FRIENDS OF GERALDINE ROSE:
It is with a sad heart that I share with you that Geraldine has passed away. She had been receiving Hospice care since April and then last week was put on comfort care. She passed away peacefully early this morning.
We plan to have a memorial service this coming Spring and will advise you of the when and where. Feel free to share this email with other friends of Ger’s.
Please include her in your prayers.
Thank you for being her friend.
Jeanne Boss
SAFFRON FRASER:
“I read on the post office door that Geraldine Rose died on December 5th. I’ve known Geraldine most of my life. 33 years ago we asked her to officiate our wedding. She took that job very seriously, we had meetings, and ‘counseling.’ She said, sternly, that she had never had a couple that she married divorce, and that we had better not be the first. There’s lots more I could say about Geraldine, but I’ll leave it there. So, that’s why I planted a rose yesterday. I’ll see her in my garden for years to come.”
CONTRIBUTOR KATY TAHJA had a great time selling her books and talking local history at the Unity Club’s Holiday Bazaar last week. She says she especially loved the comments like “Oh, you’re Katy that writes for the AVA! I love reading your stuff!!” Journalists always love to know people are reading their contributions. Thank you to my readers...
A GREEN-ORIENTED local approached me last week at the post office and, pointing at the vacant lot where Pic ‘N Pay once stood, workmen in lime day-glo were laboring over a pumping apparatus. “I hear they’re putting in a gas station over there,” the green said. Doubt it, I replied, but I’ll check. JJ Thomasson, former AVHS basketball star, retired fire jumper, and owner of Anderson Valley Market, not all that long ago bought the property where the lime day-glos were working. At the market, Stephanie Marcum, always a delight and altogether charming, was at the register. (The ladies at the register know everything, everything I tell you!) Stephanie explained that the lime guys were water testers. “There used to be a gas station there,” Stephanie said. I groaned. I remember when a station was there maybe 50 years ago, and here the water testers were testing for residue fuel in the well supplying the rentals to the rear of the site. The late Carolyn Short was fending off this water testing scam almost to her dying day where her service station sat down the street for many years. All this testing is costly, of course, and if you know of anybody in Boonville who’s ever died from consuming trace amounts of octane I’d like confirmation.
THE 2023 AVFD FIRST RESPONDER AWARDS
Ordinary people with extraordinary dedication.
The awardees, nominated by fellow crew members, are:
Fred Ehnow - EMT of the Year
Josh Mathias - Firefighter of the Year
Josh Mathias - Outstanding Leadership
Gideon Burdick - Engineer of the Year
Steve Snyder - Ambulance Operator of the Year
Alejandro Aguirre-Mendoza - Rookie of the Year
We have an outstanding team of people who take time out of their lives on a regular basis to help others when called; it’s never convenient, it’s often difficult, and it’s always profoundly rewarding.
(AV Fire Chief Andres Avila)
CRAB SEASON has been delayed to protect endangered humpback whales and other species, and they said they would reevaluate just before Christmas. The commercial season traditionally opens Nov. 15 but has been delayed each of the past five years to reduce the number of whales getting entangled in crab trap gear.
MENDOCINO COUNTY’S MOST BEAUTIFUL JAPANESE MAPLE
Never so beautiful as its colors turn, just happens to grace the entrance to the mighty AVA, Boonville
PETIT TETON FARM
Petit Teton Farm is open daily 9-4:30, except Sunday 12-4:30. Along with the large inventory of jams, pickles, soups and sauces made from everything we grow, we sell USDA beef and pork from our perfectly raised pigs and cows. Right now we also have stewing hens, squab, and a few rabbits for sale
We’d love to see you. Nikki and Steve
VELMA’S FARM STAND AT FILIGREEN FARM
Friday 2-5pm and Saturday 11am-4pm
Velmas
The farm stand is open Friday from 2-5pm and Saturday 11am-4pm. And find us at the Unity Club Holiday Bazaar on Saturday, December 9th from 10am-4pm.
For fresh produce we will have:apples, pears, persimmons, winter squash (delicata, acorn, kabocha, butternut), cauliflower, romanesco, cabbage, broccoli, potatoes, chicories (chioggia, castelfranco, puntarelle, treviso, etc.), carrots, beets, onions, leeks, shallots and herbs. We will also have dried fruit, tea blends, olive oil, fresh and dried flower bouquets, evergreen and everlasting wreaths, tomato sauce and fruit compote available. Plus some delicious flavors of Wilder Kombucha!
For folks who are looking to make applesauce, we have #2 quality apples available for purchase in 40lb cases. Please email Annie in advance if you would like to pick up a case at the farm stand this week! (#2 apples are just cosmetically damaged but perfectly delicious!) $50/40 lb case.
All produce is certified biodynamic and organic. Follow us on Instagram for updates @filigreenfarm or email annie@filigreenfarm.com with any questions. We accept cash, credit card, check, and EBT/SNAP (with Market Match)!
WHY CAN’T our cemetery district absorb the unconscionably abandoned Ruddock Cemetery? It was completely overgrown when I visited the ancient Philo burial ground last, which was at least a decade ago, and it was in bad shape then, a nearly impenetrable mass of brush and blackberry. The Ruddock is hidden away up a little grade between what is now Maggie Hawk Winery and the Domaine Anderson Winery. It is not visible from either establishment. Ruddock is eternal home to some of Anderson Valley’s pioneers.
VAL HANELT: I attended a cemetery board meeting (2018?) where they discussed taking over the Ruddock — the Ruddock family had requested it. Clyde Doggett did a thorough presentation of his findings and reported that there was no place to put new graves in any number that would make sense for the District to take it over. The Ruddock family requested maintenance at no benefit to the district. Also, I believe that they wanted the right to continue to bury family members there, I think for free. It is on a hillside and flattens out on top, but right next to a home. It was overtaken by berries and poison oak five years ago, and, unless someone from that family group cleared it, it is probably a lot worse now. I had to do some trimming (and careful placing of my feet) to get the photos for Findagrave.
ED NOTE: I still think our cemetery district should assume responsibility for Ruddock in the same spirit that the Yorkville Cemetery has been adopted. Yorkville went untended for years, and while the district is at it, they should also take over the old Ornbaun cemetery. Both are important to Valley history, not to mention respect for the local dead.
IN AN EARLIER POST, I’d suggested that our Cemetery District adopt the abandoned Ruddock Cemetery in Philo and the Ornbaun Cemetery of Yorkville.
VAL HANELT promptly replied: “For the record: The Ornbaun cemetery is private and is run by a Cemetery Board who meet regularly. The large extended Ornbaun family have a clean-up day with a picnic every year. It is not open to the public.”
MAYBE the Ruddocks, a pioneer Valley family, should consider adopting the Ornbaun approach. There are Ruddock descendants still around, and as Ms. Hanelt has pointed out they have previously petitioned the Cemetery District to adopt their burial grounds.
IT MIGHT BE TIME to re-think the way we do public schooling: “Frustrated Herbert Slater Middle School teachers rallied outside the school Friday morning, joined by parents and students, to demand safer schools following a violent outburst Thursday which led to a two-hour-long lockdown and three students arrested.”
BE SURE to check out the display window at Rossi Hardware, always a delight and especially beguiling at Christmas.
Display windows being pretty much a lost art, especially in rural small towns, we can thank Vanessa Rossi, Chris Rossi’s daughter, for brightening holiday Boonville’s downtown. Our photo never does these wonderful displays justice, but they are always interesting, often brilliant.
DRIVING AROUND SANTA ROSA on Friday with everyone’s See’s Candy order was makin’ me feel like a crack dealer.
— Renee Lee, AV Senior Center manager
LEW CHICHESTER
One of the features of the AVA which I find consistently informative are the reports from Louise Simpson, AV School Superintendent. I have served as a trustee of the Round Valley School District for ten years now, and her updates and perspectives from a rural school district are relevant here as well. Regarding truancy and enforcement both our school districts have similar issues. No enforcement. But it is not a police problem but a failure or refusal to prosecute policy from the DA’s office. This comes up from time to time in our school board discussions and we are informed consistently that the DA will not prosecute truancy, claiming it is not cost effective or worthwhile, as if this is a crime without a victim. I find this to be extremely disappointing as one of the goals in education is to instill in youth the understanding that behavior has consequences. The DA is teaching our young people, inadvertently, the benefits of antisocial, selfish, lawless behaviors, which have no negative consequences.
UNTIL RECENTLY, Mendocino County had a County School Superintendent, Michelle Hutchins, who made truancy a priority. In 2019 before she was voted out of office and replaced by former Ukiah Unified under-supe Nicole Glentzer, Hutchins wrote:
“There’s a great website called absencesaddup.org that goes into why attendance is so important and the reasons students skip school. To be clear, chronic absenteeism includes both truancy (unexcused absences) and excused absences. Whether students have a good reason to miss school or not, when they are not in the classroom they are not benefiting from the teacher’s instruction and interactions with their peers. The data on this is quite clear. Students who can read at grade level by third grade are about three times more likely to graduate from high school and go on for post-secondary education as compared to their peers who do not make the transition in third grade from learning to read to reading to learn. Authors of another study followed a cohort of students through high school and were able to correlate a lack of graduation back to their sixth-grade attendance, behavior and course failure. School builds on material taught the year before. When students get behind in the early years, it can be incredibly difficult for them to catch up. Unfortunately, students who live in communities like ours with high levels of poverty are far more likely to be chronically absent than others because of factors out of their control such as unstable housing, unreliable transportation and a lack of access to health care. So how do we address this problem? The answer varies because the reasons for chronic absenteeism vary. Our large school districts—Ukiah Unified, Willits Unified and Fort Bragg Unified—have put considerable time and resources into helping families get their students to school every day. Ukiah Unified, for example, added family-community liaisons to their staff and hired an additional school resource officer to work with families whose students are chronically absent. Our smaller districts rarely have the resources to hire additional staff, so school employees do their best to follow up with struggling families between other responsibilities. To help them, the County Office of Education provides training on how best to use their limited resources to combat chronic absenteeism. Whether districts can afford more staff or not, at some point there needs to be legal consequences for chronic absenteeism. I worked in a county with a successful school attendance review board (SARB). Both (then-)Sheriff Tom Allman and DA Dave Eyster support the reduction of truancy, but they are pragmatists. Schools are not the only organizations with limited funding and stretched resources. DA Dave told me, “If I have to choose between prosecuting a murder case and prosecuting a parent whose child isn’t attending school, I’ll prosecute the murder case.” Who can blame him? However, both he and Tom have said that if we created a family court system that only referred a small fraction of cases—the most egregious ones—to the DA’s office, that might work. So, that’s what I’m working on right now.”
Unfortunately, none of these suggestions (attendance review board or family court) were implemented. But at least Ms. Hutchins acknowledged the problem and offered the services of her County office staff to help. We have seen no evidence of even this small level of awareness at the County office lately. It’s clearly more of an issue for small schools than for larger ones, and support for smaller schools was a specific point of difference between Hutchins and Glentzer in the last County election.
In her letter endorsing Ms. Hutchins in that election, local organizer Linda McClure wrote:
”Previously, Mendocino County was among the lowest performing counties in California. State funding to develop resources was being passed directly to districts. Three of the County’s 12 districts, the largest ones, got most of those resources, contrary to state requirements. Michelle Hutchins brought the county into compliance while improving resources to both large and small schools. But many Ukiah Unified officials were unhappy with that change. They boycotted the County office’s resources. Ukiah’s Assistant Superintendent Nicole Glentzer is opposing Michelle Hutchins in this race. Ukiah’s annual budget is about $108 million. The County Office’s budget is about $24 million for all schools. Still, Ukiah ranks very low for student achievement per the state measurements (academic, attendance, truancy, suspensions, and graduation rates).”
Local school administrations and Boards should be lobbying the County office for the kind of even handed distribution of resources and specific truancy support because besides the obviously educational shortfalls that it causes, the funding of those already resource-strapped districts is further eroded when eligible students aren’t in class. (Mark Scaramella)
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