In the early 1990s, AVA Cartoonist Dr. Doo (Fred Sternkopf) ran a series of cartoonish sketches depicting timber activist Judi Bari as a bodysuit-clad Wonder Woman, intrepid survivor of a murderous carbomb attack.
Bari and her female posse of trust funders decided that Dr. Doo’s cartoon was “sexist.” They complained about Dr. Doo in a series of Letters to the Editor demanding that Doo stop the “sexist” sketches or that the AVA stop publishing the offending cartoons.
We ignored them, so the Bari-ites devised one of their signature “direct actions.”
One of Bari’s acolytes was an attractive young woman named Melissa Roberts, who had befriended us and had helped out with publication prep a few times. Many, many hours of prep work led up to print day, with a hard post office delivery deadline, a fact irrelevant to people who don't work.
When we arrived at Willits Printing early Wednesday morning to drop off the AVA’s “flats,” the 12 pages of pasted up broadsheet with that week’s collection of news and enlightenment, Ms. Roberts was standing by her old beater car parked in front of Willits Printing, with a beckoning smile, as if to have coffee and a chat during the printing process.
Before we could get out of the car with the flats, there was a blast of a whistle and around the corner came Judi Bari and her (mostly) short people — Little Tree (Alisha Bales, then about 20), Kay Rudin, Mary Korte (not so short), Naomi Wagner, and one or two others.
Miss Tree jumped into the passenger seat and Wagner and Bari held the driver side door closed to prevent our exiting the car.
Meanwhile Roberts had snagged the box of AVA flats from the back seat and ran inside the print shop. Miss Tree tried to grab the car keys but was unsuccessful. When we asked what was going on, we were told to shut up and ”just wait a few minutes.”
We knew that the Willits print crew would not begin without our go-ahead. After the few minutes the dwarves released him us and we noticed that everyone but Roberts was standing on the sidewalk outside the printer’s front door. We demanded that the flats be returned and that they stop fooling around.
Since Roberts had previously assisted the AVA with copy prep and publication a few times, she was familiar with the layout process and timing of the weekly print run. So she had been designated as the lure and the designated page alterer. After grabbing the flats she had rushed into the print shop and replaced the offending cartoon with a cartoon of their own drawn by Kay Rudin depicting Dr. Doo as a misogynist.
When we realized what they had done we told Roberts: “Just give the flats back and we can forget about this. I’ve got a paper to get out.”
She refused.
Assuming a military posture, we quickly marched double time over to the payphone outside the nearby Safeway store to call AVA HQ. Wagner and Miss Tree trotted along trying to keep up, urging us to agree with their cause and alteration and proceed. We just kept marching, grumbling, “This is stupid. This is really stupid…”
Reached by phone, The Editor, shouting so loud he could be heard beyond the phone booth, “Call the cops!” We called the Willits Police office line and reported that the Boonville newspaper had been hijacked.
By the time we returned to Willits Printing, most of the Bari-ites had disappeared.
Willits Police Sergeant Gerry Gonzalez (who later went on to become Willits police chief, and now sits as a Willits city councilman) arrived with a second younger cop and loudly announced: “We understand there’s been a theft.”
“Not exactly,” we replied. “It’s been altered without our permission.”
After a brief moment of thought, Gonzalez asked, “So they violated your civil rights?”
“You could say that,” we replied.
“Who committed this crime?” asked Gonzalez.
We glanced at Roberts who was standing a few feet away leaning on her car, innocently batting her eyelashes.
“She did,” we said, nodding toward Roberts. “But we’ll drop it if they return the original.”
At that point, we did not know where the flats were. He later found out that Roberts had left them with the printer staff assuming (incorrectly) that they would proceed with the Rudin cartoon.
Roberts said nothing.
“Do you want to press charges?” asked Gonzalez.
“We’d rather they just give us back the original,” we said. Then, turning to Roberts he again said, “Come on. Just give it back and quit screwing around.”
But no. Roberts was a loyal Bari-ite. So we went into the print shop and asked to use their phone to call The Editor again.
Since we didn’t have the original cartoon, and we were certainly not going to use the Rudin substitute, and we had to get going to meet dispatch deadlines, and the enraged Editor was shouting, “Arrest all those hags!,” we told the print crew to insert “CENSORED” in big block angled letters in the space where the original Dr. Doo cartoon had been.
An hour had elapsed, jeopardizing our distribution deadline, but we finally got the print run completed and returned to Boonville in time to finish the production and (barely) make the Post Office drop-off deadline.
In the ensuing weeks we received indignant letters from Bari and her “dwarf bully girls,” as the Editor called them, complaining about Dr. Doo’s “sexist” sketches, the Editor pointing out that the great feminists, self-described, had not only dangled Ms. Roberts as sex bait to distract me they were also politically phony in every other way, including their croc tears for timber workers.
Had the group at our home for a pow wow when we were fighting the Blanche Brown estate forestry plan. Same decade later year. We were able to stop the estate from using our road in for their timber cut but they found another way in and did a clear cut. Next Winter rains on treeless slopes caused landslide that covered the stream.