Valley People 8/29/2024

MARSHALL NEWMAN NOTES:

Lots of geese on the wing these last 10 days. Seems like the migration is underway a month - maybe more - early. Likely the precursor of an early winter, but we won't know for another few weeks.

A READER COMMENTS:

Saw Boonfire at the Cloverdale Friday Night live concert this past Friday. Exciting to see local kids going for it. Loved the girl singer's voice. Not exactly my kind of music, but I appreciated the talent. What really impressed me was how many community members of Anderson Valley came out to give moral support to the band. Very cool. Warmed my heart.

AV ATHLETICS:

AVHS has been recognized by the NCS and CIF for completing the 23/24 school year without a single ejection. We are proud to play sports and compete with respect!

CARS PARKED on both sides of Highway 128, lines out the door, as the new Jumbo’s Win-Win classic American-themed Restaurant in Philo gets off to a locally unprecedented opening week.

LISA NUNES:

Regarding the Algae in the Navarro River, a test was done to determine if cyanobacteria is present in the Navarro River. The test came back POSITIVE for relatively low concentrations of the bacteria. Because there is a risk of an increase in bacteria, the North Coast Regional Water Board will be coming to post signs tomorrow (Friday) on the river. The letter states some recreation is still safe if you avoid mats and suspicious algae. In my neck of the woods here in Philo, that is not a possibility.

THE NORTHWEST TIRE & OIL IS NOW OPEN!

Located at 8500 CA-128 Philo, CA 95466

Servicing Gas only at the moment and open for our community. They are accepting cash and card payments! Thank you for everyone’s patience & support!

THERE IT WAS, page D-4 travel section, Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. The “Ten Perfect Adventure Lodges." Argentina! Ontario! Utah! Virgin Islands! The Boonville Hotel! Malta! Tanzania!

BILL KIMBERLIN

This is one of my neighbors place in Boonville. The black case on the right usually says, "Eggs" as she sells the bounty from her chickens here to her lucky neighbors.

THE AV SENIOR CENTER BUS will be taking a group of people to the CV Starr Center in Fort Bragg on Wednesday, September 4th. Limited space. The sign up sheet is at AV Senior Center or call Renée at 707-895-3609.

TRUE HISTORY. The all-time local Dumpster Dive turned up a perfectly preserved, meticulously wrapped, complete set of Playboy magazines at the Boonville Dump. A certain pair of middle-aged women, fearing someone would discover that their late father collected Playboys, hustled them up to the dump and tossed them over the side, assuming no one would notice exactly what they were off-loading. How much is a complete set worth? You can buy one on E-Bay for about $7,000 which is a very good price. A good bookstore friend tells me that very first 1953 edition featuring Marilyn Monroe all by itself typically fetches “several thousand dollars,” and a complete set can go for “somewhere between $15,000 and $25,000.”

FROM DEBBIE HOLMER’S column “Glance at the Past” in the Fort Bragg Advocate: “100 years ago, December 11, 1923. Friday afternoon Deputy Sheriff Ward Ries arrested two Indians, Darwin and Richard Knight, near Mountain View on the Greenwood Road, who were making a get-away, after having stolen an automobile and wrecked it near Boonville.”

I KNEW I was old the day I went to see my long-time friend Jesse Mejia in that maze of a medical center at the vertex (?) of the Duboce Triangle in San Francisco. Jesse was on the third floor of the South Tower. I’d footed it over there the couple of miles from where I was staying. My glasses fogged up as I entered the sprawling structure, and my brain was still fogged from the usual psychic overload presented by Frisco's human parade I'd passed as I made my way. It took me a while to find the right elevator, having failed to find the stairs. I’ve lived in the country for a long time so I’m way out of the big building habit, and The City seems bigger and faster every time I visit, which isn’t often because I prefer Anderson Valley's small and slow vibe. I finally got to the right wing of an endless maze of long corridors where a nurse pointed me towards a large room where five patients were partially hidden behind curtains. One of them, I was certain, was my man, whom I hadn’t seen for a while. It was after dark and the lights were low. Jesse was 81 but he looked better than most 60-year-olds. Not wanting to startle my friend by waking him, I sat down in the chair by his bed and waited for him to rouse himself. I’d been sitting in silent vigil by my friend for a good 15 minutes when a Mexican gent about my age approached. Eyeing me suspiciously, he asked, “Do you know my brother?” Yes, I said, I’ve known Jesse for many years. We’re old friends. I’ve come a long way to see him. “My brother’s name is Pablo,” the man said. “Mr. Mejia is in the bed over there.”

THE LOCAL ANGLE. The real Popeye was based on a fellow named Frank Fiegel, a one-eyed tough guy who was something of a local legend in Chester, Illinois, for getting into fist fights with men who annoyed him. And most men Fiegel encountered annoyed him. We’re talking way back in the early 1920s when a talented young fellow named Elzie Segar, also a resident of Chester, population 3,000 or so, converted the real life adventures of Frank Fiegel into the cartoon character, Popeye The Sailor Man. Fast forward to Boonville and Ukiah. The late Tom Segar, heir to the Popeye fortune, once a resident of Upper Boonville, was Elzie Segar’s son. Mr. Segar and his wife ran Mysteries By Mail out of a large blue-roofed, barn-like structure six miles up the Ukiah Road where the Segars also made their home. The Segar place is now owned by Robert and Nicola Anderson of San Francisco.

D.M. ROUSE: “You still got the gun boss. Current OTR reads like on target tracer fire. Disagree a little fiction vs. nonfiction because currently engrossed in Theroux's masterful "Burma Sahib" which adds depth and detail and alarming reality to Orwell's own take on that formative period of his in “Burmese Days.” Methinks no American writer has ever written better than Theroux and this great work enhances my long held belief there's a blurry area between f and non f and it's where much of the truth lies. You sound great and well recovered from the med trauma. Happy for you, D.M.Rouse.”

THANKS, Mr. R. Agree totally on Theroux and, like you, thought his re-creation of Orwell in Burma was truly brilliant and absolutely true to the great man's life there as a policeman for a dying empire. Orwell's essays ought to be required reading, especially ‘Politics and the English Language,’ which is especially pertinent today as we're bombarded our every waking moment with political lies.

ON MY medical front, I can tell you (and the random curious) that I'm about to begin a month-long regimen of chemo pills, two of them, one of which required my signature when it arrived at my front door, whether to keep it out of the hands of stoners or to make sure I got it I'm not sure. Strong medicine, apparently. These two big blast chemo nostrums replace old fashioned chemo and radiation. They will be followed by a single blast of iodine delivered by some kind of chemo machine-like device. Why iodine? Beats me, but I'm not arguing. A month from now I should be out of the woods, or deeper in them, depending. My affliction is characterized by a general loss of energy and a rather constant but minor discomfort caused by the incessant attention demanded by maintenance of the hole in my throat. If I go anywhere more than an hour away I have to take a throat vacuuming machine with me, along with HME's, which are the protective plugs for the hole I now breathe through. I force myself to walk a couple of miles a day, do exactly 50 push-ups in one shot, and lift some light weights. I used to do these exercises for fun but they are now more of a willed effort. The doctors have said the surgeries they did on me were successful because I was strong enough to withstand them, so my years of physical effort paid off. None of them could believe I was on zero meds coming in and had never been on any which, it seems, is now unusual in the elderly. Without my wife functioning as a round-the-clock nurse I'd have been a goner. As it is I'm rounding third and home plate looks doable with a head first slide.