Mendocino County Today: Saturday 5/3/2025

Breezy | Noyo Bay | Explosive Device | Courthouse Groundbreaking | Wild Iris | Boys Volleyball | Protection Racket | Today's Events | BOS Agenda | Weekend Events | Ed Notes | Plant Sale | Groovin' Grove | Barn Sale | UCCA Finale | Sunday Events | Unity Club | Bridge Fundraiser | History Day | Silly Circus | Wildflower Time | Lem-ko-lil | Katlyn Long | Sheriff Moore | Yesterday's Catch | It Shows | PD Purchase | Many Books | Pot Tax | Total Schmuck | First Drop | Bob & Suze | Three Poems | Adult Reading | Marco Radio | 1972 | Game 7 | Jailed Lelo | Climate Bill | Crossing Guard | Gatsby 100 | My Hero | LA Times | Wheeled Meals | 1980s | Park Service | Tax Proposal | Communist Ideology | Lead Stories | Obvious Folly | Visiting Giza

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MUCH COOLER with strong and blustery northerly to northwesterly winds and a few showers today. Continued cool and windy with strong coastal northerlies again on Sunday. Robust northeast winds and warming expected for Monday. Dry weather and above normal interior warmth expected all next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 48F on the coast this Saturday morning. Windy is our weather word this weekend with skies clearing later today. The system that is upon us will take it's rain to So Cal.

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EXPLOSIVE DEVICE FOUND - NEAR UKIAH VALLEY FIRE AUTHORITY STATION

by Justine Frederiksen

An explosive device was found near the Ukiah Valley Fire Authority station on Talmage Road Wednesday afternoon, the UVFA reported.

Battalion Chief Ryan Nelson said that someone removing weeds near the station at 1300 Talmage Road on April 30 found something in the grass that did not look safe and brought it to Nelson’s attention.

When inspecting the device, Nelson said he could see a fuse attached and recognized it as an “improvised explosive device,” as UVFA personnel have seen many such devices while responding to calls for service.

“I notified the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office Bomb Squad and sent them a picture,” Nelson said, explaining that after confirming that the device definitely appeared to be a bomb, personnel with the SCSO Bomb Squad responded to the station to safely dispose of it.

Nelson said the SCSO personnel deployed a robot to pick up the device and move it a safe distance away from anyone who could be harmed. The device, which was most certainly an explosive, was then safely detonated.

Though Nelson described the incident as “very scary,” Battalion Chief Eric Singleton said that the UVFA “has not received any threats and we do not believe we were targeted, as there is no evidence to suggest that at this point.”

Singleton described the bomb as being found not on UVFA property, but rather in a ditch alongside Talmage Road that is “in between the station property and the road.”

When asked how long the device may have been in the grass, Nelson said he could not guess, only noting that “the device had duct tape on it which was not well-weathered from the sun,” so the device was not extremely old.

When asked if there were any cameras that could help identify when and how the device was placed there, UVFA staff said that the official investigation is being handled by the California Highway Patrol in conjunction with other local law enforcement agencies.

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

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CELEBRATING A MAJOR EYESORE AND AN UTTER LACK OF PLANNING

Mendocino Community Celebrates Groundbreaking For New Courthouse

On April 30, more than 125 community members celebrated the Mendocino County Superior Court groundbreaking event to officially begin construction of a new three-story, seven-courtroom, 82,000 square foot courthouse in Ukiah next to the Train Depot. The audience included members of the public, representatives from the City of Ukiah and County of Mendocino, current and retired judges and court staff. More than twenty members of the design-build team, consisting of Hensel Phelps, Fentress Architects and Kitchell were on site to mark this occasion. The Judicial Council of California was also well represented and is providing approximately $120 million in state funding to build the new courthouse. Judicial Council staff will be on-site throughout the construction phase to provide oversight and support. Finally, Angela James from the Pinoleville Pomo Nation performed a blessing at the end of the ceremony and described the history of the tribal community’s involvement with the land on which the courthouse will be built.

Presiding Judge Keith Faulder began the ceremony with remarks about the history of the courthouses in Mendocino County, from the mid-1800s to the present, and the twenty-year journey to realize this important groundbreaking milestone. He recognized the funding challenges that have made achieving this goal often seem out of reach. He acknowledged the detailed and creative design work, already completed, by the design-build team, Judicial Council, City of Ukiah and the court.

Chief Operating Officer Salena Chow from the Judicial Council highlighted the importance of this new courthouse. Ms. Chow said, “This project represents many years of partnership between the court and council, working alongside our state, city, and county partners. Breaking ground on this new courthouse marks a major step toward providing a modern, efficient, and secure facility that will better meet the needs of the public and expand access to justice for the residents of Mendocino County.”

Juan Orozco, Ukiah City Councilmember, affirmed the City’s commitment to the new courthouse, highlighting its importance to the downtown area. City Manager Sage Sangiacomo added, “The courthouse has been an important fixture in Ukiah’s downtown for more than a century and a half. While our community has outgrown the current building in many ways, its critical role as an anchor remains. This investment by the State in a new facility, and their commitment to keeping it downtown, will benefit Ukiah tremendously—for another 150 years or more, we hope.”

Curtis Fentress, Principal in charge of Design at Fentress Architects and John Petty, Operations Manager at Hensel Phelps highlighted their design and construction partnership and noteworthy features in the new courthouse in their remarks. Mr. Petty stated, “The Hensel Phelps/Fentress Design-Build Team is honored to team up with the Judicial Council of California, The Superior Court of Mendocino County and the City of Ukiah to deliver this state-of-the-art facility for the people of Ukiah and Mendocino County. This courthouse is designed to be highly efficient, durable and resilient while targeting LEED Silver certification. All parking stalls will be covered with PV panels providing a substantial amount of the energy required for the new facility. Additionally, the landscaping will be drought tolerant and native.” Mr. Fentress added, “The Ukiah Courthouse was designed to serve a judicial system that has evolved over the past few decades. Throughout the design process we were committed to justice, accessibility, security, and public service. We’re proud to have created a landmark that will serve Ukiah and Mendocino County for generations to come.”

Following the event, Court Executive Officer Kim Turner recognized the extensive collaboration among the design-build team members and the synergy that is created by developing a project that honors all perspectives. “The design-build team, the council and the court have been meeting weekly for nearly two years to work through every aspect of the design. The process has been energizing and has allowed us to ‘problem-solve’ design features, honoring the ultimate needs of the court for a functional, efficient and visually stunning new facility.” Ms. Turner added, “The court is also committed to honoring the legacy of our current Ukiah courthouse and the Mendocino community by reproducing in our new facility the current courthouse’s murals painted in the 1970s, depicting many aspects of life in Mendocino and our commitment to justice.”

The courthouse is slated to be completed in 27 months, meaning judges and staff will be able to move into the new facility before the end of 2027. Early discussions are underway between the County and the City to determine what will be done with the current courthouse once the court vacates the building.

For more information contact:

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THE ABOVE PRESSER from the County Courthouse reminded us of the time back in March of 2016 (described in the item below) when we tried to discuss the wastefulness of the new Courthouse with then judge-candidate Keith Faulder. Faulder was running for his current (open at the time) seat against Patrick Pekin back in 2016. (Faulder won by the slimmest of margins, only 154 votes countywide; Pekin was subsequently appointed to a different judgeship.)

(March 2016) — YOU’RE NOW BEING TRANSFERRED TO LISTEN ONLY MODE: Last Wednesday night judge candidate Keith Faulder held a phone-in town hall meeting. After answering several lob ball questions which sounded like they came from Faulder’s grandparents, it was my turn. (Me, Major Mark Scaramella, USAF ret.) I quoted some excerpts from the Deputy Sheriff’s Association statement in 2014 in which they explained why they unanimously opposed the construction of a new County Courthouse.

I THEN ASKED THE CANDIDATE if he really thought a new courthouse was necessary.

I HAD HOPED that candidate Judge Faulder would at least take a neutral stance on the indefensible project, maybe a little judicial lib-labbery of on-the-one-hand/on-the other hand variety… Maybe even a little give and take on the subject.

BUT I WAS WRONG. Faulder immediately launched into a canned near-verbatim recitation of [the late] Judge Dave Nelson’s unconvincing party-line talking points about “safety and security during prisoner shuttling,” disability access and “the privacy of juvenile defendants.” (Huh? This one’s a brand new non-reason. Nelson must be putting in some serious OT dreaming this stuff up.) Faulder had even memorized the exact budgeted cost of the new courthouse — $98 million [in 2016] — which he insisted was all state funds, not county funds, completely missing the point about the fiscal and disruptive impact on other County departments. And deliberately missing the point on the origins of this money — the extortionate fines and fees the judge factories impose on all citizens, including those residing in Mendocino County. Even “state money” has real origins. (And as if the Deputy Sheriffs hadn’t taken the shuttle-security issue into account in their opposition.)

HAVING HEARD previous callers get a chance to follow up, I was just about to say, “If I’d wanted Judge Nelson’s opinion I would have asked him. But you missed the point that the County will have to pick up the tab for all the disruptions in the other departments… And that the Deputy Sheriffs were certainly aware of the safety issue…” But instead, I was quickly hung up on and told by a disembodied recorded female voice: “You are now being transferred to listen-only mode.”

WELL. We now know judge Faulder will be quick with the gavel at the first hint of insouciant courtroom comment.

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[Back to 2025…] “LISTEN ONLY MODE” is a good summary of this entire project. Mendo hasn’t had any say in the project whatsoever. And the public? We get to listen to/read the self-congratulatory press releases and announcements from people like Faulder and Supervisor Maureen Mulheren who might as well be AI-bots on the subject.

The Court Presser’s final sentence — “Early discussions are underway between the County and the City to determine what will be done with the current courthouse once the court vacates the building” — made us laugh out loud. This project has been underway for more than ten years and they’re only now in “early discussions to determine what will be done with the current courthouse once the court vacates the building”? Typical.

(Mark Scaramella)

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NEW UKIAH COURTHOUSE GROUNDBREAKING
Noon Wednesday, April 30, 2025

by Jim Luther

We gather here to
Break ground for our new courthouse
Where we’ll try cases.

Every courthouse has
At least one working courtroom
Where cases are tried.

Jury box. Flag. Bench.
Counsel tables. Witness stand.
Your basic courtroom.

A place purpose-built
To single out the facts proved
From the facts alleged.

Lawyers. Bailiff. Crowd.
Parties. Jurors. Witness. Judge.
Court reporter. Clerk.

Live participants
Each aware each other’s here
Seeing that it works.

Live testimony.
Exhibits. Offers of proof.
Objections. Rulings.

Serious action
That matters enough to rate
Our close attention.

All in one courtroom.
This courthouse will have seven.
Each of them special,

Each one purpose-built
To single out the facts proved
And provide justice.

Where humanity
Will lay down its cards, cite law,
And expect justice.

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The first ever boys volleyball season at AVHS is a wrap! Competitive in every single game versus schools like Ukiah, Kelseyville and Roseland University Prep, our boys punched above their weight all season long and finished on a high note, playing their best Volleyball they defeated Credo in 3 sets as we honored our lone senior #3 Ehndy Perez in his last game.

We are very proud of these young men for stepping out of their comfort zone and taking on the challenge of a new sport. Under the guidance of basketball coach Luis Espinoza and Volleyball coaching legend Flick McDonald, these 8 young men have set a solid foundation for this program to build upon. Let’s Go Panthers!

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LEW CHICHESTER (Covelo):

The two articles Friday, one, the letter from John Haschak and Matt Kendall to the supervisors about un-permitted cannabis cultivation, and two, the press release from the plaintiffs in the lawsuit in federal court against the Sheriffs of both Mendocino and Humboldt counties for “unconstitutional searches and seizures…” are so closely related as to be almost the same story, and may become so as the information unfolds.

My perspective, from living on a piece of private property in the middle of the Round Valley Indian Reservation for more than fifty years: The development of cannabis grows on the Round Valley Reservation, which is exempt from state and county civil laws, has been using the tribal ordinance allowing personal use cultivation as a screen for obvious commercial grows, leased to non-tribal members, and these grows can include criminal activities.

I commend the Sheriff for his actions attempting to set some kind of limit on what will be tolerated, as the tribal government seemingly does nothing to enforce internally its own marijuana laws. Some tribal members, including those on the council, are personally benefitting from blatantly illegal behavior in contradiction to the “compassionate use” ordinance of the Round Valley Reservation, contributing to a general degradation of the land, encouraging criminal behavior, and apparently this is OK under some fiction of sovereignty. It’s a mess, and maybe this lawsuit will get this straightened out. I doubt it, it’s just a mess.

SHERIFF KENDALL:

Well Lew, we will see where this goes. The question posed is a question of tribal sovereignty. I fear when it comes to policies which create dangerous environments and lawlessness for everyone living in the area we have to take a close look at the factors causing the issues. We need to know where that sovereignty begins and where it ends.

I received a lot of calls from Round Valley residents, both tribal members as well as non tribal members voicing their concerns and raising questions over this. These folks advised their concerns were that tribal policies are beginning to look like a protection racket, that has become a real issue. These questions need to be answered and I am hopeful they will be.

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LOCAL EVENTS (today)

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COUNTY TO REVISIT THEIR BAD TAX SHARING AGREEMENT WITH UKIAH

by Mark Scaramella

Item 4j on next Tuesday’s Supervisor’s agenda is described as:

“Discussion and Possible Action Including Formation of An Ad Hoc Committee to work with CEO through the Consultation Process Required by the Master Tax Sharing Agreement with the City of Ukiah, Regarding the City’s Proposed Change of Organization as Discussed at the April 16, 2025, City Council Meeting (Sponsor: Executive Office)”

Has it belatedly dawned on the CEO and the Board that Supervisor Maureen Mulheren’s secretly arranged, one-sided “tax sharing” agreement with the City of Ukiah will cost the County millions of dollars in lost parcel taxes?

Last June former Ukiah councilperson Mulheren and several giddy Ukiah officials convinced Mulheren Supervisor-colleagues to approve a tax sharing agreement that was roughly estimated to cost the County $3 million over the next ten or fifteen years. At the time, the County’s $3 million loss guess was pure speculation because even the Board’s own plant as Acting Auditor-Controller-Treasurer Tax Collector, Sara Pierce, said the tax sharing formula was too complicated to even try to assign a value to, and nobody knew how many parcels of what value it might apply to.

https://theava.com/archives/246292

Then last month the Ukiah City Council approved an ambitious city-staff plan to take advantage of the one-sided agreement to try to grab hundreds of taxable parcels north and south of the City of Ukiah last month and transfer them from county to city control and reap the property taxes.

https://theava.com/archives/264861#5

Mulheren’s tax sharing agreement and Ukiah’s recent proposal have since been described as a “bait and switch” maneuver by Sheriff Kendall who seems to be the only senior County official to realize that the County stands to lose a large chunk of revenue which, among other things, would take a large bite out of the Sheriff’s budget.

Exactly how an ex-post facto ad hoc committee will approach clawing back the tax sharing agreement at this point is unclear. We doubt that another secret ad hoc committee is the solution to the problem that was cooked up in secret in the first place and was never reviewed by the public or the County’s affected department heads until it was sprung on the Board last summer. Especially when Ukiah now holds the high cards.

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THE SUPERVISORS’ HAVE SCHEDULED AN ALL-DAY CLOSED SESSION AGENDA for next Wednesday which includes performance evaluations for the County Librarian and CEO Darcie Antle. It also includes a discussion of the status of the wrongful suspension civil case filed by Auditor-Controller-Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison. Plus a case filed by the Vichy Springs Resort against the City of Ukiah (not the County, although one assumes the County is involved somehow), and the lawsuit filed by the Willits Environmental Center about the County’s pot permit program described by Jim Shields elsewhere in today’s postings. It’s probably too optimistic to hope that the Supervisors will attempt to settle the Cubbison case by offering a fair settlement with back pay and court/attorney costs plus a damages payment to put the disgraceful case behind them. So far we have seen nothing to indicate that the County has any such plans, even though the County is running up large outside attorney costs and the case will be heard by the same judge who declared County officials to be “willfully ignorant” and without credibility (among other things) when she tossed the criminal case against Cubbison at the preliminary hearing stage.

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LOCAL EVENTS (all weekend)

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ED NOTES

A READER WRITES:

I frequent a grocery store in town, you may remember from your Eugene days, called Fred Meyer. There is a particular location that I hate. On one occasion, I was returning to my car and a homeless man (or houseless person, as they like to say here) stood about 10 yards away and locked eyes with me. He shouted, “You fuggin’ faggot!” To which I mouthed, “Me?” while pointing to myself. Not half a second later he shouted, “Yeah you, you fuggin’ faggot!” He then proceeded to charge in my direction. I leapt in my car as fast as humanly possible before he could make contact and locked the door. Today, I reluctantly went to this same location as it is the closest to my work, and my friend Mr. Jones needed something so I went during lunch. Anyway, I thought I had been very lucky not to have had any strange encounter and smugly walked back to my car. I saw another houseless gent make eye contact with me but he was oddly partially obscured by a wall. I quickly registered that he was midst-urination and then he shouted to me, “Uh, sorry ma’am, I just couldn’t hold it.” This time I didn’t impulsively respond to the gentleman but rather saved the 5 seconds to get to my car and head back to work, hoping to forget what I had seen before I had to teach Spanish.”

THE FBI was not only founded by a lunatic, it was, and still is, staffed by people who, shall we say, lack sophistication. Of course if you think Arthur Miller was a communist and Marilyn Monroe a pinko, you probably think of the contemporary FBI as super sleuths. Maybe they are, but in my direct experience, I’d characterize the G-Men (and one very young Asian G-Woman) that I’ve met in circumstances ranging from unpleasant to guarded they are as limited-to-crippled in their understanding of great swathes of American experience, and completely at sea when it comes to even the most basic distinctions among left wingers. And here comes Patel!

EVERYONE to the left of Chuck Schumer is viewed as a socialist, and a socialist is the same as a communist, and a small ‘c’ communist is the same as a member of the Communist Party (which no longer exists) and an anarchist is an obnoxious street grunge towed by a team of pitbulls, and they’re all liberals, and liberals are communists and socialists and we’re back to where we began.

I BRING YOU these profound observations because I read a story last week about how Hoover’s FBI kept Marilyn Monroe under surveillance. Of course the Kennedy Brothers and mafia figures enjoyed her company so I suppose in a peripheral sense Marilyn would have been “a person of interest” to J. Edgar Closet Case.

BUT THAT’S not why the old voyeur had Marilyn in his highly selective sights while he maintained that there was no such thing as organized crime, an insistence some writers think arose out of the mafia being in possession of blackmail photos of Hoover prancing around in a cocktail dress. (Even mentioning this stuff you start to sound like a paranoid.) But Hoover, who hated the Kennedys and shared audiotapes of Martin Luther King’s after-hours life with other Klan-minded government officials, was mostly interested in Marilyn because he really thought she was a red.

WHY? Well, she believed in civil rights for black people, a stance Hoover and the political right generally assumed was inspired by communists. Marilyn also publicly denounced McCarthyism; and she often expressed contempt for Hoover himself. In other words, Marilyn Monroe was an intelligent person and a good American.

THERE’S an essay by George Orwell on his experience picking Brit hops in the 1930’s. The work was the same wherever hops were grown, and the people doing the picking were drawn from the bottom of the class barrel. A reader reminds us that “hops were at their peak in Anderson Valley prior to the enactment of Prohibition, i.e., pre-1920. The crop was dried at the source and shipped in a dried state, important to a region like Anderson Valley, far from urban centers and isolated by poor roads. Some beer may have been made locally (most likely in Ukiah — where a book I found on the internet mentions Gibson’s Hop House burned in 1905, with the building loss estimated at $5,000), but most of the hops probably went to Santa Rosa, where Enterprise Brewing and Grace Brothers Brewing were big businesses. Hops may have resumed in the valley in the 1930s and 1940s, as Grace Brothers remained in business, but I have no memory of seeing hops when we first arrived in 1957. It is certainly an interesting — and largely unrecorded — aspect of valley history.”

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Blue Meadow Farm
3301 Holmes Ranch Rd, Philo
(707) 895-2071

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GROOVIN’ AT THE GROVE with Gene Parsons, Bella Rayne, et al this Sunday in Mendocino

Montessori Del Mar presents Groovin’ at the Grove

Join us for our school’s inaugural spring festival at the Mendocino Grove!

Sun, May 04 | Mendocino Grove Campground just south of Mendocino

There will be music, food, games and fun. Kids are free

Live Performances: Music starts at 2:15pm with the MdMCS Drums Club & Big Chris,

Bella Rayne & Friends on at 2:30

New Nashville West (Gene Parsons) performs at 5:30pm. Live Auction: At 4:30pm, there will be a LIVE Auction of amazing items including overnight stays and dinners at Mendocino County’s finest hotels and resturants, activities and services bundles with something for everyone and more!

Kids’ Zone: A dedicated area for kids featuring face-painting and fun and interactive games and activities.

Food and Drink: A variety of local chefs will offer food for purchase throughout the day including pizzas, paella and more. Wine, beer and nonalcoholic beverages will also be available.

Vendor Booths: Local vendors will have vintage clothing and other items for sale.

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EXPERIENCE MUSIC AS MOVEMENT, MEDICINE, AND MISSION

& Have a Rockin’ Feel-Good Time

At 2:00 pm. on Sunday, May 4.

Be sure to come to the Ukiah High School Cafetorium for an unforgettable experience with Las Cafeteras in our grand finale of the UCCA 2024-25 season.

And what a band they are! — Performing around the world in shows from Bonnaroo to the Hollywood Bowl, WOMAD New Zealand and Montreal Jazz Festival, having made numerous albums and videos while collaborating and sharing the stage with an incredibly diverse array of musical artists including Cafe Tacuba, Colombian superstar Juanes, the Gypsy Kings, hip-hop artist Common, Los Angeles legends Ozomatli, and Los Lobos and even the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The musicians of Las Cafeteras play a variety of traditional and innovative instruments, along with bass, synthesizer, and percussion to create a sonic explosion of joyous music, medicine, message, with irresistable dance beats.

Tickets for non-season subscribers are $35 in advance and $40 at the door, if available. Get advance tickets on the UCCA website and at Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah and Mazahar in Willits.

As part of our on-going Educational Outreach Program, free tickets are available to youth 17 and under when accompanied by an adult, and to full-time (12 units) college students. Free tickets must be reserved in advance by calling 707-463-2738 with name, phone number and email address.

www.ukiahconcerts.org

For more information, call the UCCA at 707-463-2738 or email us at info@ukiahconcerts.org

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LOCAL EVENTS (Sunday)

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UNITY CLUB NEWS

by Miriam Martinez

Come to the Unity Club meeting this Thursday, May 8th at 1:30 in the Fairgrounds Dining Room, and you will receive a fist full of Money. Funny Money that is. Our auctioneer will be Ellen Fontaine and she will keep the bidding fast and furious. Bring an item you’d like to give to a new home, or plant starts that didn’t make it to the Wildflower Show. No matter what you bring, you’ll be sure to come home with treasures. Our Hostess team for the May meeting are Dawn Trygstad, Ali Nemchonok, and Jean Condon. They will provide delicious snacks and beverages.

Our Community Lending Library had an amazing book sale during the Wildflower Show, only $5 for a bag of books. I wonder, will the sale continue for the whole month of May? Find out at the May 8th meeting. Hours remain Tuesdays from 1:00 to 4:00 and Saturdays from 12:30 to 2:30. When the Fairgrounds are rented out, the Library will not be open.

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ALBION BRIDGE STEWARDS DINE OUT AT THE LEDFORD HOUSE RESTAURANT MAY 15

Join us at The Ledford House restaurant in Albion on Thursday, May 15, between 4:30 and 8:30 pm, for a dinner fundraiser for the Albion Bridge Stewards.

Proprietors Tony and Lisa Geer are generously sharing a portion of the proceeds with our group.

Make reservations early at https://www.ledfordhouse.com/ or call 707-937-0282.

Enjoy a wonderful dinner and beautiful view while supporting the ongoing efforts of the Albion Bridge Stewards to protect the historic Albion River Bridge -- the last remaining timber trestle highway bridge on the California highway system, and possibly the longest timber trestle bridge in the United States.

The Albion Bridge Stewards are hoping to see you there!

Information about us are at https://savehighway1.org/

Annemarie Weibel

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BRI CRABTREE’S SILLY CIRCUS SHOW

Part of the Summer Reading Program at the Ukiah Library

Mendocino County Library invites children of all ages to join us for an afternoon of silly circus fun with Bri Crabtree! With more than 20 years of experience in the field, we can expect a high-energy show including jokes, juggling, magic, and most importantly, laughter for everyone.

The hilarity begins on Friday, June 20 at Coast Community Library in Point Arena at 11 a.m. The circus continues at the Fort Bragg Library on the same day at 2 p.m. The tour continues Saturday, June 21 at 10 a.m. at the Round Valley Library in Covelo, winds down to the Willits Branch at 1 p.m., and finds its finale at the Ukiah Branch at 3:30 p.m. These events are free and open to the public.

For more information, please view www.mendolibrary.org or contact the Mendocino County Library at 234-2873.

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LOOK! FLOWERS!

May is wildflower time. Everywhere I look, blossoms big and little, in all shapes and sizes, decorate the landscape. It’s like some generous deity spilled a box of crayons (the BIG box) into a shredder and tossed the resulting bits out over the hillside. May was possibly what Ray Bradbury had in mind when he advised, “Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

All those tiny bursts of color keep my spirits up even as life steps on the gas and accelerates towards summer. This is a busy time of year. If your To-Do List is feeling like a Too-Much-To-Do List, step away for a bit to have some good times with good people. You’ll come back to that list with fresh eyes and energy. As always, we have some excellent suggestions below in our community calendar.

In the meantime, enjoy those wildflowers while we have them.

See you out there ~

Torrey & the team at Word of Mouth Magazine

www.wordofmouthmendo.com

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JEFF BURROUGHS

Correct me if I’m wrong, Elizabeth Knight, but Lem-ko-lil translates to “Place of big burnt tree” ?. While walking down Robinson Creek on day I was almost to the bridge by the high school and I found a huge redwood stump buried in the gravel bar. I can only assume that it was the remnants of the big burnt tree that once stood as a place marker for the pomo. I think Lem-ko-lil was not only a year round villiage but it served as a ceremonial center at certain times of the year. Where the high school built a trail down to the creek you can see the remnants of one of the sweat lodges and the bigger one is under the house across the creek, near where Rod Balson lives. I got to see that one when my great uncle Delmar June was repairing the floor and had the flooring removed. It was about a 25 foot wide circle. I think Shorty Rawles said that the natives would get heated up in the sweat house then rush out and jump off the cluff into the ice cold water of the creek.

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THE MYSTERY OF KATLYN LONG’S DEATH

by Tim Stelloh

(From the AVA Archive: June 10, 2009)

The last few months of Katlyn Long’s abbreviated life unfolded much like anyone transitioning between relationships: Unhappy with her long-term, 31-year-old boyfriend, Long broke things off. The 22-year-old Fort Bragg girl had met someone else — someone who, friends say, seemed to make her happy.

She left California with her new boyfriend early last year [2008], but work obligations brought her back home for what was to be a brief visit. That fateful trip back would be her last: In the early morning of May 29, after spending the night with her ex-boyfriend, she was hauled to Mendocino Coast Hospital in an ambulance without a pulse — the victim of a methadone overdose.

Yet it wasn’t until last week that police revealed her cause of death; no charges have been filed.

The way detectives explain it, the one eyewitness in the case has exercised his right to remain silent since Long’s death. That eyewitness, of course, is Long’s ex, Garett Matson, son of Fort Bragg bigwig Jerry Matson, of Matson Building Materials.

Police say that over the course of that year they were negotiating with Matson’s attorney, [the late] Richard Petersen, in an attempt to get a statement. To maintain the apparently delicate balance of those negotiations, investigators commenced the media chess game: They withheld the results of a toxicology report completed last July that examined Long’s blood and found that she had overdosed. They kept a lid on all but the most public details of the girl’s death — namely, that she had died “suspiciously.” And they told the media the eyewitness was Long’s ex-boyfriend — but they declined to name the ex.

Petersen, of course, tells it differently. He says he’s offered to answer written questions from the police — but he wouldn’t subject Matson to a prosecutorial-style inquiry because he’s “suffering terrible emotional problems.”

“We can’t open him up because he feels very threatened and weak right now,” Petersen said, summarizing what he says are a doctor’s orders. “What people say about him breaks his heart.” In the unlikely event detectives share the forensic evidence they’ve collected on Matson, Petersen said he’d change his tune.

“I’d turn my client over,” he said.

In the meantime, Petersen sent a seven page statement to the DA’s office last month — a statement he described as a “timed list” of the days leading up to Long’s death. (Neither he nor the Sheriff’s office would share specifics of the statement.) And last week, detectives released an outline of what happened, along with the results of the toxicology report.

Yet it’s still unclear how — or why — that lethal dose of methadone ended up in Long’s blood.

The synthetic opiate, long thought of as a drug for junkies kicking their heroin habit, has taken on a different role in recent years as a cheap, non-narcotic prescription painkiller. As methadone prescriptions have spiked, so has the number of methadone overdoses: The drug can be lethal when combined, say, with alcohol, or when taken in too great a quantity, as its effects are far shorter than the time it stays in the body.

Sheriff’s Lt. Rusty Noe said Long didn’t have a prescription for methadone, nor did detectives find any evidence that she was using it as a painkiller. Friends say she was the last person they would expect to use such drugs recreationally.

“She was like apple pie,” said Jeanne Huckins, who shared Long’s affinity for horses and rode with her often. “One time she came to the stable and she was babbling on and on and on, and I said, ‘Katlyn, what are you on?’ and she said ‘Red Bull.’ … She was very sensitive to that kind of stuff.”

Matson, on the other hand, has a history of prior drug charges. A several year old letter from neighbors in Matson’s court file even described his home as a well known crank house that police visited often: “For two years Matson has terrorized the neighborhood with shootings, loud fights and low-life people coming and going at all hours, though mostly in the middle of the night,” the letter said. It went on to describe how he “unleashed” a vicious dog on a neighbor, sending the senior citizen to the hospital twice.

Those cases — which include discharging a firearm while under the influence of a controlled substance — were dismissed when Matson agreed to drug court. (Petersen said a person’s past is only “circumstantial evidence of what the future holds.”)

Huckins described the couple’s relationship as a troubled one — a relationship where Long felt suffocated by her ex and which she ended shortly before she died. She described how, in the months before her overdose, Long had started seeing a new boyfriend — a man named William Housley — who Huckins said had brightened Long’s mood considerably. They traveled together to Washington State to visit Housley’s parents. “She was having a wonderful time,” she said. “I noticed a real shift when she started hanging out with William. She was a happy person — instead of a person who was always crying and blaming herself, who would cut herself.”

Long returned to Fort Bragg last May, Huckins said, because she worked at the stable where she kept her horses and the owners were leaving town. While home, Matson tried to rekindle their relationship. But Long wasn’t interested. The afternoon before she died the two had an argument at Long’s parents house — an argument caused by Matson thinking the two were close to reuniting, Petersen said. Matson allegedly bashed in her car and left, but returned later that afternoon.

By 5am the next morning she was dead.

Sheriff’s deputies, who had been summoned with the ambulance, noticed “suspicious” marks on her neck, so detectives were dispatched to investigate. The marks, Lt. Noe said, turned out to be unrelated to her death. And the rest is history.

Some of Long’s friends and supporters theorize that she was murdered. Petersen disagrees. “If she overdosed, he didn’t do it. It was either accidental, or intentional on her part,” he said. “I don’t know of any one who would have wanted to kill her — including Garett. But nobody wants to believe she committed suicide either.”

For now, no suspects have been named and the DA kicked the case back to the sheriff’s office, which says it’s an open investigation — though [then] District Attorney Meredith Lintott said her investigators are still involved, as they are with most big murder cases. If the case does go to court, Lintott said, there’s no statute of limitations on murder, nor with manslaughter in most situations. It can be a different story with other, less serious charges, however.

“It’s very tricky. People go to court to litigate statute of limitations,” she said. “The whole case can be thrown out.”

So far, Long’s family has been mum on the matter — Katlyn’s mother, Linda Long, said in an e-mail that she didn’t want to compromise the case — as are several friends. But that hasn’t stopped an online petition, justiceforkatlyn.org, from being circulated; as of publication, the petition has nearly met its 1,000 signature goal. Once completed, the site says, it will be sent to the DA’s office because “…we want to show them that there are lots of citizens that will not rest until justice is served, and who will be watching this case.” Nor has it stopped thousands of posts from appearing on a forum attached to the Ukiah Daily Journal’s website. Unlike most message boards associated with controversial stories — where participants seem to revel in vulgar anonymity — this one is relatively benign: family and friends post poems; they give updates on the case; they talk about their freshly inked Katlyn tattoos.

Still, the site — like most message boards — has the air of judge, jury and executioner. And it ain’t a pretty verdict for Garett Matson.

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Ed note: the website, justiceforkatlyn, is no longer active. However there is a justiceforkatlyn facebook page.

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UKIAH WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)

James R Moore Sheriff 1876-1880 involved in the “Mendocino Outlaws”

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, May 2, 2025

VERONICA CASTILLO, 44, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

GREGORY CUADRA II, 48, Fort Bragg. Addict driving a vehicle, suspended license for DUI, concealed dirk-dagger, switchblade, paraphernalia.

ROYCE FULTON, 41, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

RYAN FULWIDER, 41, Covelo. County parole violation.

SAMUEL KASLOVE, 37, Bellflower/Ukiah. Possession of drugs in fire camp with prior.

GEORGETTE LANDRUM-JOHNSTON, 59, Willits. Failure to appear.

JOSE LEYVA-ZAZUETA, 20, Ukiah. Toluene or similar substance, probation revocation.

ANGEL MILLER, 36, Ukiah. Parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)

DANA MOSES, 63, Cloverdale/Ukiah. Reckless driving.

SHEILA OWENS, 32, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, paraphernalia.

JEFFREY ROBINSON, 47, Redwood Valley. Failure to appear.

JORGE VICENTE-RUIZ, 27, Piercy. DUI.

LARRY WOLFE JR., 35, Ukiah. Remaining in park after posted hours, controlled substance, under influence, more than an ounce of pot, paraphernalia, resisting.

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INVESTMENT FIRM BUYS PRESS DEMOCRAT AND FOUR OTHER NORTH BAY PUBLICATIONS

by Roland Li

Investment firm Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group is acquiring the Press Democrat newspaper and five other North Bay publications.

The purchase agreement, confirmed by the companies Thursday, would add the Santa Rosa-based publication to Alden’s dozens of newspaper holdings, which include the Mercury News, East Bay Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

“We always believed that a viable, independent local press was vital to our North Bay community. We believe that the newspaper, its staff and most importantly the public will be best served under the stewardship of MediaNews Group, with the newspaper expertise and financial resources necessary to carry on our mission of delivering the highest-caliber local journalism for future North Bay generations,” Darius Anderson, managing member of Sonoma Media Investments, said in a statement.

The sale would honor the existing contract between the newspaper and the Pacific Media Workers Guild, the newsroom’s union.

“We are honored to bring a newspaper of this quality into MediaNews Group,” Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group, said in a statement. “We appreciate the importance of local news and information to the communities where we publish and are proud to expand our commitment to Northern California in the North Bay.”

The Press Democrat won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for its coverage of the Tubbs Fire.

The sale also includes the Sonoma Index-Tribune, Petaluma Argus-Courier, North Bay Business Journal, Sonoma magazine, Sonoma County Gazette and La Prensa Sonoma.

Hearst, owner of the Chronicle, was also reportedly a bidder for the newspapers.

(SF Chronicle)

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MIKE GENIELLA:

Well, mixed feelings for sure. I spent 28 years with The Press Democrat, a rock-solid regional newspaper known for being one of California’s best. I worked for the ownership of Ruth Finley and Evert Person, and for the next 20-plus years under New York Times management after the Old Gray Lady of Journalism purchased the PD in 1985. It was a great run, propelled by the benefits of the Times’ ownership. I applauded when local investors later stepped up, including the late Evert Person’s widow, Norma, to bring ownership back home. I am troubled by the purchase of the PD by MediaNews Group, its ties to Alden Global Capital, and a history of gutting local news operations and selling off assets. Responsible, fact-based journalism is critical to any community. The PD may be on a serious slide to nowhere.

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CALIFORNIA POT INDUSTRY GETS WORST POSSIBLE TAX NEWS

by Lester Black

The state of California plans to increase pot taxes to the highest level allowed by law

California’s beleaguered pot industry was given another piece of bad news Thursday afternoon: The state cannabis tax rate will increase from 15% to 19% on July 1, the highest allowed by state law.

The 26% change, devised by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is ironically being made precisely because the state’s legal industry is floundering while the illicit market thrives.

Representatives with the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration announced the gross receipts tax hike during a cannabis advisory meeting Thursday. State law requires the department to increase the pot tax rate this year if cannabis excise revenue falls.

Jerred Kiloh, the president of the United Cannabis Business Association, said the tax increase will only make it harder for legal stores to offer cannabis at a price point that competes with illegal stores.

“More businesses will close sooner as the legal price is just too far away from illegally obtained products. Less investment in starting or continuing cannabis operations will occur, and demand for cannabis licenses will decline exponentially,” Kiloh said.

Cannabis tax revenue has plummeted as the legal marijuana market goes through a financial contraction, with thousands of companies going out of business. Industry leaders have blamed the legal market’s struggles on expensive regulations, high taxes and competition from the thriving illicit market, which pays no cannabis taxes. A recent study funded by the state found that the majority of cannabis users still purchase their cannabis from the illegal market.

The tax increase is thanks to a law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2022 that removed a cultivation tax but also required the state to increase cannabis tax rates if revenues fall in the future. San Francisco Assemblymember Matt Haney introduced a bill this year that would block the tax hike. The bill is working its way through the Legislature and unanimously passed its latest committee vote on April 24.

Amy O’Gorman Jenkins, the executive director of the California Cannabis Operators Association, said in an email to SFGATE that cannabis businesses already can’t afford to pay the 15% tax rate, let alone operate under the impending tax increase.

“We’re urging the Legislature and Administration to act quickly and freeze the tax at 15%. If we want a regulated market to survive in California, the time to intervene is now,” O’Gorman Jenkins said.

(SFGate.com)

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YOUR FIRST DROP

So, you're ready to join the exciting world of high-potency cannabis tinctures. Welcome aboard! But first we'd like to share some tips on how to make your first trip a safe one. The highly concentrated 500mg mega-drop can pack quite a wallop for the initiate, so we've put together this brief guide to help you through your first drop.

As with any powerful intoxicant, a safe setting is of paramount importance, and we've found that a hospital parking lot is the best site to do your first drop. We recommend spending a little time cruising the lot and trying to secure a space close to the emergency room.

For those of you who are a little more risk-averse, there are additional steps one can take:

• an air horn (or flares, if at night) can assist in calling for help,
• renting a wheelchair (or, better yet, a gurney) and getting in it before administering the drop, can also facilitate quicker entry to the ER,
• dressing in a loose smock (or, better yet, an actual hospital gown) can also be a real timesaver.

Take The Time Challenge!

Since there is a brief interval between first drop and its effect, some first-time droppers like to take the time challenge of seeing if they can get to the front desk and fill out all the admittance paperwork before the high kicks in. Extra points if you gain admittance into a room, and super bonus if you can talk staff into warming up the paddles before you pass out.

(mk)

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LOGGER

Ninety-bucks for a fishing rod?

That’s not much really…

just

one

tree

when I’m workin’…

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FISHERMAN

Guns? No, I never been inta guns—

‘course I keep one in the boat, a rifle,

just to keep the lions off my salmon…

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COWBOY

Can I borrow your fire?

he asks, dumping the puppy carcass

into the flames

It took twelve minutes

for the skull to turn to

white

ash

— Don Shanley

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MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio all night tonight on KNYO and KAKX!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight’s (Friday night’s) MOTA show is 5pm or so. If that’s too soon, send it any time after that and I’ll read it next Friday.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week’s MOTA show. By Saturday night I’ll put up the recording of tonight’s show. You’ll find plenty of other educational amusements there to educate and amuse yourself with until showtime, or any time, such as:

Baseball in 1787. “Base-Ball. The Ball once struck off, away flies the Boy to the next destin’d Post, and then Home.” The Japanese word for baseball is basaboru. I had thought it was basaburu (u not o), but I looked it up, and Basaburu is an A.I. fantasy town in the Amazon region of Peru. There is a real-life Basaburua in Navarre, in northern Spain’s Basque Country. Anyway, baseball was invented in 18th-century England, in Newell, an area of Otley in West Yorkshire. It lies on the north bank of the River Wharfe, across Otley Bridge from the central area of the town. Pass it along. https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/05/baseball-in-1787.html

The last half-hour of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but massaged and somewhat remade by fans to more closely match the story in the book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJqllbb6k80

And a fiendishly clever woodworker’s trick. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/heEjM1MME5A

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

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TOO OLD, TOO TIRED? Warriors ready to ‘embrace the hard’ in Game 7

by Ann Killion

Embrace the hard.

The Golden State Warriors have had a hard road to get here and now it gets even harder, after losing two consecutive games to Houston, including Game 6 on their home court.

“It’s always hard to win,” guard Stephen Curry said after the 115-107 loss Saturday. “Winning is hard. Sustaining it is hard.

“If you want to win at the highest level, you have to embrace the hard.”

Nothing is harder than winning a Game 7 on the road. And that’s what the Warriors face Sunday night in Houston.

“We need to be composed,” Curry said. “We need to be able to manage the emotions of the next 48 hours. Not panic, but have a sense of urgency on the adjustments we need to make. How to deal with a hostile environment.

“You’ve got to just embrace it, have fun with it, show up with a killer instinct.”

In their second chance to close out the series, and give themselves an opportunity to get a moment’s rest before moving on, the Warriors couldn’t find their killer instinct. The entire game was like pushing a Steven Adams-sized boulder uphill. The Warriors fell behind by 11 points in the second quarter before Curry went on an 11-0 run by himself to tie the score at 46-46.

They never got that close again. They cut the deficit to two points at the end of the third quarter then immediately allowed a four-point play to sizzling Fred VanVleet — fouled on a 3-point make — to start the fourth quarter. Head coach Steve Kerr said that was the pivotal moment of the game and his players agreed.

“We can’t give up a four-point play in a two-point game, off one pass ahead — that’s crazy,” forward-center Draymond Green said. “I thought it was kind of just losing the life after that.”

In closeout games, people expect Curry to carry the load. But Curry struggled against the Rockets’ zone, shooting 1-for-7 in the fourth quarter, as the Warriors went almost seven minutes without a field goal.

For the past two games, the older Warriors have looked wearier and less able to dig deep and make a run than the younger, springier Rockets. And that’s become a subplot of this series as it extends to two weeks: the physical toll on the veteran Warriors as both the intensity and the schedule demands ratchet up, with games coming every other day bracketed by long airplane flights.

“I’ve never been one to listen to the outside noise or people as a whole, ’cause they just are saying stuff and half of it don’t make sense,” forward Jimmy Butler said.

“We’ll be all right. I’m 35, I can’t remember how old Steph is, Dray is 35, too. Everybody’s got to travel the same distance. Ain’t like we’re going to go around the world and land in Houston and they got only a five minute flight to Houston. They’ve got to travel just like we’ve got to travel.”

Butler is correct, of course. Everyone has to travel. And the players are traveling on private jets with comfortable seats and being swept immediately into luxury hotels. But there’s less time for older bodies to recover, especially with the physical, bruising nature of this series.

Curry said that embracing the hard means both “the physical challenges of doing it at this stage of your career, or whether it’s because you’re playing a good team. We’ve had challenges all throughout this run. This is another one.”

The flipside of being older is having more experience than young players who may have less aches and pains but also fewer moments to draw upon. Curry and Green have played five Game 7s together and Butler has played in four Game 7s in his career.

In the last Game 7 that the Warriors played, Curry — who had scored 29 points in a Game 6 flop at home, the same amount that he scored on Friday — exploded for 50 points in Sacramento. Curry knows the expectation will be that he delivers again.

“Hopefully I can repeat that,” he said with a smile.

But Curry is two years older than he was in that game. Butler says he doesn’t remember but the NBA is very aware that Curry is now 37 and has been rising to the challenge for 16 seasons. He’s been delivering on the big stage — in playoff games, the gold medal game — for a very long time. Can he keep doing it?

“We look to him to do something special every night for the last 13 years I’ve been here,” Green said. “I don’t think it’s any different.”

The Warriors are hoping the Rockets’ youth will work against them. That they’ll get nervous. That their crowd, with long memories of many playoff losses to the Warriors including a Game 7 home loss in 2018, will get tight. That the sight of Curry with the ball will trigger collective PTSD.

But give the Rockets a lot of credit. They’ve proven to be resilient. They’ve grown during this series, played well, gained experience.

“Defense travels,” Ime Oduko said. “Our awareness and physicality has improved in the series.”

The seventh-seeded Warriors, the lowest seed still playing, have had the No. 2 seed in the mighty Western Conference on the ropes for days. But they haven’t been able to land the knockout punch.

“Thankfully we have another game to play,” Curry said. “We did our work early in the series. That gives us some cushion.

“In February if you told us we would have a Game 7, we’d take that all day long. How we got here, I’m not happy about it. But we do have another opportunity.”

And the plan is to embrace the hard.

(sfchronicle.com)

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ICE CAN’T ERASE WHAT LELO JUAREZ BUILT

by David Bacon

In 2022 I went to Washington State for May Day, and the following year as well. Just south of Canada, in Bellingham and Mount Vernon, Community2Community and Familias Unidas por la Justicia celebrate the workers holiday in the tradition followed by the rest of the world. They march.

For me, a child of the Cold War, when May Day was the forbidden Communist holiday, it’s a time to appreciate how the world has changed, Brightly-painted hand-made signs and banners call out - “Another World is Possible!” - a May Day sentiment if there ever was one. Some demonstrations can be formal exercises. Theirs are filled with farmworkers and children chatting in Mixteco or Triqui, with students and earnest young men in religoius collars, and of course with activists from a dozen unions. …

https://labornotes.org/2025/04/ice-cant-erase-what-lelo-juarez-built

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VOTE ON CLIMATE SUPERFUND BILL POSTPONED IN CALIFORNIA SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE

A large group of climate advocates showed up to support the ‘make polluters pay’ bill at the state capitol in Sacramento on April 29.

by Dan Bacher

On April 29, Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay) announced her decision to postpone the vote on the Climate Superfund Act in the Senate Judiciary Committee to “allow more time for meaningful conversations with stakeholders and will continue to push this policy forward.”

The Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act would require the largest fossil fuel corporations to pay for the climate devastation they have contributed to across California in proportion to their fossil fuel emissions from 1990 through 2024. Big Oil, the most powerful corporate lobby in Sacramento, was able to stop a previous version of the legislation from moving forward last year.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/30/2319683/-California-Senate-Judiciary-Committee-Vote-on-Climate-Superfund-Bill-Postponed-As-Momentum-Builds

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THE GREAT GATSBY AT 100: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Class Consciousness Masterpiece

by Jonah Raskin

“The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war in the Pacific, or against some European combination!”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1927

Surely Donald Trump wasn’t thinking of The Great Gatsby when he said he wanted to Make America Great again, though Gatsby is a great novel and its major character is as fake as anything about Fox news and the president himself. No major 20th century American writer, not Theodore Dreiser, nor John Dos Passos was more conscious of the friction between social classes than F. Scott Fitzgerald. No novel of the 1920s is more class conscious than The Great Gatsby, and no writer was more aware of the loss of American greatness than Fitzgerald. Had the novel been published with the title that the author preferred, Under the Red, White and Blue, readers might have sensed that America is the main character in the novel.

Two years after the novel was published, Fitzgerald told a reporter, “The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war in the Pacific, or against some European combination!”

The Great Gatsby might have provided a kind of morality tale for a society that was cracking up. The once spectacular continent is decimated, trees cut down to make way for houses, rivers polluted, and innocence corrupted— all that and more is spelled out in the pages of the novel. But when the stock market crashed in ‘29 and the Depression of the 1930s hit families hard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great Jazz Age novelist, fell out of favor with the literati and the populi.

After all, he wrote about members of the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat and not about the exploited and oppressed, either. “I can’t stand being poor,” one of his characters says and speaks for the author himself who was more intellectual than his image would have it, influenced by Rousseau, Marx and Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class. Fitzgerald’s characters consume conspicuously.

In The Great Gatsby, which celebrates this year the 100th anniversary of its initial publication, no one toils in a factory or on a farm. For decades, critics such as Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling and others have raked the novel over red hot coals, but they haven’t killed it or even synged it. The main character, Gatsby, is the quintessential self-made man, an exemplar of the rags-to-riches meme, a bootlegger who fictionalizes his life. Indeed, he claims to have made his money in drugs and oil; how contemporary is that! Gatsby isn’t his real name. It’s Gatz. He’s also the archetypal boy in the novel’s boy-meets-girl story who falls in love with the girl and loses the girl to a man with old money.

Nick Carraway, the narrator and the only real friend Gatsby has, lives on suburban Long Island and commutes to a job in Manhattan, though Fitzgerald doesn’t describe his working life. Fitzgerald glamorizes Manhattan. ”The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” he writes. The other main characters include Jordan Baker, a female golfer who cheats at the game, and Tom and Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy couple so wrapped up in their own selves that they’re indifferent to the pain and suffering of others. Daisy gets away with murder, or at least with homicide.

Her husband is a blatant white supremacist who worries that colored people will steal the world out from under from men like himself. Were he alive today he’d have voted for Trump and Vance and he’d support tariffs on goods imported from Asia and Europe.

On the other side of Fitzgerald’s economic spectrum, there’s George Wilson, a mechanic who operates a garage in a polluted landscape with toxic water and unhealthy air. Fitzgerald doesn’t describe Wilson working on cars or pumping gas, though its clear he gets his hands dirty. He’s the only character with a gun, and one of the villains of the piece, a jealous husband and a sharp-shooter. A snazzy car also figures as a murder weapon. Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler and a criminal, has made his reputation because he has fixed the World Series. In Fitzgerald’s fictional world as in Donald Trump’s everything can be fixed with money.

One might say of the wealthy characters in The Great Gatsby, as Balzac once observed, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” Still, Fitzgerald doesn’t describe the crimes behind the fortunes; what he’s after is satirizing the wealthy after they’ve made big money.

The satire is out in full force in chapter four in which the narrator describes the guests at Gatsby’s parties who belong to a whole social class. You can practically hear Fitzgerald seething just below the surface. “From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen…all connected with the movies in one way or another. And G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut.”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly — they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.”

To execute satire properly it helps to have some affection for the individuals who are satirized. Fitzgerald certainly felt some affection (along with envy and resentment) for the wealthy, especially wealthy white women like Daisy Buchanan.

In the company of the fast crowd with its luxury cars and flashy clothes, Fitzgerald was aware of his own shabby attire and “poverty.” Indeed, the author himself was a sucker for beautiful women who had money to burn. His wife, Zelda, was one of them. Before Zelda there was a teenage debutante named Ginevera King who stole Scott’s heart. He never entirely recovered.

Fitzgerald’s great theme in The Great Gatsby and elsewhere is loss: the loss of illusions, the loss of love and innocence. Two antithetical feelings feed into one another in the novel: grief and nostalgia. Fitzgerald wanted to return to the past, to turn away from the horror of World War I and the glamour of the Jazz Age. At the same time he knew that it was impossible to go back in time.

Gatsby dreams of a happy life with Daisy. What he doesn’t know, Fitzgerald writes, is that “it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” Fitzgerald admires Gatsby because he’s an eternal optimist who believes in “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” The last sentence in the novel reads, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Gatsby’s illusions are shared by his fellow citizens.

To Trump and his cronies, Fitzgerald would say, “forget about making America great again. That’s a lost cause.” He certainly doesn’t long for a return to the untrammeled west that is defined in a seminal passage in the novel by “the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.”

You may have read The Great Gatsby in high school or in college. Since its initial publication few novels have been on as many required reading lists for students as Fitzgerald’s class conscious saga. But you might have missed the poetry, the reflections on power and corruption and the contemporary relevance of an American classic.

(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)

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LA TIMES DEPLETED:

A new wave of layoffs has hit the Los Angeles Times on Friday, according to multiple reports. The beleaguered newspaper has been operating deeply in the red for years, much to the chagrin of billionaire owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who has recently taken on a more direct oversight role at the paper, leading to several controversies and a further erosion of readership.

New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin was the first to report on coming layoffs, posting on X that “roughly a dozen employees” were being let go from the LA Times’ El Segundo office near LAX. The Los Angeles Times Guild, a media union representing much of the newsroom, corroborated the cuts, saying: “We are devastated that 14 of our Guild members will receive layoff notices today.” That number, the Guild noted, represented 6% of the remaining newsroom staff.

— SF Chron

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EVEN MEALS ON WHEELS?

To the Editor:

As a social worker and volunteer for Meals on Wheels, I am shocked and dismayed by the cutbacks planned at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the potential impact on the elderly and the disabled in our communities.

Meals on Wheels provides a lifeline for seniors confronting food insecurity. Moreover, it allows volunteers to check on the well-being of meal recipients and offers door-to-door human contact desperately needed by the homebound.

When we lose sight of the needs of our most vulnerable in the interest of government efficiency, our compassion is on the chopping block.

June Rogoznica

Rye, New York

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‘ALL-OUT ASSAULT’: TRUMP PROPOSES LARGEST CUTS IN NATIONAL PARK SERVICE HISTORY

The Park Service Would Lose Almost 40% Of Its Funding, And Some Of Its Land, Under Trump’s Dream Budget

by Kylie Mohr

The National Park Service would lose more than $1.2 billion in funding, plus ownership of some of its smaller park units, under the Trump administration’s proposed budget, released Friday morning.

The Trump administration wants to reduce federal spending on national park operations by almost 40% as part of his broader agenda to shrink the size of the federal government across most agencies and departments, with notable exceptions for the Defense and Transportation departments.

“This is the most extreme, unrealistic and destructive National Park Service budget a President has ever proposed in the agency’s 109-year history,” Theresa Pierno, the National Park Conservation Association’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “It’s nothing less than an all-out assault on America’s national parks.”

The proposed budget acts as a wish list for the administration’s priorities and views on spending. But it’s merely a recommendation to Congress, which ultimately must agree on an approved budget before it becomes law. The Trump administration is expected to share a more detailed budget request with Congress later in May.

If enacted, the cuts would be the largest in National Park Service history, according to the National Park Conservation Association, a nonprofit that advocates for national parks. It’s also the first time a president has proposed turning over park sites to states and removing them from the national park system, something that would likely require an act of Congress to accomplish.

The budget “adds insult to injury” as the National Park Service continues to shrink in size due to layoffs and workforce reductions, Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, told National Parks Traveler. If enacted, Thompson said the cuts would “exacerbate an already deeply problematic and dangerous situation.” More staffing cuts are expected in the coming days as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, continues running the Department of the Interior.

The park service manages 433 national park sites, with 63 of those being what people tend to think of as “national parks” — like Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon national parks, according to the National Park Foundation. Park units also include battlefields, monuments, military parks and historic sites.

The budget proposal says sites that “receive small numbers of mostly local visitors” are “better categorized and managed as State level parks.” Most park units, no matter their size or visitation numbers, are designated by Congress — not the president, though national monuments are governed by the Antiquities Act, which gives the president power to create (or shrink) these protected areas. National monuments are not mentioned specifically in the budget request.

“This reduction complements the Administration’s goals of federal and transferring smaller, less visited parks to State and tribal governments,” the budget proposal reads. No specific units are listed.

In fiscal year 2025, the National Park Service received $3.1 billion in Congressional appropriations — 6% less than the year prior, and 13% less than the Biden administration requested. The majority of those funds goes to park operations, as well as several other smaller funds. Trump’s requested budget would reduce National Park Service funding by 38% compared to last year.

Trump administration proposed cuts include slashing $900 million from national park operations, which make up 86% of the Park Service’s total budget. This money supports daily activities, programs and visitor services at park units. It also helps protect resources and maintain facilities.

The proposed budget outlines $73 million in cuts to funding for construction projects in national parks, which already face a $23 billion backlog of deferred maintenance projects. These funds go to repairing, replacing and improving existing facilities, as well as new construction. A report on fiscal year 2025 appropriations states that the sheer amount and cost of necessary maintenance work in parks “has been a significant issue in the appropriations process” that continues to increase over the years.

Paradoxically, Trump’s budget request says that the cuts will allow the park service to “prioritize larger projects at the Nation’s crown jewel parks,” without explaining how that’s possible given the deep budget cuts.

Trump’s budget request calls for cutting $158 million in funding to the National Park Service Historic Preservation Fund, a fund established by Congress in 1977 to “carry out activities related to preservation,” according to a park service web page. The fund receives a base $150 million annually from offshore oil and gas lease revenue, not general fund tax dollars.

The park service Historic Preservation Fund offers matching grants to state and tribal historic preservation offices and has invested more than $2 billion since the 1970s. The budget request document calls the matching funds “highly duplicative” and argues that projects are “often of local, rather than national, significance.”

The park service’s National Recreation and Preservation fund is also on the chopping block, with $77 million in proposed cuts. That account funds park service programs that partner with state, local, tribal and private land managers for outdoor recreation planning and natural and cultural resource preservation. A large portion of this money goes to national heritage areas.

(SFGate.com/BigSkyCountry)

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

“Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Department of Education and provide funding to states, we’re going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.”

— Stephen Miller

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“The fact that these young women, with their trim ankles, high cheekbones, good educations, bright eyes, little bosoms, and expensive clothes, keep coming to my bungalow and often to my bed, despite the fact that I’m old, fat, often drunk, beneath them on the social scale, and in love with a dead woman, only increases Jill’s impatience with her own sex. Their foolishness drives her up the wall, and my willingness to assist them in their obvious folly is a constant bone of contention between us.”

― Larry McMurtry, ‘Somebody’s Darling’’

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