POOR OLD JOE, looked like what he is — old and frail — as he slurred his way through false reasons for exiting the 2024 campaign, claiming he could serve another four years if he wanted to. Saturday he said he was running, Sunday he said he was out. Why? Because he was shoved out. But he said he chose to “pass the torch” to Vice President Kamala Harris because he believed it would unite the country and save democracy, the grim fact being that the country is now forever un-unite-able. “I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America's future all merited a second term,” said Biden, a statement not even proximate to the national reality. Biden's entire message, like his political party, assumed that we're all as cynical and stupid as the Democratic shot callers.
WELL, SHUT my mouth. Our congressman, Jared Huffman, in perhaps the boldest move of his career, is boycotting Bibi Netanyahu's appearance before Congress. I had predicted he'd be there with the rest of the mass murderer's enablers. Kamala Harris, president in waiting, will also be among the missing when the world's lead killer of women and children appears before his congressional funders, but will of course see the butcher of Gaza later in a “private meeting.” She almost had an Atta Girl, but it's only the first of many treacheries from “the first woman of color” who will inevitbly lose to the first white man with orange hair.
AMONG THE MANY alienating developments of my long, estranged life, count the loss of Mendocino County's justice courts, courts convenient to the people who live in our far-flung county to spare them the long trip to Ukiah. It was the final step in a slo-mo process that began when the state legislature, mostly lawyers, decreed that only lawyers could be judges. Non-lawyer judges, you see, couldn't be trusted to know right from wrong, fact from fiction, truth from untruth.
WE DID FINE — better in my opinion — with non-lawyers on the bench because they knew everyone in the communities that elected and trusted them to be honest and fair. No one had formally complained about “lay” judges, but lawyers always know better, especially when they see an unguarded path leading straight to big, easy bucks and life sinecures.
THAT LAWYERS-ONLY LAW eliminating outback judges was particularly beneficial to Mendocino County's starving legal practitioners because overnight it created big pay judge jobs for local lawyers barely scratching out a living. By fiat, the lucky lawyers elected to justice court sinecures became Superior Court judges, and Mendocino County justice was suddenly more just than it had ever been, correct?
ONE-DAY-A-WEEK justice court jobs in the Mendocino County outback could now be parlayed into handsomely rewarded travel around the state as fill-in judges at rates of compensation unavailable here at home where the lawyers were many and the work was little unless one was in good with the County Courthouse and could latch on as “alternate public defender” or as court-appointed rep for the daily catch of walking wounded arraigned every morning for the crime of being unable to function and/or protect oneself in a modern technological society.
ALTHOUGH SWINDLED out of being able to elect non-lawyer members of our own communities to sort out our legal affairs, we still had courtrooms just down the road with a lawyer judge presiding. Small claims and other local beefs could be resolved here in Boonville with the lawyer-judge, often an up-from-hippie dude who privately sneered at the laws he had no difficulty slapping onto his neighbors, but we could still get to court in the place where we lived.
AND THEN the justice courts themselves were eliminated, but not the judge jobs that went with them. Everything from then on went to Ukiah or Fort Bragg. The lawyer coup was complete with the announcement that outback courts were over. Over the hill we went to the county seat, lovely Ukiah.
LOGICALLY, it would seem, with all the outback courts consolidated in Ukiah and Fort Bragg, that the judge jobs that went with the eliminated outback justice courts would also now be eliminated, but instead, and ever since, we've got more judges per capita than any population our size in the state — one judge for every ten thousand people, or one judge for every five thousand citizens if you exclude children.
IT WOULDN'T be so galling if the judges weren't the arrogant, marginally competent characters they are, wholly insulated from public accountability, hidden behind an administrative apparatus that grows larger every year in what seems to be exact proportion to courtroom dysfunction, not even mentioning the brand new County Courthouse nobody but them wants that will accommodate only them, no other county offices, not even the DA's office.
ERNIE PARDINI
I just became aware that our county board of supervisors gave themselves another raise. As I sat on the bank of the Navarro River near my home in Philo in the sweltering heat, wishing I could cool off with a dip, looking at the moss filled trickle before me in a year with near record rainfall which should have guaranteed swimable conditions well into the fall, a hangman noose seemed more appropriate than a raise for what they've allowed the wine industry to do to our once beautiful river. Just saying.
A READER WONDERS: I just noticed that Eyster wished you a happy 85th birthday on your Facebook page. Has he buried the hatchet?
ED REPLY: It’s step one of a plan to lure me into his basement office in the Courthouse to finish me off. He's tried it before but I always made sure I had witnesses going in.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] I love it when these " experts " start predicting with absolute certainty the outcome of elections several months ahead . The only thing certain about politics is that it is a very uncertain profession . A candidate can be the darling of folks today , then something happens , in the space of 24 hrs , a video from the persons past , a badly worded comment , either from the past, or present day , a " revelation from somebody who knew the candidate way back when , with an unsettling truthful story , etc , you get the drift ? and then the same supporters, media , anchors , are like " what that sonaf……, and hey presto , the game has just changed , so personally , I take these " expert predictions " with what they deserve , an enormous truckload of salt .
[2] I’ve been to a shooting where someone took a shot to the liver. Not really much external bleeding. Internally, yes. He was dead in minutes. I had a guy who was stabbed. We treated him for one stab wound. Turns out he had maybe 12-13. I never found them. Piss poor primary survey on my part. He lived. Shit happens that is stranger than you can imagine. Believe it or not everything is not some grand conspiracy.
[3] Frick v Frack. Smoke & mirrors. Wall Street makes gobs of money regardless of which party is in the White House.
Divide & conquer.
Dems vs. Republicans
Saturday TV Rasslin’. When the crowd goes home and the cameras stop, the “Good guys” and the “Villains” all drink beer together and laugh at us rubes paying the bills.
[4] Olympics used to be watching kids, amateurs matched against each other as the products of their countries. When you saw a kid that worked for hours on end fulfill their dreams with a medal, it was heartwarming.
Today, no kids hardly, professionals, political agendas, protests, arson, way overdone ceremonies, decaying venues when done.
Nah, I am not watching any of it. Not entertaining at all.
Recommendation, went and saw Twisters, good story, excellent special effects. A guy actually runs his truck into a tornado and anchors himself into the ground.
[5] HOUSING, an on-line comment:
When building permits alone run $30k plus, not to mention all the studies etc., just permits and studies often run 25% of a project yet those fees go where? Inspectors are still not inspecting fields where their experience lies. Hell, one building inspector had a degree in abstract art but had to have us explain what we did and why; not even sure he understood what we told him from the lost look on his face as he signed the work off. It is the red tape that runs costs way up. It is the new green building codes that adds tens of thousands of dollars per unit. Cost overruns happen all the time in part due to the extreme amounts of time that passes between the bidding and the work as material prices change at such rapid rates, not to even mention material requirements, i.e., HVAC. Starting the first of the year puran is changing meaning that if you have a HVAC system to install if you bid it now but don’t get to do the work till after the first of the year, well you just lost all if not even more than your profit. Labor keeps climbing as well. Can’t tell someone with skills and tools that you are paying the same as the fast food peeps when all they have to do is show up stoned and ask if you want fries with that? Insurance keeps increasing as well as fuel costs then there are things like PG&E requiring and charging for engineering studies to ensure that increased load can be handled by its grid. And boy, howdy, look the f out if it can’t because your project will be without service until you pay to upgrade their grid at your expense on their time table. Just to add 4 feet to a riser was going to run $10k for their studies and such, just so that a man could park an RV in his driveway without having to worry about the overhead lines.”
[6] I bought a compound bow at a local second hand shop for $7. Then I picked up a dozen dowels at a discount store and a bunch of nickel silver spoons at Goodwill for 25c apiece. The spoons I’m fashioning into arrowheads, and for feathers we have plenty of wild turkeys around here always dropping feathers. So far I have 3 arrows complete, with about $12 invested into the whole project. Like I explained to my wife when the Zombies show up it's gonna take more than lead to stop them, it's gonna take silver, German Nickel Silver made in Meriden, Ct.
[7] I’m a heterosexual – always have been, always will be in whatever time I have left on this good, green Earth.
I grew up in a bygone era where homosexuality was not acceptable to the masses.
I saw how gay men were totally discriminated against, and it was not pretty.
In my 20’s I happened to meet a few gay couples. They were certainly different, but I found them more sweet than not. Unlike today, they weren’t in your face, nor were they pedophilic. They just wanted to live their own lives in peace.
These kind of gays deserve to be left alone. To lump them all together is not using your head, and in fact intolerant, imo.
What we’ve been seeing the last several years with the screaming
flamboyancy and pedophilia, to me is a reaction to sudden freedom.
I don’t like the way they’re doing things now, but I understand why.
God condemned them – but that was in the past, when it was necessary for every able-bodied person to try to procreate. Even male masturbation was a sin – spilling your seed was a waste and bad.
But now it’s different.
We ought to be tolerant. It’s cruel to not be. But I don’t condone men forcing themselves on under-age boys, nor do I condone depraved flaunting of one’s homosexuality.
[8] Dear America. While you’ve been preoccupied with your domestic politics, who shot JR, oops..I mean DJ, whether Kamala is smart enough to run the show, or whether single cat ladies should gather up their pitchforks and march to wherever it is JD Vance lives…. the rest of the world yawns and moves on.
WITH THE MAGATS calling us Marxist liberals (sic) and radical socialists (double sic), a reader asked me to recommend some books on radical lit. I replied that I had stumbled around the stacks for years trying to find a readable history of the Russian Revolution, defining “readable” here as a history that didn't put me to sleep by the end of the first paragraph, but here are the ones I've read all the way through.
I NOD OFF EASILY, though, and am hardly an authority on either the subject of the Russian Revolution or expedited reading on it, but I'd begin the way I began, which was with pre-Rev creative lit — Chekhov primarily — to get a feel for what Russia was like before the Bolsheviks took over. If you can find a copy of Chekhov's Czarist-commissioned non-fiction report, “The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin,” which I read only a few months ago for the first time, you might agree that it's as good a picture as any on the conditions that inspired the revolution.
LENIN: THE NOVEL by Alan Brien, a British writer, based on the life of Lenin is also a painlessly quick crash course in the history of the Russian Revolution as seen through the eyes of Brien’s brilliantly re-created Lenin. It's one of the few novels I've read based on an historical figure that has seemed consistently plausible against the known facts.
FOR STRAIGHT HISTORY, there's ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’ by John Reed, Oregon's finest son. He also wrote some short stories collected under ‘Daughter of the Revolution and Other Stories’ that are useful in understanding what the revolutionary period was really like. (The cornball movie, ‘Reds’ was based on Reed and the RR.)
IF YOU'VE GOT lots of time and serious staying power, Trotsky's version of the Russian Revolution is well worth the effort. As a guide to the post-revolution civil war period, the stories of Isacc Babel are unsurpassed, so supremely surpassing that Babel was eventually executed by Stalin. Of course there's ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and all the books by Solzhenitzen, which should be read with one eye on the crank factor he brings to his work, not that it's for the likes of me or anyone else to patronize the old boy, brave as he was all those grim years he was on the receiving end of perverted socialism.
I ALSO RECOMMEND a couple of histories by a British historian named Antony Beevor: ‘Stalingrad’ and, I think, ‘The Fall of Berlin.’ Both these books give you a good sense of Soviet Russia at war. (And also give you the full sense of Hitler's incompetence as a military strategist; Stalin was much the superior of the two.) Edmund Wilson's ‘To The Finland Station’ is the best overall book on the revolution I know of; it's available at most used book stores still. (Wilson's book on the literature of the American Civil War — ‘Patriotic Gore’ — is the best overall account of that pivotal cataclysm so far as I'm aware, conceding the obvious limitations thereof.)
THERE'S NO WAY to recommend books on the Russians’ role in the Spanish Civil War without getting into fights with at least a dozen AVA readers, but ‘Homage To Catalonia’ by Orwell is very good from the anarchist/unaffiliated radical perspective. There are also lots of good memoirs by American and British communists who fought in Spain that discuss the complicated politics of it from the opposite perspective of Orwell, including two by men I happened to have known — the late Harry Fisher and the late Alvah Bessie. Lots of contemporary scholars and crank leftists, looking back at Spain all these years later, tend to dismiss the Lincoln Brigade as dupes, Stalinists, whatever. Not me. They went to Spain to fight fascism and that's what they did, although they too mostly came to have second thoughts about Stalin's role there.
ONE MORE BOOK I found in a long gone Frisco used book store that's probably unknown to anyone but me and three or four junior professors is called ‘An American Looks at Karl Marx’ by William J. Blake, is a native of Missouri who went on to become a big shot capitalist as a director of the London Scottish Banking Corp. and editor of the long-defunct, ‘Magazine of Wall Street.’ Mr. Blake, it is safe to say, was not a communist, but his 1939 book on Marxism is the most lucid I've read — the only one I've read because all the others I've tried had me snoring half-way through their prefaces, and catatonic by the time I got to the opening chapters.
ONE OF AMERICA'S OLDEST VINEYARDS, Ohiio based Meier’s Winery which sells about 30 different labels, has filed for bankruptcy - putting 134 years of wine making expertise at risk, a blow to the homegrown wine industry.
(SF Chronicle)
KATRINA BARTOLOMIE: CALLING ALL CANDIDATES
If you are interested in serving on one of the County’s Elected Special District, School District or **Municipal boards, please call the Elections office at (707) 234-6819. You can be sent an Application For Candidacy, once we receive your completed application we can send you paperwork that can be completed outside the office. Candidates need to bring their completed paperwork into our office and complete the final step. The actual Declaration of Candidacy form must be completed in our office, we must administer an oath to the candidate. If all other forms are completed when you arrive, your time in our office is about 10 minutes.
Municipal boards: please contact the City Clerk in the particular City for filing information.
Candidate filing ends August 9, unless an incumbent fails to file, then the filing for that seat is extended through August 14 for non-incumbents.
Call the Elections office if you have any questions at (707) 234-6819 M-F; 8am-5pm
MICHAEL WEIST: Hello, I’m surprised you didn’t mention China Mieville’s excellent book- ‘October.’ I believe you bought this book soon after it was published, as did I.
I sort of remember that we discussed it. PS Mieville published an annotated edition of the Manifesto last summer, but I haven’t read it yet.
TOTALLY AGREE, Mr. Weist. ‘October’ is right up there with Reed's ‘Ten Days,’ better actually, because it's more accessible to the everyday reader with no particular interest in the subject. I haven't read his annotated ‘Manifesto’ but have it on my list. At the mo, I'm in the middle of ‘The Wide, Wide Sea — Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook’ by Hampton Sides. The title of this absolutely enthralling account of the famous explorer and his 18th century times sounds kind off-puttingly academic, but it kept me up very late turning the pages. All I'd known about Cook was that he'd met his end in Hawaii and, by all accounts, had it coming after provoking the natives. Cook's voyages — he undertook three — were not that long ago by our speeded up standards — when half the world was still unknown to European explorers. George the Third had just dispatched an armada to put down George Washington and the boys in upstart America when Cook set forth. The Cook team was the very definition of intrepid. Imagine sailing out in turbulent seas in a 90-foot wooden boat with a single remit — find the mythical Northwest Passage. If you read one book this year, make it this one.
YOU'LL never read it in the Press Democrat, but Sonoma County atheists have included Luther Burbank, Jack London and Charles Schultz. Yes, Charles Schultz of Snoopy and Charlie Brown! And if this information isn't shocking enough to the town that has built a tourist draw around the cartoon figures, their creator, Mr. Schultz, was a socialist.
SONOMA COUNTY'S late Irv Sutley, told me that when Doc Spock of child rearing fame appeared in Santa Rosa during Spock's run as the Peace and Freedom Party's presidential candidate back in '72, Irv, functioning as Spock's host at Peace and Freedom Party events, remembers arranging a meeting between Schultz and Spock at Schultz's request.
MENDOLAND'S once plentiful cast of public cranks doesn't seem to have been replaced. I find myself nostalgic for The One True Green, Richard Johnson, the only Northcoast Green ever to have been arrested for riding his bicycle drunk. Rummaging through my memory box, I found this wonderful letter-to-the-editor from the late OTG:
EDITOR: “Like no other issue, gun control is a smoldering ember of the civil war, with the north favoring regulation, and the south opposing it. While gun proponents argue their case from the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, they are really founded on the terms of surrender at Appomattox, in which the rebel army troops were allowed to keep their weapons “for hunting.” We all know who they hunted.
“This weekend in Ukiah, there will be a gun show at the fairgrounds. If you want to see the militia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the gangbangers and the corrupt gun dealers, they will all be there. There will be a lot of confederate flags and bumper stickers declaring Hillary Clinton Wanted Dead Or Alive.
“The Republicans in the House have announced the assault rifle and automatic gun ban passed ten years ago will be allowed to die next year without bringing it to a vote. There will be virtually no limit on guns, other than the registration requirements which can be avoided by buying direct from a dealer at a gun show.
“There was a recent court decision which allows local governments to ban gun shows in their jurisdictions. But the Mendocino County supervisors have never heard of it. Also, the fairgrounds are operated by the state of California. They could also ban such events on their property. So why don’t they?”
WHY IS THERE A HOUSING SHORTAGE? Why aren't there a range of beneficial public programs that would lessen life's heaviest burdens for most of US? Apart from the grim fact that our lawmakers are funded and owned by the people who own the country, but also because not all Americans pay their fair share of what was once assumed to be our common load, that the proportional tax system that reigned when America was at its most prosperous, when working people could afford a cabin at the lake and vacations on one salary. All that top-to-bottom prosperity has been rolled back, all the way back. People who make $80,000 a year pay proportionately a lot more in taxes than the people who make upwards of $500,000. The well-to-do and their reps from our interchangeable political parties have, since FDR, gradually exempted the rich from toting their fair share of the social load.
ATTN CHEECHAKOS: As a former wilderness ranger, I can tell you it’s embarrassing to get hurt and need help in the silent spaces in the land out back of beyond. If you live out there, you shouldn’t need help out there – you should be the one they call for help instead.
On the other hand, if you’re a cheechako (greenhorn) who got hurt because you did something stupid, it should be embarrassing that you’ve made people who know what they’re doing out there put their lives on the line to save your sorry ass. I hated dealing with the “Oh look see, ain’t nature Grand!” people. They’re hearts are in the right place but they can get everyone into trouble in an instant.
LAKE MENDOCINO’S water belongs almost entirely to downstream Sonoma County because Sonoma County put up most of the money to build the dam, creating the lake back in the middle 1950s. Since the halcyon days of ‘55, inland Mendocino County’s population has grown, and continues to arrive via the 101 corridor even though existing water supplies are tapped out. Old Ag and New Grape Ag wields political influence out of all proportion to its numbers; it also uses water out of all proportion to even a semblance of fair distribution of the resource. Any resolution of the water problem will be impossible without the approval of this small group of water hogs and their rubber stamps dysfunctioning as the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors.
THE CALIFORNIA APPELLATE COURT struck down a typically greedy plan by the Sonoma County Water Agency to increase its annual diversion of water from the Russian River by 26,000 acre-feet to serve up to 150,000 new customers in rapidly growing areas of Sonoma and Marin counties. The plan was challenged by Friends of the Eel River and other environmental, sport fishing and Native American groups because it assumed that the existing diversion of water at Potter Valley from the Eel River to the Russian River, which accounts for most of the Russian River’s summer flows, would continue unchanged despite their severe adverse impact on the Eel River’s imperiled salmon. Several endangered species are among the fish populations that have been harmed by PG&E’s historic diversion of 180,000 annual acre-feet annually from the Eel River to the upper Russian River, an estimated 98% of the Russian River’s summer flow. Before the diversion at Potter Valley in the early 20th century, the upper Russian River went dry as far downstream as Healdsburg.
NOT MUCH beyond that members of its board of directors had been caught building McMansions on ecologically precious land the Conservancy had supposedly bought to protect it from development, which right there would cause any right minded donor to cease directing cash money anywhere near the plush Arlington offices of the million member acquisition group.
WE’D ALWAYS THOUGHT the Nature Conservancy was the only reality-based environmental group in all of capitalist America. You want to save the environment? Buy it, because that’s the only sure fire means to spare it from the limo brains, and the only strategy the limo heads and every other free enterprise American approves of.
BUT AMERICA, also being the land where millions of delusionals grow up thinking that limo rides, big ugly houses in big ugly neighborhoods of big ugly houses, strategic botox injections, and 2.2 drug dependent children will not only make them happy but constitute the American Way of Life, are we surprised to learn that cash-flush, tax-exempt tree charities like the Nature Conservancy are interchangeable with the killers sitting in the big corporate free enterprise offices, that both share the same private jet values? Anybody who’s surprised that the Nature Conservancy’s leadership spends a lot of tax-exempt money on itself deserves to get ripped off.
A LOT OF THE BIG enviro groups are corrupt. So are a lot of the little ones, as even the most cursory examination of the spending practices of Redwood Summer Justice Project or the Bay Area Committee for Headwaters or Circle of Life or the Trees Foundation, or the Taj Bloody Mateel confirms, and suckers from all over the country send these scam-a-ramas big annual piles of money, unaware they’re really funding about a dozen full-time bunco artists.
BUT THE NATURE CONSERVANCY property at Branscomb, the last time I hiked through, seemed to be in good shape. No LL Bean types were building redwood palaces and all its old redwoods were still vertical.
DEB SILVA on Charles Schulz:
Schulz was a weird guy. You may remember this incident involving him that happened in the mid-90s. Briefly, Schulz's financial advisor, Ron Nelson, had an affair with a female employee at Snoopy headquarters. Nelson told his wife about the affair and asked his wife for a divorce. The wife, Shirley Nelson, went bonkers and arrived at Ron's workplace with a gun and proceeded to shoot him then turned the gun on herself. Ron was critically injured, and Shirley had a worse injury. Neither of them died.
Schulz, who had some strange priorities, took the side of the aggrieved wife, going so far as to eventually post her bail and help out with her attorney fees. Schulz was dead set against affairs of any kind. He fired Ron Nelson and the woman he had the affair with resigned before she was also fired.
I put together a pdf of all the articles that appeared in the Press Democrat about the shooting and its aftermath. Ron Nelson ended up marrying his girlfriend and as far as I know they are still married.
INDULGE ME, PLEASE, while I lash out this morning. Four lashes, before a return to… to safe seas, serenity.
AMERICA’S architectural deterioration over the last hundred years can be tracked by school architecture. What schools looked and felt like to the young people studying in them used to be absolutely crucial to Americans. No more.
TODAY'S SCHOOLS are an aesthetic fist in the face that express only fear of the young people processed inside of them. Ukiah High School is an extreme example of evil school design, a lengthy tube designed to monitor and control the inmates. Compare the tube to the gracious old Ukiah High School and wonder why the old school wasn't shored up and kept in service. Boonville's schools aren't as bad as Ukiah's, but compared to the pre-war buildings that housed Anderson Valley's young they are a major architectural step backward. (The gym at the high school, erected in the middle 1950s, contains more square feet than the classrooms, to give you an idea of community priorities at the time.)
MARIJUANA, like pornography, has an overall detrimental social effect, especially on young people who get into it while their brains, already battered by negative media, are physiologically unequipped to absorb it. Today’s dope is much stronger than that of twenty years ago, not that I speak from personal experience because I don’t smoke it, but only because I don’t like the foggy state induced. I used to like to drink but, as a person unable to stop until I either hit the floor or someone hit me, and an alcoholic telling me that I was one, too, if I drank like that, and me with a payroll to meet, I quit.
BUT, AHEM, from close observation of the habitual pot smokers I know, I’d say they lack energy, the ability to think and write coherently, suffer fairly severe verbal impairment, tend to slovenliness, and always have these irritatingly smug smiles plastered onto their stoned pusses. “This stuff keeps you loaded for three to four hours!” a former contributor exulted, blissfully unaware that he’d dropped whole paragraphs from his stories as he chuckled late into the night at televised Love Boat re-runs. What kind of recommendation for a drug is that? But it still shouldn’t be illegal, if for no other reason than so many otherwise functioning (more or less) Americans are doing it.
LEO NOMELLINI- (JUNE 19, 1924 – OCTOBER 17, 2000)
SF 49 er- If you lived in Palo Alto in the 60's and beyond you would see Leo Nomellini driving around in his two seater Thunderbird. He took up the whole front seat just by himself. I can still see him with his right arm around the second seat coming down our street. Leo was selected by the San Francisco 49ers in the first round of the 1950 NFL draft. He played 14 seasons as a defensive tackle in the National Football League (NFL), all of them with the 49ers, playing his first three years as an offensive tackle as well. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He also did pro wrestling.
LEO ‘THE LION’ Nomellini, star tackle for the 49ers from 1950-1963 died of cancer at age 76 on October 22, 2000, at Stanford Hospital. His football friends contributed tributes and anecdotes to a couple of pretty good Bay Area obits for the big bruiser the following day. But they left one anecdote out. It happens that Mr. Nomellini was a down-the-street neighbor of ours when I was a kid growing up in Palo Alto from 1953 to 1955. Mr. Nomellini was born in Italy and grew up in Chicago. He was a tough but friendly man who was well known to the neighborhood as the big 49er lineman down the street who always waved and smiled at us star-struck kids as we rode by on our bikes. These were the days of hand-powered push mowers. Nomellini, who stood 6-feet 3-inches and weighed upwards of 270 pounds, impressed us kids by being able to stand on one edge of his front lawn and give his big push-mower a giant shove and it would somehow mow 20 or so feet of grass before it came to a stop at the other end of Nomellini’s lawn. Nomellini would then stroll across the new-mown strip, turn the mower around, give the mower a couple of short pushes to catch whatever it had missed on its prior one-shove dash across the lawn, and then shove the mower back across the lawn again, and again, and again in single bursts until it was thoroughly mowed. By the time he was done, Nomellini usually had ten or twelve awestruck kids standing around watching and applauding each shove. He didn’t pay us much attention though — the future Hall of Famer was all business. — Mark Scaramella
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