FORMER AV DEPUTY DENNIS MILLER DIES IN RENO
Good morning AVA.
I wanted to let you fellas and the residents of Boonville know, Retired Mendocino County Sheriff Sgt Dennis Miller passed away this week at his residence near Reno, Nevada. He passed working in his back yard doing what he loved to do on Monday morning.
Dennis Miller was hired at the Sheriff's Office first as a dispatcher in March of 1975 and left in February of 1977. He returned as a deputy sheriff on May 14, 1979 and served until he left for El Dorado County on September 26, 1998 where he worked for several years before retiring to the Reno area.
Services will be held Friday, October 4th at 1 pm at Walton's Funeral home, 2155 Kietzke Lane, Reno, NV 89502.
Sheriff Matt Kendall
OLD TIMERS will remember the Moonie camp on Boonville's south end, circa 1971. (Now Sheep Dung Estates.) Few of us knew who the Moonies were or what they were doing behind their beautifully crafted, hand-hewn wooden sign stuck out on the highway heralding a “New Ideal City,” whose grandeur would always, as it turned out, remain imaginary. We knew that there were an awful lot of young people confined to the property with only a few ancient farm buildings to house them. On still nights we could hear the rookie Moonies chanting in great choruses that echoed off the hills. During the day we would encounter frantic parents rushing around Boonville trying to retrieve their adult children from what the parents assumed was a cult. It was a cult, a cult presided over by a Korean electrical engineer who said he was God. Or a god. Or a freelance messiah. It was a confused belief system the reverend was selling, but apparently made sense to some confused young persons, of which there were many wandering the highways and biways of our confusing country. The Moonies were finally shut down when county officials discovered a thousand or so aspiring, sleep-deprived world unifiers on premises with nary a septic tank. Banished from Boonville, the Moonies moved their camp to Sonoma County and, soon, a chinchilla farm appeared on the Boonville place with an occasional little beastie appearing in Boonville when a local teenager employed part-time at the farm liberated one. (A chinchilla is an upscale guinea pig.) This second enterprise was overseen by a German national married to an Italian national in one of Moon's famous mass weddings where Moon decided who would marry whom. The couple seemed compatible, their two sons wild and, at least as children, unlikely cult material. Moon, like Jim Jones and many lesser gods who touched down in the Anderson Valley, went on to grander things, including a daily newspaper based in Washington, D.C. Moon and his “Holy Spirit Association for Unification of World Christianity,” much like the Mormons and their jaw-droppingly improbable theology, is no longer considered a cult because in America, as the Mormons can tell you, cult-to-tax-exempt church is purely a matter of cash. Lots of it buys respectability, plausibility too, which Moon gets from his “professionally” staffed newspaper and the fat checks he writes for Republican officeholders. (Reagan and both Bushes got Moon money by the bushel.) One of Moon's many enterprises was poaching endangered leopard sharks. A branch of Moon's bogus church finally got caught at it and had to pay $500,000 to help restore leopard shark habitat in San Francisco Bay. The sharks were in big demand by collectors, selling for between $9 (hatchlings) and $75 each. The Moonies had been depleting this particular fish population for 11 years, making a lot more from the sale of the sharks than they've had to pay in fines. From unmoored youth and chinchillas in Boonville to leopard sharks in San Francisco Bay, to photo ops with the president, Reverend Moon sailed on. He went a long way since his ideal city in the hills of Boonville.
PANTHER ATHLETICS: A SUCCESSFUL WEEK
Highlights from this last week:
Junior High volleyball defeated Laytonville!
Soccer defeated Redwood Academy!
JV and Varsity volleyball bested Potter Valley at home!
And we officially announced the first boys Volleyball team at AV which will begin practice in February after basketball season!
BILL KIMBERLIN:
These long ears were outside my office window in Boonville this morning. That is a lot of ears for someone so small. I have been told that this is to hear airborne predators that might swoop down on them. Does that sound right? They hear the wings flapping?
I MET KAMALA HARRIS at a jazz event in San Francisco maybe twenty years ago. The Missus and I were gifted the tickets by my nephew, a jazz aficionado. We were seated at a table with, among others and of all people, Willie Brown and his Russian girlfriend. Brown didn’t seem happy to see me. Maybe he remembered a night in Mendocino in ‘85 or so when I was on a bullhorn outside a Democratic Party wine fete for him at the Mendocino Hotel. I was with a mob of enviros outside trying hard to wreck the party inside. The local Democrats, led by a character called Luke Breit, were entertaining Brown, nevermind that he’d just cancelled an attempt by Mendo to locally regulate the aerial application of herbicides. Big Ag objected, and when money talks, Willie Brown listens. I was seated next to his Russian girlfriend. Every time I tried to talk to her she said, “Vot’s that you say to me?” and variations on that theme. She and Brown were carping at each other like a pair of high school kids. I’d hope for a chance to argue with Brown about everything, but out of deference to Nephew, I didn’t. Charlie Musselwhite and his wife Henrietta were seated on my other side, fortunately, because they are always pleasant and fun. Kamala Harris, then San Francisco DA, was going from table to table introducing herself. When she got to us, I mentioned that my cousin worked for her. “He does?” Yes, I said, Jimmy Rowland. “Well, I can tell you I love James Rowland. He’s head of my domestic abuse department.” I replied that our family suspects that Jimmy is himself a victim of domestic violence, explaining that his wife, known in our family as The Barracuda, had recently thrown him out of their car somewhere deep in the desert down by the Mexican border. Kamala took a closer look at me to assess just what kind of crank she was dealing with and quickly moved on. “Nice meeting you Mr. and Mrs. Anderson.” I must say I liked Kamala’s vibe, as the hippies say. She seemed real. The music that night? Knocked me out. Beautiful. The company? Except for the Musselwhites, to be avoided.
CITY MEMORIES: One Saturday afternoon on Clement I ran straight into Gavin Newsom. Walked around a corner and there he was. Newsom was mayor then. He was greeting passersby in connection with a petition drive whose purpose I didn't note. The Mayor looked me manfully in the eye and said, “Hello, nice to see you.” I said, “Hello, good to see you too,” and walked on about my business — the purchase of a pork bun. I'd never seen The Mayor live. If I didn't know who he was, and a pro at looking people in the eye and pretending to know them, I would have been surprised that he pretended to know me, and he may have wondered why I pretended to know him, but I was just being polite, and who am I to break the great circle of pretense? The mayor was very pale, with one of those unhealthy, dead man pallors you see on serious juicers. He didn't look well, but then how could he given the givens of his career path? I beat back an impulse to urge him, “Flee, kid. Run. This is all very bad for you. You'll get cancer walking around faking it all day. You're young. Get out while you can.”
ON THE NEXT corner my then-supervisor, Jake McGoldrick, was stationed, standing with a couple of middle-aged men in short pants. In the San Francisco of yesterday, which I yearn for, grown men only wore shorts if they were exercising, but youth has since become eternal in America, as youth itself is older than ever. Anyway, McGoldrick, up close, also looked like a serious boozer. These days, the McGoldricks are gone, replaced with shiney-faced pols with big white teeth, fairly oozing insincerity. McGoldrick's face was turning purple and he had a big, emergency room gut. He also greeted me, “Great to see you.” I said I was happy to see him, too, not that I was particularly, but he did greet me first, and with a superlative yet! I'm old school when it comes to manners, and easily flattered.
McGOLDRICK was beating back an attempt to recall him by people who couldn't beat him in an election. I said I looked forward to voting for him against the recallers, adding that I hoped he'd consider closing Golden Gate Park to all motorized traffic forever, not just the Saturdays and Sundays as he was promoting. He laughed the laugh people laugh when it occurs to them they're dealing with an extremist, and I moved on. The recallers also wanted McGoldrick out of office because he was for a speedo bus lane the length of Geary. I didn't see the need because the Geary buses run often and more or less on time, but like all other vehicular traffic in the city, bog down east of Van Ness because there are too many vehicles for SF's small-size downtown. A rapid bus lane would make no difference in bus speed east of Van Ness where everything is slowed by congestion. Neither issue, of course, was grounds for a recall election. Like Mendo, there's no evidence of planning anywhere in San Francisco.
FARTHER down Clement towards 10th, I ran into the Mexican guy working a fruit and vegetable stand who spoke fluent Chinese, or a dialect thereof. I once heard a Chinese guy say to him in English, “You speak Chinese better than I do.” The Mexican guy replied, “I speak better English than you do, too.” They both laughed. People everywhere get along better than you'd think from the constant media implication that we're on the verge of civil disintegration.
LIVING in the city, you do a lot of scuttling. You walk sideways — scuttle — with your garbage cans through narrow passage ways, ducking beneath overhead plumbing, locking the sidewalk door coming and going. “Ten years ago a burglar got in the building.” That's the lock box rationale I constantly heard, probably because the lock box people knew I secretly hoped someone would break in simply to confirm a decade's worth of pre-emptive suspicion So, we all scuttled in and out of our little stacks of apartment boxes, assuming menace everywhere. I knew only the people in my building, half of whom were related to me, and I knew the Korean family across the street, the young couple who lived next door, and a Chinese woman in her middle sixties who also lived next door. This woman watched the street all day from her upstairs window. She introduced herself to me only, I suspect, to scope me out for my criminal potential. I must have passed muster because she was very friendly ever after. I never saw a single person on our block who even looked like he or she might be malevolently disposed, but everyone I knew was fearful, everyone wary for no real reason at all.
ON GARBAGE DAYS, an ancient Chinese couple systematically rooted through the cans for items of cash value. 150,000 San Franciscans depend on various kinds of “food assistance.” Lots of old people who've had hard lives scrape right to the end no matter how prosperous they become. The Depression scared hell out of my parent's generation. My mother saved string and tin foil well into her eighties. Few Depression survivors threw their money around even after they had some. I knew Arkies in Boonville who kept all their cash hidden in their homes, and they had the best vegetable gardens around long before the gardening movement got rolling. They knew from bitter experience how precarious things are. One old guy I knew carried so much cash in his wallet he wrapped it in wire to keep it all contained between the wallet's sprung-seam covers. The Depression generation knew in their bones the system could go any time like it did when they were young. And who can imagine the terrors an elderly pair of immigrant Chinese had survived, but there they were, the old man working the cans on one side of the street, the old lady the other side. They stacked their finds at the end of the block, hauled it off somewhere, then came back and worked another block. I always wanted to follow them to see their total operation, but I couldn't do it without scaring them. I've tried to talk to them but they'd just smile and keep on moving, on task, not needing to share trade secrets with some hulking busy body of an Ang Mo Qui (Long-nosed monkey or, depending on inflection, red-haired devil in the Hakka dialect.) I saw them working the trash most days and some nights in all kinds of weather.
ONE AFTERNOON a young woman, two small boys in tow, was tying lengths of rope from the spindly limbs of a smallish tree outside my building. She and the two boys looked happy so I assumed she wasn't about to hang them or herself, but I asked her for a clarification. “I want my kids to rope swing like I got to do when I was a kid,” she explained, “and they won't let us do it in the parks like this. You don't mind, do you?”
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