WE WERE SADDENED TO HEAR of the October 20 death of Fred Sternkopf, aka ‘Dr. Doo,’ of Mendocino and Caspar, whose lively cartoons graced the pages of the print edition of the AVA for decades. A multi-talented artist, Sternkopf produced a wide varity of artwork, mobiles and paintings over his lifetime. “Much of my work is political or spiritual in content,” said Sternkopf in a recent on-line mini-bio. “I strongly believe fine art should speak directly to the soul. With each encounter with a work of art, something new should be seen and realized…over and over. True art shouldn’t just be decorative, but add to the expansion of the inner self…the soul, and bring about personal reflection and insight. Every time one looks at the same piece of real fine art it should be a new experience…a revelation…helping to discover oneself.” Sternkopf was 87.
We hope to have a full obituary soon.
THE BOONVILLE PRECINCT reported record attendance on at the Boonville Fairgrounds on Tuesday.
Poll workers said voters were arriving “in waves,” and they even had moments where there were lines behind the voting booths, a rarity in recent prior elections. No serious disruptions were reported, although apparently one woman (not a Trumper, apparently) got upset when she was told that if she wanted a provisional ballot she’d have to surrender her mailed ballot (which she had already filled out). While there, we saw several dozen people arriving in just a few minutes. Supervising poll worker Kathleen McKenna said she had been instructed to call 9-1-1 if anyone even showed up with partisan “electioneering” regalia such as a Trump or Biden hat or button and wouldn’t remove it, quickly adding that that had never been a problem at the Boonville precinct. McKenna also reported that a Sonoma County resident who was driving through the Valley stopped in and wanted to vote in Boonville, apparently because he wasn’t sure he’d get back to his Sonoma Coumty polling station in time. But after some discussion with the local poll workers who explained that they didn’t have Sonoma County ballots, he ultimately left without voting.
VETERANS DAY IN BOONVILLE, Monday, November 11, 2024
At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 2024, American Legion Post 385, Boonville, will hold a ceremony honoring Veterans at Evergreen Cemetery, Anderson Valley Way, Boonville. All are welcome. Join us Saturday, November 11th, at 11:00 A.M.
LOOKING BACK (2007): ‘Pig Hunt,’ the movie, began filming early, very early one Monday morning at the Comptche Store, where some 100 support people gathered, the 100 included the opening scene's star, the great blues man Charlie Musselwhite, who plays an outback shopkeeper but was performing in San Diego as late as Sunday night. Boonville people were pleased to learn that Vince Ballew, a local logger, would appear in the movie which, by the way, is not some hand-held camera epic but a full-fledged, union-sanctioned, Hollywood production directed by Jim Isaac whose $20 mil horror film, ‘Skinwalkers,’ will be released in July. Working behind the scenes are multiple-Oscar winners Aggie Rodgers and Geoffrey Kirkland, the latter up for another Oscar for his work on ‘Children of Men.’ ILM, the San Rafael-based special effects outfit responsible for the creation of Lucas Film's panoply of weird creatures, has constructed the scariest pig pig hunters will never see.
Most of the crew is billeted in Ukiah, with another group bunking in the Toll House on the Ukiah-Boonville Road. The lead actors and actresses, I believe, are being put up at various inns around Anderson Valley. Filming in and around the Anderson Valley will take about a month before the production relocates, to shoot final scenes in San Francisco. Everyone involved, by the way, has raved about all the good food available in Boonville and Philo. A whole lotta money has rained down on Mendoland from this venture — a whole lot.
ANNE FASHAUER:
Excited to represent this beautiful old home in Navarro.
14840 Wendling Soda Creek Rd, Navarro. $895,000.
North Country Real Estate, Boonville
IN THE CITY I got around by bike, bus and foot. In the urban setting all methods of transport can be, well, transporting. But Muni is seldom transporting in the inspirational sense while bicycling can be, although one must be constantly alert to traffic, much of which careens through city streets at unsafe speeds, haughty faces peering from vehicles the size of Sherman tanks.
ONE afternoon, pedaling up to the Ferry Building, having checked on several homeless persons about whom I was preparing a sort of photo-essay although they’d stopped talking to me out of understandable resentment at my prying, and as I approached a female pedestrian walking towards me, I could see her eyes narrow, her lips tighten in disapproval, a reception I’m used to in Mendocino County but seldom encountered in San Francisco where I’m usually anonymous.
SHE looked vaguely familiar. “Uh, oh. she knows me. She's going to tell me I’m inappropriate, maybe even very inappropriate.” But as a veteran of hostile encounters, and not at first recognizing the frowning as hostile, I didn't stop to apologize for causing her distress. I whooshed on past the frowning matron before realizing she was none other than Connie Best, Queen of Conservation Easements, lately of Boonville and maybe still is.
I KNEW her majesty had never forgiven me for pointing out that conservation easements simply give property owners tax breaks unavailable to the rest of us for agreeing not to cut down trees they wouldn’t cut down anyway, a simple statement of the obvious but not one likely to please a person who makes her living taking her cut of high-end enviro action, and it must be a handsome living if she can afford office rent in the area of the Ferry Building.
I STOPPED in at the Peets Coffee outlet in the Ferry Building for a cup of coffee, then pedalled up Market to 17th and Castro, dismounted to walk my bike up and over the hill, beating back sad thoughts of Ishi, California’s “last wild Indian,” who lived at the university on nearby Parnassus as an anthropological specimen showcased by Professor Kroeber.
ISHI was said to enjoy the eucalyptus groves of Mount Sutro, but then Ishi was much said about by people who probably read all sorts of mistaken benignity into him and his annihilated people.
BUT it was a Mount Diablo day, clear, windy and very cold, and Mount Diablo looked like it was three feet east of the Ferry Building, and gloomy speculations were vanquished by the sunny splendor of the vivid day.
UNTIL the corner of Haight and Stanyan where six kids, ranging in age from maybe three to about eight, suddenly ran up to a toothless, bedraggled, street-looking white man waiting with me for the light to change. The littlest guy was barefoot and dressed only in sweat pants and a t-shirt, and it was very cold.
“DADDY, DADDY!” they cried, delighted to see their presumed father. For a panicked instant I thought they were yelling at me. But they grouped around the other man, tugging at him, happy to see him. Maybe the grizzled old boy really was their father. Children have been known to be mistaken. Maybe dad was on his way through the park to take the kids out for dim sum on Clement, warm them up on the family special.
BUT just as the light changed, a very large black woman seemed to come out of nowhere and jumped the patriarch, jostling me out of the way to get at him. The kids scattered as the woman swung wild punches at Dad, who pivoted to get off a couple of counter-punches, one of which hit me in the shoulder. The shoeless child scampered out into the traffic where an approaching black man scooped him up like a fumbled football and trundled him back towards the fight where Dad smacked the black woman full fist as she put her head down and windmill punched him back.
SHE YELLED, “I left that three hundred dollars under the bed but all that there is now is your crack pipe, you no good, low down no good, you. That’s all the money we have and you stole it to buy crack!”
I STOOD there with my bicycle between me and the combatants, advising in my best social worker voice, “Please, There's a better way to settle this.” Fortunately, they didn't pause to ask me what the better way was because I had no idea. When relationships hit the mutual combat stage there's usually nothing that can be done.
I'D NOTED Mom's perfect diction and profanity-free distress. As we all know in these deteriorating times, when people go off in public they usually turn the air verbally blue.
IT OCCURRED to me I'd made a racist assumption, me a liberal all my days! Why shouldn’t Mom's diction be perfect? Why couldn’t she be a fallen child of the educated middle-class?
I DEFINITELY didn't want to get in between them, but just as I'd reconciled myself to an intervention, Dad sprinted across the street, on through the gauntlet of dope sellers who were always arrayed between the street and the tunnel to Hippie Hill, the kids, except for the tiny shoeless one, in hot pursuit. The shoeless one was held fast by the guy who'd scooped him up out of the traffic.
MOM continued yelling. She had a natural bullhorn going, so loud and carrying that the ghost of Ishi could have heard her clear up on Mount Sutro. “My husband took all my money. Stop him. I’m calling the police.”
HUSBAND? That guy? How could he be anybody’s husband? Mom then produced a cell phone, perhaps on speed dial for the cops because she was immediately shouting into it, “My husband robbed me so he could buy crack. He just went into Golden Gate Park.” The samaritan black guy, who was still holding the shoeless kid under his arm like the fumbled football he'd retrieved in the middle of the intersection, tried to calm her down.
HE knew her. “Ellen, you’ll find him. Take it easy. Calm down. He’ll be back.” Ellen was not mollified. “I don’t want him back even if he has my money. I want my three hundred.”
THE LATE MICHEL SALGUES, a PhD in chemistry, and the former boss at the huge, French-owned Roederer Winery in Philo, was quite candid about the realities of wine making in Mendocino County. “Why do you think we're here? We can do things here we cannot do in France because the wine industry in France, right down to labor practices, is heavily regulated.”
ONE SPRING MORNING back in the early 1970s, as clusters of hippie kids waited on Greenwood Road for the big yellow buses to carry them to classrooms as dull as the ones their alienated parents had fled for California's backwoods, a Louisiana-Pacific helicopter, spraying the freshly logged hills with herbicides to prevent non-commercial re-vegetation, heedlessly doused the little Rainbows and Karmas as they stood beside the road near where the logging had been done. The hippies mobilized and quickly passed a county-wide ban on the aerial application of herbicides. Within months, state Democrats, including the Northcoast contingent, led by mega-liberal Willie Brown, their pockets stuffed with corporate ag cash, passed legislation that prohibited individual counties from regulating herbicides and pesticides; only the state could decide who could poison the kids and who couldn't. You don't like Garlon dropped on your kid? Take it up with Sacramento.
HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND …
As I drove home the other evening there were signs of impending November everywhere — the sun slipping toward the horizon to its ever-earlier bedtime, the wind through the trees that was more cold than cool, replacing the hospitable mildness of October with a damp chill that had me musing about steaming bowls of soups and stews for the nights to come. The garden is dying back, and the forest critters are tucked away in whatever warm hideaways they’ve claimed. Under the shushing wind, it’s quiet as the dark descends.
This time of year evokes stillness, introspection, and release. The harvest is in, the tools put away. The days remaining to accomplish lingering goals for 2024 are dwindling. Rather than overwork and self-recrimination, maybe find a large dry oak leaf, lay your undone thing upon it, and place it on the shimmering surface of a creek or river to be carried downstream. It might reappear in 2025, or not. For now, let it go.
The other side of the meditative solitude of fall-shifting-into-winter is the holidays. As the cold and dark claim more of our days, warmth, light, good food and good company pull us indoors. Spending time together is the perfect complement to solitude. And provided you dress warmly and have a hot cup of something on hand, outdoor fun can help you make the most of the available daylight — nothing invigorates mind and body like a break from routine out in the bracing fresh air. There are all sorts of opportunities for fun both indoors and out in the community calendar below, so don’t let the month go by without a taste of chili or home-brewed beer, gathering chestnuts or learning about mushroom habitats, or partaking in any of the other events available to make the most of this November.
See you out there ~
Torrey & the team at Word of Mouth Magazine
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