Valley People 5/4/2025

AV BREWING CO.

We’re excited to support the 40th Annual Boontling Classic 5k Footrace, coming up this Sunday, May 4th, at 10am! The race starts and finishes at the Anderson Valley Elementary School, and proceeds go to benefit the Anderson Valley Food Bank! It’s a great cause, and a great event! We’ll be providing some merch for the post-race drawing at the end of the race, so enter and run and get a chance to win some Beer swag!

HELP FEED THE PEOPLE!

The AV food bank needs volunteers on the 2nd and 4th wednesdays every month at the grange.

Morning shift to pack groceries and unload the truck. A strong back is a plus!

Afternoon shifts to hand out groceries and register newcomers. Spanish speaking is a plus!

For more info, leave a message with your email address at 707.397.0716

BLUE MEADOW FARM PLANT SALE

Saturday, May 3, 9-3

Sunday, May 4, 9-12

Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplant

Come early for best selection!

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

AMERICAN LEGION POST 385 MEMORIAL DAY SERVICE

Evergreen Cemetery, Boonville

At 11 AM

Monday, May 26th 2025

MORGAN BAYNHAM

So you want to support the Boonville County Fair? Here’s how to do that. We need 10 or 12 folks to help with the up coming Pinot Fest @ Scharffenberger Cellars in Philo. The more people who volunteer the more they could ‘relieve’ each other and enjoy the tasting. The Fair is a major beneficiary of the wine auction. Forgive me this is copied and pasted below.

— Morgan

Mendocino County Fair needs your help;

Potential Volunteers needed for Pinot Festival. Below is the current schedule of what is needed. Please let me know what times you would like to help.

May 15th Thursday Fairgrounds set up: 2 - 4 volunteers needed. Start time will be determined later, but probably around 10am - 1pm. I will update with times as soon as we plan it.

This is to set up the tables and chairs, staging the area for the conference. This is a small affair and significantly scaled back from years prior.

May 17th Saturday 11am - 3pm: 2 volunteers needed for trash management - this does not entail picking up garbage, it is a supervisory position that I need someone responsible for (optimally 2 people relieving each other). We have rented the large trash containers. Someone needs to be posted in front of the containers at all times to make sure the trash is sorted properly and that the recycling is broken down to fit as much in as possible. If you have 2 team members that can switch off, both people will be able to enjoy Pinot Fest, too.

May 17th Saturday - 1pm - 4pm: 4 Volunteers needed for the first 2 hours of this shift to help with maintaining the festival tasks, empty spittoons, fill water pitchers, pass out cookies, take trash bags to the containers. There will also be an hour of clean up (see below). Volunteers are welcome to come early to enjoy the festival, and will have some time during their shift to participate.

May 17th Saturday - 3pm - 5pm: 2 Volunteers needed to clean up, washing spittoons, water carafes, breaking down tables and chairs, putting dirty linens in bags, gathering AVWA signs. Anyone can help with this, teenagers, etc…

Please pass this along if you know of anyone else that would like to volunteer.

Thank you,

SOCIAL NOTE

Boonville Residents Rob Goodell (who turned 80), and Linda McElwee (who turned 60) last weekend celebrated together with a blow-out party at the AV Grange on Saturday the 26. In true Anderson Valley style a monumental potluck created groaning boards with tempting snacks, main dishes, and desserts. Michael and Leslie Hubbert and Chris Bing provided live music for dancing with Judy Basehore leading off the dancers. Safe to say that a good time was had by all. They rocked the hall. (Terry Sites)

LUCILLE ESTES, formerly of Boonville's Airport Estates, is presently living with her son in Lake County. She just turned a still lucid 101. Among her many gifts, Lucille was among the County's top gardeners, if not the County's absolute top gardener, with an encyclopedic knowledge of local plants and people.

SHE once suggested we serialize the late Effie Hulbert's fine account of her Yorkville youth, which Effie spent among The Valley's last Native Americans, an account not only of Mrs. Hulbert's own experiences as a Yorkville native, but an account of what she had been told by Anderson Valley's native people about their lives in The Valley all the way back to the arrival of the Spaniards, circa 1820-1830.

LUCILLE knew Effie and Harry Hulbert. She'd first met the Hulberts when they were responsible for a sheep ranch adjacent to the Estes homestead on a ridge above Guerneville. "Harry Hulbert was the most handsome man I'd ever seen," Lucille remembered. "He looked like Tyrone Power." She said Effie was "quiet and soft spoken." Lucille had visited the Hulberts at their Yorkville home where, Lucille recalls, "Effie had the walls of her livingroom covered with Indian baskets."

LORNA BUCHANAN is Effie's daughter by Effie's first husband. Ms. Buchanan, a nurse, lives in Capitola. She is Effie's sole descendant. I would think Ms. Buchanan owns the copyright to her mother's important book, although it's printed and sold by the Anderson Valley Historical Society. We also understand in a roundabout way that the many baskets and other artifacts Effie possessed at her Yorkville home — she died in the middle 1960s — somehow wound up on exhibit at the Trees of Mystery just north of Klamath, Del Norte County, which is Yurok territory.

GET OLD and you find yourself saying, “This is the last time I’ll have to do this.” And, “This is probably my last pair of running shoes.” And maybe even the lament, “I’m on my way out, but fascism is on its way in and I’m too decrepit to get to the barricades this summer.”

WEDNESDAY morning, as I was slid into an MRI tube at an “imaging center” on VanNess in San Francisco, I was reasonably certain I was experiencing my final examination by the tube’s magical processes, as they hammer, whir, and pound away at my innards for a claustrophobic hour. Why the heck are these things so unendurably noisy? It’s like being trapped in a steel drum while people beat on it with sledge hammers. This was my fourth excursion into the sarcophagus over the past year, but the least onerous because the Van Ness imagers provided ear plugs, which made the tube time a little more comfortable.

A BLOCK AWAY, I was pleased to see a noisy demonstration in front of the Tesla agency about which I have mixed feelings given that these vehicles are a step up from fossil fueled transportation. Of course Musk is an utter swine, as if Trump could ever attract decent human-type beings to his gang of thugs, nuts and incompetents, and it’s gratifying that these demos have cost Musk a lot of money, but he has so much money, thanks to the rightwing’s steady roll back of a fair system of taxation, that he’s beyond all fiscal accountability.

THEN it was up to UCSF on Parnassus for a catheter swap by a briskly efficient young woman who got it done with a marvelous combination of efficiency and humor, the latter, I would think, a prerequisite for a task few people could perform without a solid sense of the absurd.

YOU MEAN a woman had to do this? Afraid so, and believe me as a child of the ‘50s and a psyche formed by John Wayne and the Marine Corps, it took some doing to get used to nurses of whatever gender, but especially women, rummaging around the sequestered regions of my failing anatomy, especially my battered pud. I wrote out a note to this angel of the catheter: “I wish I could double your pay.” She laughed, and was gone.