Mendocino County Today: Friday 4/11/2025

COOL AND BREEZY conditions are expected today and Saturday. Frost is possible in the colder spots Saturday morning. High pressure builds in on Sunday and into next week with temperatures warming to 10 to 15 degrees above normal. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 51F this Friday morning on the coast. Cloudy & windy today, sunny & windy Saturday then sunny & warm on Sunday. That's what they say anyhow.

BOB ABELES (Boonville): In hyper-local news, after an all day power outage, PG&E completed relocating the power lines serving the Lambert Ln. neighborhood early yesterday evening. This was step one toward replacing the bridge that failed several years ago. Hopefully AT&T will take a cue from PG&E and complete their line relocation without leaving the neighborhood bereft of phone or internet service for more than a day. I have my doubts.

FTM off-road, diesel mechanic, Point Arena…the best! (Randy Burke)

AV CLASS OF 2025 APPLIES FOR SCHOLARSHIPS

by Terry Sites

Another turn of the calendar and once again Anderson Valley High School Seniors are within shooting range of graduation. The Panther class of 2024 has 38 graduating seniors. The class of 2025 has dropped to only 28. This is roughly one fourth fewer than 2024 and, in a small way, reflects declining enrollment in all local schools.

Each year graduating seniors are invited to apply for scholarships, most of which are provided by the local community. This small valley offers an astounding number of scholarships given the overall population.

Last year’s scholarships included:

The Lions Club

The Unity Club

The American Legion

The Yorkville Scholarship

Anderson Valley Arts

Anderson Valley Boosters

Anderson Valley Teachers Association

Anderson Valley California School Employees Association

Anderson Valley Grange

The Dusenberry Memorial

Michael L. Shapiro Memorial

William Sterling Memorial

Anderson Valley Firefighters Association

Anderson Valley Career Women

Jim Levin Mendocino County Youth Projects

Northern California Scholarship Foundation

The Mendocino County Community Foundation

Nicola Miner and Robert Mailer Anderson Family Scholarships,

This same list has extended scholarship opportunities again this year. With one quarter fewer students in the running, the chances of receiving a scholarship have increased.

The selected students will be honored at a special awards dinner in the high school gym on the 22nd of April. The awards dinner is by invitation only but the graduation ceremony is also held in the gym and is open to all comers. If you would like to see our recent crop of young people walking down the aisle towards their adult lives the ceremony will be held on June 12th at 7 pm.

In reviewing many of the scholarship applications several things stood out. The first outstanding thing was the number of students accepted to ranking colleges including UC Davis, Cal-Berkeley, Cal Poly, Sarah Lawrence and UCLA. The second stand out was the number of students who have prevailed despite serious difficulties. One student’s home burned to the ground this school year. Several students have serious ongoing health problems. Many students have family members with significant health problems. Also there are the large families living in small, sometimes substandard houses. There is the need to for parents to work long hours and multiple jobs to make ands meet. Despite these obstacles, all the graduates applying have positive hopes, plans and dreams for their futures. These plans range from barber and hairstylist to lawyer and community organizer. Lots of sights are set on medical careers. Many students include their families in their future plans wishing to repay parents and siblings for the sacrifices they have made to support their education.

After the awards dinner you will be able to read the names of the recipients in the online AVA. As graduations draws near the AVA also hopes to follow their tradition of publishing photos of each class graduate.

Looking back on a big city graduation in 1968 with 350 classmates, I scarcely remember any scholarships awarded. The ones I do remember came from formal national organizations like the American Scholarship Association. There were absolutely no local based awards. The process of graduating was formal and impersonal.

As the Anderson Valley class of 2025 proceeds to build their adult lives I hope they will look back with appreciation on the well-wishing and support that their community showed toward them. In Anderson Valley graduation is a much more personal experience than in larger high schools. In this case it is clear that smaller is definitely better.

COASTAL COMMISSION UNANIMOUSLY APPROVES CITY OF FORT BRAGG’S LCP AMENDMENT FOR MILL SITE REZONING

The California Coastal Commission has unanimously approved the City of Fort Bragg’s Local Coastal Program (LCP) amendment, rezoning approximately one-third of the former Georgia-Pacific Mill Site. This important action formalizes existing land uses on the Coastal Trail property and land held by the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians, while also supporting both current and future development of the Noyo Center for Marine Science.

“This is a significant milestone in advancing our shared vision for the Headlands,” said Fort Bragg City Manager Isaac Whippy. “The Coastal Commission’s approval not only strengthens our partnerships but also reaffirms the City’s deep commitment to public access, environmental stewardship, and honoring the enduring Tribal connection to these lands. I want to sincerely thank our dedicated City staff, the City Council, and Marie Jones for their leadership and persistence—this achievement is a direct result of their collective effort and unwavering commitment.

The rezoning of Area C establishes updated land use designations—Parks and Recreation, Public Facilities, and Residential—to better reflect current community uses and support long-term goals for coastal conservation, cultural recognition, and science education. While much work remains on the remainder of the Mill Site, this step lays the groundwork for continued collaboration and meaningful community progress.”

For more information, please contact:
Isaac Whippy, City Manager, iwhippy@fortbragg.com, (707) 961 2823

COAST LISTENING SESSION FOR COUNTY BUDGET

Social media comments don’t trigger change. If you’re dissatisfied by how your county spends your tax dollars, this is the venue to influence change:

The Mendocino County Executive Office will be hosting a listening session on the Fiscal Year 2025-26 budget from 2:30PM to 4:30PM on Tuesday, April 15th at the Veteran’s Hall in Fort Bragg located at 360 N Harrison St, Fort Bragg.

This Listening Session is for you to provide input on the County budget, potential budget reductions, and what we need to preserve for a balanced budget for Fiscal Year 2025-26. Each speaker will have three minutes to provide comments.

— Fifth District Supervisor Ted Williams, ted@ted.net

ID THAT PLANE

LUCRESHA RENTERIA & MENDOCINO COAST CLINICS

MendoLatino is proud to announce that it has completed the second episode of Nuestro Norte/Our North in both English and Spanish. Where I Belong is a compelling half-hour audio program that interweaves the story of Mendocino Coast Clinics with the life of its current Executive Director, Lucresha Renteria. As one of the founders of MCC, Renteria and Mendocino Coast Clinics came of age together.

The English-language version of Where I Belong will first be aired on KZYX & Z on Monday, April 14 at 9:00 a.m. on MendoLatino’s radio program. The first half hour of the program features a conversation with Lucresha and others about the episode, followed by the premiere of the episode at 9:30 a.m.

The Spanish-language version of Donde Pertenezco (Where I Belong) will be broadcast on KZYX & Z on Monday, April 28 on MendoLatino’s radio program. The first half hour features a dialogue about the production of this episode, followed by the premiere of the Spanish-language version at 9:30am.

Nuestro Norte/Our North recounts the story of the arrival, growth, and establishment of the Latino community of the Mendocino Coast. The first episode of the series, The Making of a Teacher, can be heard here on Soundcloud. Subsequent audio stories will be released in 2025 and 2026, and will include episodes about Latinos in lumber, fishing, agriculture and the restaurant business.

MendoLatino’s mission is to make visible the voices, histories, cultures, and perspectives of the local Latino community of Mendocino. We work in multiple media formats, including radio, video, audio stories, and oral history.

Diana Coryat and Loreto Rojas, the co-directors of MendoLatino, believe that the need for this project has only grown since they began recording these stories. For the Latino community, its contributions to our region are finally being recorded and publicly recognized. For the whole region, sharing these stories generates positive and healing effects. As StoryCenter founder Joe Lambert has discovered through decades of storytelling work, “…if you see yourself in the other, if you know their story, you come to see how much is shared between all of us. And knowing those connections makes it harder to discard their needs, their suffering, their rights.”

This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit www.calhum.org. We thank our local funders: The Community Foundation of Mendocino, The Arlene and Michael Rosen Foundation, and The Tarbell Family Foundation. We are grateful for all the local support we have received from individuals and organizations, including our fiscal sponsor, KZYX Mendocino County Public Broadcasting.

ONE SMALL STEP FOR HOUSING, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR FORT BRAGG

Editorial, by Chris Pugh

People say they want more housing—until someone tries to build it. Then it’s all panic over ocean views and the “character” of the neighborhood. Fort Bragg just approved an 87-unit project on South Main Street, and frankly, it’s about time.

This project adds real housing. Not another short-term rental empire. Not a weekender’s crash pad. Housing. Ten of the units will be affordable, thanks to our Inclusionary Housing Ordinance—which, yes, applies to rentals. The developer missed that memo at first, but they corrected course. Good. That’s how the law should work.

To make it viable, the city granted a few incentives: ten extra feet of height, smaller balconies on some units. In return, we get more units, more parking, more open space, and better stormwater management. Not exactly a deal with the devil.

And yet the usual complaints showed up: traffic, blocked views, aesthetics. I get it—nobody likes change. But the bigger problem is that too many people who live and work here can’t afford to stay here. That’s the crisis. Not the view.

Look, we’re not paving paradise here. We’re talking about an infill project on Main Street. It’s not a forest. It’s a logical spot for housing—close to stores, services, and transit. If we can’t build in town, where exactly do people think new homes should go? Or is the answer just “nowhere”?

If we’re being honest, some of the loudest voices at these meetings are folks who already have homes. They’re not the ones scraping together rent or sleeping in their car between shifts. They’re not the ones who’ll benefit from a few dozen new units. And that’s exactly the problem—too much policy has been shaped by comfort, not need.

There’s a bigger context here, too. Fort Bragg is pursuing a Pro-Housing Designation from the state. That’s not just a feel-good title. It opens up access to state grants and other resources to help build even more housing. We’ve also updated parking regulations to reflect reality instead of fantasy. No, not every household in a multifamily unit needs two parking spots. And yes, we need to stop designing cities around the convenience of car storage.

The city could have eliminated the Use Permit process entirely, but didn’t. That means the public still gets a chance to weigh in—and they should. But having a voice doesn’t mean having a veto. California law requires cities to approve housing unless there’s a clear, proven safety risk. Not “we’re worried about traffic,” but something real, measurable, and legally defensible.

And let’s talk about the view thing for a second. I keep hearing that three-story buildings will destroy the ocean view. Look, unless you’re on the third floor yourself or own a drone, your view was never that expansive to begin with. Most of us live surrounded by trees, fences, and other people’s rooftops. The view is still there. You might just have to walk half a block to see it. That’s not oppression. That’s urban life.

This isn’t the first time a housing project has stirred up local resistance, and it won’t be the last. But at some point, we have to ask: who are we building this town for? Are we just holding onto a postcard version of Fort Bragg that only exists for a handful of homeowners? Or are we actually planning for a future where the people who work here, raise families here, and contribute every day can afford to live here too?

Because right now, we have too many people leaving. Or commuting from inland. Or living doubled up in single bedrooms. Or giving up entirely. That’s not sustainable.

This project isn’t perfect. No housing project ever is. But we can’t keep waiting for the flawless solution while the people who keep this town running get pushed farther and farther out. If we want Fort Bragg to have a future that includes workers, artists, young families, and actual diversity—not just tourists and retirees—we need more housing. We need this housing.

And if you’re worried that a few new buildings will change the town’s vibe, ask yourself: is that vibe worth protecting if no one under 40 can afford to stick around? Is it really character, or is it just nostalgia dressed up as policy?

We should absolutely care about design. We should advocate for smart planning, for buildings that fit into their surroundings, for projects that make Fort Bragg more walkable, greener, and better connected. But we can’t let perfect be the enemy of done. We’re in a housing crisis. Not a theoretical one. A real one. And it’s not going away on its own.

So yes—this approval matters. It’s a step. Not the finish line, but proof that we’re at least facing the right direction. I’d rather see a city that says yes with conditions than one that keeps saying no out of habit.

More housing means more options. More stability. A little less fear about what happens if your rent goes up or your lease runs out. It means people who are part of this town can stay part of it. And if that means a taller building or a little more traffic, I’ll take it.

Because a town that doesn’t make space for people doesn’t have a future. It just has memories.

Chris Pugh is the managing editor of the Advocate-News and Mendocino Beacon. He can be reached at chrispugh@advocate-news.com.

(Fort Bragg Advocate-News)

AWOL SEX OFFENDER PREVIOUSLY FOUND WITH CHILD PORNOGRAPHY SENTENCED TO 16 YEARS.

As was first posted last December, defendant Jeffery Lloyd Hockett, now age 64, of Fort Bragg, was found guilty by a jury on December 12th of the following felony crimes:

Possession in April 2024 of pornography of minor children under the age 18 years, with prior felony sex convictions involving minor children out of Oregon in 1997 and 2006;
Possession in April 2024 of over 600 pornographic images of minor children under the age of 18 years;
Possession in April 2024 of sadomasochistic pornography of minor children under the age of 18;
Willful failure to register as a sex offender between August 1, 2023 and October 31, 2023;
Willful failure to register as a sex offender between November 1, 2023 and January 31, 2024; and
Willful failure to register as a sex offender between February 1, 2024 and March 31, 2024.

The jury also found true the sentencing enhancement alleging that the defendant has previously suffered a Strike conviction, within the meaning of California’s voter-modified Three Strikes law.

Last week, on April 1st, the defendant – still held in-custody – was back in the Ten Mile courthouse in Fort Bragg for his sentencing hearing.

The time delay between the verdicts in December and last week’s sentencing hearing was due to law and motion proceedings initiated by defendant Hockett seeking to throw out the December guilty verdicts and demanding a new trial.

That motion for new trial was heard and denied in early March.

Moving forward to last Thursday, defendant Hockett was sentenced by the court to a state prison commitment of 16 years in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation after all was said and done.

The law enforcement agencies that developed the evidence used to convict the defendant were the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force, the Fort Bragg Police Department, the Department of Justice Latent Fingerprints Unit, and the DA’s own Bureau of Investigations.

Senior Deputy District Attorney Eloise Kelsey, appearing on behalf of DA Eyster, argued in support of the need and appropriateness of sending this defendant to state prison for the term ultimately imposed.

(DA Presser)

MIKE GENIELLA

Public officials can be held liable for blocking critics on social media

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/03/public-officials-can-be-held-liable-for-blocking-critics-on-social-media/

Mendocino County DA David Eyster regularly thumbs his nose at a definitive U.S. Supreme Court ruling on social media posts by government officials. Eyster selectively blocks the public from commenting on his posts and their content with this line: “Mendocino County District Attorney has limited who can comment on this post.” Shouldn’t an elected District Attorney follow the law? Especially given that Eyster describes himself on his Facebook Mendocino County District Attorney page as “Mister District Attorney! Champion of the people! Defender of truth! Guardian of our fundamental rights!”

STATE AUDIT COULD BE A TURNING POINT FOR MENDOCINO COUNTY

Auditors are not there to punish the county or its employees. They are there to diagnose problems and recommend solutions.

Recent mistakes by Mendocino County government have shaken public trust and highlighted the need for significant improvement. Ballot errors in 2024 and persistent financial reporting deficiencies leave no doubt that the county could use a clearheaded, external review. The state aims to deliver it. A comprehensive audit is not cause for alarm, but rather an opportunity to build a stronger, more transparent and efficient government.

Last year, prior to the primary election, the county sent incorrect ballots to more than 50,000 voters. It worked to correct the error, though even that came up short and problems lingered. At least it was not the contentious November general election in which voters decided presidential and congressional races, not to mention a bevy of high-profile ballot measures.

The electoral harm might have been small, but the incident was a serious blow to public confidence that local leaders could get the job done. Election integrity is essential to the democratic process, and in this instance the county failed.

That debacle was just the latest cause to question Mendocino County operations. Previously, a state controller’s investigation had found significant shortcomings in the county’s financial reporting. Late filings, a decentralized accounting system with numerous bank accounts and the use of error-prone spreadsheets for tracking transactions all left questions about how much officials were spending on what. Those poor practices make oversight and accountability difficult.

Things were supposed to get better after the auditor-controller and treasurer-tax-collector’s offices merged, but that reportedly led to low staff morale and high employee turnover.

Things are not irretrievably broken in Mendocino County, but they could use a refresh.

Enter California Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, whose district includes Mendocino County. The Healdsburg Democrat recently announced that the state auditor’s office would spend a few months reviewing county operations and financial practices. It also would take a look at what happened with last year’s primary election.

Mendocino County officials should cooperate fully. This is not a time for defensiveness or embarrassment when issues come to light. Auditors are not there to punish the county or its employees. They are there to diagnose problems and recommend solutions. It will be up to Mendocino County to implement them.

County supervisors, at least, seem to be taking the whole thing in stride. It would have been easy to get their hackles up about the state sticking its nose into local affairs and judging them. Instead, supervisors said they welcome an independent review.

Supervisor Ted Williams said an audit will “shine a light on inefficiencies, offer a road map for improvement, and ensure each dollar is properly tracked, reinforcing transparency, accountability and public trust in government operations.”

Supervisor Maureen Mulheren concurred: “The board is open to figuring out what is the best and most transparent way to move forward with the way we operate our financial system.”

They’ll need to maintain that sort of positive attitude in the months ahead and instill it in county staff if this review is to succeed. With transparency, accountability and a commitment to positive change, the county can emerge better equipped to serve its residents.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat Editorial)

Mark Scaramella Comments: This “editorial” is dumb even by PD standards. It reads like they took a couple of Williams quotes and fed them into an AI machine with instructions to write an editorial in the style of Pete ‘Oatmeal’ Golis but exclude any mention of the Board’s own responsibilities for budgeting failures or their ill-advised financial consolidation and costly suspension of Cubbison. PS. Nobody we’ve talked to has heard anything about the “audit” being underway. You’d think by now they’d have at least asked for some basic County finance documents since they expect to be done by January of 2026 and the ($800k!) audit was announced months ago. But as far as we can tell no such requests have been made. The title’s implication that the PD magically knows that the Auditors do not intend to “punish” the County, is 1. unfounded (how do they know what the auditors are “there fore”?), and 2) if true, advance notice that the “audit” will be useless. In a normal world, the objects of a serious audit are supposed to be very nervous about the results, not yawn and say, “Welcome.” In the Air Force we used to joke that the two most blatant lies that were made annually were 1. When the Inspection team arrives they say, “We’re here to help.” And the OIC responds, “We’re glad to have you.”

FARM BUREAUS IN RUSSIAN RIVER COUNTIES ISSUE PLEA TO PRESIDENT TRUMP TO KEEP THE POTTER VALLEY DAMS IN PLACE

About a month ago, the Lake County Board of Supervisors begged President Donald Trump to put a halt to the deal to remove the two antiquated hydropower dams way up near the headwaters of the main stem of the Eel. That deal was reached in mid-February, after years of negotiations.

PG&E doesn’t want the dams anymore. It plans to petition the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to allow them to be removed, in a process that would mirror the historic undamming of the Klamath.

But Lake County wanted to throw some sand in the gears, and now that body is joined by the local chapters of the Farm Bureau in Lake, Mendocino, Sonoma and Marin counties. Last week, they sent a letter to President Trump, who has made speeches about the folly of allowing the water in California rivers to return to the sea, and in that letter they petition the president to order FERC to keep the dams in place.

Farm Bureau Letter

Re: FERC Proceeding P-77 Proposed Scott Dam Decommissioning in the State of California

Dear Mr. President, Honorable Secretaries, Attorney General Bondi,

The Lake, Mendocino, Sonoma, and Marin County Farm Bureaus are non-governmental, nonprofit, voluntary membership advocacy groups that aim to protect and promote agricultural interests throughout their respective counties. In all endeavors, our goals include finding solutions to the problems facing agricultural businesses and the rural community. Together, we would like to ask for your collective support and to intervene in the FERC Proceeding Project-77, Proposed Scott Dam Decommissioning in the State of California.

In a letter to your agencies dated February 25, 2025, the Lake County Board of Supervisors eloquently displayed the importance of Lake Pillsbury (created by Scott Dam) to their infrastructure, economy, and public safety. They also fervently expressed the contrast of the decommissioning of the Scott Dam to several of President Trump’s recent Executive Orders, including 13960, 14017, and 14028, which emphasize prioritizing water infrastructure, energy security, and human safety, respectively. The removal of Scott Dam threatens the

The Cape Horn dam that creates the Van Arsdale Reservoir is downstream from Scott Dam and Lake Pillsbury. At this location, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a California Public Utility, has diverted water to communities along the Russian River for over 120 years while generating electricity. This entire construction is referred to as the Potter Valley Project (PVP). PG&E is required to file a license surrender application and decommissioning plan for the PVP to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) by July 29, 2025.

Numerous agencies from Mendocino and Sonoma counties have been collaborating in search of a viable solution for over 20 years. While seeking solutions, federal representatives

region’s water accessibility, economic stability, and disaster preparedness, partnered with NGO’s and a single tribe along the Eel River to devise a plan they dubbed the Two Basin Solution. This “solution” includes the removal of both dams, and water could be diverted only during the winter months and high flow. Despite being directly impacted, Lake County was not included in stakeholder meetings, decision-making processes, or the Two Basin Solution discussions. Key agencies and representatives failed to engage Lake County leaders, even though the region faces significant economic and public safety consequences.

Removing impoundments for this “run of the river” scenario is said to be most e ective for salmonid species to migrate upstream. Some also believe that decommissioning the PVP is the single most important action to recover fisheries and restore ecological function throughout the Eel River watershed, despite PG&E’s draft decommissioning plan acknowledging that it will cause negative e ects to wildlife that depend on the reservoirs and the Russian River.

Preserving the Potter Valley Project is the desired outcome to maintain our water supply, allowing Mendocino, Sonoma, and Marin Counties to continue receiving this water, serving over 600,000 people. Communities were built based on this water supply, and communities will be ruined should it go away. Moreover, the restoration and modernization of the PVP could result in the return of su icient hydroelectric power generation that could supply our region with sustainable electricity once more.

It seems our future hangs in the balance as the current “agreement” is that regional agencies will collaborate on the construction of new infrastructure that will continue water diversion from the Eel River to the Russian River, but at lower levels than what has historically been diverted and only during the winter high-flow season. Many in our community have generally been unaware of the impending crisis that has been unfolding until now. There is an awakening coupled with a sense of urgency as it is realized that the removal of the dams and the conditional diversion puts us at the mercy of river water flow, which stems from rainfall in an area that is no stranger to drought. Moreover, summertime access to water, which is eminent today, will not be an option.

PG&E does not want to continue operating the Potter Valley Project, including maintaining or upgrading the dams. Despite decades of seeking solutions and identifying parties to take on the project, we continue to encounter dead ends. If FERC accepts the decommissioning plan by PG&E, there will be devastating impacts to infrastructures, economies, and public safety in Lake, Mendocino, Sonoma, and Marin Counties.

We ask the Trump Administration to intervene and prevent FERC from approving PG&E’s

decommissioning plan until a long-term solution is secured.

We urge the Bureau of Reclamation to assume ownership and responsibility for the PVP. Given the Bureau of Reclamation’s expertise in federal water management and dam operations, this is the best path forward to ensure continued water delivery to over 600,000 people in our region.

Congruently, we request federal assistance in securing funding and regulatory relief for raising Coyote Dam (Lake Mendocino), which is a crucial mitigation e ort if decommissioning proceeds. Coyote Dam was initially designed and authorized through the Flood Control Act of 1944 to be built in two phases, but only phase one was completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1958. As of late, regional interests have been working toward the second phase of construction. Our e orts have been supported with federal funding, but there is concern that momentum could wane or the process could become so arduous that the project is unsuccessful or aborted.

PG&E is poised to submit its decommissioning plan to FERC by July 29, 2025. It is anticipated that the review and approval of the license surrender application and final decommissioning plan could take as little as a few months to as long as only a few years. With so much at stake and the extreme gravity of our requests, we need as much time as possible to position ourselves in the best way to protect human health and safety, our economy, and our entire communities. At the very least, the approval of the decommissioning must be delayed long enough for the completion of raising the Coyote Dam and other infrastructure improvements to accommodate and adapt to the change in water availability.

We request an urgent meeting with representatives from your agencies to discuss federal intervention options. Additionally, we are prepared to provide further documentation detailing the economic and environmental consequences of this decommissioning.

With gratitude,

Estelle Clifton, President Mendocino County Farm Bureau 455 East Gobbi Street, Ukiah, CA 95470. (707)462-6664

Pat Burns, President, Sonoma County Farm Bureau 3589 Westwind Boulevard Santa Rosa, CA 95403. (707)544-5575

Daniel Suenram, President Lake County Farm Bureau 65 Soda Bay Road Lakeport, CA 95453. (707)263-0911

Martin Pozzi, President, Marin County Farm Bureau Post Ogice Box 219, Point Reyes Station, CA 94956 (415)663-1231

Press release from Friends of the Eel:

Turning a blind eye to serious safety and reliability concerns, as well as questioning a private company’s business decision, the Farm Bureaus of Marin, Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino Counties have asked the Trump administration to halt or delay the removal of Scott and Cape Horn Dams.

The dams comprise the Potter Valley Project on the upper Eel River. Dam owner Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) must surrender its current federal license to operate the dams, and intends to remove them starting in 2028. A separate agreement announced this February by Eel and Russian River interests proposes construction of a new, low-impact facility to maintain a reliable water supply to the Russian River through wet-season diversions from the Eel.

In an April 5 letter, the agriculture organizations argue that, instead, the federal Bureau of Reclamation should acquire the dams from PG&E and continue to operate them for the benefit of Russian River water users. Alternatively, they propose Eel River dam removal be delayed until Coyote Dam, on the upper Russian River east of Ukiah, is raised to provide additional storage in the Lake Mendocino reservoir.

PG&E has been clear that it does not make economic sense to operate the Potter Valley Project. In 2021 when the project’s transformer failed, PG&E ultimately decided not to replace it. At the time, the company projected it would take 18-24 months, at a cost of $5-10 million. Without a transformer, the project produces no electricity. But with renewables surging, especially cheap solar and batteries, PG&E doesn’t need the expensive electricity the Eel River dams used to make. Even when the project was producing power, PG&E estimated that operating the project cost more than 20 times its revenue.

Simply put, Scott and Cape Horn dams have come to the end of their useful life. Scott Dam, built in 1922, has accumulated so much sediment that its operations are restricted and dam failure is an ever-increasing threat. If the water level in the Lake Pillsbury reservoir falls too low or too quickly, PG&E engineers warn, the accumulated sediments near the base of the dam will fall down and clog the only low-level water outlet on Scott Dam. That would end diversions entirely.

However, it is Scott Dam’s vulnerability to seismic damage that is the real headline. Over the last 20 years, the US Geological Survey has mapped the Bartlett Springs Fault. We now know what Scott Dam’s builders did not: that the dam sits nearly atop the fault, near the middle of its more than hundred-mile length. We know that the fault can create earthquakes of magnitude 7 and greater.

And we know that in 2023, within a week of PG&E receiving an assessment of Scott Dam’s seismic vulnerability, the utility lowered the radial gates atop the dam. We also know that the California Division of Safety of Dams told PG&E they can’t raise those gates again without permission. These gates were built to compensate for volume lost to sedimentation; lowering them reduces reservoir capacity by about 20,000 acre feet. Between seismic risks, sediment problems, and the need to avoid harming Eel River fisheries, diversions from the Project have become at best unreliable.

Not if, but when Scott Dam’s only low-level water outlet is clogged, or an earthquake topples the whole thing, the diversion to the Russian River will end. The best way for Russian River interests to secure a reliable diversion is not to fight Eel River dam removal, but to remove the antiquated dams now and build a modern, run-of-the-river diversion structure. Of course, they must also continue working toward self-sufficiency within their own watershed.

The critically imperiled salmon and especially steelhead of the Upper Eel River need dam removal as soon as possible. And the commercial fishing industry desperately needs relief as they look toward a potential third disastrous year of fishery closure. Against piles of evidence and analysis, the farm bureaus claim instead there’s some magically cheap and effective way to provide fish passage over Scott Dam. There is not.

The farm bureau proposal appears to align with the federal administration’s ambitions of rolling regulations back to the 1950s. Back then PG&E and the Russian River took as much of the Eel’s flows as they wanted whenever they wanted, driving Eel River salmon and steelhead toward extinction. It would also be deeply unfair to expect PG&E’s already-burdened ratepayers to carry the costs of keeping the Eel River dams operating for the benefit of wealthy landowners and perpetuating the injustice to farmers, towns, fishermen, and Tribes in the Eel River. That is the essence of this predatory proposal: powerful entities resisting change to unsustainable systems because they benefit from the status quo.

(LostCoastOutpost)

‘MURDER’ FESTIVAL IN MENDOCINO

Angela Lansbury superfans, known as “Fangelas” are preparing to flock to the Mendocino Coast the first weekend in May for the sold-out Second Annual “Murder, She Wrote Festival.” The TV series is one of the most watched shows in syndication, and Mendocino was used as a filming location for nine of the episodes. Many locals have fond memories of the days the production company came to town. Enjoy this reprint of a Mendocino Beacon article from April 20, 1989.

Television Series Crew Return to the Coast

They’re back!

Crews from Universal Studios returned to Mendocino for a week of shooting the television series “Murder, She Wrote.” Many of Mendocino and Fort Bragg’s homes and businesses are transformed into Cabot Cove, Maine - home of mystery writer Jessica Fletcher each spring. This year is no exception.

Filming began last week on the Mendocino Headlands with the Beacon Building, Blair House, The Wharf, Russian Gulch State Park and Hill House also serving as backdrops for the series.

Since the television series began filming locally several years ago, estimates are that more than $2 million has entered the local economy. More dollars are generated in the area through the hiring of area residents, and through return trips to the area by individuals associated with the production.

First Assistant Director Allen DiGioia said the crews have employed more than 150 local residents during the week, many of those “background artists” or extras. Additionally, actors and crews spent Sunday roaming the streets of Mendocino in search of souvenirs and gifts for those they left in Los Angeles.

“I think the word is out (on Mendocino),” DiGioia said, “And it’s good.” He said the production enjoys their trips to Mendocino not only because it is a welcome relief from being in the studio, but also because of the ease with which they are able to work with the community.

“People here are very cooperative,” he said. “It’s easy to get locations, people…. There will be many more productions here.”

“There are a lot of names given through channels about a location, either good or negative. Mendocino has a good reputation. People only have positive, good reports.”

Director Walter Grauman says at least one more season of “Murder, She Wrote” will be filmed on location in the area and agrees there is no better place to be working on location.

“The exteriors… local talents… local color… It’s all conducive to good film.”

Pat Turner, who is filling in for local casting coordinator Toni Lemos, said one of the benefits reaped from the local filming is continuing to work with the “Murder, She Wrote” production company.

“This crew, the group… there’s a camaraderie a niceness,” she said. “Many of these same people are all working together again and they all work extremely well together.”

Local residents and tourists in town for the weekend followed the crews from location to location to seek autographs, a photograph, or simply a glimpse of one of the cast. In addition to “regulars” Angela Lansbury, William Windom and Ron Masak, other actors including Jean Simmons, Richard Anderson, Shelly Fabares and Ken Howard were on the set at one time or another.

The episode is a two-hour special which will air near the change in television seasons. No specific date has been given yet.

Crews left early this morning to return to Los Angeles and complete taping of the segment.

MENDOCINO COUNTY HISTORY (Jack Saunders)

This is cropped from another photo I have and was taken outside the Castle Bar (marked) in Ukiah, presumably on the 4th of July. The bar burned down in 1913 and was said to be 49 or 50 years old at the time. The flags appear to have 47 stars, and Arizona became the 48th state in Feb 1912. Interestingly, I think this is the same car that I posted several photos of two days ago, and the driver looks like the same guy that was in one of those. That car was identified by others as a 1910 Studebaker, and it appears it may have entered passenger service between Willits and the terminus of the CWR in Jun 1910. If it is the same car, then combining these “facts” would suggest that this photo was taken on 4 Jul 1910. Can anyone identify any of the people in the photo?

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, April 10, 2025

BRER BENTON, 44, Willits. Cultivation of more than six marijuana plants.

EMERSON CALDERON, 24, Fort Bragg. County parole violation.

ROBERT JAMES JR., 30, Ukiah. County parole violation.

TIMOTHY MCILVAIN, 55, Laytonville. Probation revocation.

JAFET MORALES-CAMACHO, 27, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Controlled substance, suspended license for refusing DUI test, failure to appear.

ROBERTO PAYES, Tucson, Arizona/Ukiah. Domestic battery.

ALEXANDER RAMIREZ, 32, Fort Bragg. County parole violation, unspecified offense.

JEREMIAH RAY, 39, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

BODHI SHIDAY, Trinidad/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JOSHUA STARK-EDWARDS, 28, Willits. DUI with blood-alcohol over 0.15%.

KRISTOFF SUBA, Willits. Probation revocation.

ASHTYN TAYLOR, 19, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

RANDY BURKE: Book of the week. Prophecy back in 1997. It will blow your mind.

CORPORATE MISSION STATEMENT

by Marilyn Davin

Dinner parties were quite the thing back in the ‘80s. Women were entering corporate jobs en masse and medical honchos were trumpeting the dubious notion that wine was the new health elixir. Bottoms up! We had lots to talk about and did so, frequently long into the night.

At one such event at my house the issue of trade came up, though nobody called it that back then, opting for the more politically ambiguous “globalization” instead. A former colleague, sitting across the dining room table from me on this particular night, had recently taken a PR job at Levi Strauss. As a history refresher, Levi closed nearly 60 of its U.S. manufacturing plants in the ‘80s, ultimately resulting in one case in a 1990 class-action suit alleging that Levi had closed its San Antonio, Texas, plant and decamped to Costa Rica to avoid paying pension, disability, and other benefits to its workers. This is capitalist America; the case was ultimately dismissed.

At some point during dessert, my former colleague and newly minted Levi employee looked up and declared that Levi had moved its manufacturing plants to Central America to “provide a higher standard of living” to its new Central American employees. Mid-bite into my flan, I looked at her blearily across the empty wine bottles and, suspecting she’d drunk deep of her new company’s Kool-Aid, said, “You can’t honestly believe that horseshit.” Instead of cutting her losses she doubled down with descriptions of worker living conditions pre-Levi plant ─ the dirt floors, the no-electricity, no-clean-water misery of it ─ all wiped out courtesy of Levi’s corporate benevolence: Big Bwana, anyone? There was probably a grain of truth in that last part, but Levi didn’t move its plant to low-wage Central America to improve the lives of its people; the company moved its plant to make more money.

I have never believed in the inevitably of “world trade” as envisioned in the Go-Go Eighties. Maybe it’s my mother’s whispers that the United States doesn’t stand for poverty wages and inferior goods. Maybe it’s the simple reality that if you’re a rich country you have nowhere to go but down and if you’re a poor country you have nowhere to go but up, standard-of-living wise. In the American mission to turn every man, woman, and child on Earth into a bargain-hunting shopping machine, in retrospect not enough attention was paid at the time to what would become of the American manufacturing workers who lost their good-paying manufacturing jobs in the interests of higher corporate profits and abundant consumer goods produced by offshore cheap labor. Economists today bloodlessly describe the American evolution from a manufacturing to a “service” economy as if low wages, no benefits, and no possibility of advancement were all inevitable. A Forbes analysis published last year summarized this shift, based on a U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics periodic report: Despite being a leading driver of employment growth for decades, manufacturing has shed employment over the past 40 years as the U.S. economy has shifted to service-providing industries. In June 1979, manufacturing employment reached an all-time peak of 19.6 million. In June 2019, employment was at 12.8 million, down 6.7 million or 35 percent from the all-time peak.

It’s time to set the record straight. Business doesn’t care about you, and never has. This is not an equal relationship though nobody describes it publicly like that these days, laboring as we do beneath a cloying miasma of non-confrontational public politeness. You may love your local businesses; you may even call their owners your friends. But they will disappear in an eye-blink, just like corporations, if they stop making money ─ because that’s what business is about, even spending a portion of its cherished profits on feel-good TV ads featuring pigeons, deer, and emus to open your wallet. The proliferation of animals in advertising is telling; even the lowly chipmunk has been judged more credible in the marketing arena than a human being, something Trump might learn something from if he were even a marginally thinking human himself.

Our only real protection (short of revolution) from this capitalist tsunami is the law, which our republic’s founders correctly assumed were needed to protect citizens from inevitable capitalist greed, by its nature insatiable. It’s that pressure on our assumed protectors that is perhaps the most troubling element of the Trump monarchy, which recently released statements touting the weakening of the laws that restrain business from its basest instincts, laws that determine the safety of our food and pharmaceuticals, the cleanliness of our water and air, and thousands of other things that collectively determine the quality of our lives. The New York Times recently summarized this very issue, stating that, “A combination of firings, stop-work orders and litigation pauses has hobbled regulators like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.” And those are just a handful of the government-created agencies charged with protecting us from greedy, soulless power mongers like Donald Trump.

I was called for jury duty at the height of the 1980s version of what was called “globalization.” We potential jurors crowded into a courtroom for questioning by the judge, a process known as voir dire, presciently from the French for “to tell the truth.” One such potential juror told the judge that he was a corporate supervisor and that global competition made it impossible for him to miss any work. The judge paused a moment, turned a baleful eye to him, and replied, “The interests of justice are never secondary to the interests of commerce.”

MAGAS LOVE DUMB

Editor:

According to the National Literacy Institute, 21% of adults in the U.S. were illiterate in 2024. Fifty-four percent of adults have literacy below sixth grade level (20% are below fifth grade). These low levels of literacy cost the U.S. up to $2.2 trillion per year.

This is exactly what Donald Trump and his billionaire supporters want. The last thing he wants is a literate and educated public that is able to evaluate his actions and his many lies. That is why he wants to cut down and finally eliminate the Department of Education. He is a traitor to democracy. This is shown clearly by his acting against the Constitution of the United States.

Ed Oberweiser

Fort Bragg

DOUBLE DUTY

by Fred Gardner

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, 38, a Yale Law School chum of JD Vance, is being given a second job as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “A rare dual appointment,” notes Steve Beynon in a Military Times piece that hints at its absurdity. “As acting director, Driscoll, who has no background in law enforcement, will oversee nearly 8,000 employees, including more than 2,500 federal agents charged with enforcing firearms laws that have made the agency a frequent target of pro-gun activists and Republican lawmakers.” (ATF requires background checks, which cut into gun sales.)

"Driscoll oversees the Army, its $185.9 billion budget, and nearly 1 million soldiers across active-duty and reserve components. The Army is in the midst of a radical shift, transitioning from the Global War on Terrorism era to revamping its equipment and doctrine to modernize the force in hopes of deterring China.

“Driscoll, who has been a close friend of Vice President JD Vance since the pair met at Yale Law School, has spent most of his professional career in venture capital and other business enterprises. He came into the Army secretary role with a light resume compared to his predecessors, most of whom had robust backgrounds in national security policy.

"Driscoll served in the Army from 2007 to 2010 as a cavalry officer with the 10th Mountain Division based out of New York. He deployed to Iraq once during his service, left the Army as a first lieutenant and immediately went on to attend Yale."

STEPHEN TALBOT:

A spot-on, perceptive essay by Jill Lepore about the origins of Elon Musk’s reactionary anti-democratic ideas. I recommend it. Musk’s views go back to his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian chiropractor, amateur pilot, and rightwing believer in “technocracy,” who led an antisemitic Social Credit Party before moving to South Africa where he became a rabid supporter of apartheid and white supremacy.

As Professor Lepore concludes:

“That Mr. Musk has come to hold so many of the same beliefs about social engineering and economic planning as his grandfather is a testament to his profound lack of political imagination, to the tenacity of technocracy and to the hubris of Silicon Valley.”

My take:

Musk and his chainsaw wrecking crew -- unleashed and applauded by Trump, of course -- were supposed to be MAGA heroes eliminating “waste,” but they have quickly become enormously unpopular. No real American likes being ordered about, fired, or fleeced by an obnoxious, robotic oligarch. No real believer in the American Dream wants their country and government trashed by this creepy South African / Silicon Valley hybrid. (Out here in California, we know Musk as part of the “Pay Pal mafia.”)

Now that Musk’s Tesla sales are tanking and he has proven to be electoral poison -- failing miserably in his efforts to buy the election of a judge for the Wisconsin state supreme court -- the Trump mob is starting to grumble. Maybe Musk is expendable. Even the utterly despicable RFK Junior is now saying that Musk’s minions incorrectly fired thousands of Department of Health and Human Services employees.

As Trump’s disastrous tariffs and gross incompetence send the stock market into a nose dive and threaten to wreck the economy, we know that with or without his co-president Musk, Trump and his gang will continue their stupid rampage until we put a stop to it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/elon-musk-doge-technocracy.html

UNLICENSED DRIVER

To the Editor:

Having Donald Trump as president is like being a passenger trapped in a car driven by a reckless teenager who has no business driving.

He doesn’t know the rules of the road, either doesn’t understand or refuses to follow signs or traffic signals, won’t take advice from others and has a dangerous problem with road rage. But he is absolutely convinced that he is the greatest driver in the world.

Stephen A. Silver

San Francisco

ESTHER MOBLEY: What I’m Reading

In Punch’s Pre Shift newsletter, Eliza Dumais speaks with Alice Feiring, the country’s most prominent writer on natural wines. Feiring rejects the idea that natural wine has “peaked.” “We need to stop associating natural wine with something that’s fucked up,” Feiring says. “There are trends in natural wine and phases in marketing, but natural wine itself is not the trend.”

Anyone else confused by these tariffs? Eric Asimov has the headline for you: “Your tariff questions about wine, answered.” Thank goodness.

I hope by now you’ve seen the Chronicle’s full Top 100 restaurants list! In a separate piece, critics MacKenzie Chung Fegan and Cesar Hernandez discuss some of the restaurants they snubbed.

Cincinnati Reds' Elly De La Cruz rounds third base to score during the third inning of a baseball game against the San Francisco Giants in San Francisco, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Nic Coury)

MY GOD, THE SF GIANTS ARE FUN AGAIN

At long last, the joy is back for Giants fans, writes SFGATE columnist Dave Tobener

by Dave Tobener

When was the last time you had this much fun watching the San Francisco Giants?

You’d probably have to go back to 2021, and before that, the dynasty years, to find a time when Giants baseball was this enjoyable. The past few years had their moments, but for a good portion of the fan base, a fog of ambivalence had set in as the team slogged through season after season of not-quite-.500 ball. Add in a seemingly never-ending roster churn, and Giants baseball wasn’t exactly fun; it was more like something people did out of duty.

That isn’t to say that this year’s version of the Giants won’t still end up hovering around .500 when September rolls around. The team has plenty of holes and is playing in the league’s toughest division. A great start helps, but there’s no guarantee the Giants will be able to keep pace through the summer.

Even if that were to happen, there’s a sense that the fan reaction would be different this time. There are reasons to think that way: The organization seems to finally have a direction after a few rudderless years, and Buster Posey being the public face of the franchise has quelled a lot of the doubts that tend to creep up whenever ownership does or says something stupid.

There’s also the fact that the team finally added a star this offseason in Willy Adames, making up for the other star shortstop it whiffed on signing a few years prior. Adames — who seems to be clearly pressing at the plate so far — hasn’t quite delivered on the field yet, but his presence alone has made the Giants more interesting.

As one of the premier free agents on the market last winter, he could have gone virtually anywhere he wanted, but he chose San Francisco. That would’ve been enough to endear him to the city, but Adames has also embraced his role as the face of the franchise and as a team leader.

Virtually every piece of Giants marketing material has Adames front and center. He’s the first player out of the dugout to celebrate a teammate’s success. He even bought the entire team custom belts to match the new City Connect jerseys. His name may not have the same cache as an Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, but Adames is doing everything the organization could ask for as far as selling the Giants to a wavering fan base, with the added benefit of knowing he’s here for the long haul.

That’s another thing that’s made this version of the Giants more enjoyable: stability. Guys like Adames, Matt Chapman and Jung Hoo Lee are locked up for years, making it a little easier for a fan to spend $175 on a jersey or buy tickets knowing that the lineup will remain relatively unchanged. The last regime, for better or worse, focused on exploiting matchups to the point that their entire roster construction philosophy seemed to be about finding the best possible platoons. That’s not the case this year.

The biggest factor, though, is that this version of the Giants — the on-field version — is actually entertaining. Take the last game of the Reds series this past home stand. The Giants, who’d been shut out in two straight games, found themselves down 5-0 after three innings. Would anyone have expected the Giants of the past three seasons to come back and win that game? Unlikely. But these Giants did, in dramatic fashion.

That’s the kind of baseball fans want to see — and the kind of team fans want to believe they have. It makes all the difference between having an engaged fan base and one that shows up just to check a box.

By now, everyone knows what matters the most to this ownership group. Winning is nice, profits are better, and the break-even philosophy isn’t going anywhere. But it’s one thing to break even financially, and quite another to keep breaking even on the field. Fans were rightly tired of teams built to do just that and maybe get lucky enough to make the postseason.

It seemed like the Giants were headed down that same path this season, but it’s hard to ignore the vibes around this team right now. It feels different. Whether it’s because of Adames, Posey or what, it’s like everyone in the clubhouse is pulling the same way. They’ve bought in. And the fans, as always, can tell.

Yes, this might not last. The Dodgers and Padres are monsters, and the Giants are an injury or two away from disaster. Plus, they’ve played only 12 games, and a lot can happen in a season.

But sometimes, you need only a handful of games to know what a team is all about. These Giants might be pretty good — and maybe more importantly, fun.

‘REALLY UNUSUAL’: NEW STUDY SHOWS WHY SALMON VANISHED IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

It also demonstrates the species’ resilience

by Amanda Bartlett

During the summer of 2014, two graduate students studying wildlife biology at UC Berkeley noticed something strange was happening along the California coastline.

Suzanne Rhoades and Cleo Woelfle-Hazard were monitoring salmon at two field sites hundreds of miles apart: the South Fork of the Eel River running through Humboldt and Mendocino counties and the Salmon Creek Watershed in western Sonoma County. But they realized steelhead trout and coho salmon, whose populations have been in decline, were noticeably absent from both watersheds — a troubling discovery they quickly relayed to professor Stephanie Carlson, Berkeley’s A.S. Leopold chair in wildlife biology, who had been overseeing their work.

The news struck Carlson as “really unusual” and “a big surprise.” As the group began to relay their observations at regional conferences, she noticed that nearly every time she brought up the missing cohort of fish, someone in the audience would find her afterward to share that they had observed something similar in a different watershed, ranging all the way from the Bay Area to the North Coast.

The mystery prompted a near-decade-long study that was published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealing the impact of one “severely dry” California winter that dramatically altered the ranges of three native species, and in some cases, caused them to completely vanish from the watersheds where they once thrived.

But it also demonstrated the resilience of coho and chinook salmon and steelhead trout, paving the way for how the fish can be better protected in the years to come.

“The story is both about the vulnerability of already depressed populations to the impact of single extreme events, but also about their comeback — and the lessons we can learn from their comeback,” Carlson, also the lead author of the study, told SFGATE in an email.

Rain Check

The wet season in the Golden State typically begins with fall rains in October or November. As salmon and trout return from the ocean, they rely on elevated river flows driven by the increased precipitation to access their upstream breeding areas, Carlson explained. But in the winter of 2013 and 2014, a “multi-month delay” inhibited their progress, and when the first significant rain didn’t reach the California coast until early February, the fish experienced a slew of cascading effects.

Some populations spawned several months later than usual. Others were unusually concentrated in downstream river reaches. Many more of them “likely perished before breeding,” Carlson said, and the team of researchers noticed that counts of juveniles were “extraordinarily low” the following summer, with some of the young fish “missing entirely from some sites.”

They carefully tracked data collected by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s California Monitoring Plan, other long-term monitoring programs and student researchers. Scientists spent winters walking the streams in search of adult salmon and their nests and summers snorkeling in the waterways to count juvenile offspring. Carlson said the group working on the study also utilized “PIT” technology to track individual fish — tags that are essentially the same as the microchips people get for their pets if they get lost — but instead are placed throughout river networks to observe when and where the fish swim.

The data led to another surprising revelation — that the species had repopulated all of the impacted sites, largely because of fish that stayed in the ocean during the dry winter and waited to return to breed until the following year.

“It was a reminder of the importance of conserving diversity within populations to give these populations options in the face of variable and extreme conditions,” Carlson said.

A disappearing act

Still, some impacts linger in current populations from that extremely delayed rainy season over a decade ago. Carlson and her team documented that salmon in the Russian River were an anomaly, not rescued by reserves in the ocean, but by a conservation hatchery program — similar to another hatchery that helped give a boost to the chinook salmon population in the newly restored Putah Creek in Northern California, as UC Davis researchers told SFGATE last month.

Hatcheries have a polarizing reputation: They provide food but can also cause negative impacts on the genetics, long-term health and habitat of wild fish, Andrew Rypel, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, said at the time. Carlson doesn’t want to solely rely on such managed facilities, but based on the study’s findings in the Russian River, she said it appeared necessary for the population to persist in the absence of more restored habitat.

“Its importance was made abundantly clear when we realized that the impacted cohort (juveniles born in 2014) didn’t survive to reproduce,” Carlson said in an email. “In other words, extirpation of that cohort. Fortunately, the conservation hatchery holds some fish in captivity for their entire lives as a source of reserves in the event of cohort failure.”

Future challenges

Carlson also underscored the importance of diversity within salmon populations, as well as the waterways where they live, which can help serve as a buffer against unexpected events in the future — such as unusually severe droughts or storms. Both, she said, are increasing in frequency on a global scale.

“These events can be short-lived but with really big impacts,” she said. “By virtue of being extreme or unusual events, they are also really difficult to study.”

For Carlson, the study shows the importance of long-term monitoring data across multiple sites and how it can help detect the impact of these events in the years to come — not just for salmon, but other species that call Bay Area watersheds home.

“In the face of climate change, it is important to ensure that species of concern have access to different types of habitat since we can’t always predict where organisms will do best in extreme events,” she said.

(SFGate.com)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I’ve seen Boomers who could barely walk take their cart to the cart corral. And I remember my late mother--at 90-years-old, with arthritis, and slowly dying of terminal lung cancer, but still completely coherent and able to drive her car--refusing to park in a Handicapped parking space (even though she had a disabled placard that she jokingly called a “gimp sticker”) because she said that somebody else might need that Handicapped parking space a lot more than she did. She was part of the Greatest Generation--you know, that generation that survived the Great Depression and World War II. Tough? You bet--not like today’s young wusses.

by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (1985)

Worry the bottle Mamma, it's grapefruit wine
Kick off your high heel sneakers, it's party time
The girls don't seem to care what's on
As long as they play till dawn
Nothin' but blues and Elvis
And somebody else's favorite song

Give her some funked up music, she treats you nice
Feed her some hungry reggae, she'll love you twice
The girls don't seem to care tonight
As long as the mood is right

FM - no static at all

LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT

China Raises Tariffs on U.S. Imports to 125%

Deepening Trade Fight With China Poses New Threat to U.S. Farmers

Pressuring Migrants to ‘Self-Deport,’ White House Moves to Cancel Social Security Numbers

Supreme Court Sides With Wrongly Deported Migrant

Why Iran’s Supreme Leader Came Around to Nuclear Talks With the U.S.

Search Ends for Victims in Dominican Republic Collapse That Killed 221

Stunt Design Will Be Honored at the Academy Awards

IRREGULAR WARFARE

by John Perry

El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) opened in 2023. It has capacity for up to forty thousand prisoners, although is said to be only half full. CECOT was built to incarcerate members of violent gangs, who by 2015 had made El Salvador the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous country. Dispensing with warrants and court hearings, in 2022 the government jailed almost 2 per cent of the population, many on the basis only of their tattoos. The official murder rate fell from 18 per day to one every three days.

In early February, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, toured Central American capitals. In San Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the ‘world’s coolest dictator’, offered to make his prisons available, for a fee, to hold ‘criminal’ migrants deported from the US. In mid-March, 238 Venezuelans were flown there from Louisiana with no due process and in defiance of court orders. All were alleged members of a violent gang from the north of Venezuela called Tren de Aragua (TdA).

On arrival, the Venezuelans were led out of buses in shackles, forcibly bent over and delivered to the prison. Their heads were shaved, they were stripped naked and their clothes were thrown away with their hair. Some broke down in tears. They were given white T-shirts and shorts and led into cells with a hundred occupants each. They now sleep on bare metal shelves, share two open toilets and a barrel of water, have half an hour’s exercise daily, and receive no visitors or phone calls.

It soon emerged that many of the deportees had little or no proven connection with the gang. A scorecard attached to the immigration service’s ‘Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide’ revealed that merely having a tattoo or clothes thought to indicate gang membership is enough to get a Venezuelan citizen deported from the US.

The miscarriages of justice are extraordinary. One victim is a gay make-up artist with no apparent gang affiliations, just some tattoos related to traditional Epiphany celebrations. Another is a 27-year-old delivery driver with a work permit who lived in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and children: he was arrested as he stepped outside his house. A former professional goalkeeper living in Phoenix, Arizona, was detained because of a tattoo showing his support for Real Madrid.

The tenuous justification for the deportations relied on the designation of TdA in February as a ‘terrorist organisation’, conflating violent crime with political intent. Last month, TdA was declared to be ‘infiltrating’ the US and engaging in ‘irregular warfare’ at the alleged direction of the Venezuelan government. The Trump administration claims it can therefore deploy the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act, enabling Venezuelans it apprehends to be classed as ‘alien enemies’ who have ‘illegally infiltrated the country’.

Trump’s case is ludicrously weak. First, as lawyers challenging it argued in their 514-page filing to the Supreme Court, the US is not at war with Venezuela. Second, US intelligence agencies contradict the assessment that the gang is controlled by Nicolás Maduro’s government. Third, studies show that most Venezuelans have emigrated for economic reasons. Arguing that their arrival in the US is an ‘invasion’ is clearly absurd. Yet the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the deportations could continue.

Meanwhile, lawyers in El Salvador instructed by the Venezuelan government have been told that their writs of habeas corpus do not apply and they must instead address their challenge to Washington, leaving the deportees – who are essentially kidnap victims – trapped in legal limbo.

Trump has labelled the latest cohort ‘murderers and rapists’, enthusiastically sharing pictures of prisoners shackled, shorn and manhandled. The images reinforce his message that migrants are ‘criminals’, and an analysis of his speeches shows that he uses this terminology against Venezuelans in particular.

His actions also reflect a toughening of policy towards Maduro’s government. On taking power, Trump sent a special envoy to Maduro, to assure him that the US was no longer interested in regime change in Caracas, and to broker a deal for migrants to be deported direct to Venezuela. Some US prisoners in the country were released as a result.

Trump later accused Maduro of breaking the deal, even though migrants were being flown home and welcomed on arrival. The US president imposed new sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports and threatened to penalise third countries that buy the oil. At the end of March he proposed a security deal with Venezuela’s neighbour Guyana in response to an active boundary dispute between the two countries. Rubio warned Maduro that ‘we have a big navy, and it can get almost anywhere.’

What’s in this for Bukele, apart from the $20,000 he’s said to receive for taking each of these ‘criminals’ and (in Trump’s words) giving them ‘such a wonderful place to live’? He’s earned an invitation to the White House later this month (‘I’ll be bringing several cans of Diet Coke,’ Bukele joked). He’s also strengthened his image as a leader who has transformed his country’s security.

But most important might be Bukele’s need to suppress evidence that, back in 2019, he negotiated with gang leaders, offering concessions in return for a reduced murder rate. One such leader, nicknamed ‘Greñas’, later fled to Mexico, where he was apprehended and sent to the US to face terrorism charges. Due in court soon, he could have spilled the beans on the deal, which Bukele denies ever took place. Trump’s justice department dropped the charges before they reached court. It then sent Greñas back to El Salvador, where he was put in CECOT and is unlikely ever to leave.

A NEW THOMAS PYNCHON NOVEL IS COMING THIS FALL

Featuring a Depression-era private eye, “Shadow Ticket” will be the 87-year-old writer’s first book since 2013.

by Alexandra Alter

Thomas Pynchon, who has been rarely photographed during his lengthy career, pictured here in his high school yearbook

The elusive novelist Thomas Pynchon will publish a new book this fall, his first in more than a decade.

The novel, “Shadow Ticket,” is due out on Oct. 7 from Penguin Press, and looks to bear many of Pynchon’s hallmark elements — paranoia, espionage, musical motifs and wacky, larger than life characters who get in over their heads.

Set in 1932 during the Great Depression, it follows a Milwaukee private eye named Hicks McTaggart, who is sent on a mission to find the runaway heir to a Wisconsin cheese empire. This routine mission goes dramatically awry when McTaggart ends up on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner and then in Hungary. In pursuit of the rogue heiress, he gets caught up in political undercurrents roiling Eastern Europe — tangling with Nazis, Soviet agents and British counterspies, as well as swing musicians, criminal motorcyclists and practitioners of the paranormal.

“Shadow Ticket” is Pynchon’s 10th book and his first new release since 2013, when he published “Bleeding Edge,” a surreal detective story about a fraud investigator in New York City in 2001, who gets in trouble when she starts digging into the finances of a billionaire executive of a computer-security company.

Pynchon cemented his reputation as a literary giant with his third novel, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a sprawling, 760-page postmodern metaphysical masterpiece set in Europe after World War II, which was published in 1973 and won the National Book Award. In the decades since, he continued to dazzle critics and readers, with dense, comical, idiosyncratic works like “Vineland,” “Mason & Dixon” and “Against the Day.”

Yet after more than six decades as a literary celebrity, Pynchon, 87, has remained extremely private, shunning interviews and public events and rarely being photographed. (He rejects the label “reclusive,” once complaining after a news crew filmed him in Manhattan without his permission that the term is used by journalists who are irritated when people won’t talk to them.) He’s occasionally poked fun at his reputation as a misanthrope, and voiced a cameo appearance on “The Simpsons,” gruffly yelling into a mobile phone with a paper bag over his head.

His opacity has frustrated scholars and journalists but has only added to his literary allure and mystique. Many were surprised in 2022 when Pynchon sold his archive to the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., which included his research notes, typescripts and drafts, and publishing correspondence, but no personal letters or photographs.

“Shadow Ticket” will likely spur renewed interest and speculation about Pynchon’s private life and legacy. A description of the book in a news release announcing the publication on Wednesday sounded suspiciously like it might have been written by Pynchon himself, and Penguin confirmed it was his handiwork: “Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.”

(nytimes.com)

THE LETTERS OF WANDA TINASKY

In the mid-80s, when Thomas Pynchon was in Northern California writing “Vineland” and parts of “Mason & Dixon,” scores of letters-to-the-editor appeared in the Mendocino County press signed “Wanda Tinasky.” Nearly all the letters were addressed to Bruce Anderson, editor and publisher of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, whom Wanda described as “…an old-fashioned masochistic horsewhippable editor…” Wanda’s letters were funny, highly and wittily referenced, and controversial; after five and a half years, Wanda disappeared as enigmatically as she had arrived, with no one discovering her identity. Was Thomas Pynchon Wanda Tinasky? There is a rather large body of educators, scholars and other Pynchonophiles who believe that she may very well have been he. This book does not set out to prove anything. What it does do is give the reader plenty to ponder in the remarkable numbers of coincidences between Tinasky and Pynchon. There are nearly 500 annotations to the letters: clues abound. The second half of the book consists of other letter-writers during that period, several of whom Wanda crossed swords with, and editorials/articles by Anderson: an inside look at life in Mendocino County, California.

WANDA, THE FORT BRAGG BAG LADY

Real Pynchon

by Vassar English Professor Don Foster (November, 2000, from his book ‘Author Unknown’)

And although I met Thomas Pynchon one evening in Berkeley in June of 1967, I cannot say I really know him.
— Andrew Gordon, “Smoking Dope With Thomas Pynchon” (1994)

Little, really, is known about the life, looks, or immortal soul of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. Born on Long Island in 1937, he shares a May 8 birthday with such notables as Harry Truman, president; Sonny Liston, boxer; Ricky Nelson, one-time teen idol; and Beat poet Gary Snyder. Scion of an old New England family, the novelist is believed to be a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the William Pynchon whose religious tract, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (1650), was condemned for its heretical opinions and burned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Literary historians and cult followers say that Thomas Pynchon attended Cornell, left school to serve in the Navy, returned to college, changed his major from engineering to English, and completed his degree in 1959. Pynchon has since been credited with the authorship of, among other works, five mostly great novels — V (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow, (1973), Vineland (1990), and Mason & Dixon (1997) — an oeuvre that has become grist for a cottage industry in professional literary studies, including a scholarly journal called Pynchon Notes. He does not like having his space invaded.

Everyone who has ever made it through Vineland, or read The Crying of Lot 49 for a college English class, knows the Pancho Villa story. The year was 1963. When Time’s book editor dispatched a photographer to Mexico City to take Pynchon’s picture to accompany the magazine’s glowing review of V, the novelist fled to the hills, taking refuge behind an enormous mustache that inspired the locals to call their shy Yanqui guest “Pancho Villa.” V’s author has been missing in action ever since. The last known (or supposed) photograph of Pynchon is from l955, or rather that was the last, until 1995, when editors for New York magazine published a reputed shot of Pynchon’s backside as the novelist walked down a Manhattan sidewalk with his only begotten son. But the New York photograph only added to Pynchon’s reputation for ineffable divinity (cf. God to Moses: “After I have passed by … I will take away Mine hand and thou shalt see My back parts, but My face shall not be seen” Exod. 33:22-23). A year later, the London Sunday Times Magazine published a full Monty of Pynchon & Son’s violated privacy, an Instamatic point-and-shoot, taken by the aspiring paparazzo James Bone. Not everyone believed it was Pynchon. Some Pynchonophiles (as they call themselves) say that Thomas Pynchon is not even real. Some say that his novels were written by J. D. Salinger, or by the Unabomber, or by an extraterrestrial sapience, or by a secret organization. Or that Thomas Pynchon is really Wanda Tinasky. Or vice versa.

Pynch. Anon.

“Along with some lesser Counts,” the Rev is replying, “‘twas one of the least tolerable of Offenses in that era… the Crime they styl’d ‘Anonymity.’ That is, I left messages posted publicly, but did not sign them.”

— Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dlxon (1997)

An age is darkened when truth lies not in what is said, but in who says it.

— Wanda Tinasky, Mendocino Commentary (28 July 1983)

In the 1980s, a seemingly insoluble mystery perplexed the denizens of Mendocino County in Northern California: Who is Wanda Tinasky, and who in hell does she think she is? Wanda wrote scathingly funny critiques of local artistes and politicians, publishing her observations in the same periodicals in which community activists, left and right, agitated, and in which local poets contributed their musings on the eternal verities. Ms. Tinasky described herself as an elderly Jewish bag lady, a White Russian émigré living outside the Fort Bragg limits, under a bridge (Fort Bragg is a foggy coastal hamlet inhabited by bohemians, loggers, fishermen, and hemp farmers, not to be confused with Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the U.S. Army’s Airborne Division and Special Ops). Ms. Tinasky confessed to being “old and poor and funny-looking” with “gaposis and halitosis and B.O.” She admitted to eating out of garbage cans and to dressing out of the free box. But after eighty-some years her mental faculties were still sharp. “It is a bas canard,” wrote Wanda, “or in the Queen’s English, a duck fart, that I am an alcoholic escapee from a mental institution.” In 1984, soon after getting started in this epistolary vein, Wanda was booted from the Mendocino Commentary for her biting assessment of the local Literature Industry, and for remarking, urgently, that the Commentary’s poetry editor “wouldn’t know a poem if it bit her in the ass in broad daylight.” Wanda promised to continue exercising her critical rod with welt-raising vigilance: “‘Whom the Lord loveth, He chastiseth.’ (The Lord, c’est moi).” Banished from the Commentary, she found a new home in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, an upstart leftist weekly published out of Boonville (an actual town in the Anderson Valley), a paper whose “old-fashioned masochistic horsewhippable editor,” Bruce Anderson (no relation to the Valley), promised to print anything, any time, and did. While professing herself devoted as always to Reader’s Digest and to the mystical writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Wanda penned a testimonial saying that the AVA was absolutely the best paper in Northern California. In fact, after her underwear gave out (she said), she sometimes used the AVA for that purpose and was quite satisfied.

In dozens of letters published in the AVA from 1984 to 1988, Wanda reviewed American television (“TV is no worse than smack and coke, the slobs just don’t know how to handle it, that’s all”); media stars (“I admire Phil Donahue for calling himself a ‘workaholic.’ Phil’s idea of work is sitting under a hair dryer”); and politicians (“Ronzo [Reagan] claims he doesn’t wear makeup on TV — the likeliest story since Linda Lovelace claimed she thought she was getting a tonsillectomy”). Most of Wanda’s commentary, however, concerned the lamentable state of the arts in Mendocino County. Week after week, Wanda detailed the vers libre crimes of such artsy-fartsy coteries as the Ten Mile River Poets, the Albion Ridge Poets, and even Wanda’s own secret society of one member, the Pudden Crick Poets. In her original verse for the AVA, Wanda roasted the canonical authors along with the local hempen homespuns (on Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: “He brought out Joyce & Eliot— / There must be something in this s*** — Wanda Tinasky”). Wanda’s sharpest barbs were reserved for the doyennes of local culture, such as Beth Bosk, host of Eve in the Afternoon, a controversial radio talk show. (Bosk’s advice to listeners included such locally famous advice as “When a woman is bleeding, she should go into the garden and squat. It’s good for the plants.”) Wanda wrote tolerantly to the AVA of being “amused or stimulated” by Ms. Bosk’s radio show, “never infuriated or bewildered.” (“It is true that once, in trying to say ‘fecund,’ she spoke a word not commonly met in family broadcasting or publications, but I was not outraged by it.”) Despite their differences, Wanda hoped Ms. Bosk would continue to think of her as a comrade, although not in arms.’

In September 1988 Wanda’s letters abruptly stopped. The AVA carried on without her. But in 1990, while reading Vineland, Bruce Anderson felt a shock of recognition. Lights went on. Bells rang. “Wanda Tinasky” was Thomas Pynchon! In a 1986 letter, Wanda had professed to be writing a “thinly veiled novel of life in romantic Mendocino County” — and eureka! here it was: Vineland. Pynchon, while researching the novel, had resided somewhere in Northern California, no one knew just where, but Vineland was populated with aging hippies like those evidently known to Wanda Tinasky from her wanderings in Mendocino County and from her pit stops at Fort Bragg’s Tip Top Lounge. On March 21, 1990, after running the Pynchon-Tinasky attribution past the noses of a few Pynchonophiles, Bruce Anderson announced his discovery: “SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED. The justly famous American novelist, Thomas Pynchon, is almost certainly the pseudonymous comic letter writer, Wanda Tinasky…” The announcement was greeted with a flurry of letters, also published in the AVA, one signed “T. Pynchon,” another, “T. Pinch,” still another, “Wanda Tinasky-Pynchon,” each one hinting that Bruce Anderson could be right, or he could be wrong.

Questions

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

— Thomas Pynchon, “Proverbs For Paranoids” (1973)

Personally, whenever I see one of those bumperstickers that say, “Question Authority,” I always write “Why?” on it.

— Wanda Tinasky, Letter, Mendocino Commentary (28 July 1983)

It was in June 1996, a few weeks before Joe Klein fessed up to Primary Colors (but half a dozen years after Bruce Anderson first looked into Vineland and saw the spittin’ image of a Fort Bragg bag lady), that reporters and book editors began calling me about The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. Edited by TR Factor, fully annotated in semi-scholarly fashion, the Letters were now on sale and believed by many, including Ms. Factor, especially Ms. Factor, to have been written by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. Though interested, I had not yet seen the letters and could not comment.

Following Joe Klein’s July 17 Primary Colors confession, the calls resumed, on the Literary Influence theory that if Joe Klein or his agent lied about Anonymous, then Pynchon and his agent may have lied about Wanda. In October, after a “Who’s Wanda?” call from the Washington Post I finally gave in to my curiosity and wrote to Bruce Anderson, editor of the AVA, to inquire how I might obtain a copy of the Tinasky Letters, if only to speak in a more informed way when reporters or reviewers phoned. A few days later, I received a package mailed from Oregon, the first of several, from a person who introduced herself to me as “TR [no periods] Factor.” (I never did learn what the “TR” stands for. “Thomas Ruggles,” perhaps.) The goodwill parcels from Ms. Factor included a digital and hard copy of the Letters, plus back issues of the AVA, plus reams of material about Pynchon, plus contact information for a dozen Pynchon scholars, all free of charge, and with no strings attached except an obligation to demonstrate, the sooner, the better, that Thomas Pynchon really was Wanda Tinasky, the bag lady of Fort Bragg.

Taking me under her wing, TR for the next three years advised me to get off my academic duff and deliver the inevitable verdict. From Ms. Factor’s point of view, Pynchon’s authorship of the Tinasky letters was transparently obvious. A firm denial by Pynchon’s wife and literary agent, Melanie Jackson, had forced upon TR, and upon the whole Pynchon Establishment, a rhetorical posture of agnosticism (“The Literary Mystery of the Decade” TR called it in her advertising); but TR felt the proofs were as strong as Holy Writ. Stronger, even. The Wanda Tinasky Research Group had discovered beaucoup evidence that Wanda was Tom, and Tom, Wanda. There was the internal evidence: Ms. Tinasky had employed a highly unusual word, a slang term used also by Pynchon: Wanda, like Tom, wrote “86d” to mean evicted. Wanda, like Tom, constructed elaborate puns, tossed off obscure literary allusions, and peppered her work with wacky original limericks and song lyrics. Like Tom, Wanda spoke irreverently of literary book awards & exhibited an unkillable fondness for the ampersand. The two writers employed similarly eccentric symbolism. In one of her earliest letters to the AVA, Wanda had suggested that Bruce Anderson rename his paper “The Boonville Bugle.” In Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 a muted bugle is a central if meaningless symbol, the emblem of “Tristero,” a secret postal system. Lot 49’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds the bugle emblazoned, among other places, on the walls of a women’s latrine. Wanda Tinasky professed to have been a former employee of the U.S. Postal Service, during which time, she said, she had entertained herself by “writing on the walls of unobservable places such as the women’s can.” How much evidence did one need, for god’s sake?

Then, too, there was a world of biographical and ideological coincidence. Like Wanda, Pynchon had an ancient interest in the Beat poets and in obscure rock and roll (but in the ‘50s, I reasoned, among aspiring American writers, who didn’t?). Both Wanda and Pynchon waxed nostalgic for the counterculture of the ‘60s; both were skeptical of modern technology. Pynchon was believed to have composed Vineland on a manual typewriter, an Underwood — the same make as Wanda’s! (But that was bad information: Pynchon’s typewriter was an Olivetti.) TR’s smoking gun was a 1985 letter in which Wanda mentions having worked for Boeing Aircraft “about thirty-five years ago.” Pynchonophiles knew that while writing V the novelist was employed by Boeing Aircraft — from February 1960 to September 1962. (Go ahead, do the math!) For TR Factor and fellow members of the Wanda Tinasky Research Group, you didn’t have to be a genius: those little Pynchonian clues added up.

But…

There are some irregularities, Miz Maas.

— Thomas Pynchon, The Crying Of Lot49 (1966)

While reading TR Factor’s annotated edition of The Letters of Wanda Tinasky, I was slow to perceive the obvious. Wanda was witty, smart, and well read. She may have read Pynchon, but she did not seem (to me) very Pynchonian. I had trouble hearing, in Ms. Tinasky’s blatantly satirical prose, the rhythms of V or Vineland or Gravity’s Rainbow. For one thing, Wanda was too funny. Pynchon wields his irony like a rapier, deftly. Wanda’s punch lines usually left some Mendocino County poet or other bleeding on the floor. I looked at Wanda’s language and texts from every angle — Wanda’s diction, grammar, syntax, her political and literary sensibilities, topical allusions, reading matter, internal biographical evidence — all of which seemed (to me) a poor match with what I knew of Thomas Pynchon. But then, I did not really know Thomas Pynchon. Other scholars had vouched for the attribution, one of whom was reported by TR to have ventured a hundred-to-one, a thousand-to-one odds” against Wanda Tinasky’s identity matching that of any writer except Pynchon. (Okay, that particular scholar had changed his mind the next morning, reversing the odds, but TR felt sure there were other Pynchon scholars who had seen the light, and who would endorse the attribution if they were not such bleep-sucking cowards.) TR arranged for collectors of Pynchoniana to supply me with photostatic copies of rare letters actually typed and signed by the novelist, but these yielded only fresh cause for alarm. Wanda usually put an unnecessary space between a quotation and the quotation marks, front and rear, or between marks of parenthesis and the bracketed phrase, “ like so “ and ( like so ). Pynchon did not. Nor did the typeface for Wanda’s surviving letters match that of Pynchon’s original typescript of Vineland, sample pages of which were sent to me by John Kraft, a scholar who was himself skeptical of the Pynchon attribution. Charles Hollander, however, a Pynchon expert enlisted by the Wanda Tinasky Research Group, affirmed that the handwriting of Wanda Tinasky and of Thomas Pynchon were “nearly identical,” especially the lowercase c, m, and t. Hollander’s remark reminded me of Malvolio’s mistaken text analysis in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (“These be her very c’s, her a’s, and her t’s and thus makes she her great P’s”). To my admittedly fallible eye, in no way did Pynchon’s hand have the cut of Wanda Tinasky’s.

Wanda and Pynchon appeared to have followed different paths to the Northern California coast. For one, Wanda seemed older. To illustrate her critical observations, she recalled obscure news stories as early as 1938, from the days when Tom Pynchon Jr. was still in diapers. Topical references in the Tinasky letters placed Wanda in Washington State in the 1950s, Northern California throughout the 1960s. Wanda spoke of her past acquaintance with Lance E. Davis and John R. Meyer, distinguished scholars who graduated with B.A.’s in 1950 from the University of Washington, and with various Beat poets, mostly on the West Coast. None of that sounded to my ears like Pynchon’s biography.

Then, too, Wanda was just too damned mean to be Pynchon. Most of Pynchon’s rare public statements consist of generous book-jacket blurbs for other authors. In his known letters, Pynchon similarly praises other writers while deprecating his own work. Pynchon seems disinclined to take out the kneecaps of aspiring writers (except, perhaps, of journalists who invade his privacy). I could not imagine this man, a successful and critically acclaimed novelist, holed up in Mendocino County dashing off letters to the AVA, skewering local poets, harpooning fish in a barrel as a morning warm-up exercise while writing Vineland. And the hypothesis that Pynchon would call Alice Walker “a purple-assed baboon” (as Wanda had done) was unthinkable. Was that Pynchon’s style?

Pynchon And The Pynchonesque In Mendoland

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

— Thomas Pynchon, “Proverbs For Paranoids” (1973)

And here they are, now. Find the remote, get out the Snapple and Chee-tos, and like the Love Boat staff always sez, Welcome aboard.

— Thomas Pynchon, Liner Notes For Lotion’s Album, Nobody’s Cool (1995)

Before opening a parcel from “Fred Gardner” of San Francisco — no one I knew — I matched the address with a phone number and dialed up Mr. Gardner to ask what he had sent me. Enclosed in the parcel, explained Gardner, was the nonexplosive product of his own painstaking literary research, outlining his reasons for believing that a comic West Coast letter writer calling herself Wanda Tinasky was actually Thomas Pynchon; and that a sexually ambiguous West Coast virago calling herself TR (no periods) Factor was a mendacious, usurping, plagiarizing, typescript-stealing, opportunistic, goddamn bleeping bitch. Or words to that effect. Fred had heard from Bruce Anderson that I was interested in the Wanda phenomenon. Fred was interested, too. The Letters of Wanda Tinasky was his baby, snatched from his arms, he said, by his late-arriving editorial assistant. Mr. Gardner had sent me a copy of his work, together with a single-spaced, twenty-page report in which he detailed how badly he’d been bleeped over by Miz bleeping TR Factor. He was thinking, now, about suing her pants off, and it would not be pretty.

Fred Gardner was no Boonville yokel but a man of the world, a sixties radical and a onetime boyfriend of Jane Fonda (1969-1970, after Roger Vadim, before Tom Hayden), back when he was organizing GI coffeehouses to radicalize the U.S. Armed Forces (which was another project that never totally worked out). He works today as Public Information Officer for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. In 1994, Gardner intended with his friend and fellow journalist Alexander Cockburn to edit an AVA sampler that would feature commentary by Bruce Anderson and other Mendocino County wits. Searching back issues for the liveliest material, Gardner hit upon the Wanda Tinasky letters, learning from Anderson that Wanda may have been Pynchon, Fred realized that Bruce was sitting on a gold mine. Gardner volunteered to gather the necessary evidence for Pynchon’s authorship and to edit the Tinasky letters into a book. The Wanda Tinasky Research Group was born, an organization composed of Fred, his son Marc, and another Pynchon enthusiast, Steve Howland. Alexander Cockburn wisely bailed, wishing them all the best of luck.

In his twenty-page single-spaced history of TR Factor’s book-editing caper, Fred explained to me that it was he, not Factor, who did the research for the annotated Tinasky. It was he who transcribed and edited the letters, solicited scholarly commentary, and personally interviewed every living individual ever mentioned by Wanda, friend or foe, from Boonville to Seattle to Boston to L.A. and back again. Then he hit a snag. In June 1995, as the typescript neared completion, Gardner wrote to Melanie Jackson to let her know what was coming down. Ms. Jackson wrote back to say that a mistake had been made: that Pynchon was not, in fact, Wanda Tinasky, and had never pretended to be. (“I have conferred with the author and his editors and publishers,” said Ms. Jackson, “and no one can see any resemblance between his work and any of these letters… Thomas Pynchon’s name cannot be associated with your project in any Way.”)

The course of true literary detection never did run smooth. Mulling over Melanie Jackson’s strong denial, wondering if (just possibly) he had been bamboozled, Fred Gardner, on a tip from Beth Bosk, drove to Oregon to interview TR Factor, a former Mendoland resident and contributor to the AVA who Bosk believed was the real Wanda Tinasky. TR denied it (“Be still, my beating heart!” she exclaimed to Fred, upon learning of the attribution. “Thomas Pynchon has read my prose.”). TR graciously volunteered to join the WTRG, assisting Fred with the annotations for $10 an hour, with deferred wages until after the book went to press and started making megabucks.

The Gardner-Factor partnership, rocky from the outset, soon turned acrimonious. Fred thought TR’s annotations too long-winded. TR thought Fred too bossy, and deficient in his typing skills. Fred advised caution in ascribing the letters to Pynchon. “Wimp!” said TR. The showdown came in the last week of August, in Boonville. Fred and his new assistant got into a huge screaming match that lasted for two days, hour after shrieking hour, barely avoiding (according to one eyewitness) knockdown fisticuffs, a fight that Fred would probably have lost, if it had come to that. One of them had to go, either Fred or TR. Fred walked.

When The Letters of Wanda Tinasky was finally published in June 1996, “Edited by TR Factor,” the new editor tipped her cap to Fred in the acknowledgments, then shed his blood in a two-page diatribe in the AVA. “Nothing Fred had was usable,” she explained, “much less professional… not an iota, smidgen or mote of scholarship… A high school typing student could have done a better job and without the scores of errors.” And then she took it from there. The thought occurred to me that I could be in trouble with this Ms. Factor if I said that the Wanda letters were not really by Thomas Pynchon. She took her Pynchon very, very seriously. Not wishing to have a falling-out with Ms. Factor, I back-burnered the Tinasky letters while looking for an opportunity to slip out the back door unnoticed. If Thomas Pynchon got himself into this mess, he could probably get himself out of it without my help.

In April 1997, while I was still working, by day, on my report for the Unabomb prosecution and wondering, by night, how to break the news to Ms. Factor that I could not give her the endorsement she had hoped for, Ron Rosenbaum, a columnist at the New York Observer, saved the day. Ms. Factor and the Tinaskyites had demanded a cogent, reasoned argument that Melanie Jackson was lying about Pynchon’s nonauthorship of the Tinasky letters. Rosenbaum delivered the goods. Appearing on the eve of Mason & Dixon’s publication, Rosenbaum’s April 1997 article on The Wanda Tinasky Letters highlighted Pynchonesque features of Wanda’s prose that Rosenbaum himself dubbed “The Cap/Cape of Invisibility Riff,” “The riff on reverse Schadenfreude,” and “the disappearance of Maxwell Perkins-type editors” (lines of attributional argument that I still do not fully understand or appreciate but that made perfect sense to many Pynchonophiles besides Mr. Rosenbaum). There was also Wanda’s don’t-lose-your-ass riff. Rosenbaum cited an episode in Pynchon’s V in which a man born with a golden screw in his navel removes it, only to have his ass fall off. “But think about the name Tinasky,” counseled Rosenbaum. “Break it down to tin ass key. A tin key that unlocks the ass, a golden screw that holds the ass on.” Could that be a coincidence? I thought it probably could. But it made Ron Rosenbaum wonder aloud “why whoever Wanda is hasn’t come forward — unless it is the Man himself.”

There was more. Rosenbaum had received an advance copy of Mason & Dixon, which had not yet hit the bookstands. Taking advantage of this sneak preview, Rosenbaum made the hitherto unreported observation that one of Pynchon’s characters in that book signs a letter (like most eighteenth-century epistlers), “Y’r ob’d’t s’v’t.” That also happened to be Wanda Tinasky’s trademark sign-off, or pretty close: “Yr. ob’d’nt Servant, &c., Wanda Tinasky.” Rosenbaum’s announcement sent a shock wave from New York to Boonville and back, registering ten points on the Richter scale at Tinasky Central. A jubilant TR Factor shot me an e-mail from her Oregon hideout concerning the “Y’r ob’d’t s’v’t” in Pynchon’s soon-to-be-published Mason & Dixon. “If this is true,” said TR, “Pynchon may as well have autographed the Wanda Tinasky books himself”

Until Rosenbaum hopped onto the Tinasky bandwagon, it might have been enough for me to say: “Get real, folks. Thomas Pynchon is not, was not, and never will be Wanda Tinasky, not in her wildest dreams.” But after six years of a slowly growing Wanda cult, and with new converts being won over daily by Mr. Rosenbaum — who professed also to know that it was not really Shakespeare who wrote “A Funeral Elegy” — it seemed to me that Wanda would never rest in peace, nor Thomas Pynchon in Manhattan, until the author of the Tinasky letters was truly identified. That, however, was easier said than done. Wanda could have been almost anyone — anyone except Pynchon — who lived in Northern California between 1978 and 1988. I had no guarantee that Wanda’s creator was still living there, or alive at all for that matter. Finding a retired bag lady, a decade after she quit writing, from my own home three thousand miles from Fort Bragg, with no reliable witnesses, no original documents, no tips from the public, and not so much as an authenticated writing sample, seemed a virtual impossibility, like searching for a good three-dollar bill in Fort Knox. One thing for sure: there would be no confession forthcoming. If Wanda Tinasky intended to reveal her identity, she would have done so by now, if only to gloat over having been mistaken for the Great American Novelist Thomas Pynchon. The odds of finding Wanda Tinasky were minuscule.

In August 1998 I decided to give it the old college try. I applied the methodology that might have been employed to help find the Unabomber before the Unabomber was found, and had freakish good luck. It took only a month to track Wanda down.

Recognition

And the voices before and after the dead man’s … searching ceaseless among the dial’s ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love, whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.

— Thomas Pynchon, The Crying Of Lot 49 (1966)

An only child, Thomas Donald Hawkins was born in Pangurn, Arkansas, on January 11, 1927. He grew up in Port Angeles, Washington, where he received local acclaim for his acting skill in high school theatrical productions. After graduating in 1950 from the University of Washington, where he majored in English, Tom married Kathleen Marie Gallanar, supporting his bride as an employee of Boeing Aircraft. In 1955 the Hawkinses moved to Beaumont, Texas, where Kathy went to work for an ad agency and Tom became a studio director for the city’s new television station, KFDM-TV. On April 24, 1955, pictures of Tom Hawkins appeared in Beaumont’s Sunday Enterprise, one of them on the front page, the other on page C-6 over an article headed “Food Seen on TV Isn’t Edible (Shaving Soap Serves as Cream and Coffee Is Plain Dye).”

Quitting KFDM-TV after just two years, Tom worked with Kathy at the Beaumont ad agency, but they returned to the West Coast in 1960. Eager to join the Beat poetry scene, the Hawkinses settled in San Francisco. Tom took a job with the U.S. Postal Service and shocked fellow workers by growing a beard, something that had not been seen on the face of a San Francisco postal clerk since — who knows — the days of the Pony Express. To entertain himself during breaks, Hawkins wrote poetry on the toilet stalls, signing himself “Dr. Mung.”

Searching for a wider audience than those who sometimes sat in a San Francisco post office Employees Only men’s room, Tom submitted his poems and letters for publication in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Journal and Evergreen, and Paul Krassner’s Realist — without success. So he started his own house, the Ahab Press, comprised of a mimeograph machine and a post office box. Inspired by Tuli Kupferberg’s YEAH, Tom’s major publication for the next few years was Freak, an underground newspaper (a “little magazine,” as they were called in those days) featuring the original writings of “Tiger Tim Hawkins” — film reviews, consumer reports, literary criticism, social satire, scatological limericks, crude cartoons, essays on the etymology of sexual slang. Also, jokes about twins separated at birth, a game that Hawkins was still playing as Wanda twenty years later (“Dashielle Hammett and William Faulkner,” “Steve Martin and Governor George Deukmejian,” “Patty Hearst and Dan Quayle,” “Heather Locklear and Barbie”).

In the 1980s, writing as Wanda, Hawkins recycled some of his old “Tiger Tim” material almost verbatim. For example:

Tiger Tim Hawkins, Freak’s Clean Poems (1964):

In days of old when knights were bold / And rubbers were not invented, / They trod the ooze in wooden shoes, / And waded til they were contented.

Wanda Tinasky, “Parodies & Congeries,” Anderson Valley Advertiser (1987):

In days of old when knights were bold / & rubbers were not invented, / They trod the ooze in wooden shoes, / & shloshed til they were contented.

Tiger Tim’s Freak sold for two bits at the few Bay Area bookstores and Beatnik pubs whose managers made room for it on consignment. Sales were disappointing.

Thomas Donald “Tiger Tim” Hawkins did know good writing when he saw it, even if it wasn’t his own. For the Tiger’s money, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) was the greatest, most brilliantly original novel ever written. No one else seemed to appreciate that fact except “jack green,” publisher of an underground Manhattan newspaper called newspaper (published 1957-1965). Tom’s attributional epiphany came on December l4, 1962. While browsing in Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, Hawkins discovered a copy of jack green’s newspaper no. 12, and began reading. Mr. green, like Tom himself, was a huge Gaddis fan — no, wait, there was more to it! — Tom read on. While studying green’s spirited reply to William Gaddis’s boneheaded reviewers, Hawkins felt a shock of recognition. Lights went off. Bells rang. The newspaper publisher, jack green, didn’t just admire William Gaddis, jack green was William Gaddis!

Hawkins walked home, sat down, and typed Mr. green a letter that very afternoon — on the same manual Underwood typewriter that he would use two decades later when writing as Wanda Tinasky. Typing in lowercase (“as a mark of respect”), Hawkins coyly presented himself to green as a “sweet con fan” of newspaper. The true and undisclosed object of this letter, however, was to investigate, discretely, whether jack green also wrote the Great American Novel The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Tom slyly inquired of Mr. green whether “anyone in any publication, to your offhand knowledge, [has] taken notice of the velikovskyan catastrophism in the recognitions? … I presume that you are in contact with william gaddis; have you discussed this element of the recognitions with him?”

Following this curious paragraph, green wrote one word in red pencil — “No” — and mailed the letter back to Tiger Tim. But that handwritten “No” from jack green’s red pencil in 1962 had no more effect on Mr. Hawkins than a typed “No” from Melanie Jackson would have on TR Factor in 1995. Hawkins was now convinced that green and Gaddis were definitely the same guy. Escalating his commitment to this wrong idea, he set forth his theory in a little book called Eve, The Common Muse of Henry Miller & Lawrence Durrell, a self-published paperback in which “Tiger Tim” Hawkins affirmed that “Eve” Durrell and “Eve” Miller were essentially the same Muse; that Eden’s “forbidden fruit” was a hallucinogenic drug; and that jack green and William Gaddis were truly the same person. Selling for $1 Eve never achieved bestseller status. Two copies have survived, one at Trinity College (Connecticut), the other at Amherst College (Massachusetts).

More than twenty years later, Hawkins was still trying to win converts for his theory that William Gaddis (author of The Recognitions, JR, and Carpenter’s Gothic), was really jack green. In 1963, theorized Hawkins, the prolific Mr. green also began writing under the nom de plume Thomas Pynchon. In a footnote to a 1985 letter to the AVA, Wanda wrote, “The novels of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon were written by the same person.” Wanda did not disclose who. But a year later, writing to Beth (Eve in the Afternoon) Bosk, Wanda enclosed a few essays by someone named “jack green,” with the explanation that green “did pretty well in the auctorial line with novels published commercially under the names of William Gaddis & Thomas Pynchon.” Who would write that?, theorized TR Factor, in 1995 — who except Thomas Pynchon, trying to fool Beth Bosk into thinking that he was really some guy named jack green?

Taking Off

fabulate (fab-ye-lat) verb 1. To talk or narrate in fables; 2. To invent, concoct, fabricate:

“a land which … had given itself up to dreaming, to fabulating, to tale-telling” (Lawrence Durrell)
“praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and, when called upon, take off and soar” (Thomas Pynchon)

It was after Tom Hawkins retired from the U.S. Postal Service that he and Kathy moved north to Mendocino County, buying a small house and three sheds on a lot just north of Fort Bragg. Tom and Kathy’s Beal Lane neighbors thought they were a real sweet couple. Tom, granted, was a little eccentric. The Hawkinses had no visible means of support, and no automobile. Tom stretched his budget for food and household supplies by writing letters complaining to manufacturers of defective products, demanding and often receiving multiple replacements. To buy groceries, he thumbed a ride into Fort Bragg, or caught a lift with neighbors, often stopping for solitary drinks at the Tip Top Lounge or browsing Fort Bragg’s three bookstores to trade or steal used paperbacks. Lest he should be recognized, he changed his manner of dress and appearance every few months, shifting from clean-shaven to unkempt beard to goatee or bushy mustache and back again. When venturing into town, Tom wore disguises, and always a different hat. His hats, more plentiful than Elton John’s collection of sunglasses, were displayed on row after row of Styrofoam heads on the west wall of his writing shed.

Tom Hawkins’s opium gardens were lush and flamboyantly beautiful — opium poppies of every color, a scene made more exotic by the strutting peacocks that he kept for watchdogs. (The bane of the neighborhood, the peacocks shrieked at night like crying babies. Tom and Kathleen had no children but treated their peacocks like family.) Tom’s favorite pastime, when not in the shed knocking out Wanda letters on his manual typewriter, was to rake the eucalyptus droppings from his yard and poppy plots. Until the back pain got too much for him, he was out there almost every day with the rake, year-round, gathering the eucalyptus pods and leaves and fallen bark into piles. During breaks, he skulked about the neighborhood and would sometimes appear suddenly, unexpectedly, at a neighbor’s window, peering in. Sometimes he would say hello. Other days he would just turn and walk away, and go back to his rake, or to his Underwood.

Kathleen Hawkins was a tall, sweet-tempered woman with curly blond hair who looked much younger than her fifty-odd years. Late in life, she came into some money, which gave her a measure of freedom she had not known during her first thirty years of married life. She bought a pickup truck for Tom and an old Honda for herself, learned to drive, and took pottery classes at the College of the Redwoods, where she made new friends. Despite crippling arthritis in her hands, which made every artifact a painful labor of love, Kathleen was naturally gifted in molding clay. With encouragement and assistance from other local potters, she built a kiln, setting up shop at her home on Beal Lane. Tom often puttered about the studio, helping out, sometimes making pots or plates of his own, but Kathleen was the artist. Neighbors said she never seemed happier. Pottery gave Kathy a freedom of expression, a source of recognition and praise, a sense of accomplishment. She produced large plates and vases carved with figures of cranes. At the time of her death she was working on a series of elaborate clay masks, inspired by African models, a few of which still turn up from time to time in Northern California galleries. Her works are signed with a line drawing of a peacock.

Despite their odd ways, neighbors told the Fort Bragg police, and journalists for the Press Democrat, that Tom and Kathy Hawkins were just a pair of “old lovebirds,” and “real nice, real friendly, willing to help you in any way.” No one saw any signs of trouble. One neighbor later speculated that Tom may have been unsettled by the change in his wife and nursed a growing resentment until one day he just exploded. Or perhaps it was the painkillers he took for his bad back, or the opium. In September 1988, three weeks after mailing what would be his last Wanda Tinasky letter to the AVA, Tom bludgeoned Kathy in his pickup truck, crushing her skull.

Amazed, perhaps, at his own ghastly violence, Tom carried Kathy’s body inside, into the living room, where he mourned over the corpse for several days until it became infested. On Friday, September 23, he arose and set the house on fire. As a column of smoke rose to the sky over Beal Lane, Thomas Donald Hawkins drove north on Route 1 in Kathy’s orange Honda at top speed, soaring into space over the cliffs at Bell Point, crashing onto the rocks ninety feet below. His decomposed corpse was found in the surf on October 6 near Ten Mile River Bridge, five miles from the Chadburn Gulch, where Kathy’s Honda lay smashed and sunk. No one, perhaps not even Kathy, suspected that Tom Hawkins was also Wanda Tinasky, culture critic for the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Poetry

… Wanda Tinasky amok

like the bodies popped off and

burned in the house at the

top of the hill blazing glory …

— Gordon Leon Black, Mendocino Commentary (1986)

Gordon Leon Black, high priest of Mendoland culture, disliked Wanda Tinasky. For one thing, Wanda had adopted the unpleasant habit of calling him “Back Page Black,” a nickname inspired by the location in which Gordon’s original poems could usually be found in the Mendocino Commentary. Mr. Black never figured out who Wanda really was, but he didn’t mind saying that he didn’t like her Philistine attitude. In fact, he said so all the time. Once, Gordon went so far as to liken Wanda to a killer arsonist. In October 1986, three years into Wanda’s epistolary crusade for better poetry, two years before the Hawkinses’ domestic tragedy, a former Hell’s Angel settled down in Fort Bragg for a virtuous retirement from gang life, along with his motorcycle-mama spouse and their two children. The fellow brought with him a suitcase full of Hell’s Angels’ money (which he had embezzled) and a trove of borrowed bike parts. In October, someone killed the man’s wife and children, then him, then burned the place to the ground with the bodies inside, then vanished.

In a poem for the back page of the Mendocino Commentary, Gordon Black compared this horrific crime to Wanda Tinasky’s unfair literary criticism — “Wanda Tinasky amok.” Those four hapless (“popped off” victims were like the Albion Ridge Poets, and Wanda Tinasky (with her “anonymous attacks in the letters column was like their cold-blooded killer, still unidentified, a nattering nabob of “negative affirmation” whose mockery was not to be endured by those with truly cultural sensibilities. Writing to the AVA, Wanda Tinasky in the next week’s issue loudly objected to the imputation:

Dear Mr. Anderson:

Please don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for an issue or two, as I am a bit distraught about having to move again. This morning a “law man” crawled under the bridge asking for “Wanda Tinasky,” & of course I was co-operative, offering to take a message, & from what he said I gather that some Albion Ridge poet known as Back Page Black published a scurrilous “poem” in the Mendocino Commentary, implying that I was involved in the multiple murders-cum-arson that put Ft. Bragg on the map for a day or two recently. “Aw,” I told him, “Wanda’s too puny to do anything but eat nana pudden, & whine to go on the Donahue show,” but I don’t know that he was totally convinced & think it the better part of valor to haul ass for a while until this thing blows over — maybe I’ll have to sue for a million or two, to defend my goddamn honor. Do you know a cheap lawyer, Mr. Anderson? Would you like to run the Mendocino Commentary for me? I’ll be in touch, when I get relocated.

Yr. Ob’d’nt Servant, &c. &c.,

Wanda Tinasky

The appended “P.S.” and “P.P.S.” were about other matters.

Wanda at this point in her life was innocent of arson and homicide, and Gordon Black was whistling in the dark about her true identity. But Back Page Black was evidently a shrewd judge of character, even eerily prophetic. In drawing his analogy between homicide and Wanda’s literary criticism, Black seems to have known Wanda better than Wanda knew herself. Or perhaps the Hawkins murder-suicide two years later was just another instance of someone’s life imitating someone else’s art. Even in our secular, unartistic, postmodern age, a piece of poetry or a great novel can sometimes make a small difference, register an influence, change the world.

Fishing For Wanda

You hide, they seek.

— Thomas Pynchon, “Proverbs For Paranoids” (1973)

The linguist’s first order of business — when seeking to identify the elegist “W.S., or the novelist “Anonymous,” or the Unabomber “F.C.,” or the bag lady “W.T., or any other anonymous author — is to obtain an accurate text of the Questioned Document(s). The second step is to obtain known writing samples by possible suspects. In August l998, when I finally took up the Wanda Tinasky question, much of that labor was already done for me. Most of the authentic Wanda letters had been gathered and edited by Fred Gardner, and published by TR Factor in the 1996 Tinasky volume. A few may have been overlooked. Others were missing by legal necessity: Beth Bosk withheld permission for a reprint of the Wanda letters that were addressed to her as the host of Eve in the Afternoon and as editor of The New Settler Interview — withholding them not because she was embarrassed by the satire but to express solidarity with her ripped-off friend Fred Gardner against rival editor TR Factor. For my purposes I didn’t need every letter that Wanda Tinasky ever wrote, but I did need to cull those that were not true Wanda. A few of the Wanda letters that Factor had thought to be authentic, and had reprinted from the AVA, were transparent forgeries by Wanda wannabes.

From 1983 to 1988, if you were someone who hung out Wednesdays at the Sea Gull Bar, you could tell when a new Wanda letter had appeared in the AVA. Some Albion Ridge or Ten Mile River bard would shuffle into the Sea Gull with a rolled-up AVA tucked under his arm. With hand in pocket, fingering an imaginary Smith & Wesson, the dejected poet would ask his fellow artistes one by one, “Are you Wanda Tinasky?” (“Not I” “Don’t look at me!” “Ain’t me.” “Nope.”). The latest victim of Wanda’s serial criticism would then take a seat beside his colleagues at the Gull — many of them fellow victims of Wanda Tinasky’s ridicule — and drown his sorrow in Boont Amber Ale or Belk’s Extra Special Bitter (local brews), or a horn of zeese. (The Anderson Valley, home of the AVA, has its own dialect, called “Boontling,” with a homegrown loggers’ vocabulary that goes back to the days of the vertical redwoods. A “horn of zeese” is a cup of coffee. A few Mendoland bards have written whole poems in the Boontling tongue, with never a word of praise or encouragement from the likes of Wanda Tinasky.)

Wanda was tough on artistic morale in Mendocino County. In “I Remember Wanda,” Karin Faulkner recalls her colleagues at the Sea Gull plotting a futile revenge on Wanda Tinasky, and on Bruce Anderson, too, for giving column space to that bilious witch. Some wrote anonymous replies to Wanda, or even forged Wanda letters of their own for publication in the AVA, just to get her goat. (Wanda hated that!) Karin never forged one herself, though she knew she “could imitate the style. Any good writer with an imagination could. Letters to the Editor are so short. And print is such an easy place to conceal identity.”

I began my belated search for Wanda ten months after receiving that initial summons from TR Factor. Acting on Faulkner’s caveat, I weeded out a few letters signed “Wanda Tinasky” though not penned in her characteristic style. Next I did a quick read through known writings by the local candidates, one of whom was Michael Koepf from the coastal village of Elk, a controversial figure variously described in the AVA as a “fisherman,” a “pot farmer,” and a “Scheiss Koepf.” Mr. Koepf was also a novelist, not widely read, but twice accused (by authentic Wanda) of having forged Wanda letters to the AVA. Koepf’s Icarus, once owned by the Fort Bragg Public Library (before it burned to the ground in an arson fire), was rarely checked out. Nor did it check out (when I found a copy in Poughkeepsie) as a text attributable to Wanda Tinasky.

Mike Koepf had told Bruce Anderson and Fred Gardner, and now me, that he knew for a fact that Wanda Tinasky was really Don Shanley, one of the Ten Mile River Poets. According to Koepf, no one in Mendocino County had ever read one of his novels except Don Shanley and Wanda Tinasky, who made fun. Beth Bosk told me that Shanley was her suspect as well. From The Western Edge (Ten Mile River Press) I learned that Don Shanley wrote his first real poem (inspired by Ginsberg’s Howl) in 1959. From the AVA I learned that Shanley was a friend of Bruce Anderson’s by shared sympathies and good times, a seed wholesaler by profession, and “Horticultural Expert to the Stars” by tongue-in-cheek self-description. None of which got me very far. But when I discovered that Shanley favored the ampersand, & that he inserted spaces ( thus ) inside his parentheses, I asked him for a copy of his collected poems, which he kindly sent me by FedEx at his own expense. But Mike Koepf was mistaken. Shanley’s a bright and witty guy, just possibly California’s most literate landscape artist, but his life-defining experience as a poet was a gut-wrenching tour of service in Vietnam. There was too much human feeling in his poetry, too little glibness, for him to be true-blue Wanda Tinasky; and the prose was no match, either.

Scratch Mike Koepf and Don Shanley. Scratch Bruce Anderson, Devereaux Baker, the Berry Lady, the Bicycle Man, Beth Bosk, Bill Bradd, Lawrence Bullock, and every other local candidate from A to Zeese. I tried for an eyewitness. Wanda, in a 1985 letter, recalled being picked up while hitchhiking and having to share a cramped truck bed with the classical musician Marcia Sloane and her large cello. I called Ms. Sloane. She remembered riding in the back of a pickup with a middle-aged hitchhiker in a sweatshirt but did not recognize him. She said she would not have recognized Thomas Pynchon, either.

Freak Accidence

Here’s What They’re Saying About “ Eve “

“ Orotund pshit ! “ — G. Legman

“ Laughed & laughed “ — L. Ferlinghetti

“… intriguing. Do you take hallucinogenics? — G. Snyder

— Tiger Tim Hawkins, Freak’s Literary Tertiary (1964)

If you’re sap enough to buy a book some whore of a paid reviewer recommends, you get what you deserve.

— Wanda Tinasky, Anderson Valley Advertiser (13 MARCH 1985)

September 7, 1998. It had now been more than fifteen years since Wanda’s first letters to the Mendocino Commentary, a decade since Wanda vanished from the AVA, and three weeks since I began looking for her. I seemed to have reached a dead end. The locals had their private theories but no evidence concerning Wanda’s identity. I would have to follow some other line of inquiry than eyewitness accounts or inside information. I could look for prior publications, but where, and under whose name? Wanda’s principal literary sources were the Beats, especially Gary Snyder, Gershon Legman, Kenneth Patchen, and Kenneth Rexroth, all of whom Wanda appeared to have known and admired, and Paul Krassner, whom Wanda remembered with contempt as a pimple-faced armpit-sniffing “hero of the Kiddiekar revolution.” Wanda professed to have been “ghosting for Krassner while he was ghosting for Lennie Bruce.” That seemed as good a lead as any, but Lenny Bruce, the envelope-pushing comedian who wrote How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1965), had died of a drug overdose in 1966; and Paul Krassner knew nothing of the Tinasky letters except what he’d been told by Fred Gardner.

While angling for Wanda in 1995, Gardner had interviewed just about every living person named in one of Ms. Tinasky’s letters. His net had come up empty. (E.g., Gardner to Krassner: “Did Thomas Pynchon ever write for The Realist” Krassner: “Oh, no. Never did. I’ve never met him, never had any contact with him. … Nobody ever ghosted for me.”) Gardner had asked the right people the wrong questions.

Searching on-line databases for books about Paul Krassner earlier than 1980, I found five titles, one of which was called Paul Krassner, The Realist, & $crap: Plus a P.S. on it, by “Tim” Hawkins (San Francisco: Ahab Press, 1964). That sounded pretty interesting. In her postscript to a 1986 letter, Wanda Tinasky promised readers of the AVA: “P.S. I’m going to improve myself… & learn to write good and not use ampersands & put all I want to say in some coherent hole without doing a P.S. on it.” This 1964 book by Tim Hawkins--with its ampersand in the title, and a “P.S. on it,” and its apparently hostile reference to Paul Krassner’s “$crap” — might shed light on Wanda’s cryptic remarks twenty years later.

In a comprehensive computer search, I located only one surviving copy of Hawkins’s Krasner, at Columbia University — and that was in the first edition (1963), which lacked the 1964 “P.S. on it.” No matter. Ordering a photocopy from Interlibrary Loan, I learned that Paul Krassner in 1963 had used some of Tim Hawkins’s material, not in the Realist, for which the submission was intended, but in a porn magazine called Escapade, with which Krassner was then associated as an anonymous contributor. Furious at having been thus ghosted, “Tim” Hawkins wrote the “$crap” essay, denouncing Krassner for involvement with Lenny Bruce; for making crass jokes in The Realist about Nazism, racial violence, thalidomide babies, abortion, rape, and incest; for contributing to pornographic magazines; and for pleading poverty while making big bucks off the degradation of women. As puffed by Hawkins, Paul Krassner &c. came in “three decorators shades of yellow.”

I wrote Paul Krassner in Venice, California, to ask whether he recalled this episode. Mr. Krassner wrote back, “Don, I vaguely remember the tract but have no recollection of Hawkins. Sorry, P.K.”

At the time, however, the Hawkins publication must have jiggled Mr. Krassner, if only a little. On December 17, 1963, Lawrence Ferlinghetti dropped Tom Hawkins a note after hearing the editor of The Realist flame Hawkins on a Bay Area radio show: “I wonder if you heard Krassner the other night,” wrote Ferlingheni, “when he spent about two hours talking about your book? I think you kind of upset him…” (But at this point in the investigation, I was still looking for a “Tim” Hawkins, and knew nothing of the Ferlinghetti-Hawkins correspondence. That discovery was still a week away.)

Finding Wanda

Once I thought that “literature” was mainly a means of communication between isolated human beings in a world of uninhabited bodies. I no longer think that.

— Tiger Tim Hawkins, Freak’s Literary Tertiary (1964)

Searching on-line databases of library holdings across North America, I found additional works by “T.” or “Tiger Tim” Hawkins under his own Ahab imprint: Eve, The Common Muse of Henry Miller & Lawrence Durrell (1963), Freak (1962?-1964), Freak’s Literary Tertiary (1964), and On the Fairy-Fag Doublet (1964). I ordered copies from Vassar’s Interlibrary Loan Office and, while waiting, rang up John Robert Meyer, now a distinguished professor of the history of economics at Harvard — but known to Wanda as an undergraduate at the University of Washington in the late ‘40s. When interviewed by Gardner in ‘95, Meyer had suggested that Wanda could be a woman named Anne Orem, whom he knew while at Purdue. Orem didn’t check out. I now asked Professor Meyer if he remembered anyone named Tim Hawkins. No, but he did know a Tom Hawkins, a prankster who grew up in the town of Port Angeles, Washington. The last time Meyer heard from Tom Hawkins he was working for the U.S. Postal Service and hanging out in Beatnik pubs in San Francisco — but that was a long time ago. Meyer hadn’t heard from Tom in years.

In a 1987 “Open Letter to Gary Snyder” published in the AVA, Wanda professed to have written a poem, some “18 or 19 years ago, commemorating the birth of Gary Snyder’s son (“How big is the moon? Big / As a silver dollar…”). Snyder at the time was “living in a basement apartment on the south side of Pine street in San Francisco, by the Zen center.” Wanda reminisced, as if addressing Snyder: “I disguised myself as a mailperson & took you some miniature pink roses…

I e-mailed Gary Snyder, now a professor emeritus, Department of English, at UC Davis in Sacramento. Did he remember a fellow named Thomas Hawkins? Yes, he remembered Tom quite well. Did Hawkins send him a poem on the occasion of his son’s birth, a poem beginning “How big is the moon?” Yes, yes, that was Tom’s work. But Professor Snyder had not heard from Tom Hawkins in years.

Taking my inspiration from milk-carton ads for missing children, I sent flyers to Fort Bragg’s Tip Top Lounge, Fort Bragg bookstores, the Fort Bragg Seniors Center — asking in boldface 24-point type: “Do you remember TOM HAWKINS?” Evidently no one did. In the meantime, I located a phone number for a Thomas Hawkins of Fort Bragg and gave him a jingle. When he answered the phone, I did not ask: “Mr. Hawkins, are you Wanda Tinasky?” but rather, “Mr. Hawkins, are you the same Thomas Hawkins who was known to the Beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth?”

This was the wrong Tom Hawkins, but the call was not wasted. This Mr. Hawkins remembered that there was another, older, Tom Hawkins, also of Fort Bragg, who passed away, oh, maybe ten years back, in 88 or thereabouts. Drove his car into the ocean and drowned.

I called the Mendocino County Coroner’s office. Yes, they remembered the case. “Thomas Donald Hawkins. Killed his wife, then himself.” (That did not sound to me like anything Wanda Tinasky would have done.) “No kids. Next of kin was an uncle, same name, Thomas Hawkins, of Port Angeles, Washington…” (Port Angeles!)

While waiting for a photocopy of the coroner’s report, I turned to the Internet, did a reverse-address lookup for Tom Hawkins’s Beal Lane address, and called the current residents, a couple named Ed Sander and Tenaya Middleton. Tenaya, who was not a reader of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, asked if I was the same guy who had called her fellow cellist Marcia Sloane only a few days earlier to ask if she had ever traveled with her instrument in a pickup truck, along with a hitchhiker who may have been “Wanda Tinasky.” I confessed I was. So who was this calling?, Tenaya silently wondered. Some strange fellow from New York with a thing for placing unsolicited telephone calls to Mendocino County cello players? I had not known that Tenaya was a cellist. I explained that I was actually looking for a fellow named Thomas Hawkins.

Tenaya was a big help. On September 23, 1988, she happened to be in the neighborhood visiting a friend and saw the billows of smoke over Beal Lane. It was only by chance, on a tip, that she came to purchase the Hawkins property when it was auctioned off by the executors. Except for the main house, destroyed by fire, the property when purchased by Tenaya was just as Tom and Kathleen Hawkins had left it. In the shed out back where Tom did most his writing was an old Underwood typewriter and reams of correspondence, most of which Tenaya threw away without reading. But while working through the debris — musty books, unpublished typescripts, back issues of the Anderson Valley Advertiser — she discovered and saved a bundle of cards and letters addressed to Mr. Hawkins from Gershon Legman, Kenneth and Miriam Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder. Graciously, trustingly, Ed and Tenaya sent me the correspondence, news clippings, and other papers that documented the life of Thomas Donald Hawkins.

On September 12, 1998, ten years after Tom Hawkins killed Kathy, his partner, lover, and Muse, with a blow to the head, and took his lonely flight over the Chadburn Gulch, I faxed a letter to Melanie Jackson with the news. Apart from a few hoax “Wanda” letters, Wanda Tinasky, the bag lady of Fort Bragg, was a fellow named Thomas Donald Hawkins, deceased. A few days later, by U.S. Post, I received a thank-you letter, typed, corrected, and signed by Thomas Pynchon. It was no joke. The author of V and Vineland and Mason & Dixon really does exist, and he writes exactly like Thomas Pynchon.

Pynched Cojones

You cannot imagine, my friend, the satisfaction I feel at heaving chicken livers at Mercedes, the release. There’s nothing quite like that oozing bloodred slug trailing its path across the hood of an expensive foreign car…

— C.O. JONES, “SELF-EXPRESSION,” THE LETTERS OF WANDA TINASKY (1996)

Pynchon’s meat, to be sure…

— TR Factor, “Is Thomas Pynchon Wanda Tinasky?” (1997)

How to break the news? After more than a year of receiving TR Factor’s heel-nipping correspondence, the woman remained, for me, a shadowy figure. TR had volunteered no information about herself, no credentials, no resume, no phone number, no return address. Before saying who Wanda really was, I wanted to learn who TR Factor really was. Searching through back issues of the AVA, I hunted for stray writings by TR — and became interested in a contributing writer who signed his or her letters “C.O. Jones.” C.O. Jones sounded like TR Factor. And in fact, C.O.. Jones was TR Factor, born and christened Diane Kearney. This fierce Mendocino County polemicist had peppered her political commentary with ad hominem zingers until 1985, when a fellow contributor ridiculed her nom de plume, a pun on cojones (Spanish slang for testicles). “If C.O. Jones needs a pair that bad,” wrote her AVA critic, “she should get her name on the waiting list at Stanford Hospital where they are transplanting baboon balls. Until then, for accuracy in media, she should be called Sans C.O. Jones. [signed] E.N. Tranas / East Palo Alto.” Jones shot off a testy reply, observing that Tranas’s name and city could be reshuffled anagrammatically to read: “AN APE SATAN / TOTAL LOSER.” In making this witty riposte, Ms. Kearney-Jones/Factor evidently overlooked the fact that “E.N. Tranas” was already a pseudonym on the same model as her own “C.O. Jones” (entranas: Spanish for bowels).

Feeling underappreciated, Ms. Jones collected her marbles, moved to Oregon, and changed her name legally to TR Factor, where she was found, still sulking, by Fred Gardner in July 1995, and invited by him to participate in the Wanda Tinasky Research Group. A troublesome thought now occurred to me. If I should disappoint TR by saying that the Tinasky letters were not by Thomas Pynchon, what vile anagrams might be constructed from “D. W. Foster / Poughkeepsie” in the letters column of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, or on the Internet, or in the planned second edition of The Letters of Wanda Tinasky?

I bit my tongue and said nothing. Melanie Jackson and Thomas Pynchon now had the scoop on Wanda Tinasky and Tom Hawkins. Let them do with the information as seemed best. I was done with the residents of Mendoland. But they were not yet done with me. In March 1999, Gordon Leon Black — Albion Ridge Poet, author of “Wanda Tinasky amok,” host of classical music on KZYX radio, and all-round high priest of Mendoland culture — wrote to the Anderson Valley Advertiser with his assessment of “Foster’s literary detection,” which was not high. Having read “A Funeral Elegy” by W.S., Mr. Black invited Bruce Anderson to print an “ample sample” of the “Shakespeare” elegy and let readers of the AVA decide for themselves whether or not Shakespeare actually wrote it.

I took the occasion of Mr. Black’s skepticism to contribute my one and only letter to the Anderson Valley Advertiser (March 17, 1999), observing without fanfare that the “Wanda Tinasky” of local memory, believed by many to be the novelist Thomas Pynchon, was actually Thomas Donald Hawkins (1927-1988) of Fort Bragg; and that Mr. Hawkins’s five-year gig as Wanda Tinasky had inspired a few copycat letters to the AVA and Mendocino Commentary that were not really his, including one by Gordon Leon Black. Explaining these matters to a local audience that still remembered Wanda more than a decade after her disappearance, I hoped that no one would really notice, or care, that Ms. Tinasky was not Thomas Pynchon. TR Factor noticed. TR Factor cared. TR Factor went ballistic. She wrote a blistering letter to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, using such colorful language that Bruce Anderson, whose free speech policy is to print almost all of the letters that come in, would not print it. In her own original Amazon.com book review of The Letters of Wanda Tinasky (copies of which may yet be ordered, while supplies last, from Amazon.com), Ms. Factor let me have it with both shovelfuls, spicing her remarks with opprobious comments on “Don Foster” that she’d picked up on the Internet. Sometimes I just don’t know when to bite my tongue.

P.S. On It

But why am I boring you like this with ghost stories of the dead and so-well-buried Beat Generation of literaries? Oh, yes: jack green…

— Tiger Tim Hawkins, Eve, The Common Muse Of Henry Miller & Lawrence Durrell (1963)

When he first learned from Fred Gardner (then from TR Factor, then from major news organizations) of The Letters of Wanda Tinasky, Thomas Pynchon speculated, not implausibly, that Wanda was really Bruce Anderson and that the Pynchon attribution was a hoax designed to gain attention for the AVA. He was mistaken about that. TR Factor and Bruce Anderson believed that Wanda really was Pynchon. They, too, were mistaken. Hawkins, who never intended for Wanda to be misidentified, believed that Thomas Pynchon was really William Gaddis, who was really jack green. Hawkins was only two-thirds mistaken. Gaddis is Gaddis, and Pynchon is Pynchon, but jack green was not really jack green. The publisher of newspaper was actually John Carlisle, the son of Helen Grace Carlisle, author of The Merry, Merry Maidens (1937). Carlisle adopted the “jack green” nom de plume in 1957 after he quit his job as an actuarial clerk for Metropolitan Life Insurance, grew a beard, and founded newspaper.

A few years ago, selections from jack green’s newspaper were republished under the title Fire the Bastards! (1992), edited by Steven Moore. This is the same Steven Moore who wrote the definitive Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1982), and this is the same Steven Moore who (twist upon twist) wrote the foreword to TR Factor’s edition of The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. When publishing his scholarly work on jack green and William Gaddis, and when contributing to the Tinasky volume, Professor Moore (who really is Steven Moore) never knew or suspected that Wanda was a fellow admirer of jack green. For Moore’s money, Wanda was Pynchon. (“Well, if it ain’t Pynchon,” wrote Moore, “it’s someone who has him down cold: his inimitable literary style, his deep but lightly worn erudition, his countercultural roots, his leftist/populist politics, his brand of wit and humor, his encyclopedic range of reference, his street smarts and raffish charm, his immersion in pop culture and sports, and his hatred of all agents of repression.”) The inimitable Tom Hawkins would doubtless have been pleased with the epitaph. He was not Pynchon and never pretended to be, but the Wanda Tinasky story was his best laugh ever, and as Pynchonesque as any story not by Thomas Pynchon will ever get.

Don Meredith, Mike Noseworthy, Jerry West on the California Lutheran College football field, probably 1966. Photo by Herb Noseworthy.

22 Comments

Chuck Artigues April 11, 2025

Thank you Chris Pugh, well said!

Harvey Reading April 11, 2025

ONE SMALL STEP FOR HOUSING, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR FORT BRAGG

Just the opinion of yet another growther… They won’t stop until everything that can be developed is developed. They’ve been at it, in one way or another, since the species evolved, and will be the death of that species with their notions.

- Jacob April 11, 2025
  
  FYI, some people who participated in the FB hearings on the apartment complex have filed appeals to the Coastal Commission so the “leap” forward is on hold and may even be reversed, depending on how the Coastal Commission reviews the project. As a supporter who also spoke at the hearings, I am disappointed but understand since the City’s review work appears to be inadequate, which isn’t uncommon here.
  
Harvey Reading April 11, 2025

“We ask the Trump Administration to intervene and prevent FERC from approving PG&E’s
decommissioning plan until a long-term solution is secured.”

Taking out the dam and restoring stream flow IS a “long-term” solution, but Trump loves artificiality rather than natural processes…whadda country!

Lew Chichester April 11, 2025

Re: the Potter Valley Project, Scott Dam and the Farm Bureau letter. What exactly do the Farm Bureaus of the three counties propose other than just stopping the decommissioning of PG&E’s hundred year old dam at Lake Pillsbury? It seems like a quite believable story that PG&E doesn’t want any of the infrastructure anymore for a number of reasons, mostly it is not profitable and the old dam presents a considerable risk of collapse in a big earthquake. OK, I got that. So again, what does the Farm Bureau propose? Do they want to buy the whole thing, operate it, assume the risk? It is beginning to be apparent that the rest of us ratepayers have been subsidizing this whole thing for quite awhile and the Farm Bureau likes it that way.

- Adam Gaska April 11, 2025
  
  In the letter, we request that the Bureau of Reclamation assume ownership and management of the PVP.
  
  - Lazarus April 11, 2025
    
    I think the “Earthquake excuse given by the government stooges and PG&E is rich. I suspect an earthquake capable of knocking down the dam, would likely kill thousands in and around the Leaning Tower of Luxury aka the “Millennium Tower” in Frisco! No mention of tearing it down…Oh yeah, they propped it up.
    However, barring that, think about the waterless landscape that will remain where generations, learned how to swim, sail, water ski, and go fishing. With all the money PG&E has ripped off its customers for and they have the stones to do that? I hope the locals can drag this out for another 100 years.
    Life is a crap shoot, you pay your money and hope you have a long roll. But nobody gets out alive…
    Ask around,
    Laz
    
    - Bruce McEwen April 11, 2025
      
      I have asked around and a bottle of 40 yr scotch whisky was marked at $9,999.97 in March and as of April 10, it had gone down to $7,999.97 at the same store, for the same 750 ml bottle. Now, should I take a second mortgage on the condo and snap it up? I could cater a Gathering 0’ Clans with it and stand every man jock a marnin’ dram and pint o’ McEwen’s (auld Uncle Bill) beer for maybe $500 smackerooze a piece—waddaya think? Then they could boast they drank ten-thousand dollar whisky, huh.
      
bharper April 11, 2025

Wading through the Wanda article.
I was the first brewer for AV Brewing and did sales and delivery on the coast. The Sea Gull was not one of my customers. Nor was Belk’s Bitter part of the line of beers until many years later.

Hard to follow in your article who said that.

Bill Beer

- Bruce Anderson April 11, 2025
  
  Don Foster, the scholarly literary sleuth, said that trying, I guess, to establish local color.
  
  - bharper April 11, 2025
    
    Does it not dilute the veracity to color scholarly endeavors with fabrications?
    
    - Bruce Anderson April 11, 2025
      
      Yeah, a tiny bit I’d guess it was a simply error, not a fabrication, which would make it deliberate.
      
      - bharper April 11, 2025
        
        He wouldn’t be the first.to project the present or himself into his subject of years past.
        
Nancy April 11, 2025

Plane? C-130 if 4 engines or one of the myriad of C-130 variants if just 2 engines. Hard to tell from the picture.

- Jim Armstrong April 11, 2025
  
  C123, aka Provider, Vietnam workhorse.
  
  - Jim Armstrong April 11, 2025
    
    Yep, Nancy is right, it may be a four-engine, a 130 if so. Also a Vietnam workhorse.
    Edit: Windshield, other windows and markings say C 130.
    
Mike Jamieson April 11, 2025

Gadi Schwartz of NBC News reports on the revelations and film leaked by personnel from the Combat Information Center on the USS Jackson. The incident is dated Feb 2023 and occurred off the southern California coast. It entails 4 40 foot long cylindrical craft with rounded edges going in and out of the ocean, darting around, etc. This is the same type of craft in the famous USS Nimitz event in 2004 when Cmdr Underwood captured infrared imagery of the 40 foot tic tac hovering and then darting off at 18 000 mph.

NBC News coverage:
https://youtu.be/3AJWk3N5IYE?si=zdHiQcNieNbIEGiI

Steve Heilig April 11, 2025

“Along with some lesser Counts,” the Rev is replying, “‘twas one of the least tolerable of Offenses in that era… the Crime they styl’d ‘Anonymity.’ That is, I left messages posted publicly, but did not sign them.”
— Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dlxon (1997)

-An apt message for the CATs (Cowardly Anonymous Trolls) long infesting this forum. They know who they are, but are too scared and hypocritical to stand behind their words and step out of their dark hovels.

- Bob Abeles April 11, 2025
  
  As a personal hobby, I enjoy determining who/what the CATs (I like that) are. I bat around 50%. I’m not going to out anyone, but be aware that if you are a CAT, you’re probably not as anonymous as you might think.
  
- Fascism For Fun and Profit! April 11, 2025
  
  “Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.”
  
  — US Supreme Court, 1995, McIntyre v. Ohio
  
  - Bruce Anderson April 12, 2025
    
    The voice of experience….
    
mark g donegan April 11, 2025

David E. is a POS and needs to be gone.

22 Comments

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