THE LAST PRINT EDITION of the mighty AVA will appear on the 2nd of May. If you want to be included in the final paper-paper we must have your contribution no later than noon, Sunday, April 28th.
RENEE WYANT LEE comments on the weekend’s Benefit & fundraiser for Tyler Neil who died tragically of pneumonia at a young age leaving a wife and three kids in Yorkville: Thank you, Anderson Valley, for showing Megan and kids how we can love our own! Tyler would be so proud and appreciative! What a stellar night! Nichole, you are a force to reckon with! Cheers to you and everyone else that made tonight happen—far too many to mention! After all was said and done, I am even more grateful for Goober and Ginger making sure I got home safely home by giving me a jump. Feeling so much Valley love this weekend!
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MERRY KINION POOL: I am so impressed by the turnout tonight for Megan & her children. I don’t think there’s anywhere else that would show such love. Nicole Wyant, Terri Rhoades, Wanda Johnson, Renee Wyant Lee, Palma Toohey and so many others who rocked and showed true AV spirit. All the people who showed up to support was overwhelmingly amazing. So proud to be from such a beautiful place.
REMINDER that school is IN SESSION Monday! We look forward to seeing your student on time! We are excited to welcome them back!
Louise Simson, Superintendent
AV Unified School District
IT’S SPRING BREAK in Anderson Valley and kids have so few options for staying connected and active while their parents work all day. Looking forward to the day when we have a skatepark here -- a meeting place to be with friends, and something fun to do! This video from The Skatepark Project gets right to the heart of what a skatepark could mean for AV... Community connection and well-being. Gratitude to Tony Hawk and his foundation for spreading the goodness far and wide.
— Noor Dawood
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!
PETIT TETON FARM is open Mon-Sat 9-4:30, Sun 12-4:30. Along with the large inventory of jams, pickles, soups, hot sauces, apple sauces, and drink mixers made from everything we grow, we sell frozen USDA beef and pork from our perfectly raised pigs and cows, and stewing hens and eggs. Squab is also available at times. Contact us for what's in stock at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com. — Nikki and Steve
I CAME BACK from several hours at Mission Bay on a glorious spring Tuesday where me and mine were much encouraged by Dr. William Ryan's rosy prognosis that it appears likely I will stumble on for a few more years.
I've since learned that Ryan is a well-known surgeon, that I was lucky to have him in charge of my throat excavations. He's brief and to the point, and I can't say I've ever been more in awe of a person with his rare combination of genius and physical abilities. Think of all that goes into the making of a surgeon!
The doctor was followed by speech therapist, Erik Steele, an earnest fellow who assumes I'm eager to resume verbal communications. I'm not, but I'll master the various voice options just to keep everyone in my family happy.
Objectively reviewing my vanished powers of speech, and having written whatever's been on my fragged mind for so many years, including stories and messages to my grandchildren, why not continue as mostly mute? Speech seems much overrated, especially at my age, and lack of it saves the daily deluge of redundant conversation.
People ask me how I'm dealing with the pain. I'm not because there isn't any. The hard part of the recovery process is breathing through the hole in my throat, which involves a plastic larynx with a filtering plug at the exposed end of it via which a daily deluge of choking slobbery drool is emitted that prompt mild panic attacks when the whole works backs up, cutting off my oxygen. This slobber-drool period — a month of it now — is about to end to be followed up by several weeks of radiation “whether or not it's needed.”
Sleep has been difficult since it was thrown totally off by three weeks in the hospital with its round-the-clock interventions, one of which scared hell outta me. A cadaverous Asian woman loomed up in my face one 5am to pronounce, “Blood!” in such a peremptory tone I thought I was either being robbed of my precious bodily fluids or The Reaper had sent an assistant to carry me off. She appeared two mornings in a row. I dreaded a third but she'd apparently drunk her fill.
Doctor Ryan flatters me by saying stuff like, “You've done amazingly well. Whatever you've done all these years…” Whatever I've done? Self-indulgence leavened by daily bouts of fierce exercise. Pure luck except maybe for the exercise regime.
There is much that is mildly excruciating about all this, but for me the most overall painful has been psychic. The infantilization that comes with total dependence on young nurses for what for all my long life had been private has been… well, cringe-inducing. “We've seen it all, Mr. Anderson. Don't worry about it,” a young nurse laughed when I asked her to secure my gown to conceal my scarifying rear end. I've never seen it but its visual terrors are a safe assumption. The nurse got a big laugh out of my modesty. “Scarifying. I like that,” she said.
The man who saved my life says I should be able to fully resume exercising in another month, while in the meantime I walk more and more around the house fighting off a temptation to see how many push-ups I might manage. There's no cure for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
A READER WONDERS:
I got news that Jamie Lee — who used to write a few things for the paper before he went flat Earth — passed away at his place on Nash Mill in Philo — but haven't been able to confirm.
AV STUDENTS GO TO PUERTO RICO
Students in Ms. Cook's Spanish 3/4 class are experiencing the wonders of Puerto Rico this week with a variety of experiences including exploring the rain forest, visiting an FFA school chapter, a coffee plantation and more! The trip was underwritten by various donors including the Anderson Valley Education Foundation. Last year, following the trip, 13 of the 14 students that took the Advanced Placement Exam passed above the state average! Kudos to Ms. Cook for her planning of this meticulous learning adventure!
Take care,
Louise Simson, Superintendent
Anderson Valley Unified School District
LAST BOONVILLE CONCERT OF THE SEASON!
Percussionist Chris Froh blew everyone away at the Grange last December with his solo concert on all manner of marimba, vibes, drums, and electronics. This time he is back with several of his students, the UC Davis Percussion Ensemble! They will be carting in all manner of instruments like you've never seen before, and treating us to an amazing evening of virtuoso and vibrant music from all around the world. Proceeds benefit our music teaching program in local schools of Boonville. Please join us!
Saturday, April 13th at 6:30pm
Doors open at 6pm
$10-$20 sliding scale for over 18, under 18 free.
Anderson Valley Grange
COMMUNITY SERVICES DISTRICT BOARD MEETINGS used to be more lively than they are these days. Back in the early 2000s a local man attending a Board meeting for the first time complained that he didn’t like looking at then-Board member and Firehouse Construction Manager Anne Bennett’s t-shirt for the entire meeting because, he said, it would be distracting. Director Bennett’s t-shirt had the name of her Boonville-based vacation rental business in large letters: “SHEEP DUNG.” Then-Board Chair Judy Long suggested that the simplest solution would be for Ms. Bennett to take the offending shirt off. “No, you can’t do that,” replied fellow Board member Tex Sawyer. “That would distract me!” (Mark Scaramella)
WHEN I bought the Boonville weekly 40 years ago, I published the promise below on the front page of my first issue. Bold as it reads, bold is not how I felt. I didn't know if I could make a go of it, by which I meant sell enough papers to at least pay the print bill. Almost all the advertisers fled the first month, and the local authorities had to be hounded to send me legal ads rightfully belonging to Anderson Valley’s “newspaper of record.” The first of many ensuing libel threats appeared. Our downtown office was vandalized. My vehicles were destroyed. But the paper grew, and if it has never exactly prospered, it has survived for four decades. Why? Because right from the start, really good writers sent us really good writing, as lively a weekly collection as any publication in the country, and within a year or two the Boonville weekly was perhaps the best known small town paper in all the USofA, not that that specious fame brought in much hard currency, but it did bring in even more good writers. As all of you know, print has been swallowed by telephones, and lively prose of the type appearing here is less valued, and we're old and unable to continue the hard slog of weekly print production. I thank all of you who made this adventure the wild ride it has been, and I hope you'll stay with us in our cyber-form.
Intents and Purposes (AVA, January 4, 1984 Vol. 32, Issue #1)
This newspaper stands against wealth, privilege and all branches of local, state and federal government. These positions are subject to change should the management of the Advertiser become either wealthy or privileged. Since there isn't any wealth to speak of around here, and less privilege, government, especially local government, will be the focus of much attention.
We will print the stories that go untold in Mendocino County because of the timidity and allegiances of the existing press.
We are neither liberal nor conservative, believing that ideology is for idiots and dictators. We are enemies of dogma and rigidity for which we will roll out the big guns.
We will attempt to publish articles and features of interest to all segments of our diverse community, something for everyone.
We will present lengthy features on such subjects as the likely impact of the Roederer Corporation on Anderson Valley; what it is like to be an illegal Mexican worker in Mendocino County; items of historical interest; the economics and problems of: sheep ranching; licensed children’s homes; the Mendocino County Schools operations in Anderson Valley; the local schools: interviews with local movers and shakers; and lots of gossip, the life's blood of the small community.
lf there are stories you'd like to see, let us know: If we become shrill, boring or humorless, let us know. When we’re dumb or dishonest, let us know. Better yet, sue us.
But make no mistake about it, we fully intend to do as we please, mollifying no one, least of all our advertisers and subscribers.
Bruce Anderson, Editor
MARY PAT PALMER:
I'm thinking that a "slow walker" group would do well. So far there are four of us tho some are more sporadic than others. I am pretty much always out the door at 10. I live on Grey Fox, off of Lambert Lane. I walk from my place to the 2nd bridge, about 1/2 mile and 1/2 hour. Folks could meet me if they walk west on Lambert from 128. Afterwards a latte at Mosswood or just home. Let me know if you are interested - 707-895-3007, or mpatpalm@herbalenergetics.com.
BILL HOLCOMB’S BEAUTIFUL CAR
“Never had a hobby, but I love old cars,” Bill Holcomb begins, his eyes constantly drawn to a stunning 1956 Mercury convertible so perfectly beautiful in his driveway off Ornbaun Road in Boonville that it was almost as if the car were preening, somehow aware of the magnetic visual it presented.
“I like to look at ‘em, drive ‘em, and work on ‘em,” Bill adds for emphasis, making it clear that a hobby is one thing but his love of old cars is a passion, and passion is a big step up from mere past time.
Retired after years as a heavy equipment operator, and a skilled hands-on guy with an obvious gift for both making motor-powered things run and look good while they’re running, Bill explains that he found himself a little out of sorts after years of an 8-5 routine.
“I needed something to do. My wife, Eva, is always busy and there I was not so busy.”
One morning at the Philosopher’s Club in downtown Boonville, a pleasant little restaurant on the main drag sometimes known as the Redwood Drive-In, Bill Holcomb mentioned to Jerry Philbrick, the well-known Comptche logger, that he was looking for an old convertible to work on.
“I need something to do, Jerry. I’m retired. I want to fix up a convertible for car shows. Something from the 50’s” Bill remembers saying to the old logger one morning over a long breakfast.
Philbrick said he had just the thing sitting out in a barn at his Comptche ranch and Bill Holcomb nailed down the day and the exact time he could come out to have a look.
There, in Jerry Philbrick’s barn, were the remains of an American luxury car, a two-tone, 1956 Mercury hardtop convertible with the big engine. Dual pipes. Luminous radio dial. Continental tire kit on the back. The works. Make that a three-tone Merc; the interior was white, the lower body dominated by a dramatic orange called “persimmon orange,” the upper body a less dramatic but just as vivid blue.
Hey! It was the 50’s. We wore polka-dot Bermuda shorts and Argyle socks. Persimmon orange was an extremely cool color. Still is.
But in Philbrick’s barn, the Merc, the persimmon in its orange now a faded sunset orange-ish, existed in skeleton form. The car was a ghost of its once splendid self. An automotive has been.
Most of us wouldn’t have looked twice at the thing, let alone fallen in love with it. Bill fell, and fell hard.
He hauled the Merc’s exhausted carcass back to Boonville and went to work on it, visions of glorious re-birth keeping him at it long into the night.
“It had 85,000 miles on it when Philbrick pushed it up onto my trailer with his backhoe, “ Bill remembers. “In the 50’s 85,000 miles was a lot of use. You’d start thinking of trading them in at about 50,000 or 60,000 miles. I tore this one down to the frame. There was nothing left inside of it, but the frame was good, just rusted out where the water had sat in it.”
The vehicle’s history is as singular as its design. There are people who say all these cars were junk even when they were new, and it wasn’t until the imports that the American industry had to make cars that lasted longer than 50,000 or 60,000 miles. These people don’t get it. 50’s cars were about beauty and style, which is why people as different as Icelanders and Japanese pay top dollar for them.
“Jerry Philbrick,” Bill recalls, “told me he remembers the day his dad bought the car for his mom. Jerry was shipping out for Korea — the Korean War was on. Jerry and his folks had driven to San Francisco in Jerry’s car because Jerry was getting on a ship for the Far East. He was in the Army. The Philbrick’s planned it so Jerry’s parents would drive Jerry’s car back home to Comptche for him. The three of them were walking around on Van Ness Avenue waiting for Jerry to ship out when Jerry’s mom spotted this car in a showroom and said she just had to have it. His dad called the dealer and bought it right off the showroom floor for $3,800!”
But 43 years later, in Jerry Philbrick’s barn out in Comptche, the old Merc with the big engine — heck, gasoline was often as low as 11 cents a gallon — wasn’t in what you’d call mint condition.
“When Jerry’s mother no longer drove it,” Bill says, “Jerry’s dad put mud grips on it and drove it all over the ranch like it was a jeep. I probably took a thousand pounds of mud out from underneath it when I first got it back to Boonville.”
Bill Holcomb, as he washed away the accumulated years from the Mercury’s creaking frame, was a kid again himself, on his way back to that memorable era, the time of the great American automobile.
“No sir, this was a rich man’s car,” the 60-something Bill remarked, gesturing at his gleaming accomplishment in the driveway. “This is the car all us school boys dreamed of when we were driving Model A’s,” casually establishing his mechanical bona fides in an explanatory afterthought.
“In the 50’s all the schools had good machine shops and auto shops. A lot of us were lucky to graduate from high school let alone think about going on to college, so the high school shop classes taught us skills we could use to get good-paying jobs right out of high school. And darned if Ford didn’t make this car itself right in Los Angeles at the time. Had a factory there then, although I didn’t work in it.”
The long-time Boonville resident clearly knows his way around machinery. In a long career as a mechanic and heavy equipment operator, and blessed with the people skills that can’t be taught, Project Restore ‘56 Merc had exactly the right guy at the top. Bill quickly mobilized an impressive Anderson Valley team of helpers whose collective talents Bill organized to help him bring the Merc back to life. A surgery team, one might say, efficiently working on a patient.
Restoring a piece of art from 1956 is all art, and art is money. And time. And logistics. And automotive detective work. And research. And patience. And a virtual jeweler’s eye for detail, and nuance of detail. And the help of many skilled others, many of whom Bill found right here in Anderson Valley, a can-do community if there ever was one.
Bringing an old car back to life is not for lightweights. Bill had it all except, perhaps, the cash.
“There were times when I thought I might have to go back to work to pay for everything,” he laughs. “And there were a few times when I got the fish eye from my wife Eva about how much I was spending, but…”
But there was no stopping him. Bill jokes about going back to work to make this beautiful machine beautiful again, but one look at the final product and it’s obvious the guy would have worked three jobs to get it done.
Two years and four months and “at least $30,000” after being retrieved from its grave in Philbrick’s barn the Merc is all the way back!
And what a ride it’s been.
Maestro Holcomb on the re-creation of ‘56 Mercury Convertible, an American classic.
First, he did the research.
“I’ve got a stack of books probably two feet high. And I found the original book on this car. And I bought all the old repair manuals for it. Then, Tom Miller, a parts man, helped me track all the parts down.”
Knowing which parts were needed was a lot easier than locating them, which is where Bill’s formidable determination and Tom Miller’s savvy combined to form one unstoppable automotive sleuth. Together, the two 50’s-vintage Boonville men tracked down every part the old Merc needed and then they retrieved it from whichever obscure place in the country they’d found it. Bill and Tom conducted their search in every likely place, from libraries to cyber-space to remote auto wrecking yards. They even tracked down rumors of parts until they found every single thing Bill needed to authentically reassemble the beautacious ‘56.
Nearly every part thus relentlessly tracked down, captured and brought back to Boonville seems to have an intriguing story of its own.
“The hood came out of a place over in Williams,” Bill begins, reliving the discovery of each part of his four-wheeled puzzle. “Williams is a gold mine for us old car guys,” Bill adds with the slightly mad glint of a 19th century gold miner in his eyes.
“I got one piece of chrome out of New York. I called this guy up and asked him, ‘Do you have one of those lower chrome pieces for the bottom of the fender?’ He did. I bought it for $10 then, when it got to Boonville, I sent it over to a place in Marysville where they did all the chrome for me.”
“The interior? Ace Upholstery in Ukiah on Orr Springs Road. The one guy’s been sewing for 25 or 30 years. There’s just him and his brother. I was very impressed by the work they did. I told him I wanted deep tuck and roll, but he did it light tuck and roll because he said that’s the way it was done back in the 50’s.”
“He was right,” Bill chuckles. “The deep tuck and roll was what kids did back in the 50’s. I lived in Torrance when I was a kid. You could drive to Tijuana easy from there and get the tuck and roll done for two or three hundred bucks. But heck, a car only cost $1500 or so then. We’d save up and take our cars across the border to get our tuck and roll upholstery. Had to have it. But the rumor was that unless you stayed right there and watched them do it, they’d stuff horseshit in there and in the winter your seats would get wet and they’d start smelling! I don’t know if we believed that or not, but everybody said so.”
(“Tuck and roll” refers to a fancy form of car upholstery which was absolutely crucial in the 1950’s, cool guy vehicle. “Bitchin’,” they called it in LA.)
“That little light in the back I got that from a guy in L.A. named Ruben Martinez. He’s restoring a ‘56 Ford right now. Heckuva nice guy. I traded him a little piece of chrome off a ‘56 Ford I bought for parts for the Merc. He was thrilled because he couldn’t find that one piece of chrome he needed for that ‘56 Ford he was working on.”
“See that other little red thing there, the emergency light? I couldn’t find one anywhere, but I went up to Willits to get some parts out of an old Mercury and it had one on it. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
As the Mercury’s many parts were being assembled from near and far and redone for a luxurious new life on an old luxury car, a talented crew of locals pitched in.
“Mike Montana went through the engine for me. There’s a great mechanic right there. And he’s in Navarro! Lex Burger did the transmission. Lex is the other way out in Yorkville. Lou Fortin has an old Mercury over in Ukiah that he’s restored. He used to be principal of our elementary school in Boonville, and when he heard what I was doing he came over and helped me get mine right. Steve Rhoades, a Boonville guy, did the sandblasting on the body. Gotta be done right, not too fast, and Steve did a perfect job.”
Some of the stats: $5,000 in the chrome, $5,500 in paint, $3,000 in upholstery.
Labor?
Bill pauses, then, with a weary sigh in his voice, says, “I don’t want to even think about the cost of labor. I lost track of my hours a long time ago. I can tell you I’ve never seen one like this at any of the car shows. I’m told one in LA went for $80,000 and another one in San Francisco went for $70,000. Tell you the truth, I hate to talk about what I could get for it, though, because that’s not why I did it. I did it because I love it. It’s not for sale, and it won’t be for sale. I’ve always enjoyed going to car shows, but the one coming up in Willits will be my first show with something of my own to put out there. I already took it up to Willits not long ago to have the front end aligned, and they were more impressed by the dashboard than anything else I’d done! I took all the dash numbers out and repainted them by hand.”
As the grandfather of a pair of highly mobile, and highly eligible grandsons who live just down the road, Bill says he knows both of them would like to get behind the wheel, “But grandpa’s driving it for now.”
The Mercury’s distinctive three-tone paint job featuring “persimmon orange” was an adventure of its own.
“John Schnaubelt down at Airport Estates was a big help with the painting. If you want it to look right, to look real good, you’ve got to get professionals to do the finish work. Someday, I’m going to learn how to paint; I want to be able to spray paint a car. It doesn’t look too difficult but still you’ve got to know what you’re doing. They used to spray by hand back in the ‘50’s, especially a three-tone car like this one. Up here you’ve got blue, but we painted the persimmon first, and we had to mask it off so the blue didn’t run into it. And then we painted the inside white. I got scared when we started painting it. ‘Oh my god,’ I thought, ‘state orange!’ But when we put the chrome on it was just right. It’s quite a process. It took over a year at the paint shop alone to get the paint the way it’s supposed to look.
Project ‘56 Merc was meticulously accomplished in every detail, and radically improved in one — the radio.
“They wanted $180 to fix the radio. Well, the radio wasn’t very good to begin with in the 50’s cars, so I’m putting in a new one using a disk player with the rock and roll songs from the 50’s on it. You’ll turn on the old radio there behind the original dial on the dash and get a sound they didn’t have then.”
We didn’t dare go into it beyond a single oblique mention of Girls in relation to Cars circa 1956, but there was an instantly agreed upon statement that began, “If I’d had a car like this back then, and a sound system like the one that’s going in this car now, I’d…”
Any 50’s guy doesn’t need the rest of the sentence.
More prosaically, and to convey the painstaking process that went into the marvel now sitting on a quiet hill west of Boonville, a process requiring far more disciplined effort than luring the Queen of the Sock Hop out for a ride on a tuck and roll leather interior of an 1956 automobile, Bill points at a shiny fender.
“This one piece here took a whole day to put on. It’s perfect; you can’t tell where it was messed up,” he says, staring with a perfectionist’s eye at a seamlessly scrolled length of gleaming chrome.
Astonishing, really, this transformation of a rusted-out hulk of a car from half-a-century ago, but here it is in all its original magnificence, a little more than two years after Bill rolled it rusty, muddy, and battered, out of Jerry Philbrick’s Comptche barn.
Harley motorcycle people rightly claim there’s no sound as beguilingly original as the sound of a Harley engine, suggesting that its pistons make music to anyone with ears to hear it, but when Bill turned the key in the pristine ignition of his gorgeous ‘56 Mercury convertible, and its muffled twin pipes began to contentedly purr like lions after a very big meal, the sound was, well, transporting, and anyone who was young in that time is instantly 45 years younger.
Driving through Boonville, Bill down shifts at the Redwood Drive-in. Everyone looks out into the street and smiles. Everyone on the street stops and looks and grins at the beauty rolling by.
“More than 200 horsepower,” Bill chuckles. “Beautiful sound, isn’t it?”
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