Valley People

DEBORAH SARSGARD has had to resign from her position as CSD trustee while she fights off cancer. Ms. Sarsgard is presently resting at a nursing care facility in Oakland in between rounds of chemo-therapy at UCSF: Rehabilitation Center of Oakland, 210 40th St Way Oakland, CA 94611, Room 27B. The phone at the nursing station is 510-658-2041.

LOTS OF GOOD-SIZED steelhead are pooled up in the Navarro just below Shenoa. Question is, though, are they on their way up or down stream, and will there be enough rain in the next few weeks to get them where they need to go. The Navarro is already pretty far down this season.

MEANWHILE, out in Fort Bragg, salmon fishermen expect a pretty good year based on the returning numbers of spawning salmon counted in the Klamath.

YOU KNOW you're from Anderson Valley when, Jeff Burroughs writes on his Facebook page, “I was digging out some old rugs for my mom…” when Jeff found chairs he believes came out of the old Navarro By The Sea inn.

I REMEMBER an unhappy encounter at the bar of that establishment circa '72. The proprietor had refused to serve a friend of mine, a Marine Corp vet who'd survived Khe Sanh. I had to restrain Friend of Mine from lunging at the guy's throat, and we were soon back in the parking lot where a sign read, “I don't mind the hippy movement so long as it keeps on moving.” Something like that. Friend of mine came with long hair and beard to match. You could say he was a dangerously alienated fellow who, after several years of random punch 'em ups, became, of all things, a marriage counselor. An old Old Timer might be able to confirm what I later heard about the anti-hippy hysteric who owned Navarro By The Sea, subsequently purchased by Bobby Beacon who soon closed it down. I was told the owner prior to Beacon, the one with whom we'd shared an unhappy moment, had done time for murder, which didn't surprise me. I recall him as a mean-faced, unhappy little character who seemed to live to throw people out of his bar.

AV HIGH GRAD CASSIDY HOLLINGER WRITES: “It’s hard to believe it’s been four years now, since working Trivia Night at the Lodge and waiting to get out here to Vassar. I'm graduating in May with two degrees (Drama and Philosophy), and I just found out I got accepted to the Masters in Performance Studies program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts! (Now let's see if I can put my Vassar education to work and figure out how I'm going to pay for Grad School.) Hope all is well back home; my mom sends me the paper every once in a while so I can catch up!”

WRITING ON THE theme of, “You Know You’re From Anderson Valley When—” Facebook page, Bill Kimberlin comments, “There was an article recently in the Anderson Valley Advertiser titled, ‘The Old Philo Post Office.’ It was authored by Marshall Newman. Marshall's family ran the El Rancho Navarro summer camp across the river from my aunt's ‘Ray's Resort.’ Marshall writes, ‘While the southernmost portion of the building was always the post office, the adjacent space was a barber shop in the late 1950's and early 1960's.’ Just to clarify, my aunt, Leonore Ray Falleri, owned the Philo Barber Shop and we used to work around the building as kids. The Post Office was, and is, a separate building from the old Barber Shop. There was the Post Office, then another small building, and finally another separate building, the Barber Shop. All are still there today. March 15, 2013.”

LAST WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON’S (13 MARCH) movie meeting at the Boonville Fairgrounds was after the fact. The Supervisors had already fast-tracked permit approval for a cretinous, big budget Dreamworks (co-produced by Disney) epic based on a video-game about careening vehicles and dead bodies, not to put too fine an aesthetic judgment on the film Dreamworks and Mickey Mouse will make in Mendocino County beginning in mid-April.

DREAMWORKS claims they’ll drop several mil — maybe $3-$5 mil — in Mendocino County while filming “Need For Speed.” (At ease, tweakers, this isn’t about you. We know you need speed.)

AND THAT PROMISE of money persuaded the Supes that it is perfectly reasonable to shut down local roads for extended periods of time to get this baby in the can, as they say in Tinsel Town.

THE BOONVILLE FAIRGROUNDS’ yawning deficit will be eliminated for at least a year while the film company rents the Fairgrounds for their headquarters, so count me as a reluctant Yes vote for the temporary inconvenience while show biz does its thing in the Anderson Valley.

ONE SALES PHRASE invoked Wednesday promised that “millions of people will be exposed to beautiful Mendocino County,” a major negative to my mind, a guy who would have pulled up the gangplank after I arrived in 1970. But you get the feeling here that if Dreamworks had appeared before the Supervisors to say, “Of course in return for the five million we will spend in Mendocino County we expect the residents of Anderson Valley to lend us their wives and daughters during our sojourn here,” the vote for the movie company would have been 4-1, Carrie Brown dissenting, instead of the 5-0 it was.

RATHER AN ODD, QUEEG-ISH performance Wednesday by Supervisor Hamburg who, a Chihuahua secure in the Supervisor’s lap, said things to the effect of, “Gee, you people opposed to this thing are the kind of people who try to stop everything.” Ordinarily, libs are on the receiving end of that particular canard, and here Mendolib’s herd bull was dishing it up on behalf of a multi-mil corporation. But Hamburg was hearing things; nobody had said they were against the movie industry or tourism.

AND CALTRANS has commented that the Ukiah-Boonville Road is their property, which will be news to most citizens of our fair county, and one more piece of evidence that Big Orange is way, way outta control.

WHEN A YOUNG PERSON alerted me that Aaron Paul would be in Boonville to make a moron movie called ‘Need For Speed’ I was instantly all for whatever disruptions the thing might impose on my fellow rural louts, never more than half awake from their habitual pastoral stupor. This kid is a genius! I've been watching the Breaking Bad series, by far the best thing I've ever seen out of TV Land, and in which Aaron Paul is one of the stars in a flawless cast in the brilliantly serial pegged to an ailing high school chemistry teacher who becomes a crank cook to spare his family post-mortem penury. Paul plays the stoner dude who becomes the chem teacher's street distributor. If you haven't seen it know that it has the AVA’s highest possible recommendation.