Valley People (June 6, 2024)

AV COACH JOHN TOOHEY:

I would like to take this opportunity to reach out to the community and its passion for the kids and let everyone know we very much need coaches for the next school year. Junior High Volleyball in the fall, Boys Volleyball in the Spring, Junior High boys Flag football in the fall, and we always need more assistant coaches for all sports and volunteers to drive to games.

We also are in constant need of help maintaining facilities. I’ve seen a lot of passion for the experience of students, there are a lot of opportunities to participate!

Thanks AV!

AV CHARITY INITIATIVE

Hello Anderson Valley families,

I am delighted to share with you the latest update on our charity initiative. Through the recent sales of household and garage items, we have raised funds to support financially challenged individuals in need of dental work in Anderson Valley.

If you are aware of anyone in our community who requires dental assistance, please do not hesitate to refer them to me. I will be more than happy to connect them with my dental office in Santa Rosa, where they can receive the necessary treatment.

It is important to note that our services are provided on a first-come, first-served basis, taking into consideration the urgency and severity of each case, as well as the budget generated from our previous sale, which currently stands at approximately $1,000.

I assure you that I will continue to make announcements as we conduct further sales to support individuals in our community who are in need of dental care.

Thank you for your ongoing support and involvement in our charity work. Together, we can make a significant difference in the lives of those facing financial challenges and require dental assistance.

With gratitude,

Hani Jamah

AKA Dr. Jay

THE BOONVILLE HOTEL

Summer is on its way….

the roses are blooming everywhere, we're jumping in the river, cracking the rosé and putting on our flip flops.

come see the last vestages of spring before we roll into a beautiful summer….

pssst..second weekend of June is surprisingly quiet.

use the code "lemonade" get 20% off your room stay. (June 7, 8, & 9th)

outdoor dining has begun!!

our Paella Sundays are back, now thru mid-October.

check out the menu & reserve a table on our website + the daily news in social media land.

in the garden

Fridays-Mondays 4-6pm

(no reservations needed)

the star on the front of the Boonville Hotel

Offspring, across the street is happening!!

we have seating outside on the our new deck, soon to have booths & shade cover.

serving our à la carte menu of handmade pastas, beautiful sides, main plates to share & of course wood fire pizzas.

you should know about the roast porchetta on the menu every Saturday Lunch,

it's worth the trip alone!

Open Tuesday-Saturday 5:30-8:30pm

Saturday lunch 12-3pm

Paysanne

Adding Mondays and Thursdays mid-June thru Labor Day weekends + open evenings w/Offspring

Along with everything else:

Perry's churning, housemade ice creams

top picks this month…

Boonville Barn Collective Strawberry IC

Peach Leaf IC

we have some beautiful new late spring, early summer drinks from our bar on nights the restaurant is open.

Along with friday & monday evenings 4-6 we are offering a simple bar menu perfect for a light meal.

we're serving our prix fixe menu, sourced from local farms thursday thru mondays during the warmer months.

Perry posts the menu online Wednesday afternoons for the upcoming weekend.

we've been here 36 years, and are planning for another 36!

thank you for being part of it all. hope to see you soon

MAGA HEADQUARTERS, SOUTH BOONVILLE

CONGRATULATIONS to the sixth grade elementary team for a great graduation. The parents and families were delighted.

Also, I have been given a lead on the tile mural restoration. Does anyone happen to have former staff member Chris Bing‘s phone number?

Hang in there and have a great rest of the week.

Louise Simson, Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

BOONVILLE BARN COLLECTIVE

Our Renegade Certified strawberries will be harvested on Monday and Thursday mornings. We don't have a regularly stocked farmstand where we sell our berries. Instead, we send out weekly emails when we have strawberries available where you can reserve a flat ($35) or half flat ($20) for pick up here at our farm. Send an email to Gideon@boonvillebarn.com to get added to the strawberry list and we'll be in touch when we've got strawberries to sell!

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

Take a moment and remember childhood June. Release adulthood June, when high season grows our to-do lists faster than a sweet pea vine shimmies up its trellis. Instead let’s channel lackadaisical June, end-of-school June, with Field Day students-vs-teachers kickball game vibes and a wealth of empty hours to fill before September.

Sure, adulthood has its perks. There’s something about financing a car or regularly serving square meals to one’s offspring that adds a dollop of satisfaction to life. But at the end of the day, it just can’t compete with the feeling of fruity popsicles freezing your teeth as the sun warms your bare shoulders, or singing with abandon in a car full of friends and the windows down, or sliding into a hammock with a juicy new book for the afternoon because summer is here, and that is what it is for——regardless of your age. So remember to get out and have some fun! We have a pile of suggestions below to get you started …

See you out there ~

Torrey, Holly, Dawn, & Lisa

ON MY COMMUTE from Marin to Mission Bay, I pass Funston Field in the Marina where I spent many happy hours of my youth, among them the day I met my first real curveball. I was 16 and playing in a winter league with my high school team supplemented with a few adult ringers to prevent us from getting blown out by a lot of off-season pros keeping themselves fit during the winter months by mopping up wanna be's.

SOME PEOPLE remember their first kiss, I remember my first curveball.

AT THE HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL in 1955 it was a rare pitcher who could boast a curveball with a big break or a fastball in the low 90s. These days, I read about Bay Area kids who have, as they say, major league “stuff.” So, there I was that memorable day at Funston, probably hitting fifth because I could still see and was a pretty good hitter, only rarely striking out and never, ever taking a called third strike, the specialty of a contemporary major leaguer named Brandon Belt.

THE OPPOSING pitcher was Marino Pieretti, whose name and bona fides I did not know at the time I went to bat against him. It was obvious he threw hard as he mowed down our first two hitters on fastballs. Cocky as hell as a ballplayer in my callow youth, maybe the most callow youth in the entire Bay Area at the time although there had to have been heavy competition, I could hit fastballs, although I'd only seen mostly high school fastballs and some semi-pros which, tops, were maybe in the 87-88 range. So I thought I could hit this guy, whoever he was.

I FOULED OFF Pieretti's first two pitches, both fastballs, and I was pretty sure if he threw me another fastball I could hit it. But he threw me a curveball which, as they say, “fell off a table.” That pitch broke so fast and so far I ducked clear out of the box as it landed perfectly for a called third strike. I'd never seen the likes of it and, as my teammates hooted at how totally I'd been fooled, I learned that Pieretti was a Triple-A ballplayer who was up and down from Triple-A to the major leagues. He'd played with the Dimaggio Brothers and had grown up in the same North Beach neighborhood as the Dimaggios.

NOW that ballplayers are millionaires, they don't play off-season semi-pro baseball against high school kids and other bushers, but in the 50s it was not unusual in the Bay Area to see guys of the Pieretti caliber throwing a major league curveball at a high school kid.

MARK SCARAMELLA REMEMBERS: By a class scheduling fluke I naively signed up for what was called “Group Games II” because Fresno State required a phys ed course in the mid-60s when I was a Freshman. All the other ones were called “Group Games I.” Turned out “Group Games II” was our varsity baseball team in the off-season, but for some reason they couldn’t call it that, it was just there so that the baseball players knew which one to sign up for. I was a competent college tennis player and had played some little league ball. When I showed up at the designated time and place I immediately realized what I had signed up for. I approached the Bulldogs’ long-time and nationally known manager Pete Biden (no relation to you know who). Biden’s Bulldogs were nationally ranked, most his top players went pro. I knew Biden casually and he knew me somewhat because his wife was one of my mother’s best friends and bridge partners. I told him I doubted I could contribute much to the team or its practice drills. But I was willing to give it a shot if he wanted me to. Biden suggested I try bullpen catching. Off I went. Somehow, I caught the first pitch. But being inexperienced I caught it flat in the middle of the mitt. It stung. So did the second and the third… Every pitch I caught hurt. I couldn’t get the hang of proper catching technique. Then the pitcher threw a curve. I completely missed it and it hit me in the chest. I couldn’t catch a curve no matter how hard I tried. After a little more of this torture, the pitcher threw up his hands up and said he wouldn’t throw to me anymore. So I went back to Biden who shrugged his shoulders and pointed over at the nearby tennis court with its big green wooden backboard. “Tell you what,” Biden barked, “Go over there and practice your tennis against that wall for an hour and a half three times a week and we’ll call it a B, Ok?” I agreed. I got a B in Group Games II and my backhand improved markedly.

WELCOME TO THEOPOLIS VINEYARDS where passion meets precision in the heart of California's Yorkville Highlands!

Founded by Theodora Lee, affectionately known as Theo-patra, Queen of the Vineyards, this boutique winery has been producing award-winning wines since 2003. Join them for a tasting and experience the bold flavors and rich history that make Theopolis Vineyards truly special. Book on their website with the link in their bio. Cheers!

FEEL LIKE DANCING? BOONFIRE will ignite the Arena Theater stage on Saturday night, June 1 at 8pm!

Boonfire’s playlist of originals and covers features a blend of reggae, rock, and everything in between. The entire band grew up with Jamaican music, 90s Seattle grunge, and old school hip-hop, giving their original compositions a unique musical perspective that is sure to excite fans of multiple genres.

Having just released a new album, “Complexity,” fans can expect many new songs in addition to known favorites at the Arena Theater concert.

“Complexity,” released in April of this year, seamlessly blurs the lines between reggae, rock, and everything in between.

Made up of Anderson Valley and North Coast locals, the band members came together in Boonville and have played NorCal rock & reggae since 2016, having performed at many venues throughout Northern California, such as the prestigious Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in 2017, sharing the stage with the likes of Steel Pulse, The Skints, and Nattali Rize. Point Arena fans also enjoyed them at Point Arena Cove Street Fair in 2023 during the Independence Day weekend.

Boonfire@Arena

Tickets: $20 general, $10 youth (18 and under)

Saturday, June 1, Doors open at 7:30pm, Show at 8pm

The Arena Theater Bar and snack stand will be open.

JEFF BURROUGHS: Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show

In the year 1936 horse racing was legalized in the state of California making way for the much needed funding for the fair to continue. The area for the 1st race track was located just west of the junction of highway 253 and highway 128, just south of Boonville. Consisting of about 5 + acres the land had been donated to the Fair and Apple Show by Mr. Edward Singley, a long time resident of Bell Valley. The horse races were actually sponsored by the State of California in the early years of the apple show that created a great deal of excitement for the residents of Anderson Valley. At one of these races a young man by the name of Delmar June entered his horse, much to the delight of the locals of Boonville. Delmar's horse was as fast as greased lighting but it seems that it had been deemed an outlaw and too wild to ride. The horse had gotten this reputation because of an incident at one of the race tracks in the Bay Area where the wild horse had killed the jockey. The horse had been sold and put out to pasture at Mr. Hotel's ranch just south of Boonville where Delmar June saw the horse streaking through the brushy meadows faster than anything that had ever run at the race track. Delmar begged and pleaded with his father, Harwood June, to buy the horse and after some time Harwood finally relented and paid the $25 for the wild horse.

Delmar was just a little too big to ride against the other , smaller and light jockeys so Delmar enlisted the help of a young black man ( probably Albert or George Jeans ) who was the right size and weight to ride the horse. The first day of racing at the track was on a Saturday and as Delmar and the young jockey readied their horse for the first race, into the arena came the most beautiful, slim legged and obviously well trained horses ever seen at the Boonville race track.

All day Saturday Delmar, his wild horse and timed young jockey were beaten soundly in every race and by the time Sunday rolled around, the odds on Delmar’s horse had risen to 100 to 1. Deciding that the jockey wasn’t using the horse to its full potential, young Delmar June saddled his horse with a big heavy high horned saddle and climbed up on it himself. The professional riders snickered at the young inexperienced Delmar as they all lined up at the starting gate.

A member of the Rawles family, having been up most of the night and still a little high, plopped down $5 dollars on Delmar and his so called wild horse. Holding a drink in one hand,and a hearty "thumbs up" with the other, the bell chimed and they were off. Delmar’s horse spooked and made a few circles in the dust before he could get it going down the track. To this day, people say there had never been so much screaming at the race track as when Delmar and his $25 wild horse rounded the first turn he had already caught up to the pack, and by the time they had reached the second turn Delmar was quickly gaining ground, weaving through the pack of well groomed and expensive horses. Then down the stretch they all came ,the crowd yelling louder and louder, the horses going faster and faster but as the checkered flag waved over the finish line, it was Delmar and his $25 horse that had won by a good 4 or 5 lengths! The crowd went wild and Mr. Rawles collected the largest amount of winnings ever recorded at the race track in Boonville.

MARSHALL NEWMAN: An old image of the Navarro Mill.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO’S essay on the necessity of American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue prompted me to listen to them again, remembering when I listened to them over and over again after I heard them for the first time because the odd guy in the room next door played them all the time, and in that house there were no secrets.

THAT HOUSE was in the 700 block of Scott was beautifully done from a time the wealthy in San Francisco lived on the heights up around Buena Vista Park from where you could see all the way east through downtown to the Bay and into the Berkeley hills. The beautiful house had fallen, not in beauty but in tenants, having been subdivided into low rent rooms. It's since been restored to its original gloriousness but in '63 it was home to me, a guy who threw himself down the stairs every night, a German baker from the old country who could barely restrain his fascist opinions, and Henry Cohen, a belligerent longshoreman and communist who claimed he'd fought with the Cubans when the counterrevolutionaries hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs.

HENRY seemed to take it upon himself to explain the ways of the world to me. “The trouble with you kid is you're not educated,” not that I argued the proposition, but he meant educated in Marxism whose basic texts put me to sleep and still do although I've mastered the Manifesto, finding nothing in it to argue with.

MY FIRST NIGHT as a tenant, the guy threw himself down the stairs from the shared kitchen. Alarmed, I ran out to the rescue. “Relax, kid, he does that every night. For the attention.” He did, too. Every night about 6. I thought about suggesting less dramatic attention getters for much larger audiences than me, the German baker and Henry the communist, but the stair-tumbler knew how to fall because he never hurt himself. I tried getting some personal history out of him but he refused to talk to any of us, and was out the door every morning to whatever job he held, not that any of us could imagine what he could possibly be employed at.

HENRY was embarrassing as hell to go places with, but I always invited him to wherever I was going because he could be depended on to do something unprecedented in my narrow experience. He'd get in political arguments on the street, constantly hit on women, some of them obvious senior citizens. But his topper was one night in Chinatown at a cheap eats place on Jackson when he walked out without paying, the waiter chasing him down the street. “They overcharged me, kid.” Which was impossible because there was nothing on the menu much over a dollar. I paid, but he refused to reimburse me, calling me a sap for being a party to a rip-off.

I KNEW I could count on Henry to disrupt a party I'd been invited to and sure enough he walked in like he lived there and grabbed a slice of birthday cake with his bare hands and proceeded to issue enough lewd comments on the young women present, including the birthday girl, that the birthday girl asked us both to leave. It had occurred to me that Henry's utter lack of restraint meant he was nuts but, as we've seen with so many people, he was a functioning nut, making good money as a longshoreman, properly regarding Harry Bridges as “the greatest man who ever lived.”

THAT interval was my rhapsody in blue, an American in San Francisco.

BILL KIMBERLIN

They are building a new church in the Valley and I stopped by to see how they were doing. Over the last year or so every time I think they are going to add walls, they don't. It would be kind of cool to leave it just like this and I might even attend if they would let me speak about what I think about religion. Tens of thousands of people die every month over religious wars somewhere and that has been going on at least since the Crusades in the 11th Century.

I WASN'T SURPRISED when a large number of Boonville parents complained that our intrepid school superintendent Louise Simson decreed no cell phones during school hours, as if the superintendent was not only being unreasonable, she was imperiling the safety of the budding unemployable. “Gosh, what if there's an emergency and…”

IMAGINE trying to instill the fundamentals of learning in the young savages while they're simultaneously watching socially undesirable antics on their cell phones?

WE were very lucky to have Ms. Simson in charge of the Boonville schools for the past three years. She was too good to last, especially in the context of imploding standards, academic and social. When you add up her many accomplishments, begin with the major improvements to the physical plants of the schools that she managed to find funding for while she radically improved the functioning of the schools themselves, establishing standards and an atmosphere of book-seriousness which, after all, is supposed to be the point of the enterprise.

ADD CANDOR to Superintendent Simson's long list of virtues. I asked her how Boonville kids were doing on state tests: “For last year, they are still overall very low, but every cohort made growth, which is what we look at. English language learner improvement is strong at the elementary when we moved to phonics. We’re making good progress in ELA. Math scores across the state and county are terrible. We have adopted new math curriculum to address that. The scores for this year should be available sometime in September.”

IT'S UNLIKELY to happen again, but some of you will remember the huge uproar at Mendocino High School's graduation when two grads, including one of the speakers, mooned the audience. The school's faculty hustled up a pious letter-to-the-editor in the Mendocino Beacon denouncing the mooners without saying what they'd done, as if bared buttocks were too horrible to specify. I thought maybe the miscreants had done something seriously bad, like delivering speeches pointing out that they were happy to be heading out from a place they held in contempt with a precise list of whys, perhaps a learning experience for their elders to at least consider.

GLAD TO SEE CUPPLES CONSTRUCTION going to work on a major rehab of the high school’s classrooms, the first, as Superintendent Simson has pointed out, “since the Eisenhower administration.” Rick Cupples is a graduate of AVHS and, in his time, a better-than-average hoopster, a starter on one of the best basketball teams ever out of Boonville, a team that included Charlie Hiatt, Gene Waggoner, and Leroy Perry among others.

NO SENIOR CUT DAY

Parents,

I am sure you all received Ms. Simson’s message from yesterday regarding Senior Ditch Day.

We have received multiple calls this morning to check out kids for appointments. We will need proof of their appointment tomorrow morning. That note will be their ticket for graduation. If we do not have a note they will not be able to participate in the ceremony.

(Please see Ms. Simson's message below)

“We are quickly approaching the end of the year. Seniors have been notified that a Senior Cut Day will result in loss of participation in Graduation Ceremonies. We have heard another rumor that a cut day is planned. Please be clear with your student not to do it, or your family will not have the privilege of seeing them participate in the graduation.”

(AV High School Presser)

THOSE SENIORS graduating from AVHS claiming that Ditch Day is a local tradition won't want to know there’s no such “tradition.” May have been an occasional senior class over the years who cut classes but not often enough to comprise tradition. Cruel fact is that if students aren't in school, the school doesn't get paid. Cutting classes, if it happens often enough, could cost the school district a job or two, and that wouldn't be fair, if there's a concern here about fairness. I’m glad the superintendent is standing fast on this one. Administrators of yesteryear most likely would have caved. I’m a little surprised that some parents are backing callow youth instead of the authority.

UNABLE TO COMPLETELY rid my computer of ads for pornography, this one popped up, so to speak, among this morning's e-mails: “Need a larger, more powerful penis?” Like, there's something wrong with Newsom?

WHO, not so incidentally, appoints members of the PUC, an appointed body that ought to be elected. Thank the Democrats for your PG&E bills.