ST. PAT’S IN BOONVILLE
Tam O Shanters off to Senior Center Executive Director Renee Lee and her crew for pulling off this year’s St. Patrick’s Day Dinner that was as good as they come. The Senior Center was packed, spirits ran high and the food was delicious. Terri and Steve Rhodes assembled a top notch kitchen staff to cook and serve corned beef and cabbage, carrots, mashed potatoes and roll — each plate as pretty as a picture. Unable to locate chocolate chip mint ice cream, Renee had to settle for rainbow sherbet for dessert which, as it turned out, was even more appropriate. Remember the pot of gold at the end of the Irish rainbow? In this case the whole dinner was a treasure. (Terry Sites)
PETIT TETON FARM
Free: organic asparagus starts, organic Seascape strawberry starts
Fresh now: chard, kale, broccolini, herbs, mizuna mustard
All the preserved foods from jams to pickles, soups to hot sauces, made from everything we grow.
We sell frozen USDA beef and pork from perfectly raised pigs and cows.
Stewing hens and Squab are also available at times.
Contact us for what’s available at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com.
LOCAL FAMILY LOOKING FOR HOUSING:
Family of 6 (two adults, four children) looking for housing in Anderson Valley. No pets, non-smokers.
Both parents have employment in Ukiah. Please contact Nat Corey-Moran (707) 354-3330, Kathy Cox (707) 800-2300, Steph Arias (707) 367-1744, Donna Pearson-Pugh (707) 684-0325 or Kyle Clarke (707) 489-7107 if you have any information that might have. Thank you!
HOUSE TO SHARE IN NAVARRO
We have a large fully furnished house in Navarro and have two rooms with attached baths to rent. Both rooms are furnished and available April/May. We also have the master bedroom in the house, but are onsite only part of the year.
Tenants will be responsible for normal household maintenance, and minimal upkeep of the property. Each room will rent for $1,000 per month including utilities and wifi. We would prefer no pets but exceptions can be made. Those interested will have to fill out an application, sign a lease and provide owners with references.
Call or Text, Dennis (facebook)
3 BEDS 2 BATHS - HOUSE
Single family home. 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house available for rent April 1st. Front and backyard with parking available. Kerosene unit heater . Located in town. NO PETS. $1000 deposit. DM me (facebook) for application information.
Selma Soto-Rhoades
ONE MORNING in Navarro several people waiting for the bus were dressed as extra-terrestrials. I was reminded of Kary Mullis’s account of alien visitations told in his most interesting book, ‘Dancing Naked in the Mind Field’ where Mullis reports his 1985 encounter with a glow-in-the-dark, extra-worldly raccoon. Mullis, a Nobel laureate, maintained a home in Navarro. “Having passed the functional sobriety test,” Mullis said he had “driven successfully” to his Navarro home where “once I turned on the lights and left sacks of groceries on the floor, I lighted my path to the outhouse with a flashlight. On the way, I saw something glowing under a fir tree. Shining the flashlight on this glow, it seemed to be a raccoon with little black eyes. The raccoon spoke, saying, ‘Good evening, doctor’,” and Mullis replied with a hello. I can’t remember if this cordial man-beast interface resulted in more conversation, but Mullis said the raccoon was definitely from some other place.
NOW in its fiftieth year, the Ricard slum that welcomes us to Boonville, is owned by Glen Ricard of Mendocino. When I arrived here in 1970, there were four businesses and the fledgling Anderson Valley Health Center in that building, all of them fronting Highway 128. I also recall a bar run by Jim Boyd of Yorkville, a feed and grain operation, a laundromat, and one more enterprise I can’t recall, maybe a drug store. I think Karen Ottoboni’s brother owned the building, which he kept fully functional. When he died Ricard bought the place for, I’m told, $75,000. It limped along unmaintained for a few more years as its tenants dropped off. The laundromat disappeared as did a pizza parlor operated by the Portlock family, and then it was completely vacant. And it has sat there a-mouldering’ ever since, crumbling, vandals occasionally breaking its windows. Lately, it’s an impromptu sidewalk art gallery. Ricard has replaced shattered glass, which I’ve always been tempted to re-break, for years wondering why this major eyesore and health and safety hazard is tolerated by local government.
RICARD also owns at least two well-maintained structures in the village of Mendocino where abandoned buildings are not permitted, and he lives in a well-kept home in a gated, high end Little River subdivision overlooking the ocean, also a site where the unsightly is not tolerated, although the unseemly seems to be, if you happen to share my aesthetic.
I KNOW for a slam dunk fact that Ricard has turned down jaw-dropping cash offers for his Boonville wreckage, yet he continues to simply sit on the property while he sticks a daily thumb in our eye. To be fair to the grasping old coot, he did once try to rehab the rambling 50s strip mall but the county, natch, turned down his plan. It’s way past time to abate this guy. I hope our Community Services District Board will finally move on Ricard. The property would make an excellent controlled burn exercise for out fire department.
NORM CLOW writes from Las Vegas: “That wasn’t the first Classic when AV beat Cardinal Newman, it was actually the 9th, in 1966, Newman’s second year in business. AV beat them the year before for 3rd place in overtime. Seems like some school like Fort Bragg or Covelo was around for the first title game in ‘58, but I don’t have it at hand. AV’s win in 1966 was a good game, about an 8-point spread, led by C. Hiatt, T. Rawles, D. Huey, E. Waggoner, R. Cupples, G. Bates, D. Pronsolino, J. Blattner and probably a couple more to whom I apologize in absentia for not remembering. As for a county-wide affair, all the teams except Ukiah have played in the tournament to one degree of success or the other, but watching the same local and league teams that play during the season over and over again is not exactly riveting action. There used to be good teams from Lake County as well that participated, even Clearlake High in Lakeport, a couple of steps up league-wise. They had a guy named Duane Pollard in the early-to-mid ‘60 s who could shoot the lights out and frequently did. Middletown and Calistoga were regulars for a while. Seems like even St. Helena showed up a time or two way back when, but that may be my age kicking in. Rancho Cotate and El Molino from Sonoma County were there mid-60s when they were brand new. So there’s been a good mix from the general area. It can be done, but there are also more tournaments for which to compete for teams than the handful there once were, two or three actually for years. As for Branson, well, maybe they should simply be given a life-time achievement award and call it good.”
I TOOK IN four tournament games myself, and of the teams I saw, including perennial powerhouse Branson, the best coached five by far was Laytonville, led by Mark Kelly. I could have sworn Inker McCovey, the great Hoopa coach, was on the bench with Kelly, but I’m told that although Inker had appeared earlier in the evening with Hoopa, the Inker look-alike was Corey James. I met Inker years ago when some Hoopa kids stayed at my house, back when visiting teams stayed with local families instead of Ukiah motels. (Don’t get me started on what used to be, but used to be used to include night time awards banquets at the Apple Hall, to which the community was invited to enjoy a pot luck supper as the trophies were awarded. These days we get a hurry-up affair in the high school gym, and no one outside ever knows from nuthin’.) Inker or no Inker, Kelly seems to have channeled Inker’s hustling, fundamentally sound style of play. Best Laytonville team in years, and a pleasure to watch. High schools play a run-and-gun NBA-style game, which I don’t find particularly interesting and would have derided in my playing days as merely “6th period gym.” Today’s high school hoopsters launch all kinds of improbable, low percentage shots, including cascades of caroming 45-foot jumpers. Used to be you got benched for freelancing. A disciplined team like Laytonville, which almost knocked off perennial powerhouse Cloverdale, will usually beat the wild bunches, and even Laytonville didn’t have anybody who could shoot reliably from outside. But neither did this year’s powerhouse teams, including state champs Pinewood. The Cloverdale state champion teams of the McMillan era would have run Pinewood out of the gym, down 128, and clear back to Frisco, and the Boonville teams of the Tolman era would have won this year’s tournament, no problemo. The Tolman teams could put five guys on the floor who could shoot. Most high school teams are lucky to have one consistent outside guy. This season’s Boonville edition got whomped twice. The homeboys haven’t played much basketball, but they’re gamers, and Coach Espinoza has them playing hard and having fun, which is the point after all.
AV COMMUNITY PARK —CAUTION: Wasps/Hornets have built a nest in the roof over the raised platform for the lower slides. The platform has been taped off until a volunteer can spray the nest during dormant hours of the nest. It will take a few days before this will be resolved. Thank you for your patience.
CHRISTOPHER ‘CJ’ JONES SENDS BEST WISHES TO HIS MENDO AND BOONVILLE FRIENDS FROM PORTLAND
LAMPLMAYER FAMILY VAULT
“John Lamplmayr of Albion has just had an elaborate concrete vault constructed on his lot in Evergreen cemetery to contain the ashes of departed ones after cremation. There are crypts or niches built inside the vault to hold the urns. The outside of the structure is highly polished like marble. There are walks around the lot with a grassy lawn and flowers in profusion. Henry Zill of Fort Bragg built the vault, which is the first of its kind erected in the local cemeteries. Mr. Lamplmayr had the vault erected in memory of his father [John Lamplmayr, Sr., who passed away in December 1925], whose ashes have been placed in it.” — Mendocino Beacon, June 5, 1926.
BILL KIMBERLIN: The camera guys at ILM used to call light like this, that we were trying to recreate, "God Light". This was off my porch a while ago.
Be First to Comment