Mendocino County Today: Monday 6/30/2025

HOT AND DRY weather will ease very slightly over the next couple of days, but scattered thunderstorms will be likely across the interior in the afternoon and evening. Storms Monday have a slight chance to approach near the coast. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Another foggy 50F this Monday morning on the coast. Lots o' fog out there weather fans AND we have a 20% chance of showers today & tomorrow due to some possible inland thunder that might make it's way to the coast. We'll see. In the meanwhile the usual mix of fog & sun in various amounts.

INLAND MENDOCINO COUNTY UNDER RED FLAG WARNING AS FIRE THREAT INTENSIFIES

by Matt LaFever

The National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag Warning for Monday, June 30, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., with elevated fire conditions expected to continue into Tuesday. The warning means weather conditions could lead to fast-moving wildfires.

In Mendocino County, the warning covers Laytonville, Covelo, and the Mendocino National Forest, where dry lightning and strong, erratic winds could spark new fires and push them quickly through dry vegetation.

The same fire weather conditions are expected in neighboring areas, including Willow Creek in Humboldt County, Weaverville in Trinity County, and Nice, Lucerne, and Upper Lake in Lake County.

Forecasters say lightning is likely outside storm cores—meaning fires could ignite in areas that receive no rain. Gusts could reach up to 50 miles per hour, creating dangerous fire spread potential.

Officials are urging residents to avoid any outdoor activity that could cause sparks. Don’t mow or trim dry grass, use power tools, or park on dry brush. Burning of any kind is strongly discouraged.

Those living in at-risk areas should be ready to evacuate if needed. Keep pets close, fuel up your vehicle, and have your go-bag packed with essentials.

This warning doesn’t mean a fire is currently burning—but it does mean conditions are dangerous.

For updates and emergency alerts, visit weather.gov/eureka.

BRADLEY WITHERELL

Brad was a proud family man and successful businessman. Born to Herbert Witherell and Velma Witherell, he was raised in Philo, California. The Witherell family’s roots in Anderson Valley date back to the 1860s, when Brad’s grandfather first settled in the area. Brad cherished his country upbringing, where he learned valuable life lessons from his parents including raising sheep, bookkeeping, and building. Brad spent much of his adult life in Healdsburg, California, where he raised his family. He was active in community service, serving on the Healdsburg School Board, the board for the Healdsburg Museum, and the Healdsburg Rotary.

In 1982, Brad and his wife Angie established an antique auction company that continues to be operated by their son Brian Witherell. Brad is survived by his beloved wife of 40 years, Angie Witherell; his brother, Jim Witherell (Jan); his children: Nancy Witherell (Betty Andrews), Brian Witherell (Donna); his step-children: Ruth Ann Crespo (Robert), Michael Lopez (Dari), and Michelle Figueroa (Tracy); and ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. Though his passing was unexpected, Brad left behind this note: “I am the most fortunate guy in the world. I have a supportive, loving wife who has always been at my side. Wonderful children, grandkids and great grandkids. I dreamed since I was a child that I would be successful with a family by my side. All of my dreams have been fulfilled. It was a hell of a ride and I would not trade with anyone. So close your eyes, dry your tears and remember the good times. Love always, Papa.”

A gathering of friends and family will be held at the Senior Center in Boonville, California, on May 18, 2025 at 11:30 AM. Please RSVP to [email protected] if you plan to attend. To honor his memory, contributions may be made to the Anderson Valley Historical Society (www.andersonvalleymuseum.org).

THE HAPPY HANDYMAN

Is excited for the beautiful weather and long days on the coast. With that in mind it’s a great time to get’it done, that to-do list or someday project, that little annoying squeaking board or a light that won’t turn on, maybe a little paint to brighten up the place. For being in the business for over 30 years I could go on with the list for a while. If you want references I can provide local ones gladly. Let’s not waste any more time and get’it done with attention to detail and honest, hard work.

Let’s talk soon,

Pauly Gondusky

The Happy Handyman

[email protected]

707-357-3071

MARTY TUTTLE: Quiet roadside studio cabin in the town of Navarro for rent. Convenient location across the highway from the Navarro Store. Garbage, water, and Wi-Fi included. Free Laundry facilities on premises. Both Propane and Electric heat. Ideal for individuals or a couple. The move in cost is $1000 deposit and the first month’s rent. (Contact via Facebook)

MAZIE MALONE’S KIND HEARTS INITIATIVE:

I am excited to share this update with AVA readers. After years of advocacy and direct community support, I’ve launched a grassroots project called Kind Hearts Initiative. It’s now live and accepting support.

Full details: https://givebutter.com/kindheartsinitiative

Kind Hearts Initiative: A Community Wellness Project

Kind Hearts Initiative is a grassroots community wellness project offering person-to-person care—no conditions, no judgment.

Our services include:

A family support group for loved ones navigating the system around serious mental illness
System navigation filling out forms (housing, benefits, ID, medical)
Making important phone calls/family reconnections/check-ins
Appointment assistance/management & reminders
Giving directions & information for community resources
Access to a power outlet to charge a phone or device
Street outreach
Offering water & light snacks
Aid with communication/including written correspondence
Providing a calm, caring space
If someone scrapes their knee or cuts their hand, they can come get washed up and bandaged—no need for an ER visit
When possible, people asking for support are encouraged to offer something back as a task or contribution of their choosing-honoring mutual care, not charity.
Working toward a more connected and responsive system of care

We do this because so many people are falling through the cracks—especially those facing homelessness, serious mental illness and executive function challenges.

“This is care without conditions”

Kind hearts Initiative is not a non-profit. We are an independent, community powered project providing essential care and support without the red tape or barriers that prevent people from accessing services and interventions.

Your donation helps support the ongoing work, including coordination, administrative time, and outreach efforts.

Looking Ahead

This is just the beginning. In time, we hope to grow into a wellness center with offerings shaped by the community—volunteer-led, trauma-aware, and rooted in kindness.

Our Fundraising Goal

Our initial goal of $2,500 will fund the first three months of supplies, materials, and basic support items so we can open our doors, respond to needs, and build community trust right away.

We’re also seeking a small donated or low-cost space in Ukiah where people can drop in, sit down, and receive support. A room with chairs, a table, and a welcoming atmosphere would make it possible for us to offer care in a safe, steady environment—off the streets and out of survival mode.

If you have a space to offer or want to help us open the doors, please reach out to [email protected].

ANNEX PLAN DOESN’T ADD UP

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

Climb the steps at Ukiah City Hall, look up at the building’s exterior and what do we see?

A filthy, grimy, mildew-stained surface that would probably take 10 minutes to power wash back to its intended creamy yellow color.

Now look down, left and right, along the concrete edge where flowers were planted. What do we see?

Not flowers. Instead it’s two lonnng stretches of dead weeds and parched soil that would probably take 10 minutes a day to water.

It isn’t fair to judge city officials for not noticing or much caring about tiny details like moldy exterior paint or dead flowers at the building’s entrance. As long as they run a tight ship, don’t waste taxpayer dollars and keep their collective eyes on the big picture, who cares about a few dead posies and pansies?

Did you know the City of Ukiah is $216 million in debt, and its credit rating has been reduced? Did you know the city is hoping to annex hundreds of acres surrounding Ukiah?

I’m skeptical our leaders are capable of rolling up their sleeves and getting to work on a proposed annexation plan that would triple the size of Ukiah’s current footprint. I don’t believe they have a track record of getting things done both on time and under budget.

An annexation project to vastly increase the dimensions of Ukiah would be difficult to pull off even by skilled, talented, hardworking leaders with a history of competence. Let’s be clear: the words “skilled, talented, hardworking” have never been uttered to describe the wizards in charge of the drifting enterprise known as Ukiah.

Not that long ago all city offices, from the building department to the electric department to where you went to pay a parking ticket were in a small building at the southwest corner South School and Church Streets. Council meetings were held in rented space now home to Oco Time Restaurant. Ukiah’s population back then was around 13,000.

Today City Hall is a vast empire, a warren of offices and cubicles that house ever-more employees, so many that your leaders had to buy the old two story BofA building on South State to house them. Ukiah’s population today is around 16,000.

The most robust and thriving business in Ukiah is Ukiah, Inc., which grows and grows. And it’s looking to grow even more by way of annexation. They tell us adding hundreds of acres will streamline services and maximize efficiencies. More coordination between agencies. Enhanced this, improved that. More, and better, of everything.

Cue laughter.

ON TOP OF THE WORLD

Now we’re leafing through the June 6 New Yorker Magazine; on pg. 5 we are treated to a review of a new restaurant (“The View”) in a prime spot in the biggest city in America.

Why am I telling you this? Because the Executive Chef is Marjorie Meek-Bradley, a young lady who learned her way around the kitchen in, yes, Ukiah CA. Marjorie is daughter of the deservedly well known Deborah Meek and Martin Bradley, longtime Ukiahans and among the several parents of Plowshares.

It probably does not need mentioning that The View is a high-end dining spot, and boasts a feature unlike any other in New York: it offers diners 360 degree vistas. This nonstop circumference of windows gives diners a view like no other in a city like no other. The restaurant itself, says the writer, “specializes in American comfort food of a retro, ritzified sort.”

Be sure to stop in at The View next time you’re in Manhattan, and take time to say Hello to Marjorie. Tell her Tommy Wayne sent you and you’ll get a free napkin with every meal.

GOOSES & GANDERS

Raise your hand if you’re among those soiling their undies because Donald Trump thinks he’s King for refusing to follow court decisions.

Now raise your other hand if you were similarly outraged when King Potato Head ignored three separate court decisions, including the Supreme Court’s, and continued to pay off college student loans with my tax dollars.

And Slo-Joe spent four years in open, flagrant defiance the country’s immigration laws. Did you think he was above the law?

Time to rinse out your diapers.

Tom Hine spends his time between Ukiah and North Carolina, but wherever he goes, his invisible friend TWK is with him.

THE POTTER VALLEY PROJECT

by Amie Windsor

LAKE PILLSBURY — A cool May breeze lapped across the surface of this reservoir in remote Lake County, where a couple made their way out in a boat across otherwise serene waters, taking advantage of the brightest bit of afternoon sun.

This man-made retreat, four square miles of water impounded by a dam across the upper Eel River, feels durable. It’s filled with hungry trout and black bullhead, prey for the sharp-eyed bald eagles, egrets and herons that hunt these waters.

To many of its visitors, and the several hundred people who live along its 31-mile shoreline deep within the sprawling Mendocino National Forest, Lake Pillsbury is the region’s heartbeat.

But Scott Dam, at the foot of Lake Pillsbury, and another, smaller dam on the river 12 miles downstream, have also become a headache for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which owns both dams.

And that’s creating a controversy that’s drawn interest from everyone from those who live on Lake Pillsbury, to North Bay communities whose water supplies are linked to both dams, to federal agencies now under control of President Donald Trump.

PG&E no longer wants to operate the dams and an outdated, 117-year-old downstream power plant that generates electricity with a diverted share of the river’s flow. PG&E is on track to decommission those dams, and under a historic agreement reached earlier this year, both are being slated to be torn down in what would be the nation’s next big dam removal project, freeing up the headwaters of California’s third longest river to help revive its troubled salmon and steelhead trout runs.

Residents and longtime visitors to Lake Pillsbury have led opposition to those plans, which would see their cherished reservoir drained, and a connection to the place they’ve built over decades forever altered.

That future scenario, though years off and pegged to cost at least a half-billion dollars, also is raising uncomfortable questions throughout Potter Valley, a rich farming oasis 18 miles downstream, in Mendocino County.

Potter Valley has for decades thrived on diverted water from the Eel River, which arrives via a mile-long tunnel through a mountain saddle, feeding the valley’s lush fields of crops, orchards and vineyards before making its way to a fork of the upper Russian River. There, the Eel River water supplements summertime flows along an equally dry and irrigation-dependent stretch of Mendocino and Sonoma counties.

That arrangement is set to continue in some form at least for 30 years after PG&E’s exit under a pact reached earlier this year by water managers in several counties, tribes and environmental groups. Beyond that, there is potential for a 20-year extension, though the deal also emphasizes that users in the Russian River watershed develop new supply and storage solutions such that Eel River diversions are not needed in the future.

The immediate hurdle for the parties involved is exactly how the complex plumbing will work once PG&E surrenders its licenses and abandons the linked dam-diversion-powerhouse operation, known as the Potter Valley Project.

“We’ve been fighting to keep water up here for 40 years,” said Steven Elliott, a longtime Potter Valley rancher.

A volunteer for the Potter Valley Volunteer Fire Department and former forester, he raises Christmas trees with irrigation supplies from the diverted Eel River water that runs through the valley on its way south.

He’s also the recently retired longtime chief of the local irrigation district that helps manage those Eel River flows, a lifeblood of the small valley, home to about 1,200 people, most of them rooted in agriculture.

With the challenges ahead, after years of rumbling from PG&E and political wrangling between stakeholders across the two river basins — with Potter Valley stuck between — Elliott, 74, is bracing for the future, like many others in the valley.

What’s there now — and how it could change

The water that arrives in Potter Valley via canal originates as runoff to the north in the Eel River watershed, one of the state’s largest, stretching from the oak and fir-studded mountains dividing Lake and Mendocino counties to its mouth on the southern outskirts of Humboldt Bay.

The dams did much to diminish its once-abundant salmon and steelhead trout runs, and other demands on the river — food crop, wine grape and cannabis irrigation, mining, logging, roads and development — have all taken a toll.

In 2023, it was named the nation’s sixth most endangered river by the conservation group American Rivers.

PG&E’s exit, however, beckons as an opening to those who see an opportunity to bring the Eel River back to a healthier condition, with legal rights for local tribes, while restoring access to its headwaters for spawning salmon and steelhead.

With Scott Dam removed, along with the smaller, downstream Cape Horn Dam, the Eel would become California’s longest free-flowing river.

That will not be easy, quick or inexpensive, due to the complex way the river has been replumbed over decades, and the many interests and livelihoods that depend on its sustained flows.

At the top of the system sits Lake Pillsbury. It was created by the 138-foot tall, concrete and stone Scott Dam, completed in 1921.

Around the reservoir sit four year-round communities that are home to about 450 residents.

Some of them are regulars at the Soda Creek Store, run by Edie Uram, a slight but sharp octogenarian.

In summer, throngs of picnickers, boaters and campers rely on the store for snacks, beer, soda and ice before filing onto the lake’s beaches and boat docks. During fall, hunters come for elk and deer. The area is not a widely known destination, but can bustle with activity, for those who know how to find it and care to make the drive.

“We’ve been here 33 years,” Uram said. “It’s an absolutely beautiful lake. I love it. I’d just as well die here.”

But Lake Pillsbury is also the shared axis between the Eel and Russian rivers, serving as the farthest collection point for water that supports 650,000 rural and urban users across Sonoma and Mendocino counties, and as far south as northern Marin County.

A linchpin in that joined system is PG&E’s Potter Valley Powerhouse, which sits at the southern end of the diversion tunnel that shunts Eel River water south, underneath a mountain saddle. There, starting in 1908, the water has turned turbines to generate electricity, then flowed south in a canal that drains into the East Fork of the Russian River.

The power plant hasn’t produced electricity since 2021, however, and is small by comparison in the modern era, producing only a little over 9 megawatts of power — or about enough electricity to cover the needs of the city of Ukiah, 18 miles to the southwest, home to more than 16,000 people. (For comparison: the 30 biggest hydroelectric power plants in the nation produce between 1.7 million and 19.5 million megawatts of electricity per year.)

For PG&E, the nation’s largest utility and owner of the state’s largest hydropower projects, Potter Valley no longer pencils out. It’s falling apart in places and isn’t worth the upgrades needed to bring it fully into a new century.

At the federal relicensing level, those upgrades were likely to require multimillion-dollar fish passage modifications on Scott Dam at Lake Pillsbury to aid salmon and steelhead, further unbalancing the cost-benefit picture for PG&E.

“The Potter Valley Project is only a cost,” said Dave Canny, PG&E’s vice president for the North Coast region. “The project costs more than it provides benefits.”

PG&E renounced its interest in continuing to operate the powerhouse in 2019. In 2022, it submitted its formal application to surrender its operating license to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, which oversees the nation’s hydropower projects.

But PG&E can’t simply walk away. The company must submit its final plans to abandon the project — the two dams, the diversion tunnel and the hydropower plant at its end — by July 29 to FERC. Those plans must be reviewed and approved by the commission — a process that is likely to take years to complete.

An OK at that point would propel California’s next major dam removal effort, following in the wake of the four dams that came down through last year on the Klamath River as it runs from southern Oregon across Northern California.

“The Eel represents perhaps the greatest opportunity in California to restore an entire watershed and abundant populations of wild salmon and steelhead,” according to the group CalTrout, a leader of the push to remove Scott Dam.

‘Predicated on abandoned water’

For the Lake Pillsbury residents who’d see their beloved reservoir drained, it’s an opportunity that comes with an enormous cost.

“Not all of the facts and impacts are known,” Carol Cinquini of the Lake Pillsbury Alliance said. “There have been no independent studies to date, no studies on the potential mitigation below Eel River. Nothing.”

Farther downstream, residents who depend on the managed flows of the Eel River also are raising their voices, sharing some trepidation over what dam removal will mean for supplies that sustain their livelihoods.

The Potter Valley Project, even with the powerhouse offline, diverts about 39,000 acre-feet of water from the Eel River to the Russian River. An acre foot is equivalent to about a football field covered in one foot of water.

At the lower Cape Horn Dam, the water rushes through a fish screen, meant to prevent entrapment of steelhead and salmon with the diverted water.

From there, it enters the mile-long tunnel that feeds the powerhouse on the south end and links to the East Fork of the Russian River.

After the dams are gone, the pact between water managers, tribes and environmental groups calls for a new facility to be put in place to feed that diversion, and for it to operate for at least three decades, with the potential for a 20-year extension.

Scott Dam at Lake Pillsbury, Wednesday, May 14, 2025, in Lake Country. (Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)

The pact comes with an important caveat, though: The diversions would happen only during seasons of high flow, and only if there’s enough water in the Eel to support its salmon and steelhead runs. Also, that triggering threshold hasn’t been determined.

Any operation of the diversion system after that initial half-century would be contingent on negotiations between parties in existence at that time.

That’s enough near- and far-term uncertainty to rattle many stakeholders, including downstream cities and farmers.

“This whole region is predicated on abandoned water,” said Phil Williams, special counsel for the city of Ukiah, a member of the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission (IWPC), a joint powers entity that oversees water use and quality in the Eel and Russian River watersheds. “When that water is not there, there’s nothing.”

Down in the valley

No community feels that anxiety more than Potter Valley.

Tucked into the foothills of the Mendocino National Forest northeast of Ukiah, you arrive here by car — or by horse for some — and are greeted by aromatic fields of crops and herbs, peppered with the occasional whiff of cannabis cultivation.

The Russian River watershed, which runs through Mendocino and Sonoma counties, supplies water to cities and towns along the river as well as to cities and districts served by the Sonoma Water Agency. Russian River map

The four-square-mile valley, officially a “census designated place,” is heavily dependent on farming and leans Republican in its politics.

Rows of pear trees line the two main thoroughfares, nothing ornate in their names — East Side Potter Valley Road and West Side Potter Valley Road.

Cattle and sheep chomp on pasture and corrals keep horses muscled for work and rodeo.

Vineyards, the highest-fetching crop, run through it all, filling in the patchwork landscape.

The water that sustains it is governed by an 89-year-old contract between the Potter Valley Irrigation District, the area’s water service provider, and PG&E. Through its contract, PVID gets a steady stream of the diverted Eel River water, at a rate of 5 cubic feet per second — or about 37 gallons — as it flows through the area and on into the upper Russian River.

Potter Valley’s average daily demand is 120 acre-feet — or roughly 390 million gallons — with peak use topping 200 acre-feet a day. The remains, carried into the East Fork of the Russian River, flow into Lake Mendocino. There, and downstream, the river’s direct supplies support Ukiah and farmers and residents down to Healdsburg. (From there, those farther downstream rely on river supplies from Lake Sonoma, the region’s largest reservoir, which impounds Dry Creek, a Russian River tributary.)

Guinness McFadden and Elliott, two longtime Potter Valley ranchers, are experts on the valley’s water use.

Dressed in blue jeans and baseball caps, with wrinkles wrought by time and sun in equal measure, the two old-timers could be brothers, but, in fact, they’re bonded by a fierce dedication to protecting the livelihood of their community.

At 86, McFadden is more than 10 years Elliott’s senior. Bum shoulder and eye cancer be damned, he’s been a PVID board member since 1990 and has no intention of quitting.

His 500-acre ranch sits about five miles south of Van Arsdale Reservoir on the Cape Horn Dam, site of the northern mouth of the tunnel diversion that helps irrigate this valley. Since 1970, McFadden has steadily grown both the size and output of his ranch, producing wine grapes, herbs, bay wreaths, garlic braids, wild rice and honey.

Like many Potter Valley spreads, McFadden’s farm is bisected with canals — part of PVID’s 18-mile main distribution system. The district has an equal extent of secondary laterals. Farmers have built another 55 water storage ponds, capable of holding 775 acre-feet of water.

They’ve learned the hard way the system isn’t enough when frosts last longer than three days or when drought parches the irrigation zone, spanning about 2,300 acres of cropland.

Guinness McFadden at his home in Potter Valley, Wednesday, May 14, 2025. (Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)

The punishing drought from 2020-22 was “just so awful,” McFadden said. “Grapes are a deep-rooted plant,” hardy even in tough times, “and we had vines just keel over.”

The memory still fresh in mind, McFadden, like many Lake Pillsbury supporters, still holds out hope PG&E’s decommissioning — and its later stages, dam removal — won’t go through.

“I’m hoping that the government’s tentacles will step in,” McFadden said. “I’m hoping that someone there will have common sense and see how many people will be affected.”

After the Bureau of Reclamation indicated in April it was not inclined to take over Scott Dam and its downstream system, Elliott said others in the community made pleas to the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees vast acreage but no dam systems. Both agencies fall under the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“Potter Valley is just not wanting to accept the inevitability of the removal of Scott Dam when there are so many alternatives,” Elliott said.

Sarah Denos from the BLM Office of Communications confirmed the department “has no jurisdictions over waters, dams or lakes.”

A path forward

Janet Pauli is ready with some of those alternatives, however.

A vineyard rancher in Potter Valley and longtime public face for the region’s irrigators, Pauli also sits on the board of the Inland Water and Power Commission.

She was at the table in recent years as the stakeholders forged their landmark agreement, announced in February and dubbed by supporters as the two-basin solution.

The parties include Sonoma Water, the North Bay’s dominant drinking water wholesaler, the IWPC from Mendocino County, Humboldt County, the Round Valley Indian Tribes, Trout Unlimited, California Trout and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, helped broker the talks and publicly championed the pact, going up against the opposition, especially from Lake County interests and Lake Pillsbury supporters.

Among them all, Pauli understands the riverine plumbing as well as anyone and speaks about its future plainly as a challenge for Potter Valley. Winnowing the Russian River basin off Eel River supplies will, over the long run, impact Potter Valley, she acknowledges.

But that’s nothing new.

“Farmers, of all people, understand that things are out of their control,” Pauli said. “They have learned to adapt. Do they like it? No, they don’t like it. Changing your way of life is very hard.”

Potter Valley farmers have changed their ways as water diversions from the Eel River dropped over the past century, from 150,000 acre-feet to 60,000, and now to the rough delivery of 39,000 acre-feet.

When it had more water, the valley was more verdant than today. Clover, red kidney beans and alfalfa were abundant and dairy farms were a specialty. Pear orchards, too, were more plentiful. “The valley had many more hundreds of pear trees,” Pauli said.

Like Sebastopol’s Gravenstein apples and prunes in Healdsburg, those orchards gave way to vineyards, with farmers bending to the returns of a more profitable crop that demanded less water.

“Today, some of our crops are less thirsty than others,” Pauli said.

But not all. She points to hay and cattle, both of which are still thriving in Potter Valley. Hay requires more water than vineyards, but Pauli noted that “converting hay into vineyards isn’t a simple thing, and some of the land in Potter Valley simply isn’t conducive to growing grapes.”

Valley reckons with its future

Potter Valley farmers have a lot to lose if they don’t adapt. The county last valued Potter Valley’s agricultural output at nearly $35 million, accounting for 15% of Mendocino County’s agricultural economy — though county leaders say that number is a decade old, and likely low.

Pauli, along with Mendocino County Supervisor Madeline Cline, who represents Potter Valley, believes its ranchers and growers can adapt.

“It does take an understanding and a belief that you can do something,” Pauli said.

The first step, as typically is the case, is acceptance, she suggested.

“1922 to 2025 is a long time for people to have had water to use. The economy and quality of life have been built around it,” Pauli said. “It’s not easy for people to understand how that can go away. And mainly that’s because people don’t have an understanding of how vulnerable they were.”

She pushed for her community in the talks geared to the two-basin pact. She signed that pact on behalf of the IWPC.

The terms have been met with outright skepticism and scorn within her community and beyond.

Even Elliott, who acknowledges the inevitably of the decommissioning, says it could represent a crippling blow for Potter Valley and other downstream interests.

“Water is only going to be available during high-flow conditions and the amount hasn’t been determined?” Elliott scoffed. “We don’t need water during the wintertime.”

Potter Valley, through its membership in the IWPC, will have an official say in how diversions are managed, and its irrigation district is seeking a contract with the Eel-Russian Project Authority, the joint-powers entity that will oversee diversions and also includes Sonoma County and Sonoma Water.

The main issue for Potter Valley is storage. Without year-round diversions, the valley needs a way to store the limited water it does get.

A team of engineers from Jacobs Engineering Group have identified 15 spots for smaller reservoirs where water from the Eel River could be diverted during winter high flows and stored.

Costs for the reservoirs have yet to be determined. But engineers believe that adding new ponds could provide up to 6,000 acre-feet of new storage, tripling current capacity.

Replacing irrigation canals with pipes within the irrigation district system could reduce seepage and evaporation losses, enabling farmers to conserve another 6,000 acre-feet of water annually. The cost of that project is also undetermined.

Engineers also are studying whether Potter Valley farmers and residents could rely on groundwater to augment any water they might need during the summer and other low flow seasons. The valley is already served by 29 wells and some say tapping deeper wells wouldn’t be worth it.

“Deeper wells would just pull up more boron,” Elliott said. “You don’t want to go there.”

‘Can a utility just walk away?’

Adam Gaska, executive director for the Mendocino County Farm Bureau estimates the cost for well upgrades, including applications for associated new water rights, would be in the tens of millions of dollars for Potter Valley.

“Everything is going to cost money,” he said. “Whether its public money, grant money, it is going to cost money to get people to adapt.”

The same goes for decommissioning PG&E’s equipment. Representatives of the utility have said ratepayers are likely on the hook for the cost of taking out the dams and Potter Valley power plant.

Megan McFarland, a PG&E spokeswoman, said initial estimates for decommissioning, which includes removal of Scott and Cape Horn dams, are near $500 million.

“This is a high-level estimate completed with the information we have to date, and includes the cost of engineering, permitting, physical construction activities and restoration,” McFarland said. “PG&E’s estimate will be further refined as we move along the process and complete our engineering and construction plans.”

She also confirmed that “customers (who have benefited from the facilities) would fund the decommissioning.”

That plan still doesn’t sit right with many who’ve built their livelihoods on the foundation provided by the waterworks. “Can a utility just walk away?” Lake County’s Treasurer-Tax Collector Patrick Sullivan asked.

Across the line in Mendocino County, Supervisor Cline is uncertain if her Potter Valley constituents have the will or appetite to pay — either through increased water rates or property taxes — for the upgrades that are under study. A 2025 report by the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, shows the median household income for the valley hovers around $61,500.

Cline says education is key and maybe holding on to some hope. A helping hand, too, with investments, as what’s needed isn’t going to be covered by what the region has, she said.

“This community has relied on this water for generations,” Cline said. “We absolutely have to have a solution.”

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

MENDOCINO THEATRE COMPANY LEADERSHIP TEAM CHANGES

The MTC Board of Directors announced changes to its leadership team today. Beth Craven is departing after three seasons as Producing Director. Alex Wright has been appointed Interim Producing Director for the remainder of the 2025 season. The Board plans to make a permanent hire before the end of the year. “While we are sad to see Beth go, we are extremely fortunate to be working with Alex. He brings a depth of experience, a range of artistic sensibility, and the commitment and temperament this position needs to succeed”, says Jeff Rowlings, president of the Board.

Wright has been serving the theatre as Assistant Producing Director for the past few months. He directed this season’s opening hit, Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery and performed in last season’s 1000 Clowns. Alex brings a deep well of experience. He founded and managed several small theatres in Los Angeles; he served on the California Arts Council; he worked as a director and actor in TV, films and theatre; and he is an accomplished musician and composer. Alex and his wife Christina, a costume designer, “retired” to Mendocino with their dogs and horses about three years ago.

During Beth Craven’s tenure, MTC brought in a bevy of new artists to MTC, including many new local artists and crafts persons. She is credited with helping improve production values and artistic quality. She also directed the highly successful Born with Teeth; the record-breaking Woody Guthrie’s American Song, which had an extended run two years ago and remount last summer; and MTC’s latest offering, What the Constitution Means to Me. Beth will direct Always Patsy Cline, in February 2026, when MTC opens its 50th anniversary season. “It was a huge honor to work with Beth. She brought all her experience from running theatres in Sonoma County and we really benefited from that. She was 150% committed to MTC, the mission, and the artistic community”, said Rowlings.

We also need to congratulate one of our Artistic Directors, Lucas Near Verbrugghe. Lucas was hired by Mendocino College Theatre Arts Department to be their new Dean beginning July 1. “We are looking forward to MTC and the College collaborating on an exciting new project in the near future,” Rowlings adds. The search for a successor is underway.

For more info on this please contact

Jeff Rowlings

415-652-9530

[email protected]

R.D. BEACON

The sacred rock resort in Elk California was a project that took many years, a group from the town of Jackson, tied to the local reservation, acquired property all over the coastal area north from, Albion area down toward the ring, with the bulk of the land acquisition and buildings, being in the small town of elk, several million dollars, later, they were able to unlock the door, and taking yes, although the prices were extremely high for the rooms, and the boat, it never really got off the ground, bad management maybe, and the thought, that the town was ready for high-end, hotel, but the community already had, to well-established, hotel videos, that had run many years, with a reasonable food prices, and elk Cove inn, south of the town, and the harbor house, at the north end of the village, with higher prices, and higher in rooms, the sacred rock facility, had managed to go through, three different management groups, but could never, get the business to run right, not operating, as well as other businesses, in the area, their food prices were too high, and the room rate switch to the overhead, and what food they did serve, fell long short of the mark, buying a hamburger, at the sacred rock, facility just about break the bank, and you could go to another business further up the road, and by a whole state dinner, with all the trimmings, the price of the sacred rock burger, on 1 June of this year, notice came out that they were closing forever, after spending close to $30 million, in the neighborhood suddenly they’re locked the door, speculation, has people wondering why, several rumors had surfaced, stating they used money from their reservation, that was not their studios, outside the Jackson facility, near Jackson in the Sierras, word has it, that they may have spent money, belonging to the reservation, and not to be reinvested, out of the county that they lived it, rumor has surfaced, the property may quote for auction, the federal government may run, the auction site, in the ilk area it may required up to seven different properties, we can only hope, none of it was financed on long-term, payout, for these landowners, or former landowners, maybe getting their property back, many building contractors, plumbers and electricians, retired on the money they made, from sacred rock, we can only hope, that they will sell out to a major hotel chain, four seasons, that will put it all together, and make it work, we do thanks the Indians for their local contribution, the tribe at Jackson California, and spent a lot of money, supporting a lot of events and things, in the community paving, local streets, and supporting the elk volunteer fire department, we believe they deserve a thank you for the time they were here, it is disturbing to see a fence around the facility, their message on their website, attaching to this letter, they made it sound like they’ve been in business for years, but they never really had, a grand opening, I can only believe, they built their facility in the wrong spot, in the middle of the town with no beach access, except going to, the state park to the south, but not out parking availability, and the immediate area, and then the fact that they could only serve beer and wine, just like the other, hotel properties in the neighborhood, the fact that they did not offer anything, public as far as recreation, strange thing about all of it, it’s a little bought a piece of coastal property, it had no buildings, but good beach access and a lot of room, or expansion, the golf course, it would’ve taken off, and run well for years, instead they decided to buy up, a bunch of broken down old buildings, and try to bring them up to code, it seemed like somebody in the upper management of ownership of the facility, thought little elk California was the next Carmel Martin Sea, without doing good research, town was sparked from that, as being the town of Mendocino, community of Elk, former sawmill town, and all the beach property, owned by the state of California,Sacred Rock Inn permanently closed on June 1, 2025.

After welcoming guests to this beautiful stretch of the Northern California coast, we have decided to close our doors.

This decision was not made lightly, and we are incredibly grateful to everyone who stayed with us, supported us, and helped make Sacred Rock Inn what it is today.

Reservations are no longer being accepted. For any questions or past guest inquiries, please contact us at: [email protected].

Thank you for being part of our story.

— The Sacred Rock Inn Team

HUH? (WHEN DID MENDO TRY TO SECEDE?)

Bigfoot, Ewoks, and Ghost towns

Dear Friends,

There’s no doubt that California’s 2nd Assembly District is one of a kind:

Mendocino County once tried to secede from the United States and form the Republic of Mendocino (a few folks still haven’t ruled it out). Humboldt County is the unofficial capital of Bigfoot sightings (no comment on whether I’ve seen one there). Sonoma County is home to Mercuryville, one of California’s mining-era ghost towns (Nobody lives there today, which means you could definitely be the Mayor!) . Del Norte County was famously home to the Ewok village in Return of the Jedi (resisting The Empire is as relevant today as ever). And, Trinity County doesn’t have a single incorporated city (just small communities, mountains, and folks who like it that way).

This is the district I’m proud to represent — wild, weird, and deeply worth fighting for.

We have just a couple of days left before the big June 30 fundraising deadline. If you believe in protecting the natural beauty, rural communities, and wonderfully unique spirit of this place, now’s the time to chip in:

Donate Today: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/chrisrogers

Let’s keep showing the state that no one does it quite like the North Coast.

Gratefully,

Assemblymember Chris Rogers

FROM THE ARCHIVE: ORDEAL BY OATMEAL

by Bruce Anderson (June 5, 1996)

Perhaps the greatest difficulty I’ve faced since the steel door slammed shut on me twelve days ago is the quick retrofit I had to do on my palate. I’m sure I haven’t forced down a bowl of oatmeal since the winter of ‘48. And Rice Crispies? Even as a child I felt foolish leaning in to the bowl to distinguish one sound from another. Too many crackles, not enough pops. Cream of Wheat? As a budding liberal, and thanks to the books of the late great John R. Tunis, I’d slam a bowl of the stuff because there was a black guy on the box.

I’m in an iso cell, which is a euphemism for the hole, or solitary confinement as they called it in the old days in movieland. I’d say it’s about ten feet long and maybe six feet-across. If you want to get the feeling for what it’s like… If you’ve ever been in a stall at a CalTrans rest stop off Highway 101 or I-5, that’s the exact feeling. The walls are concrete cinder blocks. They’re an odd sort of pumpkin-color — that’s as close as I can come to describing it — the color of the pumpkin you get in a can if you’ve left the can open for four days or so. Only a CalTrans color coordinator could create such a demoralizing hue. It’s one of worst colors I’ve ever seen, worse than anything the military could imagine.

Anyway…

The floor is cement. There is a little built-in metal desk, a built-in metal chair. There’s a metal commode/sink. The commode is visible from the hallway. On the ceiling there are four fluorescent lights that aren’t turned off until 11 PM, then turned on again at 5 AM. But the lights are never really off because there’s a very strong light in the hallway. The bed is a steel rack with a very thin, plastic-covered mattress. It’s taken me five or six days to adjust my sinewy, steel-hewn body into the contours of this rack. It’s a lot like sleeping on the floor, really.

There is some kind of a tin mirror on the wall, but at my age I seldom take any pleasure in looking in it. I have the face I deserve, as they say.

Now on to the physical accommodations here…

I’m locked behind a big metal door with a slot in it through which my meals are shoved. The phone, which is on a little trolley, is also shoved through from the outside. There isn’t easy access to the phone because it depends on who else may be using it, and you have to flag down a guard to get him to roll it over to your door. Then they have to stick the phone through the slot. Contrary to Sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Beryl Murray’s comment in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, there is not easy access to this tenuous link to the outside world. In the same piece, Murray said that I, like all other inmates, could “peruse the library.” (“Peruse” may have been reporter Mike Geniella’s term.) I was especially taken with that term, peruse. As if other jailhouse bibliophiles and I could casually stroll over and ramble through the stacks after which Captain Murray might join me for a special lunch of an oatmeal souffle, specially prepared by Chef Soon-To-Be Five-to-Life.

Captain Murray is also telling the media that I’m “being treated just like all the other inmates.” Which is true in the sense that I don’t get any special treatment — nobody does in here. What Murray leaves out is the more basic fact that not only am I in jail, I am being punished in jail by being kept in isolation. Almost all other inmates are only imprisoned. If, say Mike Geniella of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, owned by the mighty New York Times, was in my position, I’m certain he would be housed in Sheriff Tuso’s office, get his meals shipped in from the Broiler Steak House, be drinking Fetzer’s best stuff with Tuso himself tucking him in at night.

The “library” consists of a dank, dark little room with 50 or so ragged paperbacks tossed in a heap in one corner. That’s the library that I was able to “peruse” the other night, out of which I managed to extract ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and the Collected Stories of John O’Hara, which should keep me going for another few days.

The jail seems to be bibliophobic. You can’t get hardbound books in here. Apparently what had happened was that people were buying books at local bookstores and plastering acid on certain pages and then informing inmates that on page 853 of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ they could find 15 hits of acid. Books — only paperback books, at that — now have to come directly from publishers.

I can’t do much writing and re-writing because I wear my pencil down, and I’m finished.

I have absolutely no contact with other inmates. I have only fleeting contact with the guards, all of whom are friendly and as professional as our UPS delivery men.

There are six cells here holding my comrades in isolation. I can’t see to the end of the halls but the other occupants are a transient group who come and go. Several have already been moved out to mental hospitals. It’s of course quite cruel to confine a mentally ill person to an isolation cell but some of these guys are so crazy there’s no other safe place in the jail to house them.

Several friendly faces have popped up in the opaque window opposite mine, like the larger fish at the San Francisco Aquarium. We wave to each other like one captive fish flapping fins at another captive fish.

One fellow I was able to exchange a few words with lives under a bridge in Willits. He claims his sister falsely turned him in for stealing her prescription pills. Yet he’s a happy guy, or pretends to be.

What’s odd about this iso side of the jail — and I’ve experienced both sides — is the prevalent vibe which is quite merry. If the public thinks people here are overcome by remorse for their crimes, alleged and actual, they’re wrong. It’s encouraging in a way, because objectively I’m sure the situations of most of the people in here are not cause for joyous optimism. But the inmates seem almost jolly in the circumstances.

As does the staff.

The Mendocino County Jail is not a difficult place, not at all cruel place. It’s a lot like the military: The rules can be arbitrary, and the staff can be arbitrary. But it in no way approaches anything cruel and inhumane. My tough guy friends, guys who have done a lot of time in all kinds of facilities call Mendo “lightweight.”

What is cruel and inhumane, if you’re looking for cruelty and inhumanity, is the absolute lack of art and the absolute absence of any effort to improve the lives of people in here. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have a Bartoli aria wafting down these hideous hallways in the morning, rather than the strident voice telling everybody to get up over a loudspeaker. You could have flowers on the tables where people eat. You could have art on the walls.

Are you telling me the authorities of this County don’t believe in the redemptive powers of art?

In fact, if you put a bad seascape on the walls of my cell, and some really bad shag rug on the floor, it would not be unlike a Motel 6 room. Except this room is a little more expensive; it costs the taxpayers $55 a day to keep me here, while Motel 6 is around $33 a day.

The usual scratched-in prayers for race war and other random hostilities are scratched into my cell’s walls, along with declarations of undying love for several Debbie’s, a Tanya, two Kristal’s (on spelled Chrystal), and one Theresa.

The food is quite good; much improved from when I was here in 1989. We had a wonderful spaghetti the other night, nearly the equal of my wife’s. And we had a quite good barbecued chicken. The lunch soups are excellent, wonderful actually, as good as any you get on the outs.

I do have one complaint about the food: There’s something very suspicious about the luncheon meat. It’s too thick, too moist, too vividly liverish, too corporeal. The first time it was served I found myself thinking, “This isn’t baloney: three days ago, this was a Mormon!”

Breakfast is at 5 AM. Lunch seems to be around 10:30 in the morning. I say seems to be because in isolation one loses track of time. And dinner is about 4.

Most days I get about 30 minutes outside in “the yard.” I’m by myself the whole time, except for a guard, who has to stand there while I try to do a few chin-ups and walk around what is essentially a big metal cage, maybe 50-60 feet long, 12 feet across. I pace that for a while. The only view I have, other than the jail of course, is across the trees and into the Ukiah Golf Course. On some mornings it’s a temptation to stay in my cell and be spared the sight of golfers waddling around the links.

For the first five days I guess I was having caffeine withdrawal. This was combined with the recirculated air and the smells from chemicals they use to clean the floor, which I think is primarily Clorox, which shouldn’t be particularly toxic. For five days I felt like I had a very bad hangover, and I could only conclude that it came from not having the gallons of strong coffee I usually drink. Since I came in at the wrong time of the week for “commissary day” — an opportunity to buy a few necessities from the prison store — I was finally able to get a little bag of instant coffee. Now I drink two or three cups of that made with tap water, which never gets hotter than lukewarm.

Things seem to work in twos in here. Every two days I get a shower. Like most people, I look forward to showers. They’re held in public view out by the booking desk. It’s a very humiliating experience. You’re trying to balance your little soap and undress and wash up while people are walking by. The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office is a coed operation. It’s humiliating to think that an unfortunate female correctional officer may take home the image of the porcelain orbs of my luminous buttocks looming up in the booking office like a new moon over the Mendocino Headlands.

One night I was awakened about 11:30 and asked if I wanted to take a shower? I said, “No!” I’ve had three showers in here so far, and I guess I’m going to earn some more.

Today, Friday the 31st, is my anniversary date. That’s seven days in. I don’t have another hearing until next week.

By refusing to hand over the letter and by sitting here in a sensory deprivation unit for a year, the only regret I have is that the Deerwood People are getting their revenge knowing that I’m here. So the sooner I get out, the more revenge they’re denied. I’m of course prepared to stay in here until Christmas if necessary.

For four days the only thing I had to write with was a tiny pinochle-type pencil, which was made in Sri Lanka, of all places. And the blanket that warms me at night was made in Peru.

The man next door is apparently a legendary figure here, because the young guys who come to shove my meals through my slot always call him by name, which I believe is something like “Bracket.” He’s very crazy. He bangs his head on the wall and shouts out curses at random. He obviously should not be in an isolation cell. He has since been moved to Atascadero or another mental facility.

The pill-snatcher, the jolly little guy across the way whose face occasionally appears in the window, is covered with tattoos. He woke up last Friday, popped up in his window, and asked me if it was Monday.

I’ve seen several people from Boonville in here. I won’t mention any names, but Boonville and Anderson Valley are, I’m proud to say, contributing their quota to the Mendocino County jail population. We may have exceeded our quota at the present time.

The jail is organized quite well. When one inmate leaves one of these isolation cells, three young guys doing county time pounce on it to do a team-clean. One guy cleans the toilet bowl, another guy sweeps, another guy removes miscellaneous items.

I was amused by some of the newspaper stories on my situation. There was one front page head in the Press-Democrat which said, “Anderson Jailed.” The assumption seems to be that “Anderson” is known to all without any identification needed. In a few more weeks Anderson will become like Madonna — just one word.

As it happens, I can look out the window of my cell into the television room of what is called B-tank, where Bear Lincoln is held. We’re able to exchange jolly waves. One night an inmate in the B-unit maneuvered the television set — they were watching an NBA playoff game — so that I could see it in my cell. I thought that was very kind of him, even though I had no interest in the game.

The medical cart is pushed around by a man and a woman, both of whom are in white coats. I suppose we ought to conclude that they have some kind of medical training. My sole request was for a laxative. Although edible, the food in here is pretty starchy. As I approach geezerhood, I am concerned that I stay regular, at least physically, if not mentally.

The Modern Library edition of War and Peace that I had in court last Friday was turned down by the jailhouse bibliophobes. I brought it with me hoping to at last read it, but they said I couldn’t have hard-bound books. Although logically, of course, I’m unlikely to be doing acid in my isolation cell. In fact, why anyone would want to do any drug in a jail is beyond me. Maybe a little beer would be nice, maybe a little primo. But a hallucinogen? This isn’t a place where you would want to be on acid.

The TVs in the adjacent wings are on most of the time. But they’re not on as much as they used to be. On the county side, they used to be on all day. Over here, they’re regulated to a certain extent. The other night I was trying to see what kind of stuff the guys were watching in B-tank. They watched sports, of course, and one morning, about 9 AM, a guy was flipping the dial and came to what looked like KQED, where a woman was doing aerobic exercises. A couple of voices yelled out, “Leave it! Leave it!” So they watched her do about 90 seconds of aerobics, then moved on to, I don’t know, Love Boat re-runs or something.

That’s another thing; not to be too Calvinistic about it, but it seems that while you have people incarcerated all of whom, I’m sure, could stand some intellectual fortification — I certainly can, everybody I know can — it seems that it wouldn’t be too difficult or expensive to replace television programming with tapes — educational tapes of all kinds, the better forms of drama. People would like that. The assumption seems to be that the typical inmate has no aspirations for higher art, or art at all, which is untrue.

At the risk of sounding macho, this place would have to be a lot tougher to drive me into the legal embrace of prosecutor Aaron Williams or Judge Luther. It’s not a tough place. I get the feeling — I certainly had the feeling the other day from the prosecutor, who seems to me unusually cynical for a young man — that it’s come down to some contest between Luther and the prosecutor of “Who’s Tougher?” I think, in fact, I’m tougher. I’m sure that remark will keep me in here until at least Christmas. Maybe I am tougher. It’s clear to anyone who looks at this case with reasonable dispassion that I’m being kept in jail vindictively, punitively, and arbitrarily. I’ve complied with the law and turned over the letter. They’ve declared that the letter is invalid, as if they would know that. So we’re in metaphysical territory now, friends. And I’m not very good at metaphysics. How they’ll validate this letter — WHICH IS THE LETTER and has no material effect on the case — I don’t know. But I suspect they’re going to validate it, with me sitting in here for a long time.

I don’t want to name everybody because I’m afraid of leaving people out. But it was nice to hear from so many people. People like Charmian Blattner. I was especially appreciative of Beth Bosk’s piece this week in the AVA. The AVA looks at least 10% better with my absence. I think Rob’s [the Editor’s brother Rob Anderson was temporary Editor while the Editor was in jail] a better editor. Everybody’s stuff was very good. It was a very interesting issue. Rusty & Flo Norvell, Judi Bari, Jean DuVigneaud, Linda B., Thomas Neece, Kevin Davenport, Dave Nelson (who’s been brilliant and bold with his statements to the corporate media), Joe Lee, and everyone else. And Ann Johnston’s Onion Rings at the Philo Cafe. So keep those cards and letters coming in, folks! It’s nice to hear from so many people. It’s surprising to hear from some of them, and I thank them all.

Disclaimer: I wasn’t able to rewrite this piece from jail which may account for a rough patch here and there. Then again, maybe it’s just me.

Mark Scaramella adds: The Editor wrote this piece with a golfer’s jail pencil on lined yellow jail paper while in jail after refusing to turn over the original of a letter from Bear Lincoln to the prosecutor during the Bear Lincoln trial in 1996. He then called the office collect and read it to us over the phone. We recorded that call and transcribed it into this article. Hence the concluding disclaimer. The Editor spent a total of 13 days in jail before the AVA staff convinced Judge Jim Luther that the typed letter we had received was the original letter, not a hand-written one as would have been expected if Lincoln had written it from jail. As it turned out, Lincoln’s hand-written letter had been squirreled out of jail and re-typed with certain parts omitted by Lincoln’s lawyer, then sent on to the AVA as a Letter to the Editor. When the Editor realized there was nothing in the letter that wasn’t already on the record in the case, we decided to turn it over, but the first attempt to turn over the typewritten layer did not convince Judge Luther that it was the original. A week later, after the Major and the Editor’s wife were called in by the Editor’s lawyer (later Judge) David Nelson to testify about what they recalled about the letter, Judge Luther finally ruled in the Editor’s favor and released him.

JEREMY BAZOR: My Great Uncle Vernon “Sunny” Piver born Point Arena and a Tribal Member Of Manchester/Point Arena Pomo. Signed with the Pittsburg Pirates year Unknown but 50’s

CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, June 29, 2025

JUSTICE ADAMS, 22, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

DEBORAH ANDERSON, 53, Ukiah. battery with serious injury, vandalism.

MICHAEL CAMPBELL, 40, Fort Bragg. Battery with serious injury, tear gas.

NATHAN CASADY, 47, Espanola, New Mexico/Ukiah. Grand theft, stolen vehicle, taking vehicle without owner’s consent, marijuana for sale, suspended license.

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

ROBIN KENDRICK, 19, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

ANTHONY LOVISONE, 44, Clearlake/Ukiah. Reckless driving, misdemeanor hit&run with property damage, false information to law enforcement.

JOSE PLASCENCIA, 24, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, probation revocation.

CHRISTINA PURTHEL, 34, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

SEBASTIAN RABANO, 45, Ukiah. Drinking in public, parole violation.

ANDREW RAYMOND, 39, Willits. Domestic abuse, child endangerment.

JOSEPH VALERA, 27, Petaluma/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

MICHAEL WHALEN, 26, Ukiah. Registration tampering.

BILL KIMBERLIN: Before the Wright Brothers solved the problem of controlled flight that mankind had be puzzling over for about 4,000 years they wrote to the national weather service asking where the wind never stopped blowing and had a soft landing because the said they planned to crash a lot. Kitty Hawk North Carolina, was the place they were told. Neither brother had more than a high school education. Here is one of them testing an early glider, about 1900.

SANDERS & CROCKETT

AVA,

The quote from Bernie Sanders in the June 29 edition sounds like an excerpt from his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Here is a link to the podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mYVzme2fybU?si=Oid1A374NVIYBC_s

While listening to the Sanders interview, I noticed that Charlie Crockett was on the previous episode of the podcast. Charlie is a musician from Texas whose popularity really took off while he was living in Mendocino County. I was fortunate to have seen him perform at tiny local venues while he was on his way up. Crockett is now a superstar. Here’s a link to the Charlie Crockett episode: https://youtu.be/9nK4g6vgRDg?si=UftRj3ew0Boouq6-

Hope you’re doing well Bruce.

Monica Huettl

Redwood Valley

THE GREAT WHEEL OF LIFE

Editor:

More than meets the eye…

Recently my husband and I witnessed an older woman with a walker suffer a mishap that ended with her sitting on a curb, unhurt but unable to get up. We rushed over to help, but the task was too much for us. Then I heard from behind me, “I can help,” and another, “I can help.” In an instant, we were surrounded by helpers. Seconds later she was up and on her way.

The experience made me feel good about people. We were going our separate ways when a car came up. After maneuvering around us, the driver called out, “Get out of the f---ing road!” Well, there went that good feeling. I wished I could have told him, “You don’t have the whole story. This group of complete strangers spontaneously came together to help someone.” Maybe if he knew what happened, he would have been nicer. Then it hit me. Maybe there was more to his story. Maybe he was dealing with his own emergency, and we were in his way. Maybe he is usually a very kind person. Or not. I’ll never know. There’s always more than meets the eye, and we do well to withhold judgment.

Susan Barich

Santa Rosa

“FOR THE EARTH WARRIORS”…written November 23, 2012: https://armedwithvisions.com/2013/01/04/craig-stehr-for-the-earth-warriors/

This is an example of “automatic writing”. Sitting still, holding a writing instrument over a piece of paper, allowing the Divine Absolute to utilize the physical-mental instrument to create text. I am available to leave the homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. now, as I no longer need it in order to be supportive of the Peace Vigil in front of the White House. I wish to go somewhere, to associate with others for group “automatic writing”. If you are still worrying about survival, don’t bother contacting me. If you are over that, let’s talk.

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

ON INDIAN LAND

by Chris Skyhawk

In 1992, the family group that I had been living with in the ridges of Cazadero, CA. Which consisted of the woman who was my partner, her friend who was the single mother of my adopted son, his 2 half-sisters, 2 wolf/Akita hybrid dogs, and an unusual orange cat named Carlos Castaneda, decided that we would become nomads, It was a difficult decision, we were very attached to the rural place we lived, and had developed profoundly unique spiritual relationships with its plant and animal denizens, but the ‘property” had a number of, liabilities it was built by hippies on acid, who were proud that nothing had been permitted by the County, thus making it impossible to finance with conventional methods, thus when the women bought it before my arrival, it was with high interest private loans that were basically interest only payments, and had a balloon payment of $250kK. As the balloon payment began to loom, we tried , due to our profound attachment to it, to see if friends within our circle might be found to take it, we tried for several months with no luck, as we realized that we were not going to be able to keep it, so we decided we wanted to roam nomadically and offer prayer, song and witness to places around the western US. A well off friend of ours believed in our vision, and became a one-time patron, and with that money, plus our meager savings, we bought a used 23 foot Tioga RV, and just left, and let the property go into foreclosure, We had no itinerary, just an idea, but we thought that our first stop should be the Wounded Knee (WK) memorial in South Dakota, Students of history will remember this is the site of the 1890 US massacre of about 300 men Women and children of the Sioux band led by Chief Bigfoot, that were seeking safety after Sitting Bull had been assassinated at Standing Rock, After a couple weeks, and a series of adventures we arrived in Manderson, SD, which is right near WK, through a series of lucky events(or divine guidance), we got an offer from a traditional Lakota man, who said we could make camp at his place, it was a flat bench of land overlooking the WK valley and right downstream from the memorial, perfect for our purposes! where we stayed for our first weeks, and became objects of great local curiosity!

No one knew quite what to make of us, Usually if white people come to Pine Ridge they are on their way to somewhere else (Badlands, Black Hills, etc.) But here we were just staying there, locals would slowly drive past our camp just staring at us, if they were talking inside the car it was obviously about us… It was the same in town when we had to get supplies! No one was overtly hostile towards us and given the horrific history we certainly did not expect anyone to greet us with open arms, but we were in a quandary about how to relate to the community, whose curiosity was clearly affixed to us. This went on for several weeks, until, we would occasionally get to big towns to check in with a friend back home that was tracking out personal affairs (like mail, etc. (and just to enjoy the comforts of a motel room, use a payphone, and let the kids eat pizza etc.), well when the time came for that we took off for Rapid City, about a 2 hour drive away, we took the motorhome, so the deep cell battery could recharge, and packed the unnecessary gear in the truck, which we left at our camp, and spent several days in Rapid. After some adventures in civilization it was time to return. As we approached our camp, the first thing /I noticed was that the, the hatch on the shell of the cap has been popped open

And when I looked inside, the truck was empty, I also noticed several local people on the hill above us, some mounted on horseback, watching us, I looked about in wildly in disbelief, the kids were stepping out of the rv, and realizing that their bikes were gone too, began to cry, and I was filled with self-recrimination: "Well you left your gear unattended in perhaps the poorest place in North America, what did you THINK was gonna happen”, this self-criticism was only amplified by the children’s crying, as this process went on every time I looked up there were more people on the hill watching, and I thought “what are all those Indians doing up there?” As this event unfolded I continued to look around in wild disbelief, until my eyes fell upon one of the missing articles in the brush, I went over and looked and sure enough it was one of the missing things! I shouted out my find to my family( and all the while the number of local on that hill kept increasing, and the children looked around and started finding things, too! After a while we had found everything and piled them up in the center of our camp, when from up above the teen children of our host rode their horses down the hill, and with war whoops, and a great frenzy slapping their horses, rode around us in a circle, raising choking dust in the late afternoon sunlight, until they finally stopped and with horses heaving for breath asked “How was Rapid?”

We answered, Rapid was fine, and caught up in their obvious glee stated “but it looks like a big wind came while we were gone” they giggled immensely and agreed “Oh yes, the wind was huge” and after a time, and obviously pleased with the coup they had counted, rode home. We stayed there several more weeks during which time the mood in the local community towards us was considerably more relaxed, and I will never forget the pure joy of those young people, they had, to their satisfaction, reminded us of whose land we were on, and their code of ethics was impeccable: “We could have stolen your stuff, but we didn’t!”

21ST CENTURY ADDICTION

To the Editor:

As a 91-year-old with not much to do except walk around the city, I can attest to the obliteration of social activities by young and old who are addicted to their phones.

I have seen mothers swinging their tots while looking not at their child but at their phones. Gone are the laughing “I’m gonna catch you” chimes while pushing the swings.

I have seen a father throwing a ball to his son (about 10, I guess) with one hand, looking at the phone in his left immediately after the ball left his right. The son’s face was forlorn.

I have seen attractive young couples in restaurants engaged with their phones, not with each other.

The list goes on and on.

Shirley Smithberg , New York

TWO FIREFIGHTERS KILLED IN IDAHO SNIPER AMBUSH

Firefighters were responding to a blaze near Coeur d’Alene when the shooting happened, a sheriff said. At least one other firefighter was wounded.

by Mike Baker, Mark Walkler, Jack Healy & Bernard Mckam

At least two firefighters were killed in Idaho on Sunday afternoon after they were ambushed in a sniper attack while responding to a fire in a rugged mountain area, the authorities said.

Law enforcement agencies near Coeur d’Alene scrambled to evacuate the area — popular for weekend hikers — while trying to stop what might be multiple attackers who were still firing shots at emergency workers.

“We are actively taking sniper fire as we speak,” said Sheriff Robert Norris of Kootenai County in an afternoon news conference around 4:30 p.m. He was unsure how many people had been hit by gunfire but officials said the two people killed were firefighters.

(NY Times)

GIANTS LOSE for 5th time in 6 games as Verlander again denied a win

by Shayna Rubin

Center fielder Jung Hoo Lee looks down in the San Francisco dugout after the White Sox defeated Giants 5-2 on Sunday in Chicago. (Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press)

CHICAGO — The visiting clubhouse at The Rate was somber as San Francisco Giants players and crew packed up for an evening flight to Arizona.

A weekend stay in Chicago didn’t give them much to smile about as the Giants lost to the Chicago White Sox 5-2 on Sunday to drop the series against another sub-.500 team following a sweep at home at the hands of the Miami Marlins.

The Giants have lost five of six and scored a grand total of five runs over three games against a White Sox team that doesn’t boast a particularly strong pitching staff.

“Just trying to live on the fact that we get a chance tomorrow,” right fielder Mike Yastrzemski said. “Last two series haven’t been good offensively for us, we’re capable of a lot better than that. Sometimes you go through these and have to dig down deep and find what you really want to play for. I think for a lot of us that’s pride and winning and holding ourselves accountable to play better than we’ve been performing.

“I think we’re wearing it pretty heavy right now. You can feel that in here. There isn’t a single person in here that’s satisfied with how they’re playing. Hopefully we take it to heart and come out with a chip on our shoulder tomorrow.”

This team’s latest woes has much to do with their offense. They went 2-for-11 with runners in scoring position on Sunday. But this loss came down to a troubling seventh inning for a bullpen that has hit a rough patch.

Erik Miller gave up back-to-back one-out singles and exited with two outs and two runners in scoring position for Ryan Walker. Miguel Vargas drew a walk to load the bases and Kyle Teel delivered the go-ahead two-run double to right field. Matters worsened when Walker balked, scoring the runner at third, and Lenyn Sosa singled to score a fourth run. Randy Rodriguez, the Giants’ best reliever, was going to be used if the lead was still intact in the eighth inning and was warming in the eighth when the Giants got runners on.

The runs snapped Miller’s scoreless streak at 19 games — he caught a break on Saturday when Michael A. Taylor didn’t touch home plate while attempting to score.

Justin Verlander came into the start with his teammates having provided 24 runs of support over his first 12 starts, second-fewest to Colorado’s Chase Dollander for any starter. Verlander got two runs of support Sunday. Patrick Bailey‘s double in the second inning, scoring hot-hitting Christian Koss from second base, was the Giants’ biggest hit of the afternoon.

The Giants had the bases loaded with one out in the fifth inning, but managed just one run out of the opportunity via Willy Adames‘ five-pitch walk. Jung Hoo Lee popped out and Koss squared up a slider that found a glove to stranded the bases loaded.

“When we take the field we want to get him a win, but getting a win is more important right now,” manager Bob Melvin said. “Justin certainly pitched well enough to win the game.”

Yastrzemski said Giants hitters are feeling the burden of not getting Verlander a win yet.

“Unfortunately it’s something I’ve thought a lot about because he pitched like himself today, he pitched well enough to deserve a win,” he said. “Still can’t help but feel guilty, like we let him down, but we let all of ourselves down. We didn’t have great at-bats when we needed to and sometimes that’s how it goes. Unfortunately that’s how it went today. Have to look at yourself in the mirror at this point and ask what kind of team we want to be from here on out.”

The three-run deficit gave Carson Seymour a soft landing spot to make his big league debut in the eighth inning. He gave up a pair of singles in a scoreless frame.

Now, the Giants head to Arizona looking to right the ship again for a four-game division series. The somber tone, Yastrzemski thinks, is a good sign that things will turn around.

“The care level. The fact that it is a little somber in here right now and it should be,” he said, asked why he was confident tides would shift. “That goes to show that guys care, guys aren’t satisfied with where we’re at. Where we want to go, everyone takes that seriously and that’s the only thing we can hang our hat on right now is that there is fight in this team, there is care, and I think we’re going to find that here soon.”

(SF Chronicle)

I NEEDED A DRINK, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

— Raymond Chandler, ‘Farewell, My Lovely’

PROUD GRIEF

by Fred Gardner

June 28 A young friend’s band played at the Pride Parade in San Francisco today—their first paying gig! I didn’t share my memories with them. How could I convey the fear that pervaded the city in the 1980s and ‘90s? You can report the facts of what happened, but not the mood.

It wasn’t until 1983 that scientists determined that AIDS was caused by a virus transmitted during unprotected sex – and possibly by saliva, and maybe even by droplets in the air… I stopped visiting Dennis Peron because I didn’t want to share joints with him and his friends. One day I ran into him on the street and asked right off if he was okay. He said he was. “Oh, you know me. I always hear the latest. Right at the start, when my friends in LA started talking about ‘the gay cancer,’ I decided from then on to have only safe sex.” I still stayed away, even when he started the Cannabis Buyers Club, because I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings (and joints were always being passed around Chez Dennis.)

Fear still prevailed in 1996 when a “three-drug cocktail” of anti-retroviral medication was introduced that would ultimately prove to be effective. ’96 was also the year that California voters legalized marijuana for medical use (by passing Proposition 215). I had an assignment to cover the Prop 215 campaign for the NYer, which meant frequent visits to Dennis’s club at 1444 Market St. I developed an awkward method of pinching joints so they wouldn’t touch my lips. Later I learned the “chillum method,” and published a how-to-do-it in O’Shaughnessy’s, with an extended caption by Drew Foster.

“I take my left palm and leave it open. I make a loose fist with the right hand and slide a joint between the index finger and middle finger. You cover the bottom of your palm and wrap your fingers to form a cup with your two thumbs touching. Your other hand should be solid and you’ve got this hollow spot which causes a vacuum when you suck. The smoke will go through the only open spot, around your thumb and index finger.

“A chillum is a simple pipe —a small clay funnel that Hindu priests used for smoking. If you look at the East Indian population, and Jamaicans, they smoke chillum-style, usually putting the pipe between their fingers. They didn’t have papers. They’d often use damp herb and put a coal on top so it vaporizes and they’re not sucking butane. It’s very reverent, too (putting the joint up to his forehead). Offering a hit to the deity.

My friend — White Dog — stopped smoking to qualify for a liver transplant program. He was someone whose life centered around the herb and he gave it up to get on this program because he wanted to live. Liver disease is terrible and if cannabis is helping people, they should not be pressured to get off it. My friend gave it up and his quality of life started to dip immediately, which affected his other organs. He died one week after his gall bladder shut down. I had to be the one to send him off. He was so tied to this and so devout as a vegan, even, he really walked a straight line. He died on 4/20. White Dog —he gave the most to our movement and took the least. That’s how he lived. The man never had a house or a car but it never stopped him from getting around the world. He got to pray in places where religious leaders aren’t allowed.”

David M.

In May, 1990, I was working at UCSF and sending “Notes From the City” to the AVA. David M. worked down the hall in the Accounting Department. He was in his mid-30s.

David M. was planning to see “Longtime Companion” Thursday night, but on the way his friend Susan’s car broke down. “I said ‘Let that be a sign.’ Several people had said it might be a little too intense for me at the moment. We went out to dinner and talked about how it was for her, knowing that I had AIDS. She’s still in denial… I was in denial until I was in the hospital last week. I could barely say it. And it moved out of the realm of having one mark on my arm to having a real illness --pneumonia.

FG: What’s happening at work?

We’re looking for someone to take my place. Savannah, my boss has been amazingly generous --she’s accomodated me in every possible way, and then some. Disability here is based on your last month’s salary. A month ago she told me to draft my upgrade. In a matter of 48 hours I was reclassified and got a 15% raise, which will determine my disability pay.

Immediately I have short-term disability --70% of your salary--which lasts for a year. The only taxes taken out is FICA on the first $600. In about six months I have to start picking up my own medical insurance, but that should remain at the rate the company pays for 21 months. Longterm disability kicks in after a year and that’s 50% of my salary. Also, Social Security kicks in after six months of being out. So I’m not terribly worried financially. I don’t expect this to be a long term illness for me.

As soon as it starts getting really rough I’m going to take things into my own hands. I was ready to do it the day I came home from the hospital and I took a little snapshot of what it would look like had I gone that day and it wouldn’t have been right. My papers are really not in order --my life insurance would not have been dispersed the way I want it to. My theory is to leave enough money to people who are never going to have much money so it might make a difference in their life. I have a few friends like that, who have always struggled, who I love dearly, so I want to get that in order… After that I kind of feel like I’m ready. Like, I’ve done my bit here and I don’t want to go through another round of losing three friends in four months. December through February I lost this guy who I’d grown up with, Barry, who was my musical director from back in Brooklyn. He was the last to be diagnosed and the first to go. He was not as sick as the other people. Paul and Jimmy had many bouts of pneumocystis, KS all over their body, they deteriorated terribly. I lost Paul, my gym buddy in November, and that I went through with him, I was in the hospital the entire time. That experience was really good for me in that it made me less fearless about death.

In December my friend Jimmy in Texas passed away. That was the hardest one, that’s the one that haunts me, because we were lovers and he was the symbol of me finaly getting what I wanted, the relationship I had always waited for and wanted…

FG: How did it end?

He got AIDS and didn’t want to be with anybody anymore. So we ended the physical aspect of our relationship. But right through until two days before he died we had the best part of our relationship which was our communication. We talked incessantly on the phone. We’d always been able to do that. I spent my entire new year’s eve this year on the phone just talking for hours and hours… He held my heart. I miss him the most. (Cries)

I don’t want to go through another round of watching people go. I could lose another three of my close friends.

I went in on a Friday afternoon. I had really intense pain on my side from the pleurisy --from the inflation of my lungs pressing against everything. My doctor had thought that I should perhaps take care of myself at home and I insisted that she put me in the hospital. That Saturday I woke up in the middle of the night I woke up and experienced the most intense, long sustained pain that I had ever felt in my life. I was screaming and woke up the entire floor. I couldnt’ even lift the cup with the pills in it to my mouth. It was like my whole body had cramped. I couldn’t breathe. She gave me something to calm me down, then she gave me percodan and the doctor came and gave me a shot of morphine, which enabled me to lay down and fall back asleep. Two hours later I woke up and the same thing happened again. So I was on morphine every two hours through Monday morning.

And it scared me. I don’t know what I would have done if I had been home. As I was in the pain and taking each breath I did this little thing where I talk to whoever it is I talk to, I don’t know if it’s God or whoever, and I just said if it’s now, let’s go. And that’s kind of where I am every night when I go to bed. I kind of do this little practice thing. Of saying, “maybe I won’t see another sunrise.” I practice trying to experience what that’s going to be like. And I often fall asleep crying.

I miss people now. And probably cause I’m going to miss a couple of things I still enjoy. Music, I’ll miss that. The idea of not hearing the next Pretenders album or the next rickie lee jones seems wierd to me. But who knows, maybe I will hear it.

A few days later I visit him in Pacific Presbyterian. Over the weekend David says, his pleurisy got so painful he woke up screaming, too weak to get a pill to his mouth. “I woke up the whole floor,” he reports with an embarassed smile. (Two months ago the only symptoms he was acknowledging were “thrush” and fatigue). At the hospital he got morphine. He grins and wiggles his thumb sideways in the “so-so” gesture. “As highs ago, I was disappointed. I felt a slight warm tingle around my neck and then I was out.”

DENNIS O’BRIEN

I moved to San Francisco in November 1978, working as a claims representative for Social Security. There were many gay men working there at the time. One of them was a claims development clerk (secretary) who helped me and another CR. I noticed a picture on his desk of another man. “That’s my partner” he explained. “We’ve been together for seven years”. That was the moment my understanding of homosexuality changed forever. Before then I thought it was just people playing around with others of their own gender. From that moment on, I understood that such attractions formed the physical/emotional basis for lasting/caring relationships, as strong and as real as any heterosexual couple.

PBS produced an episode of the American Experience that focused on the Stonewall uprising of 1968. It is excellent, not just in describing the event, but also what it meant to be homosexual in a society that rejected and punished those who were. One woman who was interviewed decades later described her awareness of her own sexuality:

“What finally made sense to me was the first time I kissed a woman. And I thought ‘Oh, this is what it’s about.’ And I knew that I was a lesbian, and it was . . . I knew that I would go through Hell, I would go through fire for that experience, for those kisses.”

The full episode is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLwE45vd80A.

I highly recommend it.

San Francisco had a neighborhood that was home to many gays and lesbians called The Castro, centered on the intersection of Castro and Market Streets. There were many bars there that catered to the community, some of which were “mixed”, i.e., also patronized by “straight” people. Even after I arrived there was a violent police raid on of them, but it was the last. They are now a safe place to meet and socialize.

Each year on the last Saturday in June there was a parade marking the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and to give people the chance to be themselves and/or to show support. Back then it was called simply the Gay Day Parade. It started in The Castro and went down Market Street to City Hall Plaza. They were magnificent, with marchers and their banners representing many groups and many cities, along with floats sponsored by the bars and other businesses. It was always led by a large contingent of Dykes On Bikes, several dozen motorcyclists whose engine noise heralded the start.

I was there one year with some friends, including Jim Harvey. The last group in the parade was carrying a banner that said, “Family and Friends of Gays”. So I joined in and walked with them to the Civic Center. As we entered, the crowd roared in support; at the time, even admitting you were a friend of a gay man was a form of “coming out”. I smiled and waved, very happy and, yes, proud. Later in the day Jim bought me a pin from one of the vendors that said, “Honorary Gay Man”. It still has an honored place on my bulletin board, a reminder of one of the best moments of my life.

WHEN THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE TURNED 50, AND A GOOD CITY DESCENDED INTO CHAOS

by Peter Hartlaub

It was a day for San Francisco to honor the Golden Gate Bridge.

But by mid-morning on May 24, 1987, the gridlocked horde trying to celebrate its 50th anniversary got so desperate people were urinating off the side of the landmark.

“For a few, necessity overcame modesty, producing a rush to the railing and relief into the choppy waters below,” the Chronicle’s Carl Nolte wrote the next day.

That was just one indelible memory from the bridge’s golden anniversary celebration, where bridge officials planned for 50,000 revelers and more than 800,000 showed up. Muni service was brought to a standstill. Hundreds of children were lost. And, most alarmingly in the moment, the bridge itself visibly flattened and warped under the weight of the masses.

I called my mother, Jeanne Hartlaub, who attended the event, and she raged like it happened yesterday.

“What a freaking s—-show,” she said. “We had no control over where we were going. I lifted my feet off the ground, and I was being carried by the crowd.”

A recent search in the Chronicle archive revealed unpublished images — including one of a frustrated walker who hopped over the bridge railing to shimmy precariously sideways over the San Francisco Bay, plus time-lapse photos taken from high on the span that document the mounting chaos. I searched further in the archive to get the full story.

Bridge organizers had reason to anticipate massive crowds would show up. More than 200,000 people arrived for the bridge’s opening in 1937, when the Bay Area population was one third its 1987 size. A similar fiasco occurred in 1982 at the first 49ers Super Bowl victory parade, when City Hall planned for 25,000 fans, and half a million flooded Market Street.

But when the Golden Gate Bridge Authority suggested closing the bridge for its 50th birthday, Marin County drivers were furious. A compromise was reached for the bridge walk to last just three hours and finish at 9:30 a.m., with a fireworks show later. Organizers said they expected just 50,000 attendees.

They were off by a factor of more than 15. A growing crowd on the city side burst through the barricades at 5:45 a.m., and found another tidal wave of humanity coming from the opposite direction.

“For about 45 minutes it was fun,” the Chronicle reported. “Then, at 6:10 a.m., a human wall from Marin hit a human wall from San Francisco and the Great Golden Gate Bridge Walk turned into the Great Golden Gate Gridlock.”

Chronicle photos show a chaotic scene, including a baby in a stroller being passed above the throng like a crowd surfer at a punk rock show. In an era before texting and widespread cellular phone use, thousands were separated and lost.

Walkers on the sidewalks shivered in 35-mile-per-hour winds, while those in the center shed clothes in the sweltering body heat. My mother’s strongest memory was of a high school band from Pennsylvania who came to perform, but quickly pivoted to survival mode.

“Those kids in the band were fainting,” she said. “They were passing them hand over hand over the crowd.”

The Chronicle’s Steve Rubenstein reported from a small “lost and found” shack where Mayor Dianne Feinstein was helping children looking for their parents.

“I started out with four children,” bridge walker Sue Madrid said, as she approached the lost and found. “Now I have one.”

“Officials lost count of the lost,” Rubenstein wrote.

Miraculously, the Chronicle reported the next day that no one was seriously hurt or killed. The walk’s organizers apologized and admitted the bridge should have been opened to pedestrians all day with a clearer flow of traffic.

Days after the event, photos emerged showing the roadway flattened and slightly twisted under the mass of humanity, which led to some alarmist media reports. Engineers then and now insist there was no danger. (“There is no way to put enough people on that bridge to cause any structural failure,” bridge engineer Dan Mohn said at the time. “You’d have to stick them three high and even that wouldn’t do it.”)

But the day is still remembered by those who were on the shaking bridge as a near-catastrophe and a good time.

While some were stuck at downtown BART stations — a frustrated crowd of 5,000 waited at the Embarcadero for buses that never arrived — there was a spirited we’re-all-in-this-together mood at the bridge. Many brought bottles of champagne and shared with neighbors.

“I love this bridge,” Ollie Oliviera told the Chronicle, pulling out a bottle of cognac. “It kept me sane in my younger years. I used to walk across the bridge to keep it together.”

And my mother reports that my grandmother Louise Leal, a Mexican immigrant who loved San Francisco and walked the bridge on opening day in 1937, had the time of her life.

My mother said she was also grateful … that she brought my grandmother’s heart medication.

(SF Chronicle)

IN THE SILENT MUSICAL BUNKER

by David Yearsley

In front of the Horniman Museum in the leafy Forest Hill district of London stands a weathered Tlingit totem pole. It is loomed over by the museum’s squat-yet-somehow-also-lofty clocktower and regarded from behind with neo-medieval solemnity by the knights, ladies and at least one naked supplicant pictured in the gauzy Arts and Crafts mural on the building’s façade. The eagle at the top of the totem pole peers just above a row of Spanish Bayonet trees that guard it from the busy London South Circular Road running directly in front of the museum and between the Horniman Play Park on the other side of the street. I tried to discern some message about the colonialism, in the bewildering mixture of signs, maybe something about the contest between the Spanish and British in the north Pacific.

Alaskan Nathan Jackson carved the totem pole for the museum in 1985 and crowned it with the eagle that serves as his family’s crest. The bird looks south, away from central London. Big Ben, a far more famous clocktower three times as high as the Horniman’s, rises three miles away to the northwest.

Made from cedar, the eagle also looks away from the kindred species from around the world to be encountered in the Horniman Gardens behind the museum. Out in front, though, the incongruous juxtaposition of arid-climate foliage and humid northern art reflects the museum’s founding mission, its anthropological bent to gather artefacts from around the world and across the expanse of human creativity —over which, a cynic might add, the sun never sets. A vigorous early advocate for the British welfare state, Frederick Horniman inherited his money from the family tea fortune.

Above the façade’s mural are big block letters in stone reading HORNIMAN FREE MUSEUM. The place was free when it opened in 1901 and still is. Children of London from across all classes should, Horniman ardently believed, be able to come and marvel at, even interact with, the holdings, seeking inspiration from the human-made objects while also experiencing the diversity of nature in the sixteen acres of gardens, arboretum and along the “animal walk” — no longer called a zoo.

A friend told me that what he most remembered about going to the Horniman on a school trip when he was about ten was biting into a nail in a morning bun he got at the cafeteria. A new extension opened in 2002 and is more welcoming of light and access than the hulking original structure. The clean and airy shop and café seem to promise that food safety standards have risen since the unwelcome mouthful.

But we hadn’t come to pet the alpacas. We were in search of keyboards and other musical instruments.

The Music Instrument Gallery at the Horniman Museum, London.

When a country goes about conquering and collecting from the world, and especially when that nation is housed on a relatively small island, there will eventually be storage issues.

In 2010 as part of ongoing renovations and reconfigurations, the Victoria and Albert Museum, just south of Hyde Park some four miles distant from the Horniman, closed the exhibition space that had long been dedicated to 250 musical instruments, among them many fascinating keyboards.

After this off-siting, only a couple of the most visually opulent virginals were retained in the popular British Galleries near the entrance to the V & A. The most spectacular of these was made by John Loosemore in 1655. Loosemore was also an organ builder, but during the Commonwealth the Puritans made war on the King of Instruments too. Loosemore therefore turned his considerable talents to domestic instruments and finished a lavish virginal whose case painting includes what is purported to be the first European depiction of an American wild turkey (on the fallboard, where you might imagine the player’s right thigh or knee to be when at the instrument).

The depictions of trees and beasts (both human and otherwise) would have been perfect for the Horniman, but this instrument was just too precious to be furloughed south of the River Thames to Forest Hill.

Having trekked all the way to the Horniman, we made are way inside and downstairs through the gleeful kids and their minders and to the musical instrument gallery. The space is long and narrow like a submarine, which makes a certain sense since it was directly above the aquarium—another kid-friendly attraction.

After a tight left turn around the entrance door one is greeted by an late 18th-century chamber organ and a plaque that describes, if quickly, the complex technological that makes its unique sound. The King (or, as the German-speaking Mozart, had it “Queen”) was getting its due as the first order of business, though the musical monarch had been exiled to a bunker in South London.

More keyboard glories followed down the long case: objects in polished mahogany, others adorned with intricate marquetry or keyed in ivory and covered in ebony and rosewood, on down to the far end and the warplane parts repurposed by Harold Rhodes for his electric pianos initially designed to use in music therapy for recovering World War II soldier.

Across the narrow aisle, in the long glass display facing the keyboards and bisecting the gallery lengthwise were stringed and bowed instruments, drums and shakers of ever size and stripe (literally) from Asian, Africa, Americas and Europe.

Making the turn at the far end of the space and heading back towards the distant exit, I examined through the glass early 20th century drum kits made, as the labels were determined to point out, with materials sourced from around the globe. Throughout the exhibition kinship and exploitation were paired leitmotivs.

A niche was carved out among the shawms and oboes and flutes for a pair of harps, including one played by Marie-Antoinette, but now absent since it had been recalled to the V&A.

A couple of small children had joined us. Their mother checked her phone at the far end of the submarine. I was seated at one of the sound tables that tries, futilely, to make-up for the resounding paradox that all these musical instruments are imprisoned in silence. In a museum dedicated to play, these could not be.

I had summoned a recording of a glass harmonica played by my friend and colleague Dennis James. The little girl hopped onto the bench beside me and slapped at the buttons and suddenly an Mbira shoved aside Dennis’s Mozart and then, with another press of the button, we heard the absent harp. “Why don’t we listen to one thing?” I suggested, but the girl wanted to play her way was having none of it. I knew the feeling: there’s just too much of everything in a place like this.

I strolled past the horns and trumpets with their fabulously complex plumbing (“no. 754: Cornet: 2 Stölzel Valves, 2 shanks, 2 crooks — A.G. Guichard, Paris, c. 1840”) …

… and neared again the door out the gallery and the final display cases. Here was a huge BBB-flat Tuba nicknamed “the gilded monster bass.” It was taller than I was and would have been too much even for André the Giant to wrestle with. Birds were painted on the wall just behind it flying out of the bell, as if dislodged by a blast it could never make while remanded to its cell of silence.

This lonely behemoth (the tuba not André) stood next to a case of conches. The point of this juxtaposition seemed to be that Nature produced wind instruments requiring no human intervention, could, as the tuba demonstrated, lead to absurd results. There were many, still graver implications about technology and truth.

Next to the shells were three stuffed songbirds (the European robin, the European goldfinch, and the European bee-eater) confined to glass cubicles fitted out with some scraps of their natural habitats. The inferences to be made—and heard, though not in this place—were many, among them that the repertoire of the bee-eater is more beautiful than that of a triple low B-flat tuba.

A man sat on low stool by the birds, sketching them. I watched him work for a time, until I could hear the scrape of his pencil on the paper.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)

JOE DATOR:

I thought you’d be interested to learn that I solved a little mystery that’s been nagging at me. Every so often, this Herblock cartoon goes viral all over again, for obvious reasons, and it’s almost always erroneously identified as a New Yorker cartoon (sometimes accompanied by a cockamamie story about The Washington Post refusing to run it and The New Yorker picking it up instead).

I knew it couldn’t have been in The New Yorker of “May 31, 1974” because there was no such issue, and obviously The New Yorker would never print a caption at the top, and oh yeah, there’s also the tiny little detail that no Herblock cartoon ever ran in The New Yorker.

I finally tracked down proof that it was actually in The Washington Post, on May 3rd, 1974. See attached for examples of the wrong attribution, and for the right one.

LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT

Senate Bill Would Add at Least $3.3 Trillion to Debt, Budget Office Says

Tillis Announces He Won’t Run Again as Trump Threatens Him With a Primary

A Triumphant Supreme Court Term for Trump, Fueled by Emergency Rulings

Courts Will Have to Grapple With New Limits on Their Power

Canada Will Scrap Tax That Prompted Trump to Suspend Trade Talks

Gen Z, It Turns Out, Is Great at Saving for Retirement

Jell-O With Natural Dyes? It’s Not Easy Becoming Green

THE EXPERIENCE of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena. . . . With each such victory of the human intellect, whether in history, in philosophy or in poetry, we experience a deep satisfaction: we have been cured of some ache of disorder, relieved of some oppressive burden of uncomprehended events.

― Edmund Wilson

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound (1913)

19 Comments

bharper June 30, 2025

I had a blast at the 50th Golden Gate pedistrian take over.
Rode my bike. Met my friend in the middle, had Zinfandel and salami.
The true highlight was the non appearance of closeted Republican Fienstien and her onturage because their limousine couldn’t get to the stage set up in the middle.
Got back to my tasting room job in Sonoma in time.

Rick Swanson June 30, 2025

Even Craig is using an auto-pen. :)

Harvey Reading June 30, 2025

Well, thanks for this issue. It confirmed for me my conclusion that the human species is doing all that it can to hasten its own extinction, and that it will be successful in its effort in the not too distant future. Good effen riddance!

Chuck Dunbar June 30, 2025

Dear Photo Master Falcon:

From that brave but drab little bird sitting quietly on a fencepost a few days ago—To a riot of the boldest, brightest Clarkia color. As that old song urged: ‘Wake Up Everybody!” Thanks for the beauty.

- Falcon June 30, 2025
  
  I like the way the AVA creates a tiny window…an unexpected extraction.
  
  I’m glad you liked it, Chuck, your response filled mine heart with joy.
  
  Thank you.
  
Kirk Vodopals June 30, 2025

Sacred Rock? more like Sacred Fence….

Call It As I See It June 30, 2025

TWK’s Gooses and Ganders!
Couldn’t have said it better.
But yet The Rag, another term for the AVA, still posts a flyer for No Kings 2.0. Just another paid protest thanks to the Teacher’s Union and Soros. And we wonder why our schools are failing. Don’t worry about reading, writing and math as long as you know how to properly hold a sign. Ah, let’s throw in a couple posts from the oligarch, Bernie Sanders.

Why should we expect anything less from our self proclaimed felon editor. Maybe Bruce could show up July 4 No Kings 2.0 day and get arrested, you know for old times sake. Wouldn’t that make a great Ed Notes.

- Chuck Dunbar June 30, 2025
  
  And you wonder, dear boy, why good folks take their valuable time to criticize, chastise and even mock you…Mean-spirited posts often earn the very same on the rebound.
  
  - Call It As I See It June 30, 2025
    
    What’s mean spirited? I said I agree with TWK. What I said about the protest, Teacher’s Union and Soros is my opinion. Fact, our schools are failing. And I commenting on Mr. Anderson’s proud story of being locked up, which he wrote.
    
    You see you don’t like my comment, so immediately it’s mean spirited or hateful. I actually thought I was being thoughtful towards Jailbait Bruce and telling him how he could recreate history.
    
    - gary smith June 30, 2025
      
      I don’t think you know what “jailbait” means.
      
- gary smith June 30, 2025
  
  As soon as I see Soros mentioned I know I’m reading the words of an ignoramus. As if going downtown and standing around for a couple of hours requires funding
  
  - Chuck Wilcher July 1, 2025
    
    Meanwhile Musk gets a pass.
    
Mike Jamieson June 30, 2025

It’s going to be hard to arrest him if he showed up because the police don’t seem to be present at these events:
https://youtu.be/5lw89Tl2Pz0?si=iZBxVUZG-CmIXMTC

- Call It As I See It June 30, 2025
  
  Yea, all the videos showing protesters assaulting law enforcement must be cheap fakes. Been down that road before, Karine-Jean Jamieson.
  
  - Mike Jamieson July 1, 2025
    
    The violently rioting Ukiah protesters deployed secret advanced technology that teleported the UPD and Sheriff Deputies and CHP off site to the middle of Lake Mendocino …. which is why you can’t see a single one in my video of the local No Kings event. Soros provided the tech after deploying 5 million paid rioters via his fleet of motherships borrowed from his reptilian overlords.
    
Lily June 30, 2025

Garden of E.D.en

THAT there is the old version.

THIS here is the new version…

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLJQ-ETgtiK/?igsh=ejhkZ2o2bjB1dGZn

Jim Armstrong June 30, 2025

It is encouraging to see, finally, some in-depth coverage of the proposed destruction of the Potter Valley Project.
The current iteration of Huffman’s folly has a little something for everyone except Potter Valley which has used the resource gently, wisely and productively for 100 years.

Chuck Dunbar July 1, 2025

KIND HEARTS SERVING OTHERS
Dear Ms. Mazie,

Great good fortune in your new helping venture—Kind Hearts Initiative. Many good services to be available to struggling folks and families, it looks like. It’s surely a lot to take on, and a steady, persistent, step-by-step approach will serve you well. What a worthy project. I’m sure many of us here wish you well. Good for you!

- Mazie Malone July 1, 2025
  
  Thank you Mr. Dunbar… 🌷☀️
  
  mm 💕

19 Comments

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