THE ABSOLUTE BEST entertainment deal you're going to get anywhere in Mendocino County that night occurs on Saturday, July 16th right here at the Boonville Apple Hall. For twenty bucks you get a tri-tip dinner and a post-dinner dance with Dean Titus and the Coyote Cowboys, proceeds going to the invaluable Anderson Valley Youth Football program. Tickets at Lemons Market, Philo. Info at 489-8099 or 895-2688.
HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS are due Lucy Lawson of Yorkville. Entering her senior year at Anderson Valley High School, Lucy has been selected to compete in the highly prestigious 63rd National High School Rodeo championships, to which only the top four contestants are invited to compete. To get herself into the finals, Lucy, a break away roper, was selected from among a huge pool of competitors drawn not only from the United States but Canada and Australia. Go, Lucy!
THAT DRILLING RIG at Guerrero's Tire Shop downtown Boonville heralds the resumption of the thirty-year search for the source of the alleged fuel contamination of the Boonville Fire House's water.
ELDER HOME on the rocks? Mr. Krieg's candid letter aside, I've never understood the math in play here. $850,000 for two houses and an empty lot next door to the unaffiliated Senior Center, plus a hundred thou in donations and more fancy paperboy math brings the balance to maybe half a mil. Sooooo even with full tenancy income nowhere near comes close to ever paying this baby off.
IN THE MEAN TIME — an often very mean time as the Mex-Bashers complain that the premises are rented to Mex-Americans while poor old Charmian is sent over the hill to while away her last days, a timeline that does not jibe with Charmian's demise — some of us remain confident that the ElderHome people can somehow make the thing go.
BY WAY OF CONTRAST, I was startled to learn of a communication from my old and dear friend Phillip Thomas that cites my estimated figure of a hundred thousand as the money Thomas and his uber-secretive colleagues on the AV Ambulance board are sitting on. The true figure is a little more than two hundred thousand, and why Thomas would be citing my estimate as the true figure seems to mean Thomas is peddling porkies.
THE AV HEALTH CENTER? Still headed for the fake rocks, apparently, but all these groups would be a lot better off if they ceased operating like Stalin's politburo and told us the true state of their finances. Crimeny, this nutty secrecy is irritating.
DON PARDINI'S opinion of the just-concluded Rasta-Fest I daresay is shared by a hundred percent of downtown Boonville. I stuff in the earplugs at my place, which is about three hundred yards from the big stage. I don't dislike the music, but after a few minutes of it I understand why the rasta-battalions are loaded when they hunker down to absorb hours of it. And I was shocked, shocked I tell you to learn that the Giants sent me an e-mail saying they're again holding a “Grateful Dead Night” at an August game against the Pirates. Give me a box seat behind home plate and I'll give it to the first person I see coming down the street. I wrote right back to the Giants: “Why not just have me bring in a gang of Mendocino County bush hippies and have them beat on garbage cans during the seventh inning stretch? Wouldn't that be just as entertaining and a lot cheaper for you guys?”
SCHOOL HIRES for the coming year include: Logan Silva will teach junior high history; Amber Mesa will conduct English as a Second Language; the guy hired to teach Spanish got a better deal some other place; Kelly Arbor will handle Special Ed; Science is the province of Jacob Bagnell and Elizabeth Gonzalez; Andrew Settlemire will attempt to instill the basics of English; Ali Borst-Cook, a graduate of AVHS, is temporarily a 6th grade teacher.
FROM ALL ACCOUNTS last weekend's wedding of Nichole Johnson and Derek Wyant went off splendidly, with the families of the bride and groom managing to get some 300 guests up into the hills where the altar had been set up beside the Johnson Ranch lake, a beautiful setting for the memorable occasion. The versatile Olie Erickson performed the ceremony uniting the popular Valley couple.
ASSISTANT NURSE TRAINING classes commence August 1st at the County Office of Education compound, Talmage. Classes for this work, which tends to lead to real jobs, will also be held in Fort Bragg at 300 Dana Street beginning August 22nd. The course is about a month long. Info at 463-0112.
THAT FINE STORY about a shootout in Brooklyn in last week's New York Times by Tim Stelloh prompts me to remind you that Tim, and his talented wife, Freda Moon, both write for the Times, but not all that long ago they wrote for the Boonville weekly.
CONSIDER, PLEASE, Mr. Thomas Golding-Fuller, 29, of Redwood Valley, as a kind of walking statement of the times. We can assume from his hyphenated name and blandly untroubled features that Golding-Fuller is a son of Mendo privilege — a graduate of play groups, soccer camps, organic meals, correct thinking, and perhaps even a trust fund — the full narcissistic wrap that creates the sense of entitlement so many young doofuses seem to feel these days. Master Thomas appeared in last week’s Sheriff’s Log when he was arrested for “disorderly conduct” hours after the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival had gone silent. He was walking aimlessly and disoriented down Highway 128, not in the middle of the pavement but well into the pavement where he could have been run over. Golding-Fuller had made it on foot all the way to the CalFire station a full mile south of Boonville when Deputy Walker spotted him. “He told me he had taken some ‘psychedelics’ and was confused about where he was,” the deputy said. “He said he had narrowly missed being hit by a car which came within a foot of him on the highway just a few minutes earlier.” Walker confined Golding-Fuller to his patrol car until a little after daybreak when the deputy turned the lad over for transportation to the County Jail to come down from whatever drug he was on. Deputy Walker may well have saved the kid's life, but you can bet your life the deputy won't get so much as a 'thank you' from the hyphenate.
THE ‘OLD TIME 4TH of July’ will be celebrated at the Fairgrounds again this year from Noon to 4pm. It's a fundraiser for the AV Education Foundation. Parade, kids games, tug of war, food, and temperance society fun. $4/adults, kids free.
I'M SURE OTHER Senior Citizens can confirm that our “old time” 4th of July celebrations were rambunctious affairs that began early in the morning and went on until the early hours of the next morning. In those days, all our role models except the female ones got drunk and us kids threw firecrackers at each other while rival fire departments engaged in fire hose fights on the main drag. One year my neighbor Mario Schenone was so loaded he forgot the hydrant wrench and our whole department, a delighted crowd looking on, got washed down the street. The lawyers and the insurance combines long ago put an end to that kind of real fun, and here we are with the neo-blue noses in total charge of the festivities.
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