NEW YEAR’S EVE came and went in Boonville with some premature gunshots at 8:30pm, and later in the final evening nearer to midnight, there was a minor racket from fireworks. But the big night seems to have been the most sedate in years in all parts of Mendocino County because, perhaps, people are more generally apprehensive than optimistic.
ST. ELIZABETH SETON CRAB FEED, February 17, 2024
Mendocino County Fairgrounds, Boonville. 6 pm social hour, 7 pm dinner. Tickets now on sale. Advance ticket sales only $75/adult (12+ yrs), $40/child (1 – 11yrs). Tickets: John Schultz 895-9552, Jorge Mejia 489-3821, Colleen Schenck 895-3053
JOAN BURROUGHS WRITES: Years ago I asked a member of AVCSD why eminent domain on the dangerous Ricard property is not being considered by the AVCSD. Bottom line answer: leaving Ricard out of any legal activity is because Ricard has two parcel votes on the sewer/water issue, they needed every vote they could get. The Ricard property likely is contaminated from unresolved water and sewer issues — it is monitored by the state Water System CA2300733 official name: Haehl Street Water. The report from the state indicates the main well is inactive and raw. It would appear the property might not ever be sold under present conditions - it probably has no value as it now sits - unless the municipal sewer/water system is approved that is.
In 2016 AVCSD gathered water samples on Haehl Street re this municipal monster; they stated they knew where the contamination was located within walking distance of homes in the area. As a result this entire sewer/water fiasco could have been avoided if Mendocino County Public Health had bothered to step up and do its job by alleviating overcrowding and demanding sewer oversight with a board of local directors willing to listen to parcel owners. Millions of dollars already spent might have been alleviated by working with parcel owners to assure them they will get grant assistance they need through AVCSD. To this day, AVCSD is still determined to go ahead with this monumental undertaking that is simply not approved by most Boonville parcel owners. Until there is a proven substantial need we should not be discussing millions of dollars more to be spent on engineers, planners, map producers, on and on; we should be working toward getting the community of Boonville back on its feet by helping those who truly need assistance. (BTW Karen Alturas was one of the original owners at some point in time.)
GETTING BOONVILLE to tuck in its shirt and stand up straight isn’t likely any time soon. Gualala just buried its power lines. Hopland buried theirs years ago. Boonville? Not even on the list. But Point Arena came up with $426,000 to create a pedestrian and bike path from the center of town down to Arena Cove. $426,000! There’s just as much grant-savvy in Anderson Valley, and there’s a lot more money here than in PA, but we ain’t got no trails, no sidewalks, no trees, no benches, no public bathrooms, no plan. Sure, individual property owners do what they can to spruce up their properties, but as a community our town looks like we got here about thirty minutes ago then got hit by a tornado.
BOONVILLE'S MYSTERY HOUSE. Over the years, Wilson and Marchie Summit raised a whole football team of athletic boys in a warm and welcoming earlier version of the house pictured here. If there's such a thing as an un-family house, this is it.
THE ODD MAKEOVER of the property has raised ire and eyebrows all over town. You can't miss it because the place is in the center of commercial Boonville between the Disco Ranch Wine Bar and Boont Berry Farm on Highway 128 opposite the Redwood Drive-In.
FIRST, THE NEW OWNER painted the place an eye-throbbing aqua-blue, but as we all agree, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” even if the beholder goes blind beholding it.
THEN the new owner erects an illegally tall fence on which he posts a warning sign that trespassers will be shot, the only sign like it in all the Anderson Valley. Of course just like any community we've got our share of grumps, but none who are likely to shoot you for knocking on his front door.
THE COUNTY ordered Mr. Friendly — Ms. Friendly, as it turns out — to reduce the height of the concealing fence so the house was visible. Which it now is. So, in lieu of the too-tall fence, Ms. F put in a summer corn crop, but now it's winter, the corn is gone and we get the full frontal of Bummer House and an inner fence apparently rigged to make it look like it's electrified, which it may well be.
WHO IS THIS GUY? Turns out the owner is not a guy, but a woman, although only a man has been seen on the weird premises, usually at night. A second younger man seems to be living in a rear building.
THE OWNER is listed as one Johana Elizabeth Aguilar of Santa Rosa who probably resides at 1598 Becky Court, Santa Rosa, 95403.
YO! MS. AGUILAR! Are there aqua-marine houses with boarded up windows and shoot-to-kill warnings in your neighborhood? Here in Boonville you’ve gifted us with the full paranoid monte — fence, boarded up and painted over windows, inner fake electric fence, concealing twelve-foot corn in the summer months, gun warnings, vicious dogs, cameras, stadium-quality night time illumination.
SPECULATION around town mostly goes like this: “If that nut is cooking dope in there she's certainly drawing a lot of attention to herself.” The consensus is that law enforcement's curiosity has got to be equal to ours, but I have to wonder on what pretext could law enforcement get inside the house? “It's the Sheriff! Open up. You're creeping out this whole town. We need to have a look around.” In the meantime, don't let your kids trick or treat as we all hope the place doesn't blow up.
A CONFUSED REPORTER called the other day looking for info on The Moonies, not seen in Boonville for at least 40 years. Some of us remember when there were so many recruits stuffed onto the Moonie Ranch at the south end of Boonville that on still summer nights you could hear the sad dupes chanting five miles away.
TARDILY AWARE after several years that as many as a thousand people were living on premises unfit for three persons, official Mendocino County began a leisurely campaign to limit the numbers of lost youth who could reside on the property at one time.
EVENTUALLY, the Moonies headed south to Sonoma County, converting their Boonville property to, of all things, a chinchilla farm. This enterprise was abandoned after a few years but not before a local high school kid liberated as many chinchillas as he could, none of which survive so far as is known because they don't do well in the winter months unless they're dead and stitched into coats. The property became the now venerable Sheep Dung Estates, which offers vacation accommodations to people traveling with their dogs.
ONE CAN UNDERSTAND why people become communists or fascists or liberals, but why would anybody want to throw in with a confused mishmash of Christian fascism overseen by a wacky Korean? The Moonie couple who ran Moon's Boonville chinchilla farm were both graduates of European universities. They were married in one of those mass Moon weddings in Yankee Stadium, with the Rev deciding who should marry whom, in this case a bride from Italy, a groom from Germany.
MOONIE RECRUITERS would lurk at the SF airport and the old Greyhound station downtown where they would offer backpacking youth a free week in the country. The “country” was an old sheep ranch on the southern ramparts of Boonville. Runaways from “The New Ideal City,” as the Boonville property was called, were constant, as were heart-wrenching visits from desperate parents trying to free their kids from the zombo-izing cult.
MOON HIMSELF, as we know, overcame universal public ridicule and condemnation to buy a Washington D.C. newspaper — The Washington Times — and, spreading lots of money around our alleged representatives, simultaneously bought himself respectability. Of a sort, the sort of respectability that gets journalo-hacks on the Sunday morning political chat shows to swap sleep-inducing opinions.
PARTING THE MISTS of times past, we find, at one time in the Anderson Valley, the Moonies in the east hills of Boonville, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng stockpiling weapons and mass murder plans in Philo, the Manson girls down in Navarro a year or two before the Moonies, Jim Jones teaching at AV Elementary, Tree Frog Johnson babysitting hippie kids in the west hills of Boonville, and armed nut groups like Tribal Thumb at various remote sites around the county. A few years later, the Anderson Valley could boast a Nobel Prize winner in Kary Mullis; a Playboy centerfold of the year, Donna Ronne; a Pulitzer Prize author, Alice Walker; and Angela Davis, a famous revolutionary with an up-market second home in the hills of Anderson Valley the envy of capitalists everywhere.
HAPPENED on a story from San Jose about noisy frogs. Noisy frogs? Noisy frogs. Neighbors of a South Bay lady named Connie Pranger called Animal Control to complain that the frogs in Connie’s fish pond were making so much noise the neighbors couldn’t hear their television set.
A SANE PERSON would opt for the sound of frogs, but let's not be judgmental here.
SO WHAT DID Animal Control do? They wrote Connie a ticket for maintaining an “animal nuisance” on her property.
“THE FIRST day I thought it was funny,” Connie says. “But the second day I got angry, and by the third day I got paranoid. What if they come and pour chemicals in the pond?”
OR A WINERY moves in next door and all the frogs die, which is what has happened in many areas of Anderson Valley? Someone in San Jose government realized the absurdity of going after Connie and her frogs, and government left Connie and the frogs alone. Don't know what became of the neighbors, but their beef about frogs so noisy they drowned out the sound of Love Boat re-runs seemed bogus from the start.
“WATCH IT, MAJOR!” I warned my administrative assistant who, as usual, was unaware the very real hazard posed by exclamatory incoming. “Exclamation marks are flying at us from all directions like telephone poles in a Kansas twister! Quick Get into your post office box.!”
AS WE TOOK COVER, violent punctuation pounded the outside glass, The Major said wistfully, “You know, boss, I might want to volunteer to teach reading at the Elementary School. I was a kid once.”
THE SCHOOLS, where exclamatory punctuation has always been comfortable, had advertised for reading tutors. Reluctantly, I agreed to give the would-be volunteer 45 minutes a week off the clock if he wanted to serve his community, but warned the old warrior not to get his hopes up. “Hate to break it to ya, Maj, but they’d put Richard Allen Davis on as a volunteer down there before they’d let you sit down with a kid and a book.”
THE MAJOR SIGHED, looking up at me with real hurt in his eyes, “They hate us that much, boss?”
TIMES a thousand, Maj. Whether or not the little savages can master a few simple texts or not is not the purpose of the enterprise; the purpose of the enterprise is secure employment for college grads, big salaries for people who should not be running schools, contracts for the blind architects who design the classrooms. Jobs! Major! Jobs and exclamation points! That’s the point of it all! (This episode of thwarted volunteerism happened prior to the present administration. Present admin would gladly welcome reading tutors, I'm sure.)
THE MAJOR ADDS: When I was living in San Jose in the 1980s I volunteered with a reading tutoring group associated with a local library for several years. They mostly handled high-school dropouts and a few high school grads who were either illiterate or functionally illiterate but who wanted to be able to read mainly for job purposes. I was assigned to a dozen or so mostly young Mexican men who had signed up for the tutoring. The organization required all tutors to go through several weekends of (silly) training using their materials. Unlike the training, the materials were pretty good. (Particularly useful was their 300 most used words list which they said constituted about 80% of all reading in English.) All of the tutees, being self-selected, really wanted to learn to read so there wasn’t any problem with motivation. I also spent several years as a part-time instructor teaching computers and major software applications at Evergreen Valley Junior College in San Jose with a specially developed “temporary” teaching credential they jiggered up for me. I’ve tutored a few local kids privately since arriving in the Valley as well. I’d be glad to do it again if the scheduling could be worked out. It’s shocking how ill-prepared most students are even though they have completed various coursework — on paper. I now have a unique set of skills and techniques which mainly revolve around finding out what the student is interested in and pursuing it in creative ways. It’s very rewarding watching it dawn on kids that what they think is difficult isn’t, if they just put their minds to it.
Be First to Comment