fun. Good food too!

When he finished his residency, he began to look for a practice in California. “We almost ended up in Marysville, but found the perfect practice in Ukiah. We bought a 30-acre property with 12 acres of vines and an old house south of town. It was a wonderful rural property and I was in heaven.”

Deanna soon made friends with a neighbor, Diane Shugart with whom she shared a cow that they would both milk every day for five years, one on each side. She worked hard on the garden and took classes at the com-munity college, including viticulture, feeds and feeding, a butchery class, a pottery class. “We were also trying to get pregnant during this time but were unable to do so. Then we were given the opportunity to adopt and in 1978 one-day old Essie arrived. My husband knew a Dr. Apfel and his wife Susan, who had adopted too and I met with Susan and passed on some of Essie’s baby clothes for their daughter Lily who was 13 months younger. When Essie was 3, my husband and I split up and I moved into Ukiah.

Deanna had attended the community college for her remaining credits in accounting. “I decided I needed a profession pretty fast and after finishing at the community college in1983, I went on to Golden Gate University to get an accountancy degree, graduating in 1985. In the fall of 1984, a friend of mine, an emergency room doctor, and I went camping with our kids to Hendy Woods in Anderson Valley in order to go the to the annual Men-docino County Fair in Boonville. The girls were on the merry-go-round when a guy walked by with his daughter and said ‘hello’ to my friend. She knew him as the local physician, Dr. Apfel, whom I had never met. It turned out he had been the doctor in the Valley since 1976 and his wife had passed away when Lily was just one year old. We chatted and it was love at first sight. I told him it was cold in the woods and he looked at me with his hazel eyes and invited us to come over for coffee the next morning. I had fallen for this man and knew there was a mutual attraction. That evening I talked about this with my friend and the next morning we left the campgrounds but were unsure of the directions and went the wrong way. We ended up a few miles further north on Highway 128 at what was at the time Steve and Janet Anderson’s home, now the Blue Meadow Farm of Pam and Roy Laird. Janet, with baby Emily in her arms, obviously knew the doctor and where he lived. We drove up here and there was no answer at the house. I went in and walked through. Mark was outside at the back in the garden, surrounded by beautiful flowers. Be still my heart! We had coffee, exchanged phone numbers, and my friend and I and the kids went back to San Francisco.”

On the following Tuesday, Mark was in the City to observe a surgical procedure on the daughter of a local family. That evening Deanna was really not sure if he would call her as arranged. She was on the phone talking to her friend and the line was therefore busy. Meanwhile Mark was equally as nervous wondering if she would know him. Finally they got to talk and he came over for dinner to her house on Irving Street and 7th Avenue. “He came over the next evening for dinner too — bringing a bouquet of flowers, wine, and shrimp, which he cooked! It was all too good to be true. He even has a gift for Essie. That Friday I had a court date in Ukiah for my divorce and I met up with Mark at the Boonville Hotel, then owned by Vern and Charlene Rollins. Mark had arranged for a baby-sitter for Essie and Lily, Annie Stenerson. Essie and I ended up staying for the weekend. I didn’t want to leave. I definitely knew this was the guy for me. We saw each other every weekend either in the Valley or San Francisco where I lived and on June 1st, 1985 we were married, the same day as my graduation ceremony which I therefore missed.”

Deanna needed to work for two years for a CPA firm, which Mark encouraged her to do. She was hired by Arthur Young in San Francisco and they moved down to Berkeley in August for two years, where they bought a house and rented the property on Greenwood Road, although they did visit most weekends and stayed in their guest house, a 100 year old schoolhouse. “We had lots of fun for two years in Berkeley. It’s not as frantic as the City but close enough to all that if you feel like it. We made friends, the kids made friends, and Mark worked in urgent care facilities in the Bay Area. I finished my CPA qualifications in 1987 and we returned to the Valley for good.”

People were not interested in hiring Deanna part-time as an accountant; in fact after all of her efforts she never really did pursue this career. She became a stay-at home Mom with the kids in elementary school and took art classes by Paula Gray and creative writing with Jan Wax. “Mark worked locally and also worked a few days a month in the emergency room in Ukiah earning more than I could as a part-time accountant. I did do one audit for the Senior Center but other than that I was a busy mother. I volunteered at the school and was on the elementary school site council for a couple of years. Socially Mark and I would go to the film nights put on by Eric Labowitz and Melvin ‘Woody’ Wood at Brad Wiley’s barn – that was a lot of fun. We also went on regular camping trips with friends the Goodell’s (Rob and Barbara), the Anderson’s (Steve and Janet), the Duvigneaud’s (Jean and Anne), and Rob Giuliani and Lee Serrie and would visit friends in the Bay Area too. Then our neighbor, Jean Duvigneaud, decided to run for school board and suggested I do so also. I did and ended up being on the Board for eight years. It was hard work and not an easy position to be in.”

As well as attending many Valley events and benefits, Deanna’s love of travel further afield has been an inspiration for one of her main interests, quilting. Her trips to Mexico, France, Spain, Egypt, and South Africa have been particularly memorable and more recently she and Mark have been to Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. A color and composition class with Paula Gray led to her being exposed to a book on Amish Quilts that really got her into that world. “I had always sewn, done crafts, knitting, embroidery, etc. Then the light bulb went off: ‘I can do quilts,’ but not necessarily in the style of my grandmother.’ These would be designs with color, lots of it. I met Joyce Patterson who was in a quilting class on the coast and after I had made one I joined too and have now been in the Mendocino Quilt Artists since 1995. Everyone in that group has become an important part of my life and there are currently thirteen of us who meet twice a month. I was very pleased with the reception my recent show at Lauren’s Restaurant received. I am also in a women’s book club with people such as Karen Altaras, Denisse Mattei, Kathy Cox, Mary O’Brien, Janet Anderson, Jill Myers, Gail Wakeman, Helen Papke, and others. We meet at each other’s homes, there is no dinner, and we discuss the book for two hours. We do have an annual pot luck, hosted by Mark and me, to which husbands are invited and the Cheescake ladies host our Christmas party.”

Other than all that, Deanna is kept very busy in the garden and with the goats, chickens, and fostering of cats, not to mention Rosie the Sheltie dog and her volunteer efforts continue with her role on the AV Housing Association Board. “My mother was in assisted living in Maryland at the age of 92. My father had passed many years earlier in his late 60s), but in 2001 she had a minor stroke. I visited her every few months or so but she decided she wanted to move out here and stay with us. Mark became her care provider and she decided she never wished to go into a hospital again. She lived with us for three years, a time that was very special and precious. She was always such a cheerful person to be around and she loved Rosie, for who she always carried treats around. She died peacefully just before her 96th in November 2004.”

I asked Deanna for a verbal image of her father. “Meticulous, handsome, totally in love with my mother, but a traditionalist in terms of the male/female roles.” And her mother? “We all adored her; warm, nurturing, funny. She had a great laugh and I always enjoyed being around her.”

What do you like about life in the Valley? “The sense of community is first; the natural beauty is important to me. I also enjoy the solitude and quiet, and that we are not far from the coast.” And anything you do not like? “The noise of logging trucks and that it takes too long to get to an airport.”

Next were Deanna’s brief feelings about a few valley issues.

The wineries and their impact? “Being on the Housing Association, I wish they would be more supportive of us and more interested in providing decent housing for low income workers in the Valley. We need land and buildings, not just on their properties for their workers. We are getting some help now and I hope this is the beginning of a more effective relationship.”

KZYX radio? “Fabulous – a total asset for the Valley and so entwined in Valley life at this point. I cannot imagine the Valley without it.”

The school system? “They do the best they can. It makes me so angry, the lack of money spent on schools in California.”

I posed a few questions to Deanna.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Just a beautiful day – one that makes me feel like skipping. I often feel really joyous.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Long, cold winters.”

Sound or noise you love? “Birds singing, the owls at night, the wind in the trees. The palm trees in Hawaii.”

Sound or noise you hate? “Dump trucks backing up to collect their load of gravel, all noisy vehicles on Greenwood Road.”

Favorite food or meal? “A healthy breakfast — papaya, mango, with yogurt, and lime juice, with a little granola.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Nel-son Mandela. Traveling around South Africa in 2002 we could see and feel what he did for that country and it had a big effect on us.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “My computer. It has all of my photos on it, my quilts, and Rosie too, of course. I assume Mark is safe, otherwise he’d be first, or may be Rosie!”

Favorite book or one that has influenced you? “I read ‘The Secret Garden’ when I was nine and it made me a reader. It was also the inspiration for one of my quilts.”

Favorite hobby? “Well, gardening, I’d say. Quilting is a passion and even a necessity. Traveling too of course.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “As a kid I wanted to be a nurse. And in my imagination perhaps a veterinarian.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “A job inside all of the time, and in a city. An accountant!”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “Meeting Mark and falling in love.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “My quilting, my art. Having the show at Lauren’s and seeing what I’ve been doing for ten years or so.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “That I’d rather be a giver than a taker .”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Mark is right over here.”

–

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Valley resident of over 30 years: Jose Luis Orozco Espinosa.

Floriane was born in Caen, Normandy — a city badly bombed in World War II, just ten miles away from the D-Day beaches, to parents Jean-Marie Mellion and Nicole Etienne. On her mother’s side the family is from an isolated spot in Brittany although her grandparents moved to Normandy after the war and her grandfather worked for the railroads. Her father’s side have been in Normandy, from Ecots, like Boonville in terms of size since the mid-1600s, a rural family, although her great grandparents were tailors in the city of Lisieux, and therefore a little better off. The families were neighbors and both sides of the family were Catholic, attending church regularly, which is where Floriane’s parents met. “Everyone was Catholic — we had a few nuns in our family, and a priest too, and the whole town went to church. Normandy, in northern France, is very Catholic and I was born and raised in that religion — my husband, Arnaud, is from Alsace and was raised Protestant.”

By the late sixties, Floriane’s parents’ relationship was developing but her father was a pilot in the French Air Force. Eventually Nicole said he had to choose between the planes and her and he made his decision — they were married in 1970. Floriane was born in 1971. “My name was supposed to be spelled with two ‘n’s — Florianne, but my Dad got it wrong when it was registered so that was that. I have a younger brother, Gatien, born in 1974, and sister Charline in 1976. My mother got her teaching credentials and was a kindergarten teacher for thirty years. My father did just one year at college. In the early days he sold, installed, and maintained furnaces, started his own business when I was about seven, doing the maintenance of these large industrial furnaces for various industries from asphalt companies to large hospitals — they were huge appliances and it was a niche thing that he got in to. Both sides of my family were very working class and it was tough at times, although as kids we never suffered from it. I grew up in the city but when Dad started his own business we moved to the nearby village of Feuguerolles, only ten minutes from Caen but definitely in the countryside.”

“We raised various animals on our small farm — a few sheep, rabbits, ducks, chickens, geese, turkeys. It got a bit out of control and we ate rabbit alot! We started with just three sheep but it turned out that one of the young ewes was a ram! I had various farm chores on this small property where we also had potatoes, green beans. After our move, I did not go to the local school and stayed in school in Caen. I think I suffered from that, because this meant that I did not get to know the local kids very well at all. I did that for seven years until I was fifteen and went to high school, when the local children had to go into the town too as there was no local school for their age in the small village. I was a very good student, I must say. Good at most subjects although in France if that happens you are pushed towards mathematics. I liked art but was talked out of doing it by the teachers and counselors. My parents were easy-going and not pushy either way. I never really questioned what I liked. That isn’t the way in the French system. I took English and German and then Italian too. For the last two years at high school you get to drop a subject or two but still study several all the way to the end. I was good at math and enjoyed it but it was not my passion. I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up! I was good at school but the system was one where you are just fed information. It was very old-fashioned and not at all interactive. It is still more or less the same apparently and the kids are not engaged enough, in my opinion.”

There was no school sports — that is not the way in France. Sports are an activity you do outside school and you have to join a club of some sort. I took up horse riding out of school and that became my passion. The flat plains of Normandy are horse-riding country and Floriane spent many hours at the local riding school. My closest friends early on were my siblings and we were outside a lot, despite all the rain we get in Normandy… My parents had bought a 200 year-old house and there was lots of renovation work to be done — it took about twenty-five years. My friends in high school were not sure about visiting me there with the construction work always taking place so I mainly socialized at school, although with all of our extended family close by, much of my time out of school was spent with them.”

At the age of eighteen, Floriane graduated from high school and attended prep school to get her ready for the Grandes Ecole — a system of education higher than university, and very hard to get into. “This was in Caen and for two years I did forty hours of school and almost as much again for homework. It was very stressful and some of the teachers seemed to enjoy humiliating the students, both boys and girls, and some were basically sadistic. Many students dropped out but I passed after the two years. I would not wish that experience on my worst enemy. I guess they see it as a way of sorting out the best students — but unfortunately it is done in an eighteenth century style.”

During the summer breaks high school and the prep school, Floriane found jobs at work camps, similar to the Peace Corps. She worked in Tunisia, Belgium, and even in Arizona, helping on various projects such as castle and monument renewal and gardening. “You did not get paid but your room and board was provided. I enjoyed my experiences and it was a great way to discover other cultures. In Arizona, I was on a sort of commune, working in the fields and orchards and also in construction — hanging sheet rock and plastering.”

Floriane had specialized in biology, physics, and math at the prep school and she now moved away from Normandy to the south of France, to study at Agronomy College in the city of Montpelier. “I was twenty and with the studying so much easier in comparison, and with so much more freedom, I partied all the time. I took a biology and math major, studying viticulture too, and was there for three years, obtaining a masters degree in Food Technology. I had met Arnaud at the college, where he was studying viticulture, and we were seeing each other regularly before moving in together for a couple of years. You don’t ‘date’ in France; there is no process or protocol about what you can and cannot do at various times of the relationship. It is just not part of the culture. You do what feels right.”

In 1993 Arnaud, who was a year ahead of Floriane, had found a job with Roederer and was sent to their winery in Anderson Valley for a year. In1994, after graduating, Floriane began work at Perrier, the water company, as a research scientist in their facility near to Montpelier. She moved on six months later to a job in food safety with Dole — the dried fruit company. Arnaud was in the Valley during the phylloxera grape plague and he stayed from 1993-95 during which time Floriane came to visit and did some work in the laboratory at Roederer before returning to France in 1995. “Arnaud had suggested we stay in the States and I had said ‘Never!’ It was just too far away from home and family. Plus the Valley was too isolated for me, I thought. I did not know anybody as we had been staying in Ukiah. I took a job, based in Paris, working for the big retail company Carrefour where I was in charge of food safety for seven hundred stores. Arnaud returned and moved in with me. It is tough to be a wine worker in Paris and so he took a job in Quality Control, also for Carrefour. We both got to travel around a lot and saw many different settings and wineries. The job was not his dream but it was a great learning experience. I was on a plane a couple of days a week and it was a very stressful but we got to ‘play’ in Paris at the weekends. I was also still in touch with several friends from college in Montpelier and a few from prep school.”

Floriane realized that this was the way things had to be at the start of their careers. She and Arnaud kept the fact that they were a couple from their employer as traditionally this is not acceptable in retail and stores. Then she became pregnant and they were married in 1996, son Maxence being born in 1997 and then Mathis in 1999. “I took three-months off and then went back to work — the kids go to nursery at four months. However, the kids were always sick from the germs at school. It was hell. I thought about that small valley in the country.”

Arnaud had kept in contact with the people at Roederer and when they asked him what he was doing he told them and sent in his resumé. “With all the stress of the job and the issue of the kids health it was a good time to go. We were also sick and tired of Paris. Mathis became very sick and we had to get him out of there. With winemaker Michel planning to retire, Arnaud was offered a position and it was a great opportunity for him. All four of us came over in April 2000 for one year to see if I liked it. We lived in the Blue House on the Roederer property off Clark Road and the kids’ health improved and I was happy as a full-time Mom of a one and three year old. I decided to make it work and soon made friends with parents of other kids — the Kleins, Jeanne Eliades, the Schulte-Bispings. There was a period of transition and the kids spoke French. They went to daycare with Ellen Saxe on Greenwood Ridge and were soon speaking English and French with an American accent!”

After a year the family returned to France and lived in the center of the city of Reims, a city of about 300,000 people in the Champagne province. “We had stuff in Reims and Paris, everywhere it seemed — we ultimately moved 11 times in ten years. The apartment was unfurnished and there was no parking with lots of traffic — all very different from our experience in Anderson Valley. I was rehired by Carrefour and worked from home while Arnaud continued his training with Roederer. We stayed for a year but returned to the Valley in August, 2002 and then moved in 2003 where we have lived ever since, in the two-story White House at Roederer.”

The two boys attended pre-school and kindergarten as Floriane volunteered at the school. She had received a generous severance package from Carrefour and this allowed her to set up a consulting company for the food safety industry. “However, it turned out that the regulations were not as demanding here as in France and my expertise was not relevant locally, although I did do some consulting for Roederer and a cooperage company in Napa — a French company with European standards. Meanwhile when Adam Springwater found out I was French he assumed I must know something about soccer so he asked me to help him with the Youth Soccer program in the Valley, which I did for a few years. In 2004, I also took on a radio show on the local public radio station, KZYX, with Joelle Signorelli called ‘French Touch’ and after a couple of years I took it on by myself. I continued my horse riding with Brenda Stone and got to know other horse people in the Valley. It seems like in the last couple of years I am never at home, mainly due to my horse passion and through the school where the kids are always busy with something.”

Rod Basehore approached me one day and asked if the kids might be interested in being in one of his plays he does with the AV Theater Guild. They had done the drama camps with Charlotte Triplett and so they went for it. I took the kids to the rehearsals and soon I was involved backstage and generally helping out. It was for the kids. I had no ambitions in that area. I could never see myself on stage, never. The kids did the play the following year in 2009 and I did do one little skit in that, after Rod persuaded me. It was stressful but fun. I thought it was a one-time thing and there were no kids in the 2010 play. Then earlier this year Maxence said he wanted to be in this year’s play. Rod said he wanted someone for a small part so I said I’d read the script. It turns out the part of Honey Ray had been offered to Patty Liddy who did not have the time this year. The part was not small — it was a main role with lots of lines. It was Patty’s part and I am not that good. Rod said he felt I could do it. I started to rehearse and liked the cast and we were soon all really into it. It was a really fun experience I never thought I would have. Marcus Magdalena has taken over from Rod as director of the Theatre Guild and I look forward to doing some more.”

Floriane did lots of fundraising for the Elementary School and was volunteer chairperson for the PTAV. (Parent Teachers). This whole scene became a big part of her social life. Then in 2010 she became assistant to the director of the AV Winegrowers Association — Janis McDonald, which involves lots of work with the Alsace and Pinot Noir festivals. “It is part-time and just enough. I have stopped my involvement with the Elementary School and starting a PTAV branch at the Junior High/High School. I remain very involved in my kids’ lives. I have given French lessons to some people who have asked and we encourage our own boys to follow their French culture with books, writing, and food. I still do lots of riding, with people such as Anne Fashauer and Milla Handley and my horse is boarded on Holmes ranch Road at Sharon and Deborah’s place. He is sixteen and called Ricky. That remains lots of fun to me and I do it every other day, mainly dressage in the ring. It is very good for me, very therapeutic, almost meditative.”

I asked Floriane for a verbal image of her father. “A risk-taker. That is not easy in France. It is very different here.” And her mother? “The opposite of Dad. She loves kids and is a great cook.” And what does she like most about the Valley? “I get to do things I never would have done in France. In this country you can fail and start again.” And what don’t you like about the Valley? “People leaving.”

I asked Floriane for her brief responses to a few Valley topics.

The wineries and their impact? — “Well it is one crop that can legally bring in enough money into the Valley to support the families who live here. It makes money off the wonderful land we have and hopefully does it in the right way. It’s too bad that there are so many absentee-owners of wineries — those that are run by people not involved in the community in any way. They make their money here but do not contribute and that is an unfortunate in-balance.”

KZYX radio? “I’m glad it is here. I see that there is lots of hard work put in by many people and I enjoy working there. John Coate and his team have done a great job when you see the numbers — the station was in financial peril with $200K in debts but he has worked to bring that down to $50K.”

The AVA? “When we first moved here I did not like some of the slander that was in there. The wineries have had some bad experiences with the AVA and that’s too bad. There should be a more open and friendly dialogue between the two, and others also — the paper, the wineries, the radio station are all potentially great resources to the Valley.”

The school system? “I love the school system and remain very supportive of it. The teachers are dedicated and are inspiring to the kids. It is regrettable that people are leaving and taking their kids to schools elsewhere. My kids are doing very well in the local system. I like public schools. We had a revolution in our country to get them!”

To end the interview, I posed a few questions to my guest. Some of these are from a questionnaire featured on television’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton.”

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Learning new things.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Complaining, whining people.”

Sound or noise you love? “Laughter.”

Sound or noise you hate? “Barking dogs at night.”

Favorite food or meal? “Rillettes — goose meat — served cold. It’s like a paté.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “My grandparents on my mother’s side. I wish I had had time to ask them more questions about their lives, their childhood, their history, the war.”

If you were to be left completely alone indefinitely on an isolated island in the ocean, but with unlimited provisions, what three possessions would you like to have with you? “A sun hat; a Swiss army knife; pen and paper.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “Family photographs and our pets. Everything else could burn and be replaced.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “I have many, but none that were life-changing or that influential.”

Favorite hobby? “That would be horse-riding, my passion. I also like cooking. I cook a lunch and dinner almost every day for the family. We generally go to Lauren’s on Friday evenings for dinner. It is a meal each time. We don’t do sandwiches. It is part of what I regard as my family job.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “A psychologist maybe, or a ‘horse whisperer’.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “A toll booth worker.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “As I said earlier, we do not do the dating thing. We get straight to the point. It is straight to the point, no planning.”

Is there something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “I wish I could have found a passion earlier in life.”

Tell me about a memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “The birth of my kids.”

What is something that you are really proud of and why? “My family here — that we are still here after ten years.”

What is your favorite thing about yourself? “That I am very committed and reliable, I do not flake out. People feel they can confide in me a lot. I guess I inspire trust.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “You did a good job, Floriane, come in.” ¥¥

(To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Deanna Apfel.)

He was born in November 1920 and is therefore ninety years old. He was born on the Ranch at what is now Gowan’s to parents Clyde Price and Mary Brown who had married when they were seventeen and fourteen respectively. The Price family was originally from Germany where their name had been Preisch, coming over to the States from Offenbach in the 1740’s and reaching Knight’s Landing in Yolo County, California in 1867 and Anderson Valley in 1890. His great grandfather, William Price lived in a house behind what was a few years later, the large red house on the highway — Reilly Heights, built in 1895, next to what is now Roederer Winery. Junior’s grandfather was Sumner Price who married Katie Studebaker in 1890, another old Valley family and they had four children — stepson Gilbert from his earlier marriage, Hazel, Clyde, and Ellis…

On the Brown side, Junior’s great grandfather was Doctor John Brown, whose picture can be seen in the Museum and his grandfather George was born in St Helena before coming to the Valley. Mary met Clyde here and they eloped to Santa Rosa to get married in 1915. “It was not a shotgun wedding, just a couple of scared kids afraid to come home. They lived on the Studebaker property that was divided up by my Grandmother Katie, with my Mom and Dad getting the Price Ranch, which is down the barely noticeable lane just a few yards south of the Philo-Greenwood Road off Hwy 128, now on the Gowan’s property. As a kid I was always outside and did everything from hunting and trapping to working in the orchards, picking apples, prunes, pears, and later different produce. I would have to collect all the windfall apples and put them into sacks. We’d swim in the river where the bridge by the Apple Farm is now. It was called the River Rest, but we just called it the river. I went to the Shields School, which is on the third bend in the road north past the Gowan’s Oak Tree stand. There were just eight or nine kids in the whole school, 1st through 8th grade — they were the Hiatt girls from Yorkville, Jack Clow, George and James Gowan, Helen, Stanley and Philip Hagemann, Johnnie Williams, Myrtle William, and Warren Ingram. My Uncle John Studebaker, my Dad’s cousin, couldn’t sell his produce so my Dad took it over and started ‘peddling’ the fruits, mainly on the Coast at first, but later in the produce markets in the Valley and towns and cities on the coast and down south — Navarro, Boonville, Healdsburg, Geyserville, Albion, Mendocino, Fort Bragg, even up to Rockport and down to San Francisco.”

Clyde and Mary had five kids — Jesse in 1913, Ruby in 1915, Mary Etta in 1919 (who died as a baby), Clyde 1920, and Harold in 1923. Clyde Jr. is the only one left. I was friends with Warren Ingram and his brother Rea who was later the school bus driver for many years, and also Jack Clow, who went on to open Jack’s Valley Store just outside Philo. At thirteen, Junior went to the High School that was on what is now Anderson Valley Way where the District Office is, next to the current Elementary School and just yards from where we were sitting. “I went to school because I had to; I was not too good but I did graduate in 1939. I didn’t like sports, except horseshoes, although I did play a little basketball. My main interest was band and I had started saxophone lessons with a teacher in Cloverdale when I was six years old. In high school I played the tenor sax in the school band with Clare (a boys name too) ‘C.W.’ Fields, Joe ‘Junior’ Gleeson, Bill Dightman, Pete Witherell, and my brother — Harold ‘Bink’ Price. We would hang out together out of school and all knew a little of the local language — Boontling — yeah, we ‘piked up the Boont’ and hung out at the local ice cream store — St John’s, later Weiss’s — a restaurant/bar and soda fountain, and a bus stop. The Buckhorn is at that spot now.”

“I smoked cigarettes and played horseshoes a lot. Yes, I smoked. They would sell us cigarettes, Camels, there was not much law around here then. I also smoked when I milked the cattle and hid my cigarettes there. Sometimes my Dad would buy me Bull Durham tobacco. I remember the teachers and the bus driver challenged us to horseshoes and they didn’t win a single point. I liked beer too but a few years out of high school I stopped. I found I was missing too much if I was drinking. During high school I had pocket money from my job on the produce truck at weekends and during the vacations — enough money to keep me in cigarettes for the rest of the year. I was always outside; kids were back then. I trapped with my Dad — ‘coons, skunks, otters… Mom would take us to Sunday school and church — both Methodist churches in the Valley — in Philo and Boonville. Dad never went — he was raised 7th Day Adventist but never practiced. If it were up to my Dad I would never have finished school. Even on my last day I had to leave school early to make deliveries with him in Ft. Bragg… After graduating and getting my diploma, I went to work for him. It was never going to be anything different. By 1942 he was selling to many stores, apples mainly, and a few years later I was driving down to Los Angeles on deliveries. I also got some work in the mill for the Union Lumber Company, earning 40¢ an hour.”

In 1936, Junior married Marjorie Berryhill from Fort Bragg and they had two children — David (1941) and Gloria (1945), living in my parent’s house across the highway from the Floodgate Store. “My Dad paid me $20 a week but with lots of bonuses, and then in 1944 I was drafted into the Army. I was an infantryman in the 104th Division fighting in Europe. The 413th Battalion, C Company, #39052456. We were in the fighting just after the Battle of the Bulge and we slowly pushed the Germans back.”

After the war, Junior returned to work with his father, with brother Bink also helping out a lot. “Following the war the mills started to spring up all over the valley as the lumber industry boom took off — they needed wood to build houses in the expanding Bay Area. This meant the arrival of mill workers from Oklahoma and Arkansas — ‘Okies’ and ‘Arkies.’ They took over the Valley and never fired a shot! There were mills from Navarro all the way inland to the county line — about thirty of them, not counting the small ones. Our kids attended the Navarro Elementary School. Gloria later went to the Indian Creek School, where the PG&E sub station is now, in Philo, before doing six months at the Boonville Elementary in the Veterans’ Hall. When not working I had my own swing band in which I played the alto saxophone. At school I had started the band with my school band-mates and we’d play at dances in The Grange Hall. The old hall that was burned down, the dance hall at the Pardini Hotel in Navarro, Comptche Hall, and also over the hill to Redwood Valley, and in Ukiah at the Shady Oaks Dance Hall. I’d I carry my sax on the handlebars of my motorcycle. I still have it. As a family we would spend time with the family of Warren Ingram, the California Highway Patrol guy in the Valley, and a friend for many years. We’d get together for dinner at one of the houses and play cards — pinochle, canasta, Monopoly, and I’d play checkers for hours with Warren. He was very competitive and called everyone ‘fathead.’ He called me ‘Popo.’ That was my nickname around here. Bob Glover was ‘Little Beast,’ Junior Gleeson was ‘Big Beast.’ And there was Clare ‘Sneeze’ Fields, Bill ‘Dighter’ Dightman, and Pete ‘Wit’ Witherell. Because my parents didn’t like the teacher in Anderson Valley, I went to school in Cloverdale for a year in 1932. I was called ‘Mickey’ there because I wore a Mickey Mouse belt. We rented a house in Cloverdale, about 25 miles from Boonville, and for years after that I was called Mickey whenever I was in town.”

In March 1955, Junior and the family returned to Cloverdale where their new home was one of many being built there. The down payment had been obtained through the G.I. Bill. Junior was a mill worker once again — a truck driver hauling lumber in his ’52 GMC truck and later a MAC Diesel truck, often as far as Wilmington, south of Los Angeles, a two-day trip. He moved on to work with Hulbert and Muffly as a forklift operator, feeding the mill and stacking limber off the green chain. “They were cousins of the Hulbert’s whose family my sister Ruby had married into. We’re half-assed relatives around here, not in-bred! I stayed there for about six months and then went back to working for my Dad driving the produce trucks from here to LA.”

Junior’s son David was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1959 and he and Marjorie split up the following year. Junior moved to another job — back to driving a lumber truck for Kelly Trucking, working for Baxter and Son Lumber Company out of Cloverdale. “Then I met someone I shouldn’t have met, Jackie. We lived together and in 1961 we got married and had a daughter, Twyla, and I went back to working with Hulbert and Muffly up in Arcata. I was there for a year and we split up and I returned to the Valley. My Dad had passed in 1961 and I stayed with Mom at the Price Ranch. I was forty three and back home. Mom died in 1966 and I met Alice Senn, born Kaiser and became her 5th husband in 1967 and she was my 3rd wife. I said ‘We’d better stay together. Nobody else wants us!’ We did — for nearly 40 years — until she passed in 2006.”

They moved in to Alice’s place on Gschwend Road, south of Floodgate but not long afterwards they moved to the Price Ranch and rented out Alice’s to a few young women. They turned out to be the early members of Charles Manson’s gang, who also lived there for a time. Meanwhile, Junior worked for Cordes Lumber and also Redwood Coast Lumber on Masonite property, making split rail, grape stakes, and salvaging logging and doing clean-up on his D8 Cat after major logging had been completed. “They were big Cat’s, not D9’s though… The 17-acre ranch was left to my brother Jesse and me but I bought him out for $2000. We paid off the loan on the ranch and sold it to James Gowan in two separate parcels — the orchard first in 1972 then the rest in 1973. The Gowan family still has it today. His mother was Alice Studebaker, a first cousin of my father’s. It was the Studebakers who originally donated out the ranch so James got it back, but he had to pay for it. We had bought a house in Santa Rosa in 1971 and moved there in 1973 and I took a job delivering milk to stores, restaurants, even homes. I went all over the area and out to Guerneville and Sebastopol too. It was a mistake but it took me a year to find that out… I then went to work for Performance Towing driving a tow truck for the next 33 years, and later Opperman & Son Truck Sales and Equipment, until 2006 when I was 86. I didn’t retire. They just stopped calling me! I drove all over for them, from Salt Lake City up to Arcata and down to LA. Yes, that milk route and Jackie were the two big mistakes in my life.”

“Now I have the best job of all — doing nothing. I get up real early so that I have all day to rest. I like to watch old westerns and for many years Alice and I liked to travel. Her mother lived in Wisconsin and we went there every year, taking a different route each time, up into Canada sometimes on the way. My daughter Gloria married a military man and they moved around a lot — up to Washington State, Georgia, and in Germany. I have two granddaughters — Michelle and Renée, and four great grandchildren — Kyra, Aiden, Rylee with Renée and husband Ryan in Jackson, California, and Hunter down in Texas with Michelle and her husband Jeff. Through Alice, I have a step great, great grandchild. Since 2006 I have done nothing at all. I have a woodworking hobby — making cradles, stools, kids’ toys, checkerboards, and the watering can figures outside the museum, anything pertaining to wood. But I don’t do much of that now, unless somebody wants something special. Alice passed away in 2006, on 04/05/06, at the age of 92, and for years she had provided a child care service at our home, practically raising a couple of kids ourselves — Justin and Larkin Simpson.”

I asked Junior for a snapshot verbal image of his father. “Driving his produce truck. He had a real good way of making you do something you didn’t want to do. He made a real good boss.” And his mother? “She was just Mom. But that’s a lot.”

Next I turned to asking Junior for his brief responses to various Valley issues.

The wineries and their impact? “Well, as you will know by now, everything used to be apples and sheep. There will always be changes. It then went to the sawmills and now it’s the wineries. Who knows what will be next? In the 30s, Asti Winery planted grapes and harvested for two years. There was ‘not enough sugar’ they said, this was ‘not grape country.’ I guess they were wrong. There has always been grapes on Greenwood Ridge, where the Italian families settled — Vinegar Hill as it was called — no sugar!”

Changes in the Valley? “Well, as I said, change happens and not everybody likes it. Ever since the Valley was discovered. That was by Anderson by the way, not Henry Beeson as some will tell you. I heard that from Beeson’s daughter herself, Etta Beeson. She would have said it was her father, unless it wasn’t the truth. She said the Beeson brothers, Henry and Isaac, were not with William Anderson that first time the Valley was seen by white folks. I believe her.”

I posed a few questions. Some from TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton” and some I came up with myself.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? Nothing excites me. I get up and look forward to breakfast and another day.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “The noise of traffic.”

Sound or noise you love? “Country and western music.”

Favorite food or meal? “A t-bone steak with potatoes and gravy — the Anderson Valley special.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “My Dad.”

Anything scare you? “I don’t think so.”

Where would you like to visit if you could go anywhere in the world? “Germany — to visit where I was during the war. The Ruhr River — where we lost half of our company when they were swept down the river we were crossing after a dam further up river was blown up. I lost a lot of good friends in the war.

Favorite hobby? “I don’t have one now. Used to be woodworking. Now I like to watch old western movies — John Wayne, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers. I remember the first movie I saw was ‘Wings’ in 1927. I went to see it with Albert Farrer at the Oddfellows Hall in the Live Oak building in Boonville.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “When I was a teenager I wanted to be the school bus driver. In my senior year, our driver was Johnny Giovanetti but he worked with my Dad a lot and so sometimes, if he was busy doing that, he’d let me drive the school bus down from Vinegar Hill to Hwy 128. Later I wanted to be a Greyhound Bus Driver.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “A sewage worker.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I remember my first kiss, I was at a Halloween party at Alice Gowan’s house and Helen Hagemann grabbed me and took me outside and kissed me. My first sort-of date was when I rode my bicycle up the Haehl Hill and out to Nina Delbar’s when I was a sophomore in high school. I remember George Gowan telling me about one of his first dates when he was driving the car and he put a hand around his date’s shoulder. She said ‘Should you be doing that with your hand?’ and George replied ‘Well if I take it off the wheel we’ll crash the car’.”

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “Probably not, although I have made mistakes, as I said earlier. I have not seen Twyla since she was five years old. She must be nearly 50 now. That’s life.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “There are too many of them.”

Something you’re really proud of and why? “I am proud to be here. Proud of my kids and grandkids.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “That I have always been able to do any kind of job, or fix anything. A jack of all trades and master of none.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Well, ‘Come on in,’ would sure beat ‘Get the hell out of here,’ I’d say!” as he laughed out loud. Thus ended one of the most pleasurable interviews that I have conducted over the past few years.

To read the stories of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be announced.

Antoinette was born in Lower Saxony, Germany, the second child of Volkmar von Grone and Erna von Stein, whose families can both be traced back through central European aristocracy for many centuries, her father’s being German/French/Polish as far back as the 1200s and her mother’s French/Polish to the 700s.

“My paternal great grandmother was a Countess with large land holdings and lots of money. However, it turned out she was actually the daughter of the local cobbler and her stepmother was going to expose this unless a bribe was paid. My great grandfather refused to pay and soon the news was all over Germany, causing quite a scandal in society. My great grandmother, the ‘False Countess’ never left the home again even though she was much beloved in the nearby area and became the second mother to my father. My grandfather suffered terrible shrapnel wounds in the First World War and had lost an arm at the Battle of Verdun. He had met his future wife in a field hospital where she was a nurse. Then during the Third Reich, he could not prove that he was not Jewish. They lived in a largely Jewish area of Krakow, now in Poland, but once my brother came along, with his blonde hair and blue eyes, they were fine and the ‘curse’ was lifted. I guess they didn’t get to see me. My father worked in the government’s Department of Forestry and Agriculture during the war.”

Antoinette’s mother’s family was from East Prussia. Her grandfather had been shot in the face in World War I and was disfigured as a result. Before the Second World War, they moved to a big family estate, about fifty miles from the Lower Saxony home of the von Grone’s, who had lived on their estate for five hundred years. “My mother was dating my father’s brother who was very enamored with her. He and my Dad had always talked about their girlfriends but he was not going to ‘share’ this one with my Dad. However, he was killed in the war in 1944 and my mother was a friend of their sister, who introduced her to my father. They immediately fell in love and were married in 1946. Germany was bankrupt by that time and the family had lost a lot of money and the estate was deeply in debt. Their home in Berlin was in the eastern sector so that was also lost.”

Antoinette was born on the estate in Lower Saxony and grew up there until the age of twelve, attending the local public school. “We lived in a very rural area and I was a tomboy who was always outside, although I had been drawing since I was five. I loved animals, mainly dogs and cats, but horses and wildlife too. From an early age I was convinced I had a gift with animals. Although, as a family, we socialized with other aristocratic families, lots of my friends were the local kids from the school, of whom many were Polish refugees who became a big part of my life in those years. I thank my parents for not having an attitude about me playing with those kids as we generally were expected to mix with the other privileged children. Besides, they treated me like a princess!”

At the age of 12, Antoinette was sent to a well-known boarding school in Holzminden, about 20 miles away. “I was not forced to go, I could have traveled every day, but my brother was there already, he was five years older than me, and I wanted to board. The school was for the very rich but the academic standards were not as high as the public school I had attended. I had to select four main subjects and chose Math, Biology, Literature, and History, with Art as a secondary subject. Fortunately I had an excellent art teacher, although he was hated by many of the kids. He would say ‘Few of you have real talent but I will teach you all the basic skills.’ He gave me the best grounding imaginable for my art. Unfortunately he left and for my final year I had a poor teacher who just wanted to be liked and taught art in a different, modern way. However, he generally left me alone to work on my own technique that I had learned from the first teacher.”

Antoinette was a mediocre student who was never really motivated. “I was not a bad student, I was just lazy with most subjects. My parents knew I was good at art and did not discourage me from that, but they were not keen on me becoming an artist. They wanted me to study so that I could get a good job for a time to support myself before I got married and had kids. Biology was my favorite subject other than art but my grades were not good enough to take me further. I graduated and did not know what to do. My family had a friend who restored churches who was also an artist and we suggested art restoration to him but he said I had way too much imagination to simply restore other’s paintings. He suggested design school and when my father heard the words ‘industrial design’ he though ‘money’ and was all for it.”

After going for an interview and deciding Industrial Design would not work, Antoinette and her mother met with the head of textile design at the school and that seemed like a much better fit. So in 1970, at the age of eighteen, Antoinette went to the Hanover College for Applied Arts. “Before my final year there I took time out to study Spanish in Hamburg for about nine months in 1973/74, where I really learned to be on my own feet – I had a really good time. My course had about one year left but I found myself in a very dicey relationship and needed to get away. I moved to Vienna and applied to continue my studies there but they said I would have to start over again as they were a ‘university’ and I had been to only a ‘college’ before. However, if I did a tapestry-weaving course they would accept me. My Dad said I should do that for six months and then return and finish my course in Hanover. I did that, the tapestry evolved slowly, and I enjoyed my time in Vienna so much that I stayed an extra semester. However, I made sure my courses were covered in Hanover, thanks to my professors who gave me pass grades in basic classes. I then returned for a final semester and graduated with a degree in Textile Design.”

As for a job, there were not many in that field. “I had not really thought that much about it. It was work in a battique shop, wallpaper design, or mass production stuff — all horrific to me. Then my mother’s friend said she might be able to help as she knew a teacher at a fashion school in Paris. Yes, of course I was interested and enrolled. It turned out to be the school from hell. There were just six students and the teacher was a really nasty character. I was doing haute couture, working on making the cuts in fabric that was draped on a mannequin. My ‘White Nights of Paris’ were not that at all. I worked through the night in my nine-by-nine room with very cold running water, sharing a toilet with some bad characters in the building. I was there for ten months but got my qualification and applied for many jobs in prêt a porter fashion — ready to wear clothes. I did get a job when one of the companies picked me up for a month’s trial. Others said my work would be too expensive to produce.”

In August of each year Paris virtually empties of its citizens as they head off for the countryside. “The city closes down. During that time in 1979, I finally realized that I wanted to be recognized for my work but needed an introduction to the right place. A friend of mine knew the owner of Hermés, the French high fashion house, and I got an interview with the head of the design department. However, when he saw my portfolio of textile designs he said that he felt I did not have the flair or style they required. But there was a three-month temporary position for a window decorator at the company’s store in Paris. I jumped at the chance and loved it. It was a wonderful experience and they extended my stay to eight months at which point I was told that by law they could not keep me any longer, but I could leave for a couple of months and then come back.”

Antoinette left Hermés and a few days later saw an ad in a magazine looking for people to work at Club Med teaching various skills. “I had no idea what Club Med was all about. I went to the interview, dressed in a kilt and hair in braids, for a job teaching arts and crafts. They said they loved my work and would get in touch with me. A few days later a gypsy woman on the side of the road persuaded me to have my palm read and she told me I would be traveling. ‘Yeah, right’ I thought. Club Med contacted me that night and I was soon teaching battique and weaving in Morocco!”

Antoinette had dated an Englishman and her English was good. She took a test and passed, giving her more options on where to work for Club Med. As a result she worked the tourist season of 1980-81 in Cancun, Mexico, with its mostly American visitors. “I loved Club Med and would have liked to have stayed. We lived in beautiful places and there were many interesting people to meet. You could indulge in your fantasies and have lots of fun with the guests. However, I could hear my parents in my head saying ‘Do something serious’ so I left and returned to Germany. To my surprise, my mother said, ‘We kind of didn’t think you would come back.’ They had accepted that I had grown up and wanted to know what I was going to next – it would be my decision. I started to do silk painting as a self-employed artist and they supported me in that and said I could stay as long as I wanted. Well, I stayed for six months and had a blast designing silk dresses, tops, scarves, all with painting on them… Eventually I met up with a woman who had her own store in Hamburg and I explained my vision to her – haute couture printed silks. We clicked and I moved to Hamburg into a fabulous flat with large studio, selling some things out of her store and also my own outlet at the flat. Overtime I made many contacts, got my own seamstress, and did many little shows. I knew I could call my Dad if I needed financial help but I never had to do that. I did not go back to Hermés, although I did do a final three-month run with Club Med.”

In April/May 1983, Antoinette came to the States for four weeks, visiting friends from her Club Med days in New York, Minnesota, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. “I set aside ten days at the end of my visit to see a particular guy who lived in Mill Valley in Marin County. We clicked and when I returned to Hamburg we continued a long distance relationship until I moved over here at the end of 1983 and started a business in Mill Valley, returning twice a year to Germany to sell there also.”

Antoinette eventually got her ‘green card’ through a program whereby permission to stay and work was granted if you could prove you were not taking a job away from an American. She and the boyfriend were together for nine-and-a-half years before she moved out and found herself a loft apartment. A few years later, in 1995, through an artist friend, she met Thom Elkjer and started to date. They were married in December 1996 and bought a house in Santa Rosa in 1997. “Thom is a freelance writer and I was happy to stay there for the rest of my life.”

“It was around that time that another big change occurred. I was doing a show where some of my scarves were on sale for $1200 — $1500 and one customer just laughed at that price. They would take me a week to do, so over forty hours or more it was not a huge hourly rate. However, I realized that many people would think like that and I decided perhaps a change was needed. Meanwhile I had received a big commission for some silk paintings at the Elephant Bar Hotel in Tokyo and through that met the designer Eugene Anthony. He said ‘I can see that you have a great hand but I cannot use the silks – paint on walls for me.’ I had dabbled in oil and acrylic painting for my own development but this was a new challenge and I did a painting for him on a bathroom wall — a stylized French piece, featuring animals dressed in costumes. It was a success.” For a couple of years the silk work continued alongside Antoinette’s new art but in 1997/98 she finally let go of silks. “I still miss it. The colors and effects are not available in any other medium.”

In 1999, Thom was asked to do an article on the town of Mendocino for Wine Spectator magazine. “We had driven along Hwy 128 many times on our way for getaway weekends on the coast. It was certainly pretty valley but we were always on our way somewhere else. On this occasion we stopped for a night’s stay at the Apple Farm. The next morning, I looked out of bedroom window and saw the light on the trees, the working barn, and a little fog. I thought – ‘I am home!’ Thom then told me he had always wanted to have property in Anderson Valley. I had no idea what the Valley was.”

They were both doing very well at that time as freelance artists in the Bay Area, so did not wish to move here full-time, but a weekend getaway place would work. They decided on looking for a small piece of land with a fixer-upper home, within walking distance of Boonville, level land for a garden, and an orchard. “We looked around with a local realtor but after two years we gave up – it seemed we only saw large pieces of land or things that were beyond our price range. We had actually passed this property early in our search, had even leaned over the fence and had said – ‘something like this would be perfect.’ By 2001, Thom was very frustrated and rewarded himself with a BMW. We had given up our search but came to visit the Apple Farm with friends. We showed them around the Valley and as we passed this property there was a hand-painted sign saying ‘For Sale’.”

They bought the property from Elizabeth and Jon Miller and then the real work began. “It was cute but needed lots of work, both inside and out. We came up at weekends with my painting materials and a computer, and worked in the daytimes on the garden and redesigning most of the interior. We did that for three-and-a-half years. Despite the effects on 9/11 on many, I did well for a time in the Bay Area before the economic problems finally hit me too. By 2005, we were also emotionally done with the traveling. We had to decide which house we would rent out but for a time decided we couldn’t do either. However, after Ferd and Tracy Thieriot offered me the perfect studio space up here in Yorkville, we rented out the Santa Rosa home (eventually selling it) and moved up, beginning a two-year plan to build a studio here, thanks to Bob Tierney. In the early days we already knew Don and Rene Bissatini, on Peachland Road, from Santa Rosa, and soon got to know neighbors Patty and Mike Langley, Bob Tierney and Sandhya Abee, Susan and Michael Addison, Cynthia McMath, and Kathleen Porter.”

Antoinette sold her paintings out of her home and also the Erickson Fine Art Gallery in Healdsburg. “I had always been reluctant to deal with galleries and have had mixed results. My commissions went well for a time but that business is now almost zero. I sell out of the Mercantile Store in Boonville and I have work up in the Boonville Hotel, the Mosswood Market Café, winery tasting rooms, at open studio days, and have many referrals. And of course there are my faithful customers.”

Antoinette has now been a very keen member of the AV Ambulance service for five-and-a-half years and the Fire department for six months — EMT only. “Thom thought it would be a good idea to get involved in the community but I was not as keen. However after Bruce Longstreet said I should go for it, I took to the Ambulance service right away under the training of David Severn. I remember thinking after my first transport over the hill to Ukiah: ‘It took you 50 years to get here.’ I had no idea it was so much fun to help someone. I had never worked in the service industry and had never volunteered for anything. This was new to me and I worked hard at it and love it. As for the EMT, I did not think that was for me but I developed a real drive and wanted to be good at it. That had never happened to me that way. I soaked it up and it felt great that I could still learn and I immersed myself in it. I love going on calls — the adrenaline rush, the camaraderie, and the feeling of doing something for the greater good. And I should add, we always need more people.”

“I love the Valley for its amazing sense of community. So much is done on a voluntary basis here. I have never seen it in other places. Maybe I wasn’t looking. I sometimes go back to the Bay Area and have no regrets about leaving, although if we’d stayed I feel I would have been happy there. I now feel like my home is here.”

I asked Antoinette for a snapshot verbal image of her father. “A tank – a big force in life.” And her mother? “Cerebral but a do’er; a real lady, but one who could swear.”

I then asked her for her brief thoughts on various Valley issues.

The Wineries? “They continue to grow in number and encroach evermore. I do not like it. Also I am saddened by the fact that many of them are owned by larger businesses, not local families. I am concerned about a one-crop Valley, diversity would be good, just as Sarah Bennett-Cahn is doing with her goats and sheep on her property at the south end of Boonville, and the people who are planting olive trees.”

Changes in the Valley? There are many part-timers, which is ridiculous of me to say as I was one for a time, but we are being depleted by them.”

KZYX radio? “I don’t listen.”

I posed a few questions to Antoinette.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? – “Just stepping outside the door and observing nature… My cat – I have always had dogs and cats – now I am pretty much a cat person… The pager going off for the Fire and/or Ambulance… Oh, and Thom too!”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? – “When winter goes on too long…People driving at just 45mph who do not pull over on Hwy 128 to let others pass. The problem is they do 45 in the center of Boonville too!”

Sound or noise do you love? “The sounds of nature, birds singing.”

Sound or noise do you hate? “Accelerating motorcycles. I hate that. Airplanes.”

Favorite food or meal? “Steak with sauce béarnaise and some fancy vegetables. Oh, and with orange flavored chocolate for dessert. I could eat that all day long!”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Joy Adamson, who worked with lions in Africa. The film ‘Born Free’ was based on her stories. I have a deep affinity for Africa and its animals. This is reflected in much of my work.”

If you were to be left completely alone indefinitely on an isolated island in the ocean, but with unlimited provisions, what three possessions would you like to have with you? “My cat; art materials; some sort of historical book about Africa or a medical book – so I’d learn something.”

What scares you? “Over population. The political climate.”

Favorite film or book or one that has influenced you? “Well not a film but the award-winning television series ‘E.R.’ set in a hospital. It opened up a part of me that I didn’t know was there; a book would be Arthur B. Guthrie’s ‘The Big Sky,’ an epic adventure novel of America’s vast frontier.”

Favorite hobby? “Gardening.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if given the chance to do anything? “When I was a little kid I wanted to be a lion tamer or a zoo-keeper. Then later, a biologist or medical person of some sort in the African bush — if I was about 20, not now!”

Profession you’d not like to do? “Anything in a factory, or that was mindless. I need to have regular change.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “It was when I was at boarding school at 13 — disco night.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget? “My time in Vienna; or when I was with Club Med and enjoyed the crazy freedom of youth; or even boarding school which was lots of fun.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “I am very proud of how the vision of our home here was realized. And of my work as an EMT because I didn’t think I had it in me.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “Well, I got lucky with my hair! That’s hard to say. I don’t know what to tell you.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “I’d like him to say ‘We have a special animal section where you can live and work with and study the animals.’ That would be great.” ¥¥

(To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee will be 90-year old Clyde Price Jr., whose family was among the Valley’s earliest settlers, back in the 1860’s.)

Beverly was born in Richmond, California, in the East Bay, to parents Adam Weisgerber and Marie Lindeberg. Her father’s side had come from Germany and settled in Wheeling, West Virginia during the Revolutionary War and there was a George Washington Weisgerber and a Thomas Jefferson Weisgerber. “The family lived in that area until my grandfather, a potter, moved the family to Tiffin, Ohio and he and my grandmother, who was from a French family who had been booted out of Nova Scotia, Canada, had four children, including my father Adam. Then in 1918, my grandfather was hired to work for American Standard in Richmond and he moved out here alone. My grandmother Amy said that ‘no man should be alone in the West without his wife and family,’ and they followed soon afterwards. My father went to St. Mary’s College in the East Bay and played on the football team, The Galloping Gaels. He had hopes of being a football coach. His oldest brother, a pianist, had a jazz band in the 20s and 30s, the sister was the secretary and only female employee at the big dynamite factory nearby, and youngest sibling, Jack, was killed in an automobile accident. My grandfather had given up the pottery business and opened a Desoto/Plymouth/Packard car dealership, and my Dad, substituting for his younger brother, found work there and never did become a coach. They were very family-oriented and eventually all three siblings worked in the family business.”

Beverly’s mother was born in San Francisco, the daughter of a Fire Department Captain who was on the team that dynamited Van Ness Avenue to stop the spread of the fire that followed the earthquake in 1906. He was also the first captain of the first SF Bay fireboat. One side of the family was from Scandinavia and had come to the states in the 1880s and then to California via the Dakotas at some point. The French side of the family, originally from Metz, France, settled in San Francisco and Berkeley where they opened a brewery — Raspillier Brewery. “My great grandparents were in the City just before the earthquake and they moved to Berkeley — and never went back across the Bay. My grandmother married the ‘sweet fireman’ down the street and had three kids, the oldest being my mother. She was vivacious and won Miss San Francisco, leading to an invite to do movies in Hollywood but my grandmother said ‘No’! Instead she met the football player and they were married in 1930. This was not her first marriage and my half-sister, Lois, had been born in 1925. I came along in 1937 with my sister Jeannie next in 1940.”

Beverly describes her childhood as being “idyllic.” Richmond was typical of small town American with a couple of significant differences — the Kaiser shipping yards and the nearby Standard Oil refinery. “It was a very safe environment. We would spend hours in the parks, bike-riding, roller-skating, etc. We went to the theater, put on our own shows in the neighborhood, made our own kites, and did projects with the neighbors. My grandparents had quarter-horses, along with lots of fruit trees at their nearby ranch in the Alhambra Valley. I had chores around the house and picked fruit when I was ten years old, setting up and selling my goods at the side of the road. My work ethic started early — where could you do that today?”

“I was very lucky to grow up there. It grounded me, and made me aware of the community and social issues. This was helped by my father taking me on trips all over the state, even Anderson Valley, as a child. He told me there was lots of illegal booze brought down through this Valley during earlier years of Prohibition. I was very much like him in that we were interested/curious about so many things. We visited many different people and places he knew, and I remember our family had friends we’d see at a sheep ranch in Cloverdale where I spent some summers. All of my schooling took place in Richmond and I am still in contact with friends from those days. It was assumed that students at the top of the class would go to the University of California. I found this objectionable. I liked school, particularly History and English, not languages and math. I was moderately social and, as I mentioned, I still have friends from those years. I worked on the school newspaper and the yearbook at Richmond High, which was a good school for academics and the trades. At the age of six, I had scarlet fever that became rheumatic fever, and was absent from school for two years. I did lots of things with my mother and learned to read at home and became a voracious reader, which is something that has always been a big part of my life. I read lots about recent history and current events — the Depression and World War II. Around where we lived I saw Japanese people evicted and radio equipment taken out. However, they were sent to internment camps to protect them from any backlash not because of any real threat that they posed. My father continued to expose me to lots of different things, without making judgments himself, always asking ‘what do you see?’ and ‘what do you think?’ The family talked about the war a lot and we always listened to the radio news and read the newspapers. My parents were Democrats and supported FDR. There was lots of fear at that time — but to understand that you really had to have been there.”

Beverly graduated high school in 1955 and was planning to attend SF State University. “However, my father wanted me to be independent and he intervened. He really liked the new idea at the time of junior colleges and so along with some of my friends I enrolled at West Contra Costa County Junior College. He liked the egalitarian nature of the college and knew several of the faculty members. This was a whole new idea in education, there was no tracking and we had some incredible teachers, most of them veterans of the war and I liked them very much. It changed my life in a very positive way in that from then on I wanted to be a teacher in such a college. I had no idea what I wanted to do before going there. I had been a file clerk at an insurance company when at school and I knew that was not for me. Anyway, I did very well there and I received a scholarship to go to Stanford in 1957. I also took lots of extra classes in history and literature. I found Stanford not snobby, just a very intellectual climate. However, because of the quality of the education at the JC I was able to do some tutoring myself at Stanford while I was studying. I graduated in 1959 and soon after married Bob Reardon whom I had met at the JC. I decided to get my master’s in psychology and teaching and went to SF State and we lived near the campus. It was great to be in the city again. I knew it well and regard myself as very lucky to have experienced it before it became so developed — it was a ‘small city’ until the mid-60s.”

Husband Bob was an accountant in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, where he formed his own company. While at SF State, Beverly became a ‘Girl Friday’ for the female President of a uranium company. “She was like a movie star and treated like one everywhere we went. I was very inexperienced in the business world and I learned a lot from her… I had done some teaching during my master’s program at the university and San Mateo JC but by August 1961 I found a fulltime position hard to get. I was told there were no jobs for women. However, I applied for a position at Diablo Valley College Community College, sister college to CCJC, and did a very good first interview, although I thought I’d put my foot in my mouth on a couple of issues, yet later found out I had impressed them. They believed that the heart of the school is the student and that the administration is at the bottom of the totem pole, below students, teachers and staff. I was hired to teach psychology in the Social Services ‘area.’ It was not called a Department.”

However, in September 1961, just as she was starting to teach, Beverly’s parents were both killed in an auto accident by a drunk driver on their 30th wedding anniversary.

“The faculty helped me a lot and I handled the grief by throwing myself into work. I taught general social science — biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, but also history, political science, and economics. This was a yearlong inter-disciplinary course and students flocked to it. It was teaching critical thinking — back to my father’s philosophy — ‘what do you see?’; ‘what do you think?’ We tried to develop each student’s personal worldview. Psychology was changed to focus on what people needed to know about themselves and their relationships with their family and at work. The college had a clear philosophy and every action followed from that philosophy. I learned that you are what you do, not what you say you are. The 60s and 70s were a very interesting time to teach and everyone in our faculty worked very hard, with many formal and informal meetings, and constant support for student activities and as student advisors. My efforts as a teacher during those years at that unique college and with that wonderful faculty were the final gifts that my parents gave me.”

Daughter Anne Marie Reardon was born in 1964. Around that time, as the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, etc. were becoming hot topics, the administration at UC Berkeley had denied the rights of students to distribute leaflets etc containing political opinions on the campus. The Diablo Valley CC, however, decided that the law needed to be changed and took the issue to the State in Sacramento and won, passing the law for every campus. Beverly was a part of this effort. “Following the GI Bill and the opportunities that resulted, the community college system continued the progress of new ideas in education. I am angry that this system has now gone the same way as universities and colleges with so much money invested in administration — where it should not be going, the same as with the bloated administrative and governance costs in local and state government, the health system, and education as a whole. These costs should be challenged and their existence questioned.”

In 1969, Beverly and Bob were divorced although they remained good friends until he passed away years later. At that time, she moved to the Family Life Education Department, with the opportunity to take psychology into the practical area. She was chairperson there for twelve years by which time there were three full-time teachers and 35 part-time. “The thrust of our program was built on observation, teaching the teachers and the parents how to learn to observe the children and pay attention. It was a very successful. At one point we raised $67,000 from various events — walkathons, bake sales, etc, and this became the down payment for a second school — a Developmental Childcare Center that opened in 1974. Also during these years I learned quite a lot about political in-fighting, mainly during a battle the faculty had with the school superintendent, who was eventually fired — this experience was to help in my later years of political activism. In the late 70s, the unions came in and that led to a tremendous change. I am both pro- and anti-union. They have done some incredible things but in their governance costs, like others, they have shot themselves in the foot. Unfortunately, in a school setting, they brought a lot of shallowness into the job and any ‘extras’ that teachers had done before were no longer done. Many had side jobs and the profession changed as quality faded and money became all-important.”

In the late 70s, Beverly became re-acquainted with Marvin Dutra whom she had met many years earlier at the Contra Costa College. “I knew his former wife and their four wonderful children and we moved in together in 1979, getting married in 1984. The kids are great — competent, caring, interesting people, as are their partners.”

Marvin and his brothers owned a campground in Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast, where they had gone abalone diving many times. “One day we were headed there on Highway 20 from Willits when we had a car crash. I was badly concussed and had broken ribs. Not long after this my adrenal glands began to fail and it was thought I could die. I knew I had to quit teaching because I could only do that job one way: giving everything. The accompanying workload, and particularly the stress, was a big issue in my recovery. I finally left the profession in 1981. It was a very hard decision. I loved teaching. The best part is that you are always learning yourself and I haven’t given that up as I continue to enjoy new challenges.”

Beverly had been living in Orinda for a time before moving to Martinez in 1978. From there she and Marvin had done some traveling in an RV throughout the west — Idaho, Colorado, and up to British Columbia in Canada. Once in Martinez she became involved in local politics, including a battle with the local government on the issue of late-night baseball lights at a nearby park, and another with the Shell Refinery during which she learned a lot about California’s environmental laws. She was the Chairperson of the Committee that was formed to fight the introduction of a toxic incinerator locally. It was a major battle that she and her group won and she regards this victory as a real contribution she has made in her life.

In the 80s, Beverly and Marvin bought his brothers out of the campground and became the owners of the Pomo Campgrounds on the coast in Fort Bragg. “I had made many visits to the coastal towns of Fort Bragg, Mendocino, Point Arena, and Bodega Bay over the years and remember as a child thinking as we drove out of Cloverdale on Highway 128 that it felt we were going to a special place. I was on a deer hunt on the Rawles Ranch (now Breggo Cellars Winery) when I was just ten years old. I had been to the Mendocino County Fair a few times too — my Dad was the director of the Contra Costa Fair. By the mid-80s, Marvin was still a lieutenant in the Berkeley Fire Department but we agreed that we wanted to move away from the rapid urbanization of the Bay Area and began to search around. In 1989 my daughter Anne and I came to the Valley to look at some property for sale. It was the Clearwater Ranch School in Philo which in these later years was being used for the treatment of 35 abused and abandoned kids with lots of staff working there — therapists, cooks, custodians. At times it seems like everyone in the Valley has worked there. As we looked around Anne said, ‘There’s been lots of blood and pain here, but it’s been a good place, Mom.’ I knew there could be lots of problems but when Marvin came up to take a look, after 20 minutes he said, ‘Yes.’ We met with the director — a psychiatrist and lawyer, and made an offer that was accepted. We began work on the big clean-up and the electricity and water situation. We have respected the history of the place and kept the old buildings with just the necessary renovations being carried out as we continued to live in the Bay Area”

In 1993, Beverly and Marvin decided to take over the running of the campgrounds/RV camp on the coast. “We rather arrogantly thought we could do that and lived in a mobile home on the site, while continuing to work at the Philo property, now Sweetwater Ranch, as often as we could get away from the coast.” By about 1990-91, after owning property here for a year or two, Beverly had made the acquaintance of some like-minded Valley folks, and with Diane Paget and Steve Hall, with help from Mark Scaramella, they formed the Friends of the Navarro River Watershed, with the goals of protecting the waters and controlling its extraction. “It was being pumped like crazy and wells were running dry. We made the state aware of this problem and proper studies were carried out. It was quite a fight with the wineries to get things noticed and we did a lot of work on that.”

“Currently another group works on the problem. If we owe anything to anyone on this we owe it to Daniel Myers who has done a wonderful job with his efforts on protecting the river. Unfortunately, the tendency for exploitation of the river continues. Not by everyone — some of the wineries are locally owned and the owners have had kids at the school. They have Valley sensibilities but others do not. The big fight in the West has always been water — it will get bigger and more ugly. The wineries are not the only ones to blame. There is no fishing left because the streams are full of gravel and silt due to the coast being over-logged. The monoculture of the winery’s dominance here, the lack of a slaughterhouse for cattle and sheep (for which the land is great around here)… I could go on and on, there are so many issues to discuss on this — another time perhaps. I will just ask ‘Are we going to be flushing our toilets with wine?’”

These days Beverly likes to garden, continues to enjoy her reading, and is a big fan of the music of the 30s and 40s — particularly the bandleaders Benny Goodman and trombonist Jack Teagarden, but also Bing Crosby’s jazz singing and Teddy Wilson the jazz pianist. She likes to write letters to lots of people and does not own a computer or watch television. Beverly occasionally attends a Valley event but she and Marvin are not very group-oriented. “Our daughter Anne, who runs an after-school program in Lafayette, comes to visit. It is special when her husband Peter and dog Francis can visit too. We have a large extended family — Marvin has eighteen first cousins, and they also come and stay, as do my former students from time to time — we have plenty of room for them. I joined the Unity Club in 1990 because otherwise I tend to be reclusive. I needed to be around female energy and I respect the historical sense of the club and it’s community orientation. We have to work to maintain quality of community here. I have ‘responsibility’ disease and this is a way I can contribute to the community.”

“I admire what fire chief Colin Wilson has done here and so I joined the Mendocino County Fire Council and was the Valley’s representative for several years. I have had to stop; it became too much work. I attend the Community Action Committee occasionally, and have been quite involved with the ‘Save Our Deputy Sheriff’ movement that has been a big talking point in the last year or so here. We need our police to be community based and hopefully we can keep things the way they are. We still hope to get Deputy Walker a canine. I grew up with German shepherds — my mother raised and sold them and I had one for many years, However, I have had Lyme disease and cannot be near any ticks so we no longer have a dog. I must be careful with my health and must learn to say ‘No’ to people but, as I said, I have ‘responsibility’ disease and feel we must save the deputies so my work there continues. A capitalist and democratic society cannot work without rules and we need controls and guidelines on that. Without these and the deputies to enforce them, greed coupled with drugs can quickly destroy a community.”

I asked Beverly for her response to various Valley issues.

The School System? “I try to look at the positives. It was amazing that in the bond issue last year, a school system that is 80% Hispanic was supported by a tax-paying community that is not essentially Hispanic. That segment is clearly hoping that this support for education will lead to improvement and that the future is with the kids. From such successes, hope is offered although I am not so naïve to think that everyone does well after leaving school. I have attended the past three Elementary School graduations, well organized by staff. The children, parents and visitors were all respectful of the ceremony; well done. Then I went to the 8th grade graduation and it was very poor in comparison. There was so much noise, yelling and screaming; they were out of control. Parameters were needed. It shouldn’t be a circus atmosphere. These events should be treated seriously and with respect. The teachers are there to teach, not to be loved; teaching should be their focus and hopefully it is. Education is the freeing of people and the provision of tools to show them how to learn to be independent.”

The wineries and their impact? “They can be destructive and continue to be of concern, excepting the few locally-owned ones such as Handley, Navarro, Greenwood Ridge. I am encouraged when I hear things such as Kurt Schoenemann putting in 10 acres of organic at his Ferrington Vineyards property just north of Boonville.”

Law and Order? “In the Valley it is very effective as it stands because it is community oriented. It is essential that it stays that way. If we keep saying that maybe it will bang somebody on the head enough times so that they will keep it that way.”

Drugs in the Valley? “My concern is with the effects of drugs on the human brain, that is not completely formed until the age of 24. The consequences of drug taking continue over a lifetime, both personally and socially. I taught in the 60s and 70s and saw the first-hand the results. ‘What would you have been without it,’ I find myself asking those affected.”

The AVA? — Wonderful! If we lost it, or the Philo Post Office crew, I would consider leaving the Valley! The AVA and the New Hampshire Gazette are the only two real newspapers left in the country.”

To finish up, I posed a few questions to Beverly.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Seeing the faces of my husband and my daughter.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Unfairness.”

Sound or noise you love? “The Quiet — clouds moving.”

Sound or noise you hate? “Traffic in the Valley. And these days the Bay Area is never, for one moment, quiet.”

Favorite food or meal? “Lamb.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Molly Ivins — the late American newspaper columnist, liberal political commentator, humorist and author, would be my choice, although Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are not far behind. As for the living, perhaps international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, or even Obama — I have some suggestions about junior colleges for him.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “Family photos — including those of our pets; my ‘Thou Shalt Not Whine’ sign — my mother always used to say, ‘I don’t care who did it, fix it!’; and the statue I have of a young woman reading a book. Reading has been my lifelong passion and was always important in my family.”

Favorite hobby? “Reading — almost anything — politics, history, mysteries, romances, biographies, cookbooks.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “An investigative reporter with a degree in environmental law.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “Bartending and having to listen to the same stories over and over again.”

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “I feel my life has been so blessed — there are no changes that I would make.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget? “The birth of Anne; my marriage to Marvin.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “My teaching — somebody said I was the ‘Julia Child of teaching’ and that made me feel very good because they knew how much I cared about it.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “My enthusiasm or maybe my listening ability.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Well, I wouldn’t care what he has to say, but I’d say ‘I have some questions for you’.”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be professional artist, Antoinette von Grone.

Manuel was born in Mexico in 1963, in the state of Zacatecas. His family lived in a very rural area of the state on a ranch called Los Bajius de la Gloria, about twenty miles or more from the nearest town, which is Jalpa, a town of perhaps 10,000 people that was originally founded in the 1500s by Spanish explorers searching for gold and silver. The Indian population inter-mixed with Spanish and other European peoples to form today’s meztisos. Mestizo is a term traditionally used in Latin America and Spain for people of mixed European and Native American heritage or descent and Manuel refers to himself as one, rather than Mexican.

“Where we lived is dramatically more rural than Boonville. Our nearest neighbors were fifteen miles away. My father, Efren Soto was one of ten kids who for many generations had worked on cattle ranches. His mother had blue eyes but none of her sixty-five grandchildren did. My mother Maria Espinoza had some Indian blood and was also from a cattle-raising family, but they owned some land of their own. She was one of 18. My parents were married in early 1963 and I was born ten months later, the oldest of six, with Efren, Esther, Amelia, Antonio and Ernesto following.”

Manuel lived on the ranch until he was four and then he went to school in a place called La Colonia Arechiga, a larger ranch on the way to Jalpa, where he stayed with his grandfather Soto through the week and his Dad would come and get him for the weekends. “I went to school there but half the time the teacher failed to show up or he’d leave at noon. Everywhere we went was on horse trails, there were no roads. The education was very, very basic. My parents had hardly any schooling themselves and my mother had me when she was just seventeen. But they did know that education was important for us kids. We had chores on the ranch such as taking the cows out, feeding the chickens, and planting corn by following my Dad along the ditch he made by driving a mule and plow. After a year there we moved to Jalpa, a town about the same size as central Ukiah. My Dad stayed at the ranch for work and we lived at an aunt’s house in the ‘city.’ I was then sent to a better school in the town of Tepechitlan, a town about the same size as Jalpa, where I lived with my father’s brother while my parents stayed in Jalpa. Dad’s work was getting less on the ranch and so in about 1969 he decided to move the whole family — Mom, Esther, Esther, and Amelia to Tepechitlan, where there were more opportunities for work.”

Manuel enjoyed school — his favorite subjects were science and math. He was a quiet kid and had trouble with peer pressure. Bullying was tolerated and he suffered as a result. “Kids like me, kids who were not fighters, we were picked on. Then one day I had taken enough and I made a statement. After that it was fine and I enjoyed school more. My Dad had found a decent job in construction and we even had some money in the bank. Then when Antonio was born there were problems. He had eye cancer, which was diagnosed when he was just eight months old. He lost his eye. The bills for the treatment were very big and my Dad had gone to Chicago in the States to earn more money to pay for this. He had friends there, found work, and sent money back to us in Mexico. We also got some family help with the Soto family and many aunts all living in Tepechitlan.”

Manuel’s father spent a few years in the US and by the time he returned Manuel was fifteen and had left school and another brother was born — Ernesto. “My mother’s brothers were legally working in the States and one day my parents sat me down and asked me if I wanted to go. I was very excited at the thought of going there. I knew some English by this time and said I’d go. The family gave me $500 and on April 10th, 1979 I met a distant uncle from Jalpa and we caught a bus to Tijuana, heading for ‘El Norte’.”

“It took a day or so to get there and we got a motel room. There were several men there and I was the only boy. I was still excited but also now anxious as I realized what was happening. My uncle told me I was on my own at that point — not what he had told my mother. Now I didn’t have anybody. I had spent half of my money and had to give the rest to the ‘coyote’ (the people smuggler). I knew what I was doing was illegal. I am not proud to have broken the law but it was not about that — it was about survival. The coyote left me without any money and I cried. I was just a 15-year-old boy. A few nights later we were told to leave the motel and walked to the airport that was right on the border. We were told to walk across the runways to the other side. I was near the front of the group of about fifteen guys. We climbed the cyclone fence and started to cross the runway. There was no river — I was no wetback! As we ran a plane was landing and it nearly blew us away. I was hanging on to the ground until it passed and then I ran across two runways to the fence on the other side where we climbed another fence and started to walk across desert. The coyote told us a little later that we were in the United States. I thought, ‘Well, where’s the marker to tell us we have crossed the border?’ I was very scared but knew I had only one way I could go. We walked for several hours and almost got caught twice by the Border Patrol. We also had to watch out for rattlesnakes. My uncle reminded me that I was on my own and said, ‘If we get separated, I hope you survive.’ I felt very much alone after being in the safe cocoon of my parents just a few days earlier.”

“It rained most of the night and the next morning and we took shelter under bushes for a time. We had little food and water and kept walking before reaching what I think was Chula Vista by the afternoon. A white Cadillac car drove up to meet us with a black guy behind the wheel. He said he would take eight of us and I was chosen. Three guys were hidden in a small space behind the back seat. Then four guys were told to get in the trunk — there was no room for me. The black guy said, ‘Get in there!’ and I had to get in the trunk on top of the four guys lying there. There was nobody sitting inside the car except the driver. We got through the checkpoints where I assume bribes were paid. It was a terrible journey. I was close to the muffler and my shoulder was burned but I could not move away. We had no water and did not stop until we reached Los Angeles where another uncle came and collected me, paying the coyote a further $350. I felt great relief. The next day another uncle came and picked me up and drove me all the way to Anderson Valley. This time I got to enjoy the ride.”

Manuel stayed with his mother’s family here in the Valley, having maybe met them once before, and soon started work in construction with a local contractor. A few months later, by June, he was working for Gowan’s in the apple orchards. “All through the 80s, people would be arriving from Mexico in big numbers. We were at the start of that. My parents came in June 1980 and my Dad started work the next day at the mill. We had two incomes and so we rented a house in Philo, across from Lemons’ Market, next to the mill. I was a regular worker by that time and had some status, I guess. The rest of my brothers and sisters came in January 1981 and all of them enrolled at the Anderson Valley schools. We moved again — just down the road to a bigger family home behind what was the old Philo Post Office.”

At the age of 18, Manuel started work for Tim Bates at the Apple Farm earning $3.50 an hour. “I was filled with joy — that was big bucks! They were very good to me there and I thank them to this day. I had money to go out and play pool with friends and we’d go to the bar in Boonville — Mary Jane’s or the Smiling Deer it later became. It was mainly Anglos who drank there although it was also the choice of the Mexicans in the Valley. There were not many Mexicans here back then, we were an endangered species — now it’s changed! There were, shall we say, some culture clashes. People are always afraid of the unknown and there was a reaction to us arriving and for us a consequence — often a bad one. It is human nature. Working at Gowan’s, I came into little contact with non-Mexicans and was not familiar with the American culture at first, so it came as a surprise when incidents happened at the bar. I was young, stupid, and naïve. I still am a couple of those things sometimes. I didn’t come here to change things. I came here to make a better living for me and my family. I have paid taxes from day one. I have paid my dues and have always gone with the program.”

Manuel worked at the Apple Farm for a couple of years by which time he was earning $5 an hour, and continued to live with his parents. “It is in the Mestizo culture that you live with your parents and then take care of them when they get older.” In 1982 the family moved to the Floodgate area, south of Navarro, on to Skip Bloyd’s Ranch, which had been bought by Randy Faulk. “I left the Apple Farm in 1983 when I was offered $11 an hour to work in the woods for a local logging company. The wineries had still not really taken off yet and logging was the main industry. I set chokers in the woods for the next seven years, for a couple of different companies. The money was good but setting chokers was the only job available to me in the woods at that time. It became different later, but the logging has almost all gone now.”

In 1987, Manuel, now with his ‘green card’ (he got his citizenship a few years later), returned to Mexico for the first time since coming to the States. He was 23 and drove there with his mother and brother Efren. “I didn’t see any two-legged coyotes this time — only four-legged dead ones. We visited family and friends and had a great time. One day I was asked by my friend Jose to give a ride to some people. One of these was a girl called Lucia Davila. I really liked her. We visited every year in the December/January and each time I went we would see each other as friends and I visited with her family. I had a girlfriend here in the States and she had a boyfriend there. On one of the visits, I decided it was time to ask her out as a girlfriend. She said ‘No — we live too far apart, too many things can happen and change.’ I was upset and my ego was crushed. Then a year later she came to the States — to Los Angeles. We had been writing to each other and I went down there to see her as a surprise but couldn’t find her and she returned to Mexico. On my next visit, she said she would go out with me. She was very brave to see me — she did not know me very well. We had only seen each other a few times each year. Plus, her father was not sure about me — she was her Dad’s ‘little girl.’ He said to me, ‘I hope you are doing this in good faith — we don’t know you.’ He had me in his sights but I was genuine and so Lucia came here in December 1992 and we were married in January 1993.

In 1990, when Manuel finally stopped working in the woods, he and the family still at home — Mom, Dad, and brothers Antonio and Ernesto, moved to the opposite end of the Valley, to the Martz Vineyards in the Yorkville Highlands (now Maple Creek Winery). They had a home and he worked to pay the rent there while his father was the vineyard manager. When Lucia arrived and they were married they lived in a cabin on the Martz property and son Justin was born in March 1995. “I left the vineyard in 1994 and started to work as the custodian for the school. Then in 1997 Lucia got a job as teaching assistant at the elementary school with Donna Pierson-Pugh, Val Smith, and Trish Beverley as her co-workers. She is still there today and she also works at Lauren’s Restaurant. I was custodian for a few years then became the school bus driver in 1999, working with Shorty Adams and Troy Kreienhop. I love it there but it is a challenge. I still do a couple of hours custodian work each day, an hour of groundwork, and five hours of driving. The family pooled our resources and bought eleven acres here on Goodacre Road in 1999. We have lived here ever since and sometimes it is a bit of a struggle but that’s how life often is. There are no free meals.”

When not working or doing jobs around the property, Manuel likes to work with the singing canaries that he breeds, trains, and enters into an annual competition — a hobby that has been very enjoyable for him in the past several years. The family also likes to camp and they continue to visit Mexico every other year and see the family in Tepechitlan. “We are here to stay — as my Dad says, ‘If they don’t kick us out, we’re not going back.’ I came in 1979 and we have been here as a whole family since 1981 — 30 years. We have never been a strain on the government, in fact we actually work for this country.”

I asked Manuel for an image that comes to mind when he thinks about his father. “He is my hero. He is both strict and wise — there has never been any violence in this family. He is very precious.” And his mother? “The Queen of my world. My other Queen is my wife but I had to have a Mom before I could have Lucia,” Religion? “I was raised Catholic but I am not a Catholic. My wife goes to church and that is fine. My son will make his own mind up. If you want to have friends don’t talk about religion or politics. Talk about fishing or panning for gold!”

“I like the small town atmosphere of the Valley — something I have always felt comfortable with. There are many good people here, but some bad. People gossip too much and there is too much traffic on Hwy 128.”

The wineries and their impact? — “They provide jobs and bring in money.”..

KZYX radio? “It’s good for local news and information, and they did a great job when the lightning fires were happening. It’s a great tool at times like that, but KGO is my station.”

The School System? “A great place! My kid goes there and they are doing a good job with him. There are no bad teachers; there are some bad students. My Dad told me a long time ago, ‘If there is something you don’t get from the teachers, you can always get it from the library if you really want to know it. It is up to you.’ It is easy to blame others for your difficulties. It is up to you to go and get want you want, or at least try your very best to do that.”

Drugs in the Valley? “They are not a part of my life so I really don’t have anything to say. I do know we will not put up with it with Justin if he uses them. He’ll be straight to juvenile hall. He plays by our rules while he is in our home.”

I posed a few questions to my guest. Some from TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton.”

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “My canary birds singing in the morning. I breed, train, and show the birds.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “People yelling.”

Sound or noise you love? “Water running in the creeks; wind blowing through the trees.”

sound or noise you hate? “Bad rock and roll; the sound of the jake-brakes on trucks.”

Favorite food or meal? “My mother’s handmade tortillas, in a mole sauce and with chicken. Oh, and don’t forget the frijoles (beans)! You can call me a ‘beaner’ if you like. I’ve been called worse.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “My father’s mother, Grandma Teresa, aka Chita.”

If you were to be left completely alone indefinitely on an isolated island in the ocean, but with unlimited provisions, what three possessions would you like to have with you? “A fishing pole, a knife, and a metal detector — so I could still do one of my hobbies — and might find something useful.”

What scares you? “Death. I don’t know it, so it scares me.”

Favorite hobby? “Breeding and raising my canaries. They are singing canaries — the breed is Belgian Waterslager. I am a member of the Western Waterslager Club and we meet and compete with our birds in singing competitions. I also like to work with a metal detector, mainly when I visit Mexico.”

Profession other than your own would you like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “A pilot of some sort — planes or even helicopters. It has always fascinated me.”

Profession would you not like to do? “Cleaning out septic tanks. But if I had no choice then I would do it.”

Age when you went on your first date? And where did you go? “I was 16 and I took a girl to Ukiah to see a movie and have a meal.”

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “I would have got more of an education.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget? “Being with Lucia — she is my best friend and companion.”

Something you’re really proud of and why? “My family here — Lucia and Justin. They are who I am. I am also very proud of my parents and all they have done.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “My sense of humor. But it’s not always welcome or funny for everyone!”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “He’ll probably say ‘What the hell are you doing here!?’ If He said, ‘You were stubborn but you have a good heart’ then that would be fine with me.”

To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Beverly Dutra, Anderson Valley Political and Social Activist.

Ellen was born in Healdsburg when her family was living on Sunset View Ranch a couple above Navarro, at the home of her grandfather Alva C. Ingram. “We lived in the two-story home while my grandparents had the log cabin with an outhouse and a front door that opened out on to a drop of a few feet because the porch was never built. You had to use the side door.”

Ellen’s parents were Rea Ingram and Barbara Austin who had a boy and two other girls. “Amos Burgess came to the Valley in 1954 with the Beeson Family and he wrote back to his sister, Nancy, who had married Daniel Holder Ingram, in Missouri, that the family should move out here. They eventually did, in a wagon train in 1859. My great grandfather, Daniel Cass Ingram was just about old enough at the time to take responsibility for the rifle on that trip. The gun is now in the Anderson Valley Museum, along with a fiddle of my grandfather’s. The family lived in various places in the Valley and Cloverdale, although some moved to Calistoga and died in a smallpox epidemic. They could not afford the cemetery so they were buried at home and when the highway was built they just paved over them — which is where they are to this day… Seven of Daniel’s kids survived into adulthood, including my grandfather, Alva Cass, who was the youngest. He had apples and sheep in the hills above the Valley in the 30’s and 40’s. The family were all in farming, whether it was sheep, apples, picking hops, etc. My Dad was the youngest of six and he was named Rea Daniel Ingram after the man who helped deliver him, Dr. Rea in Ukiah, He told us we could never use his name Rea as a first name for any of our kids as so many people had misspelled it over the years but a few relatives have used it as a middle name.”

The Austin side of the family was from the Scottsdale area of Arizona. Ellen’s grandfather, Warren Austin, owned a huge dairy farm and was also a teacher and superintendent of schools in that area. “Their ancestor was Stephen F. Austin, the founder of Austin, Texas, and my grandfather was involved in the Salt River Project — an organization bringing power and water to the region. My mother used to go to the dances at the local military base. Even though she was just 16, her parents trusted her, and at one of these she met Warren Ingram, who was in the service. He talked about his brother and the story goes that she decided she wanted to meet him and came to Anderson Valley where she found work at the Highland Ranch, made friends with Charmian Blattner among others, and got to meet the Ingram family. She married my Dad in 1948 and daughter Mary was born in 1949, Bob coming next in 1951, then me in 1952 and finally Donna in 1955.”

Ellen and the family lived on the ranch above Navarro until 1958. In those years she remembers playing outdoors a lot, the large cherry tree in the yard, and the many family gatherings that took place. She also remembers her grandparents’ outhouse — “a two-holer — one big and one small.” Her Dad bought the property on Hwy 128 where she now lives after another prospective buyer backed off to let Rea and his young family move in. Rea Ingram was the school bus driver and he parked the bus right outside the house at the edge of the road. “On the property opposite, now the Lazy Creek Winery, lived Grandma Pinoli, a woman who had amazing healing powers. Other than that there were not many people around this area of the Valley. There were certainly no wineries then. The Nunn Ranch was where Husch and Roederer now sit, and the Bloyd’s lived on Monte Bloyd Road. My best friend, Trish Maddux lived a mile away. Meanwhile my grandfather Alva Cass Ingram had married again after my grandmother Eva passed away. This was to Grandma Katherine who also passed and later Grandfather sold the ranch on the ridge top and married Grandma Mary. I was always told that we were related to everyone in Anderson Valley except the Rawles’ and Gowans.”

Ellen’s father had been the school bus driver in his days up on the ranch during which time he parked it down near to Hwy 128 on Wendling Soda Creek Road in Navarro, driving into Boonville every day. He was the bus driver from the late forties for many years, along with people such as Reno Redding and Bill West. “I went to Kindergarten in the Little Red Schoolhouse which was white by the way, and faced in a different direction to that which it faces now. It was painted red when it became the museum and was called the Little Red Schoolhouse Museum. I went to 1st grade at the school in what is now the Legion Hall or Senior Center. My teacher was Beth Tuttle, and then the rest of grade school was at the site where the elementary school is now. We lived in what were the boonies, I guess. We didn’t get into town much. My Dad was the head bus driver and custodian at the school and Mom taught 2nd grade and then Kindergarten at the white schoolhouse and she was also the librarian. I went to 5th through 7th grade at the old high school and for 8th grade on I attended where the high school is now, in Boonville, along with classmates such as Robert Pinoli, Stephanie Adams (born Lawson), Linda Perry (Harold’s daughter), Connie Lemons (Harding); and Ernie Pardini, who was a little younger than us. My teachers included Mrs. Farrer, Mrs. Hawkins, and Ron Snowden.”

Ellen liked school and found the classes “pretty easy.” Her favorite subjects were reading and English and she did not like typing and learning Spanish. “In 7th grade Spanish we just watched old Spanish movies, then in high school the teacher didn’t know much either and would ask Carl Gowan, who worked around the Spanish-speaking community on his family’s farm, to translate for us. I enjoyed some sports and joined the Girls Athletic Association after school program, playing baseball and a couple of times at The Fairgrounds in Boonville I played ‘powder-puff’ football. I was quite shy but was always considered a ‘brain’ because I was an Ingram, I guess, and I certainly skated on the name sometimes and was accepted in most of the various cliques or groups at the school. My crowd were not the cheerleaders, nor the jocks, nor the brains. We were not the social types.”

The principal at the elementary school, James Dean, these days the director of Unicorn Youth Services group home in Philo, had started a summer camp for wards of the court at Rancheria Camp, south of Boonville. His counselors at the camp were former boy scouts from Modesto, where he had previously lived. Ellen’s best friend, Trish, and Trish’s mother, also helped out at the camp and one day during the summer between her junior and senior year, Trish suggested that Ellen come to the camp and meet the new horse wrangler, Danny Biggs from Modesto. “It was expected that I would go to college. My brother Bob and sister Mary had both gone to UC Davis, a school that was too big for my liking. Anyway, I met Danny, we started to date, and we saw a lot of each other that summer. I worked as a lifeguard at the camp and also had a job at Gowans Oak Tree fruit stand. But once we returned to school in the fall, it was hard being so far apart. Dating long distance is not easy so when college decisions had to be made I applied to go to school at Stanislaus State University, near to his home in Modesto.”

Danny was at the Modesto Junior College but then transferred to Stanislaus State. Two years later Ellen and Danny were married and lived in an apartment in an old house in the town of Turlock but Ellen would visit Anderson Valley every month or two and never missed the County Fair in September. In the February of her senior year of studying for a Sociology degree, Ellen dropped out of school. “I had to work at a nursing home for five days a week to support us through school. One of us had to get a job. Danny graduated and went to the University of the Pacific in Stockton where he got his masters in Chemistry. I got a job in a nursing home in Stockton and then had our first daughter, Jodie in May of 1976. In August of that year Danny got a job as a chemistry teacher at SW Louisiana State University and we moved to Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country.” In November 1978, daughter Jennie was born and Danny moved to a job with the Gulf South Research Institute in their quality control department and then in February 1980 to another job, this time with Foremost-McKesson in the Bay Area. “I stayed with the girls and planned to move a month or so later.”

Tragedy struck in April 1980 when Danny drowned while on a solo fishing trip on the Clavey River in the Sierras. He was just 27 years old. “His mother told him not to go. She had a feeling about the trip and has good intuition. A few years earlier she had told Danny and me not to go out one night and we turned our car over in the snow a few hours later. Our girls were four and one-and-a-half. I sold our house in Louisiana and my parents came to get us and took us to Modesto to stay with Danny’s parents where we stayed for a time before we bought another house. We frequently visited the Valley to see the grandparents but stayed in the Modesto area close by Danny’s family.”

In 1982, Ellen met and married her second husband but it was not a good thing although third daughter Amanda came along on July 4th 1983. “It did not work out. He had drug and alcohol issues and we even sold the house to keep him happy. We moved to Redwood Valley and stuck it out for six years but it was never good and we got a divorce in 1988, with the girls now twelve, ten, and five. He has turned his life around now and he’s OK.”

Ellen continued to keep in touch with the Biggs family and got a job with the Ukiah Unified School District as an assistant paraprofessional working with the severely disabled kids in high school for three years then a further 20 years, from 1987 until 2007 at Oak Manor Elementary School. “It was a good job, working school days and hours with good pay and benefits — the best job for me in my situation. I received social security help with the girls until they each turned 18. My sister Donna lived nearby to us in Redwood Valley and my parents were still in the house here in the Valley. During the summers I worked at the Redwood Empire Fair in the Fine Arts building for minimum wage but I had lots of fun with the artists. For ten or twelve years in a row I also taught swimming on the Eel River and I’d go up there along with Mom and Dad and my sisters and their kids. My parents were both on the volunteer ambulance crew for many years, my mother taught round dancing at the Grange, and they were both regularly involved with Senior events in the Valley.”

In 1990, Ellen’s best friend and fellow paraprofessional, Nancy Jameson, and her husband Ron, had a friend staying with them in Redwood Valley — Mark Fontaine. “Jokingly, Nancy and I were talking about a questionnaire that women should take if they were thinking about going out with Mark. He was not good. Anyway, it was arranged for the four of us to go out and they were to be his ‘chaperone.’ He was not sure about doing it and as they waited for me to arrive at their house he asked them to leave the back door open in case he changed his mind and wanted to suddenly leave! We went dancing at Blue Lakes on Hwy 20 and had a good time. We went there a few more times and it was kind of working out between Mark and me. However, I wanted to be sure about one thing before we moved forward. Jennie had experienced a bad relationship with my second husband and I did not want that to happen again. I needed to know what she thought of Mark and if she didn’t like him then we would stop seeing each other. I had been a single mother for too long to go through that again and end up back where I started. Jennie is strong-willed, like Mark, and it would not have worked if they didn’t get along, but she said, ‘He is a cowboy and he has horses. He’s fine with me.’ We were married in June 1991, having a cowboy wedding with horses and wagons in Redwood Valley. We bought a house there, the girls had horses, and for the next ten years we raised the family.

In 1998, Jennie, who had attended Chico State University, married Chris and they now live in Redwood Valley where they have two children, Logan Rea and Jessica, losing baby Ben at a very young age. Amanda married David in 2001 and they had two — Ryan and Katie, before some difficulties arose and Ellen and Mark took the kids in and raised them for a year or so. Then a third child, Ella Rea, was born in 2007 and the family was reunited. Jodie went to UC Davis where she met Jens, a German student, and they were married sometime around 2004 and now have two children also — Anna and Sophie, who were both born in Holland and now the family lives in Germany. Ellen’s father had a heart attack, his second, in 1999 and passed away. Ellen’s mother moved in with them for a short time but then went to Arizona to live with her brother Bob. She was there for about three years before she passed in October 2009.

In 2008, with the house here in the Valley now empty, Ellen decided to ‘go home’ and she and Mark moved here, with Ellen commuting to her job in Ukiah for the next year. At that point, in October 2009, Mark had a heart attack when he was already in the Intensive Care Unit recovering from a femoral bypass operation. As a result Ellen retired in November, although she had been planning to stay for a further couple of years until this happened. She still does thirty days a year as a consultant for the Ukiah school district.

Since moving back to the Valley, both Ellen and Mark have become docents for the AV Museum and are involved in various Veterans’ events. Ellen is in the American Legion Auxiliary (she’s been in that organization since a child and her parents were involved) and Mark is the Legion adjutant. They socialize at the Senior Center and the various Valley events, and the kids and grandchildren visit. Of great importance to them is the Valley Bible Fellowship group to which they belong. “It is a Bible Study church in Boonville, at the Live Oak Building. I went to a Methodist Church as a kid, Sunday school too, although I can’t remember why. I don’t believe my parents made me go. Then when my grandson Ben died at just one month old it really hit the family. He died, while in my care, of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome — crib death. It was really hard to deal with. Jennie and Chris, who are both into the church, said it was God’s way of dealing with things. I told Mark I wanted to start to go to church again and I guess we were thinking about the Methodist Church in the Valley. However, we talked to the Kephart’s, friends in the Valley, and they suggested the Valley Bible Fellowship. We went and it was like home. The church gave us great comfort and a sense of community, helping us to settle here once again and fit in. It’s been a long way home but I’m here and very happy.”

I asked Ellen for a strong image she had of her father. “The perfect father — everyone liked him. He was intelligent, fair, respected. My brother Bob is a lot like him.” And her mother? “Her cooking! Black-eyed peas and spaghetti sauce. She was a smart woman and usually laughing.”

“The Valley is home to me. I love the climate and it is such a pretty place, plus there are lots of good people here. Mark wanted to move here earlier but I was reluctant — there is not much here for the kids. For adults without kids it is great… I don’t like the amount of traffic coming through these days and the visitors not only speed but they don’t know how to handle the curves — breaking all the time instead of slowing down and taking them gently…”

I asked Ellen for her response to various issues that Valley folks seem to talk about quite often. The wineries and their impact on the Valley? — “I don’t like what it seems they have done to the water supplies, although that has always been a problem to some degree. And I do miss the apple orchards. There are too many wineries now but they make a good product and in some ways they are good for the Valley.”

KZYX radio? “Since moving back here I listen in the car, but mostly I tune in to the Christian station, K-LOVE.”

Changes in the Valley? “The wineries have made the biggest changes here — both visually and culturally.”

I posed a few questions to Ellen.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? — “The grandkids…”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? — “The lack of respect some people have for others, particularly kids for their elders… Loud, mouthy kids… It used be that the bad kids stood out from the crowd — they were the minority; now it is the good ones who do…”

Sound or noise do you love? “My cat purring.”

Sound or noise do you hate? “The brakes on a big truck.”

Favorite food or meal? A rare steak, fried potatoes, artichokes, and a glass of red wine.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “My Dad.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “Family photographs; a quilt I made for my Grandfather; a trunk that is full of family memorabilia. We have so much stuff here. My mother was a hoarder and so am I.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “The song would be ‘Amazing Grace.’ The film and book would be the same one — ‘Pay it forward.’ It is based around the idea of paying a favor not back, but forward — repaying good deeds not with payback, but with new good deeds done to three new people. From this a new social movement might be created with the goal of making the world a better place.” (Interviewer’s note — The film starred Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment. The book is by Catherine Ryan Hyde and Benjamin Franklin discussed this concept in his day.)

Favorite hobby? “Sewing and quilting projects; beadwork; jigsaw puzzles. I like to have several projects going at the same time. I do have ADD tendencies — only half joking!”

Profession other than your own would you like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “I’ve traveled quite a lot in recent years for the first time in my life and I really have enjoyed it. A job involved in travel would have been something I think I would have liked and at high school I did have thoughts about being an air hostess/stewardess.”

Profession would you not like to do? “Work in convalescent hospitals — I am glad I don’t have to do that ever again.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I was 16 and Danny took me to the movies in Fort Bragg to see the film ‘Charlie’.” (Interviewer’s note. The plot concerns a retarded man who undergoes an experiment that gives him the intelligence of a genius. Cliff Robertson won the best Actor Oscar).

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “My second marriage was not good but I did get Amanda and three wonderful grandkids who are very special to me.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “There are many. Off the top of my head, going to Germany for Jodie’s wedding was very memorable.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “My work with special ed kids for 20 years.”

Favorite thing about yourself? — “That I can get along with just about anyone.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Welcome, all the family is here — Dad, Mom, Danny, Ben, and others. We’ve been waiting for you.” ¥¥

(If you would like to read the stories of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Manuel Soto, Valley resident for over 30 years, originally from Zacatecas, Mexico.)

Jim was born in 1949 at Healdsburg Hospital when his family was living on the Morrow Ranch, a mile further south on Hwy 128 than where we were sitting. It was the house that a previous interviewee and Valley ‘old-timer’ Wes Smoot had grown up in. Jim’s parents were Harold ‘Butch’ Hill and Ruth Marie Vadon and he had one sister Kathy who has now passed away. “The Hill family were 100% English who settled in Canada, where my great Grandfather owned the first cold storage warehouse in Montreal. He did well but wanted to be a farmer and once that was decided it was a downhill spiral! He had farms in British Columbia and made contact with a man there who owned a ranch in Oat Valley, just this side of Cloverdale, about a dozen miles south of here. Our family bought that ranch in 1913 and moved down. My great Grandfather never could understand why July 1st (Canada Day) was not celebrated down here! My grandfather worked on the ranch but went back to Canada to get married and he and his new bride returned to the ranch in California where my father was born…”

“My great grandfather on my mother’s side was Irving Ingram, born in 1877, whose father had come to Anderson Valley in 1859 — in the first decade after the Valley’s discovery. It was Irving Ingram who bought this ranch where we are sitting in 1911, so it will have been in the family for one hundred years this next September. He had one daughter, Ruby, and she married Fred Vadon, of French heritage, whose family was from Cloverdale. One of their two children was my mother Ruth Marie. My parents met at school and when they married they lived on the ranch in Oat Valley. Ray Smoot and his family had looked after the Morrow Ranch for some years but when Ray died in 1948, they moved to Boonville and my father became the ranch caretaker and I was born there a year later. In 1959, when I was ten, my great Grandfather Irving Ingram died and Dad took over the running of the ranch, called the Ingram Ranch at that time. Our family moved in here from the Morrow Ranch and I’ve been here ever since.”

Growing up in the Valley meant that Jim was always outdoors playing. “My parents knew there were no threats to young kids apart from snakes. We’d be outside all day long and come in when it was dark. We had no close neighbors and I was quite a shy kid so I was alone most of the time. When I wasn’t outside I’d enjoy building toy models. My mother worked in Cloverdale as an insurance agent and I went to school there — traveling with her each way. My Dad was a sheep rancher but like most of them he had to have something else on the side and he was a carpenter. They do the sheep ‘cos they like it… I helped Dad with the sheep and he had some sheep dogs too, with me doing any of the extra running around that needed doing. We grew acres of oat hay for the sheep and I had other various chores around the land and hope. My parents hoped I’d be a hunter — it is my middle name — but I have never had much interest, despite most of my family being into it. I’d go along on hunting trips but didn’t care for it and quit when I was sixteen, by which time I’d learned enough outdoor skills to survive if I have to.”

Technically, Jim should have attended the Anderson Valley schools but with his mother working in Cloverdale and his grandparents all living there he went to Cloverdale High. “I enjoyed school at that time and pretty soon reading became a big hobby of mine — the American Civil War was my favorite subject to read about, and still is today. It was not cool to be seen reading all the time and hanging out with older people but I loved to listen to their stories of their times in the late 1800’s, a time when the Valley was developing although it was still a time of horses and wagons. I sat for hours listening to their histories and tales.”

Jim was an honor roll student with his favorite subjects being history and mathematics. “I played the individual sports like track and wrestling — I was not into team sports plus I came home with my mother every day so after school teams activities were difficult for me to take part in. I graduated in 1967 but the whole sixties scene, in which I went through my teenage years, did not have a big effect on me. I went to Santa Rosa Junior College for a couple of years and transferred to Humboldt State in 1969 to get my civil engineering degree, which I hoped would support my ranching ‘habit.’ There were student anti-war protests at Humboldt and they formed picket lines around the engineering building — the closest thing to anything military that was around. It was a very liberal college and one of the professors was a Lt Colonel in the National Guard so the protests took place. They did not affect me and I remained focused on my goal of graduating on time. I was never a party animal — my sister got those genes. My family was very conservative and I was a young Republican yet remained open-minded and I had fun watching it all going on. I respected the sense of community that comes with people joining various groups — something that is seen far less these days, although the destruction of private property that went on in those times really did bug me.”

Jim graduated from college in December 1971 and on Jan 2nd, 1972, started a job in Santa Rosa at the engineering firm of Brelje and Race, consultants who worked on several projects as city engineers for Cloverdale. “The Hill family knew some political people and put in a good word for me… I found an apartment in Santa Rosa but on most weekends I was here on the ranch, helping Dad. We had no hired help and not only had our own 760 acres but also had the 870 to maintain at the Morrow Ranch, and we leased 1100 acres for sheep at the Carlson Ranch — now Summer Winds Vineyards. I worked at the engineering company from 1972 until 1978, four years as an Engineer-in-training before getting my license as a professional engineer in 1976. Then in 1978, Dad died at the age of fifty-nine of a cerebral aneurism. He was a healthy man and it came as a shock. I spent three months thinking what to do before deciding to give it a try and work full-time on the ranch for a year and see how I felt at that point — well, I’m still giving it a try 33 years later!”

However, Jim’s boss at the engineering company did pass a job on to Jim that involved a sub-division in Cloverdale. Jim took the job but turned down the next one — “there were too many political shenanigans…. I never had a real business plan but I did take work on at times and worked from home in the evenings. Most of this came from word of mouth and the more contacts I made the more work came in, and I ended up working for some prominent developers thanks to having worked for the city engineers and knowing all the workings and ‘skeletons in the closet’ so to speak… I worked on the ranch all day and then in the evening on my engineering projects until midnight or 1am. Then in 1981, I took over another ranch — I had social time at all. My days of cruising the backroads on a motorcycle were long gone; I never had that time again. It was ranch, engineering, and then I’d get to read a little as I ate. I should say that I enjoyed it though; I really loved the bulk of my time on the ranch. The engineering used to be 90% engineering, 10% bureaucracy; now it’s 30% engineering, 70% bureaucracy. As for the ranch I finally hired some help — Claude Rose, the former government trapper, who lived on the property with his wife, Lu. Claude was into the sheep dog trials and had many stories he loved to share. He helped with the sheep a lot although I did the fencing myself. The predators are always a problem — coyotes. With Gary Johnson, the trapper who is now running Stanley Johnson’s ranch next to ours, that helps a lot. The coyotes remain a problem but may be not as bad now that we have a llama in with each group. Some people use the guard dogs and I’ve heard good things about them. I have one in a pen out there and he needs to be trained and used.”

Jim’s father started a Christmas Tree Farm in the late 60s and that still goes today. “It was situated alongside the highway but too many trees were stolen — 90 in one week. So it meant guarding them and that meant sleeping on the lot from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Eventually I moved the farm on to the ranch and we sell about three hundred a year, starting on the Friday after Thanksgiving and then weekends up to Christmas. We have about 4,000 trees up there at this point. I have had several different ranch workers over time and this meant I had to earn more money to pay for them and so the engineering has come in very useful. I have had Martine Vargas for 14 years now. He is an excellent worker, although he is now part-time as I cannot afford more. He runs the ranch basically as 90% of my time has been engineering for the past ten years or more. For a time I had to visit job sites and developers’ offices but now with the computer and a fax I can do a whole lot more from home. But I have slowed down in recent years. It’s the old gray mare syndrome: ‘She can’t do what she used to do.’ I still enjoy the engineering but it is a little too much at times. As for the ranching — that is in my blood.”

Jim’s mother was very social but she often sends Jim to events now. Since 1979, he has been on the Board of Directors of the Cloverdale Ram Sale and he is in the Cloverdale Historical Society. As his time on the ranch and in engineering slows down a little, Jim became more involved in more things in Anderson Valley. He is in the shepherd’s pool organized by Gary Johnson for the sale of his lambs. With various other Valley gentlemen, he often attends the monthly ‘Cannibal Feed’ in Ukiah — a lunch with a few hundred Mendocino men from all walks of county life, put on by a different group of them each month. Jim and his mother joined the Anderson Valley Historical Society and at the election of officers a few years back, Wes Smoot nominated him as President. “I hardly knew anyone very well. I did have my love of history but that was all. It was enough I guess because I was voted in and was re-elected last week for my third term. At this point in time, if I was independently wealthy, I would retire from the engineering but, as the saying goes, ‘If I had a million dollars, I’d keep on ranching until it was all gone!’ Yes, I still, enjoy it even though it gets harder as I get older and fatter, and tire easier. My primary interest when not at work is history but there are not many people to talk to about that so joining the historical societies has been good for me.”

Since the 60s, Jim and his family have been visiting a cabin they own in Modoc County, in the northeast corner of the State. “My mother first went there in 1946 and they bought the cabin in 1964. I have gone every year since 1971. The area, in the high desert, is about the closest as you can get to the Old West anymore. I go with Mom and my niece Penny (Kathy’s daughter) and her family — husband Ramon and daughter Kayla. Kathy had another child, Jake who works at the theater in Cloverdale. The nearest town is Canby, named after the Union General who fought in the Civil War and Indian Wars — the only General killed by Indians incidentally. Custer was not a General at the Battle of Little Big Horn. He was a Lieutenant Colonel. We still have family gatherings although most of mother’s generation has gone now. We get together here for Christmas Eve and sometimes at Thanksgiving or Easter and we are slowly rebuilding a structure on the land to make it a family event center. It burnt down a couple of years ago. Last week I attended the Ingram Family Reunion in Brookings, Oregon. My great grandfather was the original patriarch — Irving Ingram. There were not only nametags but also different colored t-shirts for each branch of the family. It was a lot of fun. It seems like I am related to quite a few folks in this area. My great Grandmother, a Hiatt, used to say ‘Everyone in Anderson Valley is inbred.’ She may have been right!”

Apart from those trips, Jim has only had two vacations. Two trips he made that were Civil War related. In 1993, he caught the Amtrak to Washington DC and rented a car to spend two weeks visiting Civil War historic sites. Then in 1998, he went to Little Rock, Arkansas and went aboard a wooden steamboat, The Delta Queen, for a Civil War themed cruise along the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee Rivers, ending up in Chattanooga.”

I asked Jim for an image he has of his father. “A very strong man, in body and mind. If I could go out and choose a Dad, he would be my ideal choice. He had those John Wayne qualities — strong, a hard-worker. He was a first sergeant in World War II. He was not more than necessary in terms of discipline. He was very understanding but you would not want him mad at you.” And his Mom? “Maybe stricter than Dad. A big supporter of my academic studies. I was the first in the family to graduate from college.”

I next asked Jim about what he liked about his life here. “It is difficult to put into words. I’ve been here all of my life. I just love this type of country. I like being alone a lot and I can do that here. The country here just really suits me.” And anything he doesn’t like? “There are too many people here now for my personal liking. The traffic is too much. The breaking up of the bigger ranches also bothers me.”

I asked my guest for his opinions on various Valley issues.

The wineries and their impact? “The impact has been good in that they are agricultural rather than residential development. The downside to this is that they bring in outsiders. I am not a part of the anti-winery group but taking out forests to put in vines is ridiculous, showing no common sense or respect. Both sets of my grandparents had vines and they didn’t irrigate after the first year. The dry farming method still gave them good grapes and wine but just not as much. Doing it the old way worked well but I guess they were not as greedy in those days.”

The AVA? “I read it if one comes my way and sometimes I agree with what is said. I like the local pages and the sheriff’s log.”

KZYX radio? “I don’t listen.”

The AV school system? “I have worked in it and there are some good people there. I am not sure if the kids are getting a good deal there or not. I am not qualified to know.”

Drugs in the Valley? “The whole drug thing gets on my nerves. I am a ‘live and let live’ kind of person but when kids think that everyone is involved in drugs and are shocked when they meet someone who isn’t involved in some way, then that is telling us something.”

I posed a few questions to my guest. Some from TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton” and some I came up with myself.

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? — “When I have no aches and pains in the morning and I know the ranch is running well.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “Unexpected problems and when you can’t get your body to work like it used to.”

Sound or noise you love? “In the springtime that would be the baah-ing of lambs; and in the winter, water running in the creek.”

Sound or noise you hate? “Traffic roaring by along Hwy 128 — it’s crazy sometimes.”

Favorite food or meal? “Lamb chops and mashed potatoes.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “I’d love to sit down with Abraham Lincoln, and if Confederate General Robert E. Lee was to join us that would be great.”

If you were sitting at home and a fire broke out in the building, what three things would you make sure you took with you? “Family photographs, the 180 year old Grandfather clock — a family heirloom, and some old guns dating back to the Civil War.”

Favorite film/song/book or one that has influenced you? “Well a song would probably be the Battle Hymn of the Republic. A film would be ‘The Longest Day’ set in World War 2; and a book would be something by Bruce Catton — a Civil War historian who started my interest in the subject. His writing is not at all like the dry history books you get to read at school.”

Favorite hobby? “Reading, 90% of which is military history, mainly The Civil War but World War II is a close second. I have read quite a bit about Hitler and how he gained control of the country with his assorted gang of misfits.”

Profession other than your own you’d like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “Some sort of fiction writer. I submitted my writings to magazines over the years, but it’s always been rejected.”

Profession you’d not like to do? “A government bureaucrat.”

Something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “No, as a general rule I guess not.”

A memorable moment; a time you will never forget? “The first time I got to walk on a real Civil War battlefield. Or perhaps when I graduated from college.”

Something that you are really proud of and why? “That I kept the family ranch going.”

Favorite thing about yourself? “I can’t think of much. I am basically honest, hopefully. I’m fundamentally an honest man, but I’m not a fool.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “It would be good if he said, ‘Hi, Jim. You were very nice to animals and so you are very welcome here.’ If nothing else, I guess I’ll end up in animal heaven.” ¥¥

(To read the ‘stories’ of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Ellen Ingram, whose family first came to the Valley in 1859.)

John was born in 1949 in the Portuguese-administered islands of the Azores, specifically on the larger island of Terceira, in the Atlantic Ocean about 1000 miles from the Portuguese mainland. He is the second oldest of five children born to Vital Leal and Candida Simoes, having an older brother by four years, a twin brother, and two younger sisters. “My twin brother Roger and I were born on the same day, September 21st, as our youngest sister was, ten years later”… The Leal’s were fishermen over previous generations although they also worked in the fields picking fruit and vegetables. The Simoes family were lighter skinned than many Portuguese, and had blue eyes, a result of some of their forebears having come from Ireland, and they were simple farmers and tried their hand at fishing too — not very successfully. “My grandfather Simoes would try to catch fish using dynamite. Once it did not go off and he dove in to find out what had happened and it exploded, blowing his right arm off and taking his right eye, leaving a hole in his face. He was actually a very intelligent man and taught at the night school in the town… Both of my parents came from very poor families.”

John started school when he was seven years old and was done by the time he was twelve. He worked with his father for a time during the summer vacations but at nine he took a job working in the fields for $2 a month and two meals a day, hauling corn, herding and milking cows. “I worked like a man but the two meals were good and it saved my parents money on my food. We lived at my grandfather Simoes’ house in a town about the same size as Boonville, called Porto Judeu. The house had dirt floors, no bathrooms, not even outside, and was on three-and-half very rocky acres near to the coast. All the work was done by hand and we had little food, no cars or mechanized equipment, no electricity — it was very basic. At twelve I left school and went to work full-time for a gravel company on the crusher, carrying rock from the water’s edge in a wheelbarrow with an iron wheel, no tire, and loading it into the crusher. I had no gloves and did this all day long for two years. My hands were permanently in a grip-like position from doing this and if I tried to straighten them out the skin would crack, bleed, and hurt like heck. I was basically a little slave for less than a dollar a day. There was no future for me there. I tell the workers I sometimes employ here that they can make it in this country although they may have to work sixteen hours a day. I couldn’t do that in my country; sixteen hours a day was still not enough. It was a very tough life. People often remember their childhood with fond memories; not me, I wouldn’t want to go back to those days for anything.”

John’s mother was sick with emphysema and could not look after the children. Although his father and brothers were all working, the family could not support the two girls so they had to go to an orphanage. At the age of fourteen, John found work in construction, building houses out of cement blocks and stone. “That was hard too. I would carry the stone to the masons, mix the cement by hand and carry it to them in five gallon buckets, again for less than a dollar a day. I had to walk to work more than an hour each way, there was no transportation and we couldn’t afford bicycles. I worked six days a week from 7am to 4pm and then on Sundays I would do work for other people for food. This was usually the best meal of the week so I did not mind. Otherwise our diet was basically cornbread, collard greens (cabbage leaves), and maybe we’d get to kill one pig a year. There was no other meat, no dairy, no potatoes, and no sugar. That’s why my teeth are still good! We’d have a few chickens but that was for their eggs that were then used as currency to buy kerosene for lighting and heating or soap for us to keep clean. Occasionally I would risk stealing some eggs and cooking them when nobody was around. There was a little fruit but it was not very good apart from the bananas, but if you were caught stealing those the owner might kill you. I played a little soccer, we’d sit around playing dominoes and cards, and every town had a marching band that we’d enjoy watching and listening to.”

John’s mother had a brother and sister who had gone to Brazil many years earlier for a short time before entering the U.S. with the sister dressed as a man — women workers were not allowed in at the time. For reasons that are unclear, they settled in Humboldt County, north of Mendocino, and worked on a dairy farm near Ferndale, before moving to a different dairy in the Sacramento Valley town of Dixon. They worked hard and saved money, buying their own dairy farm in Lodi at the northern end of California’s Central Valley. The sister married and her husband had started the Mid-Cal National Bank in town in 1965 and a few years later had about eight branches. The aunt called John’s mother and said she had arranged work contracts for the family to come to the States legally and so, in the summer of 1968, they all came over except John’s older brother who stayed for a time before joining the rest in 1970.

“We arrived in Lodi and were milking cows the next day. I did that for the next three years, along with my twin brother, to support the family as my parents were both sick by this time. We fixed the papers so they showed my father was also working. My brother and I showed 2/3 of our income, and therefore we got 2/3 of our social security, with my father getting a third off each of us. We were stupid, but not really. After Lodi we worked in Elk Groove for a few months before taking on a herd of five hundred in Tracy. My brother and I had to milk them twice a day. We’d go to bed at 7pm and get up at midnight, prep the sheds, get the cows in and milk them until 7am, then clean up. Then we’d sleep for a time and start again at noon. It was sleep, work, sleep, work — that was our life. Sometimes we would fall asleep leaning against the cows. It was $6.25 a month plus a house on the ranch. I had one day off in two years and planned to go and see my Uncle in Lodi but I went to bed and slept all the next day. I slept on my one day off!”

In 1971, the family moved to San Jose at the south end of the SF Bay where John’s brother became a chef. “I love to cook too, but not for a living. I became a janitor at a McDonald’s for several months. I had a cousin in Sunnyvale who was in construction and I’d also help him when I could. His neighbor, who had a Portuguese wife, ran a drywall/sheetrock company and he was looking for an apprentice to teach; someone who was reliable and dependable and he hired me on February 22nd, 1972 — teaching me everything he knew about that business and I learned a lot over time. After eighteen months I joined the union and went to take classes at night school becoming a journeyman dry wall taper finisher. He wanted me to learn how to hang sheetrock but I said ‘No thank you’ and stayed as a dry wall finisher for the next seven years. It was 90% commercial — Safeway stores, Bank of America, plus a few high-end custom homes on the Peninsula in places like Los Altos, Hillsborough, and Portola Valley. I was the foreman for Sunnyvale Dry Wall and worked all the time, often at weekends, with little time for any social life.”

However, John had met his future wife, Jean Nunes, in 1972. She had come to the States in 1963 with her father from the Azores — Santa Maria Island, where she was born. She is one of nine children and was adopted in this country by her godmother, Gladys, when her father, Harry Nunes, returned home. He had previously bought property in Anderson Valley back in 1956 — the 249-acre property on Mountain View Road. She was working in an electronics company in the Santa Clara Valley with John’s cousin who told her that one of his cousins could cook. “She wanted to meet that one — me. We started dating and got married on July 7th, 1973. We lived in San Jose and had our daughter Jennifer in September 1974 and our son Johnnie in July 1976. Jean returned to work when the kids were still quite young, when we found a sitter across the street from our house. I saw the kids but once a week because I left for work at 6am before they were up and often returned late at night when they were in bed. We had our first vacation in 1977 — just Jean and I, to the east coast and Canada to see her family, most of whom had settled there — I had to do lots of overtime before we went so that the same money was coming in when I was away. In 1977 Harry and Gladys moved to the property he had bought in the Valley twenty years earlier. My parents had passed away by then and Jean and I would visit at weekends if I could get away, although I think the first time I had been here was not long after meeting Jean, back in 1972.”

In 1978, John and Jean left the south Bay and moved to northern Sonoma County, to Cloverdale, to be closer to her parents. John got a job with the Noonan Dry Wall Company in Santa Rosa and spent much of the eighties building track homes in the surrounding area — hundreds at a time were on the go. “I did become a lead man on a crew but it was not something I particularly enjoyed — I loved to do the work, not just organize it — that was not my thing. Our kids were in school in Cloverdale and we’d get to visit Anderson Valley more and more as the years went by. I got to know Smokey Blattner, Arthur Knight, and Bill Holcomb, the young guy who maintained the road on our property. Also Jeff and Carolyn Short who ran the Chevron Station in Boonville — he was a character. I remember that Carolyn locked him out one night when he came home late from the bar so he took a chainsaw and cut a hole in the door to let himself in! He was actually the nicest guy and she is great too.”

In 1986, John and Jean moved again, this time down to Rohnert Park south of Santa Rosa, to a house on the edge of a golf course. At some point in the following years, he took on a job in San Francisco working on Embarcadero 4 — one of the big towers that were going up in the downtown area. “It was a big job and there were lots of problems but I stuck it out, doing the job my way, and by the end was one of the last guys still working there. By 1995, when my father-in-law had passed and Jean had moved to the Valley to be with her mother, I began to cut back on the number of side jobs I had been taking on — my arm was not in good shape after all the years of hard work. I finished the job at the Embarcadero, did some work at the 101 California Street building, and then did one last job at the Bay Meadows horse race track on the Peninsula. Noonan was closing the business down and I did not want to travel and work in the City so I decided to retire. It was July 1998 and it was time.”

John sold his house in Cloverdale and moved to Anderson Valley full-time to live on the ranch in a home that had already been built there — it had been empty for about five years. “I was tired and took a few weeks off but soon got busy fixing the place up and working on the landscaping. I started to meet more people and we began spend time with the group known as the Airport Crowd here in town — Kirk & Cindy Wilder, Bob and Sandra Nimmons, Larry and Janet Lombard, Jim and Jeanne Nickless, Bryant and Penny Whittaker, and Jack and Peggy Ridley plus others like the Charles family. We’d get together at The Buckhorn pub in town most Friday evenings for a few drinks and then go back to one of the group’s house for dinner, a different venue each week.”

John still took on the occasional job with local contractor Dennis Toohey and also did the dry wall at the AV Brewery’s new visitor center, plus the firehouses in Boonville and Rancho Navarro, for which he donated his time free of charge. “That is my little contribution to the Valley, I guess. Maybe people think that I don’t help around here but I do; I’m not all about money.”

“We attend the winery socials once a month, and go to many of the Valley gatherings such as the crab feeds and bbq’s. I grow a few vines here and produce some wine each year. I have a large vegetable garden, some sheep and some steers — Black Angus — some great meat I hope. My brother will help me with that — he is an expert with meat… I still love to do some work every day but now it is for our ranch and us. I have put my time in let me tell you, and now I love my time here. I have been back to the Azores twice — in 1980 and 2001, and I do keep in touch with the Portuguese culture here. I am involved with the Holy Ghost Society, a Portuguese cultural organization, and cook at their events and festivals. I will be in Petaluma this weekend and will cook 2700 pounds of beef. Ii will be prepared in big pots with lots of spices and served with soggy bread in a broth — it is the traditional Portuguese soup. I have been helping on that one for about ten years but I also do one in Healdsburg in September at which I have been cooking for thirty years, and one in Oakdale which I’ve done for the past 13 years. I love doing it and seeing many old friends.”

I asked John what he most liked about life in the Valley. “I love the quiet here, and the many nice people. Some are not so nice, who we will not mention. I love the climate and being not far from the ocean. I love it there and there are many friends of ours in the large Portuguese community in Ft Bragg on the coast,” And what does he not like? “That some people here are not taking responsibility for their actions; there are some narrow-minded people here who are like horses with blinkers on.”

I next asked for John’s thoughts on various Valley topics.

The wineries and their impact? “Great. I love the wineries; I live for wine! I have plenty of water for my few vines from the springs on the property. Fishing has stopped in the Valley and some say the wineries are to blame but I don’t think so.”

KZYX radio? “I don’t listen. For many, many years KGO in San Francisco has been my station and I get my information from there.”

Drugs in the Valley? “They are everywhere here; I’m sure there is some on my property somewhere. I went looking with the deputy sheriff but we could not find any. He’s needs a dog to help him search,”

The changes in the Valley? “More wineries do not bother me. It means more work for people. Too many people here do not want any more people here, yet they came here when I was here already and I never said anything. The tourists do not bother me. They bring more money to the Valley. I love people coming here and if they want to stay that’s fine. I don’t own the world; I want to live with others. Too many people care only about themselves and their lives. I help people all of the time here if I can. I love to help and welcome people here to the Valley. they always have a place to stay.”

I posed a few questions, some from a questionnaire featured on TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton.”

What excites you; makes you smile; gets your juices flowing creatively, spiritually, emotionally? — “That I am going to get up and be happy in my home and do some work for myself.”

What annoys you; brings you down; turns you off creatively, spiritually, emotionally? “People who only see things their way; people who see the bug in other people’s eyes, not in their own — they say ‘it is my way or no way’.”

What sound or noise do you love? “A small airplane flying over. It’s probably one of my friends up there.”

What sound or noise do you hate? “Children in pain or crying.”

What is your favorite food or meal? “Sushi. I can eat it anytime.”

If you could meet one person dead or alive, one on one for a conversation, who would that person be? “Jennifer Lopez. Ha, ha, ha!”

If you were to be left completely alone indefinitely on an isolated island in the ocean, but with unlimited provisions, what three possessions would you like to have with you? “A sharp knife, a rifle, and some building materials so that I would be kept busy.”

What is your favorite hobby? Making and drinking wine; having fun on the ranch with my many projects.”

What profession other than your own would you like to have attempted if you were given the chance to do anything? “A photographer for Playboy magazine. That would be a good job wouldn’t it?”

What profession would you not like to do? “Many of the jobs that I did as a kid. I cannot think of worse ones than that. You think that there is nothing else to do in the rest of your life.”

How old were you when you went on your first date? Where did you go? “I think I was about 20. I had no time before that, or money, it was not because I did not want to or didn’t have offers. There were some mothers in Tracy who asked me to take their daughters out. They thought I was a good prospect, I guess.”

Is there something you would do differently if you could do it over again? “I have no regrets. Since I came to this country I have always had a good job.”

Tell me about a memorable moment; a time you will never forget. “My wife and I talk about our memories and how we worked so hard to raise our family. How did we do it? It has been very memorable.”

What is something that you are really proud of and why? “What Jean and I did together here in Anderson Valley. We have two granddaughters — Jessica 16, and Amber, 13, both are at the local school. Our daughter commutes to Santa Rosa where she works as an administrator for an eye doctor and our son is in San Diego, where he runs restaurants.”

What is your favorite thing about yourself? “That people hopefully think I am a good man and say that I will help anybody that I can.”

Finally, if Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Well, I know I’m going to heaven although it would be nice if he sent me straight back to continue what I am doing here. I would be happy if he said ‘I have been waiting for someone like you for a long time and you’re finally here. I have a job for you.’ That would be good.”

(To read the stories of other Valley Folk, visit the archives at www.avalleylife.wordpress.com. Next week the guest interviewee from the Valley will be Jim Hill, president of the AV Historical Society, and owner of the Hill Ranch — in his family for 100 years.)