THE INFERNAL ANTI-SLEEP MACHINES, were turned on much earlier than usual this year. Even though the overnight temps never got below 40 degrees, the grape growers’ wind fans were turned on Friday morning, February 21, to the dismay of anyone in Anderson Valley within earshot.
JOHN TOOHEY, Panther Athletic Director: The AVHS Junior class is looking for leads on a cotton candy machine for Prom - they have big plans to restore the annual event to its former glory - if anyone has a machine or any other decor or would like to contribute, send a message my way!
A READER WRITES: TO JOHN TOOHEY, Panther Athletic Director, When I was class president at what I call Boonville High, we controlled the popcorn machine for all the high school sports games. If there is not one still at the school, I suggest you get one. The profits from that machine fuled many a drunken party as well as gas for our hot rods. I notice the students no longer have hot rods. Without hot rods how does one learn to not be subservient?
VERN PETERMAN: Marie & Charles A. "Cat" Tarwater, enhanced & colorized after whom present day Octopus Mountain was called Tarwater Hill
THE DAFFODILS are rising. Daff lovers are annually thrilled by their sudden merry yellow appearances at the Anderson Valley Health Center, Reilly Heights, the Little Red School House.
IS THIS YOUR BULL?
Tina Gowan: “We have this bull at our place near the Farm Supply in Philo. Please let me know if it yours.”
PEERING BACK through the mists of time, I think it was Jack LaLanne, who died at age 96 after years of yogurt and clean living. Yogurt was unknown. Exercise may have been known in the 1950s but few adults made daily aerobics integral to their lives, the paradox being that fat people were a rare sight.
IT WAS LALANNE who first got me thinking about diet and the vigorous life. I got a kick out of his television presentations, viewing him as the Liberace of physical fitness, kinda effete but the sucker was strong! He was always in the news lifting the back end of an Olds 88 or pulling a box car with his teeth. I have a vague memory of him swimming handcuffed from Alcatraz to Fisherman's Wharf.
IT ALSO struck me that a lot of the moves that Lalanne demonstrated didn't have much to do with fitness, but that far back, nobody seemed to know much about exercise, least of all the high school coaches I hoped would lead me to glory on the fields of play.
HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL was a benightedly inefficient regimen of, “OK, take a lap around the track and do twenty push-ups if you ever get back. Then we'll do a couple of nutcrackers and run through the plays none of you morons can remember.”
COACHES weren't much for handholding in those days. Self-esteem was unknown as a concept, and would have been sneered at if it was known.
BASKETBALL consisted of half-court drills with the only sustained running occurring in the games; and baseball, well, look at Babe Ruth. (Media note: In the 40s and 50s major league teams travelled by train. Sports writers had their own car. One of them remembered the night Ruth, naked, came running through their car, a nude woman brandishing a butcher's knife right behind him. “There goes another story we can't write,” he said.
BUT there was always Jack LaLanne saying things like, “Would you give your dog a cigarette and a donut for breakfast?” Probably, if that's what the dog wanted, but even back in the Dumb Days when doctors not only smoked, so did most pro athletes, but most of us knew, or at least intuited, that a smoke and a jelly donut was contraindicated.
JUSTINE FREDERICKSON WRITES:
Warning: When I told my grandmother this about Jack LaLanne, she was livid and refused to believe me, but he was not exactly a model of healthy living, as he was quite the drunk, and quite the drunken driver.
When I was in college in San Luis Obispo in the mid-1990s, I worked for the California State Parks in nearby Morro Bay, and often in the early mornings there would be a very nice sports car parked in a turnout along the water directly in front of the kiosk where I worked.
“That's Jack LaLanne,” my co-worker said one morning when I asked if she knew that car, and she explained that he lived in the area, and quite frequently pulled over while driving drunk to avoid getting arrested again.
Here is just one arrest story from SLO in 1991: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-06-14-mn-666-story.html
MOM was still laying out from-scratch sit-down meals consisting of the major food groups in more or less their natural states — pan fried hamburger steak was still protein and the jello had fresh slices of carrot in it. And there was all the milk you could drink.
THESE DAYS, I see young mommies loading their kids up on negative food value items so vile that a cigarette and a donut look positively nourishing alongside churros and pepperoni sticks. And this packaged poison is expensive! The kid is already fat and pre-diabetic and destined for a wheelchair when he's forty.
OF ALL THE CLASSES disappeared from high school curriculums, the loss of home economics courses may have hurt the most citizens. Here in Boonville we were blessed with a highly skilled lady named Gloria Ross who taught kids the basics of healthy meal prep and how to eat well on modest outlays of cash. Mrs. Ross's home-ec class, along with mandatory PE, are long gone.
WE SEEM to be going backwards in the food and exercise department, even though exercise is refined these days to models of gainful efficiency on nifty machines and racks of dumbells. But lots of people still don't understand that eating right without exercise is a waste of time, and most people still don't work their bodies at all despite the daily barrage of How-To advice.
LIKE MOST PEOPLE, I've suffered through basic physical exams, which are more humiliating with the years when they aren't plainly infantilizing. Even at the very last stop on the actuarial charts, I easily beat the treadmill and ace the upper-bod strength tests, basking in the medical professional's faux amazement. “How old are you again, Mr. Anderson?” Shucks, ma'am, 112. (Your knees go, but vanity never does.)
PLEASE, Mr. Editor, you geriatric paragon, tell us how you do it. An hour a day of brisk walking, often uphill; that and lots of push-ups which, total time, occupy about an hour a day, even given my ongoing struggle with the debilitating consequences of my new econo-throat, the one that comes without a voice or the dual senses of taste and smell. There are days when I'm reluctant to push myself out the door for the hour-long trudge, but I see it as an opportunity to listen to books on tape, and off I go. If I miss a day, I feel off, way off.
DIET? Whatever, but granola and fruit breakfast and lunch, big salads for dinner, no processed foods if I can avoid them, an apple crisp when I feel the need to break the austerity barrier.
NOTE on what else is missing from the contemporary K-12 curriculum — penmanship. Watch a young person death-grip his or her pen like a dagger preparatory to plunging it in an enemy's chest. See the ensuing child-like script, a mix of block letters and swirling cursive, hearts over dotted i's if the writer is a woman, just the blocks if a man. Techno-life being what it is, the only handwritten letters we receive anymore are from prisoners, many of whom write a nice, if unique, hand developed script over years of isolation, paper and pencil.
MR. QIONG WANG was the most committed poacher to prey on Mendocino County in years, perhaps operating under the prevalent Asian delusion that all Asians look alike to us Round Eyes. Deputy Craig Walker busted Mr. Wang for possession of 36 (!) abalone, half of them under legal size and all of them out of season. Fresh abalone can bring upwards of $100 each from Asian restaurants in the Bay Area. Deputy Walker had stopped the San Francisco resident for speeding south through Boonville. The purloined delicacy was clearly visible in all its flagrantly illegal abundance in Mr. Wang’s vehicle, and Mr. Wang was duly arrested and booked into the Mendocino County Jail. Mr. Wang quickly bailed, but his booking photo and the details of his aborted Mendo foray were printed here.
SCARCELY A WEEK LATER, alert Philo residents spotted Mr. Wang driving west towards the Mendocino Coast. They’d recognized Wang from his photo in our paper. Deputy Walker was quickly alerted that Wang was back, the deputy promptly alerted Fish and Game and, as incredulous game wardens looked on, Wang strode out of the surf near Mendocino with what turned out to be 50 abs (!!), at least half of which were again under size and all of which were again out of season. The determined Wang had rented dive gear and had returned to the scene of the prior week’s crime to poach more abalone. And he was busted again, and booked into the County Jail again. And here’s his photo again, and if you ever see him again headed west on 128, call Fish and Wildlife.
PANTHERS SHOW GRIT IN FULL DAY OF VOLLEYBALL!
Panther Athletics never rests, fresh off an exciting basketball season, our first ever boys volleyball team put in a strong effort at an opening scrimmage Saturday, competing for nearly three hours with just six players! We took a couple of sets off Ukiah, battled hard against a very strong Kelseyville team, and dominated against Lower Lake without dropping a set. The improvement from morning to afternoon was clear, and it was a successful day of volleyball for our squad. Great job boys!
(John Toohey)
REILLY HEIGHTS
The Reilly Heights story is given at least in part, right here: https://theava.com/archives/920
JEFF BURROUGHS:
This is what I know, but others will know more I’m sure. Joe Reilly commissioned this house to be built in 1890 for him and his family. He married Christine Gschwyn, the daughter of John Gschwyn, a pioneer family who arrived in A.V. around the 1860’s. Joe was a logging bull team operator and a constable for Wendling Navarro when it was a boom town of around 1,500+ people. The family ran a kind of dude ranch on their property that reached the Navarro River for a few years. Ester Reilly (Clark), Joe’s daughter?, inherited the home and property and she married Earl Clark and the two of them raised sheep and apples for quite a few years. Their daughter, Christine Clark, inherited everything when Earl and Ester passed away. She still owns the house and the property that runs to the Navarro River, but the acres of apple trees, behind the house, were sold to ?? can’t remember their name, but they turned it into Vineyards and built the big winery that sits on the hills just South of the Reilly Heights building. I hope I got this information correct.
PANTHER VARSITY BASKETBALL TEAM 1960
Editor seems to have awakened the ab poachers with his reminiscence of the Qiong Wang bust. A Mr Ramos was caught with 35 of the prized mollusk in Windsor this week. Purloined from the shores of Mendocino. So far Ramos has not been charged with commercial-level poaching which usually happens when someone is in possession of more than 13 abalone.