THE ALARMING NEWS that we could lose our Boonville-based County Fair has us all thinking about strategies to make up the lost state subsidy, an amount of some $200,000 a year. Our first thought was to put Dave Evans of the Navarro Store together with Philo's serially triumphant entrepreneur, John Scharffenberger, to produce one or two big name concerts at the Boonville Fairgrounds that combine music and Mendocino County wines. Dave Evans has the rock and roll contacts and Scharffenberger has the gift of turning everything he touches to unalloyed gold, and… Not that large-scale events are easy to pull off, but there are people who can do it. Maybe the couple who produce the annual, and wildly successful, reggae event at the Fairgrounds could be persuaded (for the right money) to produce a second annual event. Just thinking out loud here, but this County fairly teems with smart, creative people who might be tapped to pull the Fair out of the fire.
THE MERE MENTION of Wes Chesbro sets my teeth to grinding, but I ask you, where is this character when you need him to do specific good? Chesbro has been in one state office or another his entire adult life, and with his Sacramento seniority he can't find a measly 200 thou for the Boonville Fair, an annual event that amounts to a family tradition for thousands of his constituents over the past 80 years?
THE GOOD NEWS. Christina Jones' new restaurant, Aquarelle Cafe & WineBar, downtown Boonville. Born and raised in the Anderson Valley, Christina, trained as a chef, has transformed the premises of the former Horn of Zeese and, from the rave reviews she's already generated for food and ambiance, Christina is off to a great start. Aquarelle is open Fridays through Mondays 5-9pm.
THE CHP announced last Thursday that one of their officers “was badly injured Wednesday night when he crashed into a tree on rural Comptche Ukiah Road as authorities pursued a suspect through western Mendocino County.” The officer, not named, was airlifted to Ukiah Valley Medical Center with an arm injury. The pursuit of Christopher Skaggs, 30, driving a BMW coupe, an unidentied female unidentified female passenger, and a third person who remains a mystery as to gender and name, lasted an hour-and-ten-minutes, having commenced in Ukiah and ended in Navarro where Skaggs was tazed into submission. The pursuit began at 9:19pm when another CHP officer attempted to stop Skaggs' BMW for speeding and proceeding erratically southbound on Highway 101 north of Ukiah. Skaggs' red beemer, when it was first red-lighted on 101, according to CHP spokesman Krul, “appeared to slow and then took an exit at North State Street and led authorities on a chase reaching speeds between 55 mph and 75 mph on winding, hilly roads between Ukiah and Comptche, including Orr Springs Road, Flynn Creek Road, Appian Way, Masonite Road, Highway 128 and, ultimately, Wendling Soda Creek Road in Navarro.” The injured officer was driving on Comptche Ukiah Road in pursuit of Skaggs when he struck a tree west of Flynn Creek Road. Several CHP officers and Mendocino County sheriff's deputies were engaged in the wild pursuit before it ended at the west end of the Anderson Valley. Skaggs, who is on probation, finally pulled into a driveway on Wendling Soda Creek Road at Navarro where he “bailed out on foot.” He was soon caught on Wendling Soda Creek Road but, still struggling, was soon tasered into submission. Skaggs' female passenger was not arrested. A third, apparently more fleet-footed companion of Skaggs, also bailed out at some point during the hour-long chase and has not been caught. Skaggs was arrested for suspected felony evasion of a peace officer causing injury or death, resisting arrest, violation of probation and driving with a suspended license.
THE MAN believed to have burglarized Lemons Market may have been arrested in Sonoma County, but... On Tuesday, October 23, Lemons was burglarized sometime after midnight but nothing stolen. The would-be thief carefully removed a window to gain entry, conscientiously placing the window on a patch of grass some yards from the store. A grainy surveillance tape appears to show a clean-cut, medium-size white man inside the store.
THE MAN Sonoma deputies arrested on November 6, however, is a young “bespectacled” black man named Tyrone Brennen, 27, of Oakland. Brennen, a career burglar, was arrested November 5 after Marin deputies arrested him not far from several burglaries of rural markets in West Sonoma County. Marin cops described him as “a one man crime wave involving as many as ten businesses in Sonoma County and three in Marin County.” After Brennen was arrested, detectives found burglary tools and an inordinate amount of jewelry in Brennen’s Oakland home.
BUT HERE'S why Deputy Walker thinks the BMW-driving Brennen may have committed the scrupulous Lemons break-in: Brennen’s North Bay burglaries began with the meticulous removal of a window. Few burglars are so painstaking. Carefully removing a pane of glass is Brennen's signature move
ANDERSON VALLEY is the only community in Mendocino County that can boast two big-time football players — Jacob Gowan and Martin Tevaseu, both of whom are pictured below. Aaron Rogers, the great Green Bay quarterback, lived in Ukiah for a time, and still has grandparents there but identifies Butte County as his home area.
STANFORD quarterback Kevin Hogan (8) is congratulated by long snapper Jacob Gowan (56) after the No. 14 Cardinal upset No. 1 Oregon in overtime Saturday. Jacob is a senior at Stanford majoring in mechanical engineering, and the son of Don Gowan of Philo and Sharon Gowan of Santa Rosa.
MARTIN TEVASEU is a graduate of Anderson Valley High School and a professional football player presently with the Indianapolis Colts where he plays nose tackle.
LAUGHING DOG BOOKS owners W. Dan and Loretta Houck wish everyone fun and happiness this holiday season. For the third year, their “Give-a-Book” trees will give holiday shoppers the opportunity to purchase books for Anderson Valley school libraries. These are titles the AV High School & AV Elementary School librarians have put on their wish list. Pick a tag and buy a book from the beautiful live tree donated by Ken Montgomery of Anderson Valley Nursery, and we will deliver that book to the library. Since we began this holiday donation in 2010, shoppers have given each of the libraries more than 100 books. And keep in mind when looking for gifts, we have t-shirts, reading glasses, and flashlight baseball caps for fashionable and convenient illumination. Laughing Dog Books, in downtown Boonville and at laughingdogbooks.com, encourages everyone to shop locally this holiday season. Thank you for your continued support.
MARSHALL NEWMAN'S interesting look back at Anderson Valley of the 1950s and 60s in this week's paper reminded me that when I descended on The Valley in 1971 local entertainment was confined to five San Francisco television channels beamed down onto the Valley floor from a relay antenna high in the east hills. Haute cuisine was still in France. The subsequent development of the New Boonville Hotel by Vernon and Charlene Rollins seemed to be the major turning point, soon followed by grapes and wine. Lots of wealthy people, in a kind of upscale feeding frenzy ignited by the New York Times, visited Boonville to eat at the Hotel and couldn't help but note that land prices were still quite cheap and that our climate rivaled Marin's. And we were off to the races. In the thirty years since, The Valley has been completely transformed every which way, with the entertainment and restaurant options seeming to rival San Francisco's. I preferred Anderson Valley before all the tumult, and I still don't understand the demand for urban amenities by people who have deliberately moved to the country from the city but, as the young people say, “Like, dude, it is what it is.”
BRUCE McEWEN had been homeless prior to his arrival at the AVA three years ago, but had commenced living and working on the property I rent from old friends not far from central Boonville. I'd told him if he needed a place out of the rain he could stay temporarily with us in Boonville, and one day he simply appeared with his bedroll. He'd come from the Hospitality House in Fort Bragg from where he'd reported to us on Ten Mile Court When he arrived in Boonville, McEwen vaguely alluded to having been threatened by street people who could no longer menace him if he moved an hour away to the Anderson Valley. Temporary seemed to become permanent until one morning in late August of this year, McEwen got up and left. We next heard from him when he wrote from Garberville, but since then not a word. I hope he will eventually become a roving correspondent, which is how we first encountered him. He'd sent us stories from the road, then from nearby Fort Bragg, then he appeared in Boonville where he pitched a tent in the backyard while he made a derelict trailer more or less winter habitable. We called him “HG,” as in Homeless Guy. The Major simultaneous to HG's arrival, adopted an orphaned cat he called “HC,” as in Homeless Cat. Like many serious drunks, McEwen sober was not only companionable he was a skilled handyman and house painter. He did a lot of work on the place, for which he was fairly compensated. But with an alcoholic you always have in the back of your mind, “Am I helping this guy or helping to kill him?” So, that morning at the end of August, just about three years after he'd arrived in Boonville, McEwen left without a word. Did I offend him somehow? It seems so. I'd had to “warn and advise” him about unhappy episodes in downtown Boonville where McEwen came to be banned by all the establishments that serve alcohol. Which is all of them. For a convivial drinking man, but one who goes from convivial to bellicose in two beers, to be 86'd from the sparse nightlife of a very small town was probably unendurable for the guy. Boonville businesses tolerated McEwen's scattergun verbal assaults much longer and much more patiently than businesses in larger towns would have tolerated them. On our end, two small houses on one acre, sharing space with a serious drunk wasn't easy, but more difficult for The Major with whom McEwen shared the essential facilities of bathroom and stove, and how many people would endure a drunk — two drunks one night — crashing around in their kitchen at 2am, scorching frying pans and leaving the burners on? One morning The Major stumbled half-awake out of his bedroom to find an attractive young black woman making herself a cup of coffee in his kitchen. “Oh, hello,” she said as casually as if she were standing in a Starbucks, casually asking The Major, “Who are you?” McEwen said he'd rescued this particular unmoored waif from the perils of the Ukiah railroad tracks, an open-air homeless retreat. “She just needed a place out of the weather for the night,” McEwen said. The young woman reappeared in The Major's house several times over the months, coming and going like she was a part-time resident. We eventually learned that she was, and may still be, the peripatetic love interest of a Boonville man whom McEwen stoutly maintained, “wasn't good enough for her.” We co-existed, our odd menagerie, albeit with the added burden of fielding periodic complaints about McEwen's Boonville rampages from bar and restaurant owners, culminating, finally, in a terrible verbal assault McEwen launched on a wedding party at the Boonville Hotel that left the bride in tears. And a very unhappy Deputy Walker to sort out. We think McEwen left Boonville pre-emptively, that he assumed he was getting the heave-ho for the Hotel debacle so he left before we could give him the bounce. I admired McEwen's gifts, especially his stenographic gift. He got court dialogue down, live, better than anybody I've ever read, and because of his gift I let him slide. And slide and slide, not that I was his parent and he was my child, but in the spirit of William Faulkner who famously said, “The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.” Of course the AVA isn't art, but McEwen came pretty close to art a couple of times, a claim most artists, especially the prose ones, can seldom make. I thought McEwen's stories, in the Faulkner sense, were worth more than a wedding party. But when he'd sobered up the next morning after the Boonville Hotel smash-up, I think McEwen, a registered Republican who clung to conventional values throughout the serial disasters of his life, knew it was time to move on. Again.
JOHN MATHESON, the young Cloverdale pilot who wants to park an old fuel truck at the Boonville Airport, flew into town last Wednesday night to ask the Community Services District Board for the necessary permissions. It wasn't clear if Matheson was appearing on behalf of himself or a nebulous skydiving operation in Alameda which he's apparently affiliated with. He explained that the Cloverdale airport does not offer jet fuel so he was hoping he could park a fuel truck at the Boonville Airport where he and his skydivers might periodically refuel.
FIRE CHIEF COLIN WILSON explained that the fire code does not permit permanent parking of fuel trucks at Boonville International, but it might be possible on a temporary basis under certain conditions. Was Mr. Matheson’s fuel tanker licensed? Registered?
MATHESON, becoming more implausible with his every statement, replied that his truck is unlicensed and unregistered and was obtained by him via a trade in exchange for some back pay he was owed by somebody. The truck is about 50 years old and not street legal, he explained, but if his request was approved, he would bring the truck to Boonville International on a flatbed and Chevron would faithfully deliver jet fuel at a lower cost than he would have to pay at a regular airport refueling station. Matheson said he had not received Chief Wilson's letter from last month outlining the strict conditions any such operation would have to operate under.
THE YOUNGISH PILOT, clad in cargo pants and a t-shirt with an airplane printed on it, looked like he'd just wandered in from the Boonville Beer Festival. He said that he had to keep his costs to a minimum because startup aircraft operations regularly go under and he wanted to succeed. Matheson magnanimously said he might be willing to pay for the equivalent of a tiedown space at the airport, perhaps $50-$100 a month, but couldn’t afford any more than that.
ASKED ABOUT HIS experience with jet fuel arrangements and Matheson said that he was a licensed pilot and a licensed aircraft mechanic and skydiver but not the owner of the operation with which he was affiliated. Insurance, bonding, fees, permits, references? Matheson said he might be willing to put something in writing for the CSD to consider.
BOARD CHAIR VALERIE HANELT diplomatically informed Matheson that he was welcome to come back to the Board at a later time “when you get organized and get your act together.”
WHEN MATHESON had left to walk back to Boonville International for his flight back to Cloverdale, Airport Manager Kirk Wilder remarked that he had not made any offers for use of the airport. “Frankly, I'm not very impressed,” Wilder said.
CHIEF WILSON told the board that the basic structure of the Holmes Ranch fire station, including its roof and walls are complete, just in time before the rainy season begins.
JOHN TOOHEY introduced himself to the board as the new Teen Center Coordinator, assuring the Board that he would combine an educational component with a focus local activities.
MARIA FERNANDEZ DELGADO, 28, and Gabriel Manzo Lepez, 24, of Philo have taken out a license to be married, as have Shyla Nail, 27, and Robert Berry, 30, of Philo; and Krystine Snyder, 34, and James Campbell, 34, also of Philo.
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