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Valley People 12/14/2024

AV ATHLETICS

The 65th Redwood Classic was the largest tournament in its illustrious history. Featuring 16 teams playing 32 games over four days across three locations, it provided a four-game guarantee and plenty of high-level basketball action.

Priory claimed the championship, defeating Stuart Hall in an incredibly competitive final. Defending champions South Fork secured a third-place finish by beating Valley Christian, while Pinewood triumphed over a tough Averroes squad to take home the consolation prize.

Anderson Valley, the host school, delivered its strongest performance in years. Despite a roster dominated by freshmen and sophomores, the varsity team made an impressive comeback from a 15-point deficit to briefly take the lead before falling to Valley Christian in their opening game. Later that evening, they bounced back to defeat Potter Valley. After a loss to Averroes on Friday, they ended their tournament on a high note with a Saturday morning win against Willits.

The game of the tournament was a thrilling overtime showdown between Round Valley and Lower Lake, with Round Valley narrowly claiming victory in a packed gym.

It was an incredible week of basketball that would not have been possible without the hard work of countless volunteers and the dedication of participating schools.


Tournament season continues with our first ever high school girls tournament: The Sequoia Classic! Games will start Friday afternoon and be played all day Saturday.

JIM ARMSTRONG: “AVTV was one of at least four ‘translators’ around the county, including Potter Valley, Laytonville and the granddaddy, Ukiah TIA (one of the largest such in the country). All of them shared for management and technology an eccentric electronic genius named Jim Dietz. I spent many hours with him up at Potter Valley site doing various maintenance chores and listening to his view of the world. It wasn’t until his death that I learned that he was a radioman on bombers flying over Europe in WWII. He never mentioned that or the fact that he had been shot down over the English Channel and bobbed around on his life raft for so many days before his rescue that the tradition of dividing up his belongings was over with when he got back to base.”

COLLEEN SCHENCK (Philo)

We greatly appreciate donations to the barn but only on Mondays and weekends of the sale. Someone left a ton of stuff this week.

We’re having a sale this weekend and can’t possibly sort or store all of it in one day. I don’t have volunteers (they already worked on Monday) to deal with this. Please respect our policy. This is a huge mess to clean up in one day!

BILL KIMBERLIN

The Anderson Valley ponds are looking good, at least from my place. “It is an ill storm that blows no good.” Apologies to John Heywood of 1546.

D’ANN WALLACE

I have attended many CPR classes over the years, but was never told this…..

When you are alone and have a heart attack. What are you gonna do then ?

A rarely good post that can't be shared often enough:

  1. Take a 2 minute break and read this: Let's say it's 5:25 pm and you're driving home after an unusually hard day's work.
  1. You are really tired and frustrated. All of a sudden your chest pains. They are starting to radiate in the arm and jaw. It feels like being stabbed in the chest and heart. You're only a few miles away from the nearest hospital or home.
  2. Unfortunately you don't know if you can make it..
  3. Maybe you've taken CPR training, but the person running the course hasn't told you how to help yourself.
  4. How do you survive a heart attack when you're alone when it happens? A person who is feeling weak and whose heart is beating hard has only about 10 seconds before losing consciousness.
  5. But you can help yourself by coughing repeatedly and very strongly! Deep breaths before every cough. Coughing should be repeated every second until you arrive at the hospital or until your heart starts to beat normally.
  6. Deep breathing gives oxygen to your lungs and coughing movements boost the heart and blood circulation. Heart pressure also helps to restore a normal heartbeat. Here's how cardiac arrest victims can make it to the hospital for the right treatment
  7. Cardiologists say if someone gets this message and passes it on to 10 people, we can expect to save at least one life.
  8. For Women: You should know that women have additional and different symptoms. Rarely have crushing chest pain or pain in the arms. Often have indigestion and tightness across the back at the bra line plus sudden fatigue.

ATTENDANCE OFF?

Margaret Pickens: Does anyone have any idea why the attendance to last Saturday’s Holiday Bazaar at the Apple Hall was so much lower than past years?

So much work goes into this event by the vendors and the Unity Club! I was really disappointed to see such a sparse turn out.

Heather Knight: It was also the same weekend as other Craft Fairs happening. I saw at least two others in Mendocino County. There was also the Redwood Classic going on as well.

CHUCK ROSS

I am kind of melancholy today. This ranch at Elk just sold.

I don't know who the buyer is yet, but this has been in one family for 166 years. Moreover, this house was the view out my bedroom window in my formative years.

Michael Donohue and Catherine (Donneley) came here in 1858 and built this house not long after.

Their daughter Rosanna (1864-1923) was their third born and the second to be born here. In 1894 she married Charles McMaster (1859-1934) and since the Donohues had only two sons and neither of them produced offspring to carry on the name, the property passed into the McMaster name.

Their son Les (1901-1972) raised sheep and cattle on the ranch. He kept two homes, one on Boonville Avenue and the other about halfway up the hill near the old McMaster homestead. He married Alvine West (1901-1982) Their daughter Sharon married Dick Mitchell (1926-2023) changing the name on the property again but it was still in the same family.

Their son Craig has run the ranch for some time but apparently yielded to the pressure of economic realties. One could make the argument that Elk is hanging on to the Greenwood name by the strength of two or three family names alone.

MARSHALL NEWMAN: Palm trees! In Philo! I don't think so.

A RECENT DISPLAY ad in Frisco’s dying Sunday paper invited readers, “Re-Discover Yourself In Mendocino.” But darned if it wasn’t the same old me I found in the rear vision mirror Sunday as I crossed the Mendonoma County line north of Cloverdale where the second roadside sign on the right is (still?) sponsored by medical marijuana, and the whole vastness of my home county is heavily dependent on intoxicants.

I WAS ALSO on the lookout for the “charming towns and villages” the ad promised, but there was only Hopland. Hopland is chock full of lively people, but except for the Thatcher Hotel and the Bluebird Cafe, Hopland is too brief to be charming. Now you see it, now you don't.

UP THE ROAD is Ukiah, a town certainly, but charming? Ukiah used to be charming, and remained charming right up until about 1955 with State Street lined with stately old Elms and the downtown confined to graceful old buildings in an identifiable downtown. Then Ukiah slurbed out in three directions, the elms were cut down, the liberals came along and made everything even uglier with big box stores on 101 and one-way secret police windows in the DA’s office on the ground floor of the Courthouse, and all the charm the place once had was shoved into a few blocks on the west side. A series of crooks, beginning with Vince Sisco, destroyed the Palace Hotel, which was once charming and might be charming again even if the crooks made off with the Black Bart painting and the rest of the cash and carry fixtures, set the place on fire and ran off, and now Ukiah is what it is, a place one visits only if subpoenaed.

FARTHER up the road is Willits which, by any reasonably objective standard, is more frightening than charming but, like most places in the county, can be nice at the higher elevations, up there with the hill muffins and their road associations, beauty increasing with distance from the valley floor.

THE “VILLAGE” of Mendocino lost its charm 30 years ago when the Jack In The Box guy “discovered” it. But Point Arena is certainly charming in the old sense, as is Fort Bragg. Mostly. Covelo is the most beautiful place in the County but no one goes there because people think it's dangerous. Gualala would probably be more comfortable in Clearlake, but Gualala tries and Gualala is even getting its power lines buried, while the Anderson Valley is maybe half-charming and we're not even on the waiting list to get our power lines buried.

MOST BOONVILLE property owners try to keep up appearances, a few don’t, the king of the non-tryers being a character called Glen Ricard of Little River and Mendocino, two charm-heavy communities where Ricard would never be allowed to maintain the firetrap eyesore he sits on in Boonville.

STRANGE how Boonville’s governing body, its Community Services District board, once compelled the much missed Lauren’s Restaurant to spend a small fortune replacing a perfectly functional stove hood but allows this Ricard guy to get away with a half-block-long pile of kindling that could destroy half of Boonville if (when) it catches fire.

WHEN PEOPLE, and ad copywriters are people I guess, talk about Mendocino County charm they’ve got to mean its unencumbered vistas, those magic areas where hills and trees and sometimes the sea combine with our non-industrial light in ways that make atheists believe in God.

3 Comments

  1. Jim Minton (formerly of Boonville, now Anacortes, Wa) December 14, 2024

    Bitch, bitch, bitch! Palace Hotel, downtown Ukiah, liberals, and the Ricard slum. The same complaints for well over a decade…. Can’t you find some new things to piss and moan about? You’re showing your age gramps.

    • Marshall Newman December 14, 2024

      He has a right. And those who thinks someone is too old or no longer handsome lack foresight.

  2. Pat Kittle December 15, 2024

    An un-heralded self-help group, for people who talk too much:

    Onanonanon.

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