Valley People (April 5, 2024)

VALLEY CHAT with Aaron and Marshall Newman

The Anderson Valley Historical Society presents another fun and informative VALLEY CHAT featuring Aaron & Marshall Newman. They will be speaking on Sunday, April 14 at 2pm. Their Chat will feature Stories of "El Rancho Navarro", living near Philo in the early 1960's. Aaron & Marshall's folks were the owners of the El Rancho Navarro youth camp during those years and they resided on the property. The property was on the west side of the Navarro River with the only access being a walking swinging bridge. Come enjoy the stories of their adventures. Join us in the Anderson Valley Museum Rose Room - Refreshments to follow and Admission is Free!

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE who understood that Louise Simson, our remarkable school chief, accomplished literal miracles here in Boonville, she specifically established a serious classroom atmosphere for our young people in addition to upgrading the schools' ancient bones by aggressively getting the money for long postponed infrastructure improvements. A whirlwind of focused energy, Superintendent Simson saw what needed to be done and did it. In the blob-like malaise of public ed, a statewide sinkhole of torpid time servers and incompetents, she was the proverbial breath of fresh air come to life.

I CAN'T BLAME HER for moving on, and undoubtedly up, because she did what was needed to be done in the Boonville schools and, I would guess, began looking around for a more challenging situation to apply her considerable talents to.

GIVEN the massive failures of larger school districts one would think the more conscientious school boards would have recruiters knocking at Ms. Simson's door, but so many public edu-establishments seem content with failure. Right here in Mendo I can name three school districts that would immediately benefit from a repeat dose of Simson.

I HOPE the Boonville schools don't revert to their pre-Simson sloth and lack of standards. She showed the way, supported a slug of energetic, committed staffers like John Toohey and Beth Swehla, cracked down on the contemporary evils of student drug use and cell phones, and generally instilled a new sense of pride in the local educational mission. I wish she was staying.

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PRINCIPAL, Cymbre Thomas, is another administrative loss for our schools. I understand her commute from Ukiah to Boonville must be onerous, but why a talented school administrator like her would want to take a job with the ultimate edu-blob, the Mendocino County Office of Education, is beyond me and Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

THE LATTER, when he was governor, took a look at the enormous public expense of county offices of coffee cups and motel in-services, and declared, “Vot is dis monkey business? Eliminate dem.” The edu-blob rose up, of course, and brandishing their devotion to “the kids,” beat back The Terminator.

HISTORICALLY, county offices of ed were central hiring sites from which teachers were dispatched by horseback to California's far flung one-room school houses. But the offices hung on as combined hiring halls and credential checks. As late as the early 1970s, MCOE consisted of Superintendent Lou Delsol and three or four secretaries who did the necessary work while Lou chatted with, in one instance, the likes of me, who'd wandered in off the street out of curiosity. During our ensuing coupla hours of desultory conversation, Lou's phone never rang, none of the secretaries popped in to say, “Don't forget your three o'clock, Mr. D.”

THESE DAYS what do we have out at MCOE's Talmage headquarters? Coupla hundred low energy worker bees not doing a single thing that couldn't be done cheaper and more efficiently by the individual school districts of Mendocino County.

EDITOR STATUS UPDATE: The Editor was released from the hospital last Thursday and is at home resting and recuperating. As The Editor put it: “Finally home after a month of high end medical torture.”

THE BOONVILLE HOTEL & RESTAURANT

Lilacs, forsythia, borage, forget-me-nots, dogwood, snowballs… Oh spring!! We are bursting around here with spring flowers. These gorgeous bouquets are created weekly with care by Rita and Misha...gems of humans. The flowers are grown at Philo Apple Farm & here at the hotel. One of the precious delights of April.

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Come Join us for a Winemaker Dinner with our good friends

@ Wentworth Vineyards, Sunday, April 21, 6pm. We'll be serving a 5 course meal along with Mark's wine pairings. You will get a chance to learn about all his beautiful work and projects. Mark and Katie + their littles; hold a big place in our hearts. Reserve your seat by calling 895-2201

Offspring
@ the Farrer Building

Oh goodness, this is too much fun. The guys went to Italy to eat pasta and came back with buckets of inspiration. Come eat the goods that Perry, Ben and John are putting on the table… it will not disappoint!

Open Tuesday-Friday 5-8pm; Saturdays noon-3pm + 5-8pm

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We have some beautiful new drinks from our bar on nights the restaurant is open, along with Friday & Saturday evenings 4-6 we are offering a simple bar menu perfect for a light meal.

We're serving our prix fixe menu thursdays thru Mondays during the warmer months. Perry posts the menu online Wednesday afternoons for the upcoming weekends.

We've been here 35 years, and are planning for another 35 

Thank you for being part of it all. It really is something.

Hope to see you soon!

DOCTOR ALVAREZ!

Ms. Swehla so is pleased to introduce Dr. Aaron Alvarez, PhD!

Dr. Alvarez is a AVHS Class of 2015 graduate and former AV FFA member. He graduated from Chico State in 2019. 

Dr. Alvarez earned his PhD, in Horticulture and Agronomy, from UC Davis. He completed research in Weed Science at UC Davis. 

He has accepted a position with Oregon State University Extension to do research in vegetables and specialty seed crops.

Congratulations Dr. Alvarez, PhD!

JOHNNY SCHMITT

I will miss the proper paper for sure, but glad to see the Editor leave on his own terms. The AVA is one of the things that brought us up here, our family used to sit in Yountville and read the paper together before we made the move up. Bruce Anderson has never been anything but a gentleman to me, and his forum for public discourse, though at times unnerving, was what helped create such a “unique” community. Thanks to his whole family, and the Major of course, for years of hard work, dedication and the occasional shitstorms that went with it, lol! The last of a breed for sure…

JOHN TOOHEY

Junior High Soccer Needs Refs

The Anderson Valley Junior High Soccer team needs officials for our home games. The officials that usually support our games do not have anyone available. If anybody has knowledge of the game and can help, please contact me here or at my school email jtoohey@avpanthers.org. See separate Soccer schedule . Thanks. 

I READ HARPER'S MAGAZINE regularly for decades. In all that time, I can't remember reading anything that annoyed me as much as a piece years ago by William Hamilton called “Day of the Locust: A new pest threatens to wipe out the California wine industry.”

HAMILTON was a well-known cartoonist for The New Yorker and the New York Observer. He drew those mostly unamusing, but always admiring, depictions of the wealthy. As most of us know, the wealthy are inherently unamusing unless somebody at the Edith Wharton ability-level has them in her sights. Otherwise, they're as dangerously savage and as unfunny as a full-moon boogie on the Albion Ridge.

ANYWAY, Hamilton is from St. Helena, wine industry ground zero. His Napa County origins seem to explain his drop-fall reverence for the new moguls of jive juice. Read the thing for yourself, of course, it’s probably still on-line, but Hamilton leaves out about half the wine story — Mexican labor. Not a single mention of Mexicans in the entire piece and only two mentions of “monoculture,” neither of them in relation to monoculture's responsibility for vine-vulnerable pests such as the glassy-winged sharpshooter he and his wine industry pals were so worried about at the time.

ACCORDING TO THE HAMILTON-HARPER'S version of NorCal wine history, these really cool people from banking and corporate law, reinforced by a few late arriving show biz and star athlete types, saved Napa's hillsides from being converted into vertical suburbs. Moreover, if it weren't for these really, really cool people from finance and law America would never have produced the wines that beat out the French for best booze back in whenever the hell, thus hastening the vinification of Napa but preserving its hillsides for sterile metal stakes rather than houses for, well, you know, commuters and other undesirables. 

IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE MONEY to buy into Napa, you buy land in Mendocino County, especially Anderson Valley. Here, there are no environmental restrictions or other impediments to people who say things like, “This is my vision” as they help themselves to our streams, poison the land, pipe in NPR, and rip off Mexicans. Labor? Get yourself a B. Traven novel for an update. No, my friends, here in Mendoland, we get the $5 million fortunes and the low-end trust-funders, the latter once known as remittance men. We get the guy who pays a mil for a hunk of undeveloped hillside, pays another mil to build himself and his blank-faced wife a 10,000-square-foot box where there's enough room to keep them both from golden year homicide, invests a big chunk of the rest in a vanity vineyard, then croaks before he can bottle his first jug of Chateau Cancer-Vision.)

HAMILTON'S piece gave us a couple of cookie cutter characterizations of stereotypical enviro-nuts, and even an interlude of wishful thinking, ultra-vi division, when he makes it clear that he hopes a hearing room full of wine execs and vineyard owners will physically assault a Sierra Club couple — non-wackos hated by the Napa vintners for both their effectiveness in checking industry excess and for their intrepid willingness to complain directly in the industry's fat, choleric faces. Hamilton wants it to appear as if the wackies are the only people alarmed at the industry's numerous crimes, although a lot of upscale and self-alleged enviros do in fact look the other way when the chardonnay charlatans do their thing. (Mendocino County's debased public radio station gets lots of wine industry money. In exchange, the industry gets a public radio free pass, as do many lesser local evil-doers.)

AMONG THE MOST OFFENSIVE assumptions of this unrelievedly offensive piece was the assertion we hear more and more here in Mendocino County: If it weren't for the wine industry the hills would be covered with houses. Harper's editors let this one slide? A once golden hillside covered with metal grape stakes is a superior visual to the carport? And either metal grape stakes or the carport is the choice? The only time of the year a vineyard is attractive is two weeks in the fall when the leaves turn, and even then the vista isn't all that attractive in the industrial ag context of thousands of meticulously (and chemically) maintained vineyard marching in perfect formation. 

THE WINE INDUSTRY is a heavily industrialized business wholly dependent on people whose exploitation is as thorough as it was in their native land. Environmentally, the wine industry uses literal tons of annual pesticides whose long-range effect has lead to one self-inflicted industry plague after another, the glassy-winged sharpshooter just one of them. May this much-maligned little beast multiply and prosper! 

WHILE SPEAKING TO A YOUNG MEXICAN WOMAN I happen to know casually in a local store a few days ago, she suddenly asked me if I thought the container ship crashing into the Francis Scott Key bridge outside Baltimore was intentional or known in advance and, if predictable, therefore the authorities must have allowed it to happen. I said it looked like a terrible but simple accident, why? She replied, “What about seem-sone?” Seem-sone? I asked. I don’t understand seem-sone. She fiddled with her cellphone and showed me some pictures of Homer and Bart Simson and so forth. Hmmm… Stumped, I asked her what the Simsons could possibly have to do with the Baltimore bridge? She replied that she saw on twitter or tiktok or something that the Simsons had predicted the collision and it could have been prevented. I told her that I wouldn’t base any opinions about the real world on the Simsons. She shrugged and seemed to accept my answer and went on about her business in the store. 

Later I looked it up.

Sure enough, it turns out that “Many conspiracy theories surrounding The Simpsons and the Baltimore Bridge collapse have emerged on social media.” And they have to do with AI. Oh great. Now we have to debunk preposterous on-line theories from AI cartoons on top of the other preposterous human theories on the internet?

The above links (and many others) seem to take the Seem-sone theory seriously enough to require debunking: “In the wake of this catastrophic incident, several conspiracy theories linking The Simpsons to the Baltimore bridge collapse are making rounds on social media. However, such claims are false…”

(Mark Scaramella)