The local old timers called all us new arrivals of the early 1970s “hippies” regardless of our relative commitments to drugs, promiscuous sex, bad housekeeping, and George McGovern, the whole package being Boonville code for “menace.” I did not identify as a “hippie,” but was certainly a hip-symp, me and hip world sharing political attitudes.
The first open clash — the first time the hippies, as an organized force, fought the old timers — occurred when the hippies combined to oppose an upscale, over-sized, time-share housing project proposed for Navarro by a San Diego investment group. Us hippies having just arrived, we wanted to keep the Valley as we'd found it — condo-free.
It was a clear split. The old timers were mostly for the development, the hippies against. Of course many of the old timers were for the development simply because the hippies were opposed to it. And lots of hippies were opposed to it simply because the old timers, or “rednecks,” were for it.
The old timers also had the attitude that community seniority gave them exclusive rights over what did or did not happen in the Anderson Valley. They were citizens, we weren’t. To the old timers, these long-haired libertines suddenly thrust among the decent people of Anderson Valley represented walking insults to all right thinking persons, and who the hell did these freaks think they were, coming in here and complaining about everything? The old timers had been in the Valley all their lives, and by god they weren’t going to be pushed around by a bunch of unwashed communists who just got into town yesterday,
The high school gym was packed for a meeting called by the would-be developers who anticipated the event as a show of relative strength. The developers had apparently been assured that the only opponents to their faux-Aztec piles of sterile boxes proposed for the northwest end of the Valley were a few stoned malcontents who would realize how isolated they were when the true community assembled in one place.
But the hippies turned out in such numbers that they took up one whole side of the gym, while the old timers, glowering on the other side, seemed surprised that there were now enough hippies in the Anderson Valley to oppose bad ideas, and this thing proposed for Navarro by the San Diego condo gang was a very bad idea for many reasons beginning with its overwhelming size and the impact the monstrosity would have on the battered, overdrawn Navarro river.
The old timers cheered the developer’s rep, a glib young man who emphasized what an economic boon the condo plan would be to an area perennially short of jobs. The arguments went back and forth, as did groans from the opposing sides at the more provocative statements by each.
But then there was a dramatic and major defection from what the old timers saw as their side, the right side, in the form of an old, old timer named Cecil Gowan who tottered up to the mike and, looking directly at the old timer’s side of the gym said, “As a lot of you people know, the Navarro dries up most summers. There’s not near enough water for a development as big as this one. I’m against it.”
Doubling his apostasy, the old man slowly made his way to the hippie side of the gym and sat down among The Enemy. The hippies cheered and beat their feet on the wooden bleachers.
The old timers were silent, many of them undoubtedly thinking, “Doesn’t that old fool know this isn’t about water? It’s about Us against Them!”
No sooner had Gowan been embraced by the hippies than Myrtis Schoenahl, a formidably large woman unaccustomed to defeat, walked briskly to the microphone. Mrs. Schoenahl glared at the hippie side of the gym before she yelled into the mike, “Can you hear me?”
A few people on the hippie side of the gym cringed in mock terror at the aural assault. A long hair shouted, “No! Louder!” The hippies laughed. Even a few old timers couldn’t help chuckling.
Mrs. Schoenahl got right to the point.
“This is really very simple,” she shouted. “What do we want in Anderson Valley? Nice houses for nice people or teepees for more hippies?”
The gym exploded into competing cries.
“Teepees! More hippies!” the hippies shouted.
“Nice people! Nice houses!” the old timers yelled back.
The issue wasn’t decided that night, but the hippies went on to a resounding victory. They collected money for a lawyer, accumulated negative environmental testimony, got ready to haul the condo brains into court. The old timers didn’t do anything but complain about “hippies taking over,” as if the capture of the dusty, semi-abandoned hamlets of Yorkville, Boonville, Philo, and Navarro was a great coup.
Great or not the San Diego-based developers soon gave up. The hippies won that one. They'd achieved political parity with the old timers. and would soon elect a conservative Democrat, the first of many, as their very own supervisor whose supporters, ironically, lied their guy into office by spreading the utterly false claim that the incumbent supervisor, Ted Galletti of Point Arena, was behind another huge condo project allegedly proposed for Cameron Road near Elk.
But the old timers went down hard. and continued to fight the hippies whenever they saw the hippies moving to consolidate power. The old timers kept control of the Boonville school board for another few years, they held on to the Community Services board for a while, and to this day they have the Boonville-based Mendocino County Fair Board in a seemingly unbreakable headlock.
One big victory over the hippies. as the old timers saw it, was the prevention of a community swimming pool.
The State Fire Marshal’s office had decreed that a sprinkler system be installed in the Fairgrounds’ several exhibition halls. Technically, a state-owned, i.e., public facility, the Fairgrounds sit on twenty or so under-used, fenced-off acres in the center of Boonville. From the outside, the place looks like a medium security prison. Inside, it is one. Or at least its heavy institutional vibes are not what you would call liberating. Trespassers, known in the outside world as taxpayers, can expect an immediate heave-ho if they happen to walk on in and spread out a picnic on a Fairgrounds lawn.
Onerous insurance and rent rates, arbitrarily imposed by the local board of directors, discourage use of the facilities between annual fairs, although over the recent past commercially driven music, wine and beer events have drawn thousands of people to Boonville for weekend debauches on the facility’s grudging premises. These events, of course, can pay the big fees.
But through the 1970s and well into the 1980s, the Fairgrounds several acres of grass and trees were open to the public only for the four annual days of the September fair while the high school football team was gang tackled in sheep shit left on the rodeo infield by a fair board insider whose animals grazed free “to keep the grass down.”
To be effective, sprinkler systems need a lot of water in a big hurry. To get a lot of water in a big hurry you need a standing pool of the stuff. Hey! I’ve got it! A swimming pool! Perfect. Water for fires, a healthy place for kids to spend those long summer afternoons. Cloverdale, which also has a fairgrounds in the middle of town, installed the required sprinkler system with a community swimming pool as the system’s water supply. Sensible people naturally assumed Boonville would follow Cloverdale’s one-stone, two-bird lead and do the same.
But an unusually hysterical — even by their seething standards — segment of the old timers besieged their hippie-fightin’ pals sitting as trustees on the fair board, begging their buddies not to build a community pool for water storage because You Know Who would swim in it. Not only would You Know Who swim in it, You Know Who would swim in it nekkid! Buck nekkid! And disease? Why bless me, Janese, it’s a known fact that hippies are walking pustules of fatal poxes, plus a few new ones they’ve probably developed right here in the hills of Boonville! If there was a community pool at the Fairgrounds every kid in the valley would soon be a walking contagion of communicable cooties.
The option to a combined water storage and community swimming pool was a storage tank, and the damn hippies and their feral, lice-bearing children could hardly swim in that, could they? Hell, they'd have to climb up the thing and pry its top off to get in. Har de har.
To ensure that Boonville opted for the storage tank, the old timers, perhaps having learned an activist lesson from the hippies who'd defeated them over the proposed Navarro condo development, began circulating petitions against a community swimming pool. A handful of perpetually angry women — rednecks seem partial to the “chicks up front” approach to public controversies — stationed themselves at the Valley’s four post offices, petitions in their determined hands. Any person who in the slightest resembled a hippie, any person who looked like he might be susceptible to hip-think, the petitioners spun out taxpayer arguments, primarily that a public swimming pool would cost too much to build and maintain.
But to people they recognized, people the hysterics knew held the correct retro opinions, the gargoyles would come right out with their true objection to the pool. “Do you want your kids swimming in the same water as hippies? Do you want your children to get sick?”
The specter of hippie-itis trumped community benefit. The battle axes presented their petitions to their allies on the Fair Board and, to this day, at the south end of the Fairgrounds grandstand sits a huge metal water tank with a cartoon bronco buster a’bustin’ his bronc painted on it. That eyesore could have been, should have been, a community swimming pool if it weren’t for the pure terror inspired in primitive minds by the vision of verminous hippie dippers enjoying a swim alongside antiseptic little Republicans.
But only a few years later, the sons and daughters of hippies and rednecks were not only swimming nude together up at Maple Basin, they were marrying each other, and soon a whole new plague-proof beast, the hipneck, was born, and Anderson Valley was at last one.
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