TINY HOMES, BOONVILLE STYLE.
Last April we published a brief plug for two local guys who had announced that they were setting up some kind of tiny home production business. But there wasn’t much else about the operation. This week we have learned that the operation is the brainchild of Felipe Camacho, a Colombian by birth who became a US Citizen a few years ago. The entrepreneur is now set up to import prefab “trailers” (essentially small homes) built and assembled in Colombia and shipped to the US in finished form ready for relatively low cost installation locally. The first one, with a sleeping loft and a full bathroom plus many other amenities, is now available for rent at $1500 per month. It has been installed behind the Brewpub and comes complete with kitchen and appliances, even a deck, The personable Mr. Camacho is set up to bring more of these small homes in to the Valley (via Oakland, as it turns out) for rent or purchase. (Estimated basic purchase price: $90k, installed). The sturdy, self-contained units are on wheels and can be towed in with nothing more than a good sized pickup, then propped up on pier blocks when installed. Therefore, they do not need to meet the same level of permit requirements that would be required for a stick-built structure.
For more information call Mr. Camacho at (704) 608-9080, or visit their website: gomagdalena.com. (Mark Scaramella)
AV FUTURE FARMERS: Miguel, Carlos, and Helen went with Ms. Swehla to the Zeni ranch to cut brush Saturday morning for our wreath project.
We start making wreaths on Monday! We will have wreaths at the Holiday Bazaar! You can pre-order a wreath too.
ANN SIRI (Philo): I have had a very happy thing happen. After a few years of struggling with much body pain from trimming and shoeing 6 large drafts I have finally found someone not only willing to help but also very good at trimming. Very kind and patient with the big guys. They are 2 brothers that work together. Rock Bottom Ranch Shoeing out of Willits. What a joy! I am 69 years and it is very hard to start giving in to some aging facts though.
BILL KIMBERLIN:
“although there’s a Boonville woman whose name eludes me”
She is Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin. Awards
- 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts
- 1991 National Endowment for the Arts, Artist’s Fellowship Grant
- 1981 National Endowment for the Arts, Artist’s Fellowship Grant
- 1980 Young Talent Purchase Award, Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
- 1978 Ford Foundation Grant
- 1977 Ford Foundation Travel Grant
ANOTHER OLD LOCAL CARD FROM E-BAY
Postmark is Philo, 1909. My guess regarding the location is the confluence of Anderson Creek and Rancheria Creek, near where Benjamin C. Van Zandt had Hazel Hill, a resort that ran in the late 19th and early 20th century. (Marshall Newman)
REMEMBER AV TV? It went dark on February 17th, 2007. The several hundred paying locals who depended on the service relayed into The Valley by a tv translator placed high on a ridge southeast of Boonville, as of that date, had no television reception. Why? Almost everyone has gone to dish television or even television delivered via home computers. The old hilltop translator was antiquated, and was doubly antiquated when the new digital transmissions began that same month. The new digital technology would have required expensive upgrades of the old translator, and the service's remaining 40 or so paying customers simply didn't have the resources to buy and install it.
IN 1958, Valley residents eager for television, organized themselves as Anderson Valley TV. Fred Medinas of Boonville — one of The Valley's many unsung heroes — put in the next half-century maintaining the remote technology that beamed the great outside into Yorkville, Boonville, Philo, and even into some neighborhoods of deepest Navarro. Reception was limited to the primary San Francisco channels — 4,5,7, then channels 2 and 44. But as the technology evolved to include dish service capable of bringing the whole world into The Valley, locals who had been content with 4,5,7, 2 and 44 became fewer and fewer.
AS I DISTRIBUTED treats to droves of Marvelous Marin trick and treaters this Halloween, I couldn't help notice that the older children — 12-14 or so — pawed through the candy kettle for packets of pill-shaped diabetic delicacies that pop in your mouth and then sort of lie on your tongue fizzing. The random marauders preferred these things to Hershey chocolate bars and even to whole Rocky Road bars. But now I'm wondering if these kids weren't junior junkies searching for “strawberry quick,” which is not a kid's drink but a form of flavored methamphetamine being pedaled around the country as crank in pop rock form. “Drug dealers,” explained a message wafting into Boonville out of cyber-space, “mix meth with Kool-Aid in an attempt to make it look and taste better.” The evil ones package and sell this stuff like the legit candy it resembles. The candy I dispensed was straight outta Costco, I think, if that's at all reassuring. PS. The most creative costume I saw all night, homemade as all the really clever ones inevitably are, was a kid of about 8 done up as a pizza.
KAREN OTTOBONI:
For those of you who follow Mendocino County Public Broadcasting KZYX
You saw this post
“Operations Director Rich Culberson has also moved on from his role at KZYX. With the move to Ukiah, we look forward to new and exciting ways to increase our operational capacity and it will grow on a foundation built by Rich. We appreciate Rich’s leadership over the years at KZYX and wish him all the best.”
The facts are that after over 16 years of keeping KZYX & Z on the air through wind, rain & snow storms, fire emergencies and much more he was abruptly fired yesterday morning.
Dolly Butters:
Over the years, I'm hearing that Rich Culbertson engineered the works so the station was able to broadcast. How can we support a station that is not loyal to an employee and refuses to give an explanation when they fire someone so crucial to operations?
THE BIG DIG is what we called that lake-size pond at the Philo end of Anderson Valley Way when it was installed in 2008. The Dig was a project of William Hill and his vineyard development outfit, funding courtesy of California's public employee retirement system.
LAKE HILL could become a local amenity if it were to become a community swimming hole when it wasn't watering the vines. A diving board and a few fish and the kids could have a heckuva summer time venue. Won't happen, of course, this industry is not noted for its devotion to community.
THE LAST swimming hole handy to locals was on lower Indian Creek where Doc Marsh maintained a semi-permanent concrete dam, behind which the water backed up a good 50 yards, the dam being porous enough to accommodate fish travel and a warm weather flow of cleansing waters, and a more idyllic site could not be imagined there among the tall trees not quite a mile west of the highway. Reaching Marsh's pond by the old trail through Indian Creek Park was almost as pleasurable as swimming in it. The dam was removed when the pond became a round-the-clock scene of drunken and drug-fueled debauchery in the 1970s which, as I recall, included a rape and several assaults.
WINSTON SMITH, the famous collage artist, used to live near Lake Mendocino, making him, if he still lives there, Mendocino County's best known artist in the outside world. I think, although there's a Boonville woman whose name eludes me who is regarded as first-rate. Ordinarily not a particularly prescient person, I have occasionally congratulated myself on my prescience in buying two paintings by the great Mary Robertson of Guerneville, and consider myself just as prescient for buying a sardonic Winston Smith called “Hell Next 666 Exits,” perhaps inspired by the stretch of 101 Winston had to drive when he passed Ukiah to get to and from his house near Lake Mendocino. Winston's “Last Supper” hung on the wall of the old Varnish Gallery in San Francisco (on Natoma, south of Market) and was, according to the artist, “at 24 feet in length it may well be the largest collage anyone has ever made. I'm now beginning to realize why Leonardo left so many of his masterpieces unfinished. Maybe they were too damn much work.”
YEARS AGO, in my softball playing days, we were deep in a game at Boonville High School against an Elk team, the great Walt Matson at first base, when a youngish man driving the gargantuan tractor that ordinarily went with a gargantuan trailer appeared in mid-game centerfield and proceeded to do a series of wheelies. This exhibition of gigantic motorized antics caused us Boonville hippies to drop our jaws to our gloves. What the hell was this? (We were new to the mysterious ways of Mendoland.) “Oh,” Matson replied as if it needed no further elaboration, “That's Bobby Beacon.”
BEACON had earlier become the subject of a fascinating story in, of all places, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he was described as “the Howard Hughes of the West Coast.” One episode alleged he'd rigged his toaster so the toast would pop up high enough so he could skeet shoot his breakfast. These days, the unelected but unofficial mayor of Elk, and by far the area's most vivid resident, presides over his famous hilltop bar, Beacon Light by the Sea, described by the NYT as “the best dive bar in America.”
MENDO WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker): Bobby Beacon For Mendocino Co Sheriff 1974
BREGGO CELLARS (now Lichen?) at the Philo end of Anderson Valley Way was once, as I recall, the Rawles Ranch, and I also recall the taciturn Shorty Rawles and his unlit stogie who lived there. Shorty, like the late Buster Farrer, made his way in his old pick-up at least once a day to the Boonville Lodge for the pauses that refreshed them, so I laughed when I read a description of Shorty's transformed ranch house as a “charming 1920 Craftsman style yellow farmhouse” with “contemporary savoir faire inside.” You don't say, I can hear the laconic Shorty saying, his cigar waggling in the side of his amused mouth.
SAME STORY mentioned that the young winemaking Stewart family, who occupied Shorty's place, had bought a grape press designed and developed by the late Michel Salgues, the former boss at Roederer, who made a second fortune selling his high tech wine presses around the world. As it happens, and peculiar friendships are common in the Anderson Valley, Salgues and I became social friends, mostly because our children were contemporaries, and I became quite fond of him and his wife, Sylvie.
MICHEL SALGUES was gone before I could collect on his promise to explain why the billionaire family that owns Roederer had stiffed its harvest crew for their request for a tiny raise, prompting the UFW to briefly organize workers at Roederer in the late 1990s. Michel assured me that when he no longer worked for Roederer he'd tell me why the winery decided to try to beat their vineyard crews for a few bucks right at harvest time. “I will tell you ze true story,” he'd promised.
ROEDERER'S CREWS had refused to be stiffed and struck. Roderer had suddenly told the workers that they’d have to pay the gondala driver who drove the collection bins between the vines during the two-week harvet period out of their own wages. After the strike Roederer bussed in scabs from out on I-5 somewhere who honored the local worker's picket line and also refused to work. Roederer's workers called in the UFW to help defend themselves against the famous, and very rich, French winery. Soon, there was a dramatic election out in the middle of Anderson Vineyards (Roederer’s vineyard operations) to join or not join the union. The vote was to join the UFW. The winery struck back by blackballing workers who'd voted union, and the UFW was outtahere in a year.
LAWYERS had been flown in from France. They stood around out in the fields that day in the hot fall sun in their expensive suits trying to look intimidating. It was a rare event in an industry heavy on romantic propaganda, heavier yet on the people whose labor makes it possible. And absolutely ruthless on the rare occasions their workers fight back.
THE UNPRECEDENTED UFW local was decertified by a team of legal jackals calling themselves Littler Mendelson based in San Francisco specializing in union-busting. That same team of legal hyenas ran seminars for County vineyard owners on how to stop workers from organizing, such was the fright thrown into them by the UFW interlude at Roederer, and there hasn't been so much as an organizing peep out of vineyard crews since. We later learned that Littler Mendelson hired a Mexican informer to masquerade as a vineyard worker, live in Roederer’s worker housing units and inform Roederer management who the union ringleaders were. They were summarily fired without knowing why.
INTRUDERS. When Boonville's beloved weekly was located in the Farrer Building, someone got in early one morning and placed three long distance calls to a “prayer center” in Cass Lake, Minnesota. The calls cost us $16. If the mystery intruder would have paid me the $16 I would have been happy to slip into my black cassock and take his confession, but… But further back, when we were working out of Tom Town in central Boonville, someone punched out a glass pane in the AVA office door, entered and threw stuff around, leaving a blood trail as he left. Presumably a “he” because a woman… Hoping for a recurrence, I slept in the office the next two nights. Our landlord, the redoubtable Tom Cronquist, a generous and most amusing guy, has lately been a patient at the V.A. hospital in San Francisco for some time now. Tom is a Vietnam vet, a combat vet I believe.
RECALLING Boonville's always vivid peoplescape, I wonder what happened to Dave Polini, our first street person of any duration. He appeared with a wife and a child, or a woman and a child, whatever the status of their relationship may have been. They initially lived as a family on Lambert Lane. Dave seemed to be functioning at the time, but then swerved off the rails, disappearing for a time before re-appearing in Boonville with no visible attachments to anything but an engrimed sleeping bag on which he sat in the lotus position near the door of Pik ’N Pay where I first encountered him. He hit me up for a dollar, and I forgot him, assuming he was one more lost soul forever in transit. Until I saw him the next day and the next, and every day for a couple of months. I often saw him writing, and I wondered what terrors, what crippling losses he was recording. Before he disappeared for good, not that Dave's outcome could have been good, I offered him space in the paper. “I'm not ready for that,” he said.
DAVE reminded me of another homeless guy I sort of knew in San Francisco. He, too, was always writing. When I'd ask him if I could look at his journal he'd say, “Nope. It's not ready yet.” But he got used to seeing me and we'd talk, more or less, with me trying to follow the bouncing ball of his narrative, none of which told me anything about him or how he'd come to be on the street. Finally, the guy let me look at one of his notebooks. Page after page he'd written, “The ocean comes in, and the ocean goes out.”
COURTESY OF GIFT SEATS and desperate scalpers, I saw a dozen Giants games before my life relocated to the medical complex at China Basin. I always preferred the very top of the stadium, 400 vertical feet behind home plate, to the box seats, because it's the box seats, generally speaking, where the more annoying fans sit.
ANNOYING because corporations buy season boxes and a lot of non-fans wind up occupying them, so you get a lot of gelded young males tech-talking, ostentatious parenting with children way too young to have any idea what's going on as their neurotically doting parents load them up with sugar and grease, or greased sugar in that perfected gut bomb, the churro, and constant trips with the kids to the playground in left field, not to mention apparent adults on cell phones jumping up to wave to other apparent adults on cell phones somewhere else in the vast ballpark. Is there a more infantile population than ours in all this doomed world?
BUT from up top you mostly get people who like baseball, and between innings and during pitching changes — every four innings or less with the Giants — you can look out at the ships and sailboats on the Bay, the late afternoon gold of the Berkeley and Oakland hills, new moons rising, and you then feel like the very cynosure of some special heaven even if you have zero interest in the game, or even in baseball as the pretext for being blessed to be there.
THAT Saturday my seat mates were three deaf mutes on one side, a Hindu grandmother in full sari, a Buster Posey Bobblehead in her lap, on the other. The old lady had been brought along to babysit the grandson of her fully Americanized son, a fan so devoted he knew Orlando Cepeda's lifetime batting average of .302 when we chatted about the Cepeda statue dedicated earlier in the day at the north end of the park.
THE OLD LADY'S SON said it was his mother's first trip to the ballpark; she was visiting from India. It also seemed to be her first exposure to massed Americans which, in a sports or political context, must be quite shocking to an old world person of austere training and practices. The old lady's demeanor was almost unvarying — mildly aghast for three solid hours, and only when an obese gent wheezed up the precipitous aisle with an armload of negative food value items worth a month's pay in the Bengal, did the old lady's face briefly move from aghast to wide-eyed alarm at the one-man riot of pure excess.
WHEN the mutes first seated themselves, I'd wondered why they'd flipped me off, me a total stranger, until I realized they were deaf and dumb or, education being what it has become in this country, “hearing impaired.” Hell, who isn't hearing impaired to some degree or, as our mates would have it, blessed with “selective hearing”? Deaf and dumb was perfectly serviceable until some earnest liberal decided “dumb” only meant stupid, and out went deaf and dumb as talking nice was simultaneously substituted for being nice as public policy. (I couldn't have known that a few months later I would myself become permanently muted but dumb as ever. The surgery to de-voice me was accomplished only a long fly ball down the street.)
JACK LONDON wrote an un-euphemized account of his brief employment at the state asylum at Sonoma called “The Drooling Ward,” and woe unto Jack if he tried that now, or the asylum itself which, in the aftermath of the '06 quake, calmed inmate panic by tying the terrified insane to trees until the aftershocks stopped. One wonders how today's berserkers, few of them institutionalized, will be calmed after the next big one?
OFFERED a $7.50 container of lemonade by her son, her sari especially elegant amidst middle-age men dressed like little boys and carrying baseball gloves as if a 400 foot vertical foul ball was possible, refused with a single abrupt shake of her head, bobbling Buster Posey's bobblehead, the odd totem still in the lap of the only ascetic in a sea of mystifying extravagance.
WHEN the Giants came back after being down four — an occurrence even more rare at AT&T Park than a Hindu senior citizen in the cheap seats — the fingers of the celebrating deaf and dumb flew, and they bounced and squeaked in their seats, and the old woman in the sari looked wistfully at her grandson, perhaps wondering how she'd come to be in such a strange place and what would become of him in it.
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