Mendocino County Today: Saturday 9/27/2025

WARM AND DRY weather will persist this weekend. Dry northerly flow will clear out most of the coastal stratus, allowing for better duration of coastal sunshine. Rain chances arrive late Sunday, with increasing probability for widespread rainfall and periods of breezy winds through early next week. The opportunity for additional rainfall may continue through mid-week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 47F with clear skies this Saturday morning on the coast. A lovely weekend is forecast leading to rain early next week, about an inch total it looks like currently.

ROBERT SOMERTON REPORTING FROM WESTPORT:

The Residential Construction Project at Shoreline & Cahto Mtn Road in Westport is progressing.

Rafters mostly finished, gable ends are being framed. Soon to be roofed over and fully enclosed for the winter.

THE FIRST MAJOR PACIFIC STORM OF THE RAINY SEASON SET TO HIT CALIFORNIA

by Anthony Edwards

The first major Pacific storm of the wet season is forecast to wallop the West Coast next week, bringing widespread rain and a chance of thunderstorms to Northern California.

Some Bay Area cities could record their wettest September day in decades. Showers will remain in the forecast Monday through at least Wednesday. The heaviest rain is expected along the North Coast, but downpours could strike anywhere from San Francisco to Sacramento.

Dry Weekend Gives Way To Sudden Change

After a stubborn system brought a lightning storm to the Bay Area earlier this week, the weekend is predicted to begin dry and sunny. That will change Sunday as increasing high-level clouds precede the Pacific storm.

Drizzle is possible in the Bay Area on Sunday night, but rain chances ramp up Monday as a cold front approaches Northern California. Warm, muggy air is expected to be in place ahead of the front, setting the table for scattered thunderstorms. If ingredients align, parts of the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills could be hit with strong storms, especially Shasta County, where unstable air and winds are maximized.

Steadier rain will probably arrive in the Bay Area on Monday evening, but the front could weaken considerably by the time it reaches San Francisco. If the system slows down, light rainfall totals are forecast locally. If it speeds up, it’ll likely maintain enough strength to soak parts of the Bay Area with an inch of rain or more.

Winds aren’t predicted to be strong in the Bay Area with this system, with gusts of 30 mph or weaker expected.

It’s been a long time since the Bay Area was soaked by a major September storm. San Francisco hasn’t measured more than an inch of rain in the month since 1986. Even a half-inch of rain in September is rare, occurring just once since 2000. But early-season storms are tricky to forecast.

Weather models are often overzealous with rainfall amounts before backing away in the days leading up to a storm. The North Bay is typically favored with early fall systems while the South Bay often ends up drier.

Rain showers are expected to linger across Northern California on Tuesday, where snow may mix in at the summits of Tahoe ski resorts.

Second Storm With Tropical Ties

While Monday night’s storm will probably be the strongest, a second storm expected Wednesday is interesting for its own reason.

Weather models are bouncing back and forth with its rainfall totals, as some simulate nearly an inch of rain while others stay dry. That’s partly because moisture from tropical cyclone Neoguri in the western Pacific Ocean is predicted to become entrained in the jet stream, causing a big dip in the storm track.

If the storm track dips over California, heavy rain is possible all the way toward San Francisco on Wednesday. But there’s a chance that dip happens farther out to sea, keeping California dry while the Pacific Northwest is hit with the brunt of the storm’s rain and wind.

A vast marine heat wave in the northeast Pacific Ocean could also alter the behavior of the coming storms. The humidity from the warm water may aid in more intense downpours than otherwise expected. It will also contribute to added instability to the lowest levels of the atmosphere, which could favor thunderstorms, particularly Monday.

Because downpours will likely be embedded within the broader precipitation shields, next week’s rainfall totals are expected to vary significantly from city to city. Through Wednesday night, the Weather Prediction Center forecasts about 2 inches of rain near the California-Oregon border, an inch in the North Bay, a half-inch in San Francisco and lighter totals in the East Bay and South Bay.

Although the rain probably won’t be enough to completely end fire season in most places, it should moisten vegetation considerably and lower fire risk significantly, especially in the Coastal Ranges and northern Sierra.

ISLAND MOUNTAIN POT RAID

On Sept. 23, 2025, deputies with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Marijuana Enforcement Team served three search warrants in the Island Mountain area of northern Mendocino County as part of an illegal cannabis cultivation investigation. The Trinity County Sheriff’s Office and the Butte County Sheriff’s Office assisted in the service of the warrants.

Three parcels were investigated during the service of the warrants. The parcels did not have the required county permit or state license to cultivate cannabis commercially.

During the service of the warrants, deputies eradicated about 6,259 growing cannabis plants. They also seized and destroyed more than 612 pounds of cannabis bud and shake.

Assisting environmental agencies found chemicals restricted for use in California. These included pesticides such as imidacloprid, which is highly toxic to pollinators, and myclobutanil. Both are listed on California’s Groundwater Protection List. Investigators also found bromethalin, a neurotoxic rodenticide known to kill local wildlife. All of these pesticides are prohibited for use in cannabis cultivation by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation.

No subjects were contacted on scene. This is an ongoing investigation into those responsible.

Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.

“A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can’t be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.”

– Seamus Heaney

MENDOCINO COUNTY DA FIGHTS BACK AS RECALL CAMPAIGN INTENSIFIES

by Matt LaFever

The campaign to recall Mendocino County District Attorney David Eyster is moving into a new phase, with organizers bringing on political consultants and exploring legal support as they prepare to begin signature gathering.

Eyster, who has held office since 2011, is already on the defensive. In his official response to the recall, he wrote that it has been his “honor to give [his] all to protecting the public from crime” and argued the campaign stems from dissatisfaction with just “one of the thousands upon thousands of cases” his office has handled.

That case involved former county payroll manager Chamise Cubbison, who was arrested in 2023 on felony charges of misusing $68,000 in COVID payroll funds. She spent 17 months suspended without pay before a judge dismissed the charges earlier this year, ruling there was no evidence of fraud or concealment.

For Helen Sizemore, the recall’s lead organizer, the Cubbison prosecution was the breaking point. A longtime Mendocino County resident with more than five decades in politics — from serving as a state Democratic delegate to working in Sacramento and now as vice chair of the Inland Democratic Club — Sizemore said she is channeling that experience into the recall effort because, in her words, “the county can’t afford his ego.”

Eyster countered that the prosecution was grounded in law enforcement’s investigation. He noted that the Sheriff’s Office originally recommended three charges, but his office reduced that to one, and that he brought in an independent prosecutor because the defendants were county employees. “The Sheriff’s Office did its job. I did my job. The special prosecutor did her job… the court process was fair, correct and legal,” he wrote.

Under California law, a recall campaign begins with filing and publishing a formal notice, which the targeted official has the opportunity to answer in writing. Once the petition format is approved, organizers have 180 days to gather signatures equal to between 10% and 30% of registered voters, depending on the jurisdiction. If enough signatures are verified, a recall election is scheduled.

Mendocino County Registrar of Voters Katrina Bartolomie confirmed her office received a Notice of Intent to Recall on Sept. 12, backed by more than the required 60 valid proponents. Eyster filed his opposition statement on Sept. 19. Bartolomie said organizers have since published their notice and plan to deliver copies to her office on Sept. 29. If the petition is approved, the campaign will need about 8,200 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Sizemore said the campaign is already preparing for that stage. Volunteers are being trained on signature collection, and organizers are considering keeping an election lawyer on retainer.

While the Cubbison matter sparked the recall push, Eyster’s critics point to other controversies as evidence of what they describe as a pattern. His cannabis restitution program—derided by opponents as the “Mendo Shakedown”—has long drawn fire, as has his handling of police misconduct cases in Ukiah and Willits. The passage of Assembly Bill 759 in 2022 also intensified criticism. The law shifted district attorney elections to presidential years, extending Eyster’s current term by two years. What might have been the end of his tenure in 2026 now stretches to 2028, a timeline that frustrates opponents who note that Eyster has already run unopposed in three straight elections.

Eyster, in his filing, dismissed the criticisms as partisan and reiterated his intention to serve out his full term. “I am proud of my non-partisan record,” he wrote. Supporters of Eyster point to his prosecutorial record as proof of effectiveness, citing his decision to personally take over the Hopkins Fire case — which led to a 15-year prison sentence and millions in restitution — as well as the successful prosecution of the “Covelo Six” for kidnapping, torture and murder.

If the recall qualifies and voters choose to remove Eyster, California Elections Code §11382, passed in 2023, specifies that the ballot would not include a replacement candidate. Instead, the office would be left vacant “until it is filled according to law.” That could mean an appointment by the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors or, potentially, the governor. County officials have not yet clarified how that process would unfold.

Critics argue that Eyster’s power has gone largely unchecked for more than a decade, while supporters say his record speaks for itself. For now, the recall effort is ramping up, and Eyster has made clear he plans to fight back and serve through December 2028.

MendoFever reached out to District Attorney David Eyster for additional comment on the recall effort but received no response before publication.

The entirety of the response Eyster wrote to the recall effort and submitted to the Elections office can be reviewed below:

(mendofever.com)

MENDOCINO COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS HIGHLIGHTS [sic] PROGRESS IN COMMUNITY HEALTH, PUBLIC SAFETY [i.e., nitrous oxide rhetoric], AND ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP [commercial electric charging stations?]

At its September 23, 2025, regular meeting, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors acted on several important items designed to strengthen public health, support local services, protect the environment, and enhance community resources.

Key actions included:

Promoting Public Health & Safety: The Board adopted a resolution directing Mendocino County Public Health to address the illicit sale and use of nitrous oxide through education initiatives and the development of a local ordinance.

Investing in Parks & Community Resources: The Board authorized moving forward with the Bower Park Restoration and Improvement Project in partnership with MARZ Engineering, securing over $1 million in funding for park restoration and improvements.

Advancing Education & Youth Resources: A new partnership between the Mendocino County Library and Mendocino Unified School District was approved to launch the “Student Success Card” Program, providing students with library cards that offer free access to online tutoring, academic resources, and digital learning tools. The Library also accepted grant funding for the Zip Books Program, expanding access to books for residents.

Clean Energy & Infrastructure: The Board provided direction to create a countywide fee structure for electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. The plan will align with local competitor rates and will be revisited after six months of operation with cost recovery data, allowing prices to be adjusted as appropriate. This supports sustainability and convenient access for residents and visitors.

Mendocino County remains dedicated to fostering a safe, sustainable, and thriving County. Through these initiatives, the County continues to support its residents, protect the environment, and invest in the future of our communities.

A READER WRITES re the County’s modified copy policy: “Hmmm. The new standard copy fee rates will be as management sees fit. Each unit/ department pays for the copy paper they use and toner. Sheet by sheet. Was 10 cents a page black n white and a few cents more for color. 100% love to spend oodles on software and computers that are replaced constantly. Staff barely know how to use the programs they already are tasked to navigate, time for a new one yippie!!! The nitrous ban long overdue. Great to see something functional that might happen in a freaking timely manner. That will be shocking!”

JOHN FLAMMING:

I retired from Mendocino County FCS as a Sr. Program Manager in March 2023. I worked in FCS from May 2008 through my retirement in 2013.

I supervised the Wraparound program from May 2008 to October 2012. From 2012 to March 2016, I supervised the Integrated Services Unit responsible for facilitating Child and Family Team Meeting (CFTM) and implementing division wide Safety Organized Practice in line with directives from the California Department of Social Services, Children’s Division. In March of 2023 I promoted to Sr. Program Manager, managing the Willits FCS office. My responsibilities included Emergency Response Unit, Continuing services unit, Placement Unit and administrative support unit. In 2018/2019 my assignment changed as we adopted a county wide approach with ER investigations and Continuing Services units. One manager would be managing all of ER and one would manage all of continuing. My assignment changed to Placement, Resource Family Approval, Foster Care Eligibility and Wraparound.

I state the above to provide context to what I now will express as the main concern here for me. It is not about the personalities (although those are concerning) it is about the practice of effectively investigating, intervening when needed, case work and most importantly collaborative engagement with the children, their families and their supports, with community partners – ICWA, RCS, Tapestry Family Services, Youth Project, School Districts, Mendocino County Office of Education, Juvenile Probation, Foster Family Agencies, the Juvenile Court, including Juvenile Court Officers, County Counsel and attorneys for parents and children, and law enforcement agencies.

These partners should be alarmed. I do not know if they are, or what they are doing. I do hope they will begin to have conversations with M.C. SS and FCS leadership.

In this article there are expressed concerns that are worrisome. There are allegations in this article that indicate deep issues of non compliance with California Department of Social Services. In 2013 (or so) CADSS developed the Inter-Agency Core Practice Model [IACPM].

This model defines specific practice behaviors by CWS staff (in all counties, not just Mendocino) to follow when working with families. They include: respectful teaming/collaboration with families and their supports, and partner agencies (identified above). Also included in the IACPM are leadership practice behaviors that also include; respectful communication and transparency, and collaboration with their staff, families, and their supports and partner agencies.

This practice model was adopted by CADSS to provide better outcomes for children, families and local communities.

If FCS leadership is not following these practice model behaviors, it is reasonable to predict poor outcomes for children who have been harmed or are at risk of harm.

It is not about the individual staff per se, it is about the increased risk of a child remaining in a dangerous place.

I encourage anyone directly involved, the partner agencies, and the BOS to look into this situation. I believe they should advocate for an open conversation with SS FCS leadership to request they follow the IACPM, to ensure respect, transparency and collaboration at all levels happen.

In respect and peace,

John Flammang

MIKE GENIELLA: Speaking up for Evan Trotter.

No doubt the circumstances surrounding Keith McCallum’s tragic death are widely known. I am not questioning the details. I am concerned, however, about the spotlight returning to Evan Trotter’s role. I know Evan personally. Since this tragedy, Evan, a skilled contractor, has committed himself to a sober, drug-free life. He works with other young men, helping them stay the course. Every year, he quietly memorializes Keith McCallum’s death. This year, Evan was accompanied by his young son. I admire the life Evan has created for himself and his immediate family, and the work he does to ease the burdens of drug/alcohol abuse that others endure. I support Evan and applaud the man he has become.

MATT KENDALL: Mike I feel the same way. We see a lot of tragedy in our county and it hits even harder because often, we know people on both sides. It’s really hard when we see young people making mistakes which we can’t comprehend. Sometimes things occur which cause people to begin clawing at the scars and reopening old wounds. When people seek atonement by living the best life they can, treating others well and moving forward, I’m not certain we can ask for much more than that.

BARBARA ORTEGA: It was kind of a strange story. I think the point was to call the Doctor a hypocrite, and the details make the parents look pretty bad. There was an awful lot about a minor’s actions though, facilitated by parental failures. Glad to hear that he turned it around.

PRESERVE RAILROAD LINE FROM CLOVERDALE TO WILLITS

Editor:

The hoped for cross-country “Rail Renaissance” described in the Sept. 21 edition of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat could also happen in Sonoma and Mendocino counties if state Sen. Mike McGuire’s Great Redwood Trail would be built next to the tracks from Cloverdale to Willits instead of tearing out the rails as currently planned.

At Willits, the railroad would connect with the Skunk Train, which has been working on adding freight service, as well as passenger service, to Fort Bragg. The tracks from Cloverdale to Willits, unlike the tracks in the Eel River Canyon north of Willits, are on stable ground and easily accessible. It is poor planning — and totally unnecessary — to destroy such a valuable resource for our region and for the health of the planet.

B.B. Kamoroff

Willits

1916 map of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad [excerpt of southern Mendocino County]

UNITY CLUB NEWS

by Miriam Martinez

I had fun at the Fair and I hope you did as well.

Sometimes when you volunteer to help at a Community Event, you just want to get through it.

Not for me, not this time; I felt energized and delighted.

Maybe it was the Coastal theme. Maybe it was the people I worked with. I'm just glad to be a little part of our Apple Fair.

It's time for the Unity Club to return to regular business. Our first meeting of the 2025-26 year will be held Thursday, October 2nd in the Fairgrounds Dining Room, at 1:30pm.

Our hostess crew will be Mary Ann Grzenda, Jean Condon, Janet Lombard, Dawn Trygstad, and Mary Pat Palmer.

What a line up!

If you heard good things about the Unity Club at the Fair, visiting Hendy Woods, or just out and about, this would be a great meeting for you to attend.

Come join us for an hour and see if we're some folks you'd like to be with.

We will hear from our Librarian Liz about the reopening of the Community Lending Library at the October meeting.

I'm so happy the heat got beat by the gentle rain.

Ah, that's better.

See you Thursday, October 2nd at 1:30pm in the Dining Room for our first meeting of the year.

JAYMA SHIELDS-SPENCE:

Thank you for all the love and support many of you have shown. My dad's memorial will be on Saturday, October 4th from 3-6 p.m. at the Laytonville Rodeo Grounds. If you are interested in helping, please contact me or my husband Roland at our office (707) 984-8089. PS- Happy Birthday Brother Jim!

The Observer

PO Box 490

Laytonville, CA 95454

[email protected]

(707) 984-6223

FORT BRAGG’S NOYO HARBOR OPENS ICEHOUSE PROJECT FOR PUBLIC TOUR

by Matt LaFever

The Noyo Harbor District is inviting the community to step inside the future of the local fishing industry with a public walk-through of its new icehouse construction project on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025, according to a press release.

The 20-ton flake ice facility, funded through California Jobs First as part of the Noyo Harbor Revitalization Project, will provide a critical service to Fort Bragg’s commercial fleet. Once complete, fishermen will be able to load freshly made ice directly onto their boats, keeping locally caught salmon, crab, black cod and other species cold from sea to market, the district said.

“More than ice, this project is about securing the future of our fishing fleet and working waterfront,” Harbormaster Anna Neumann said in the release. “We want the community to see this milestone up close, because their support has made it possible.”

Ice is the backbone of the commercial fishing industry. Without it, fish quality deteriorates within hours, threatening both food safety and market value. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes that freshly harvested fish must be chilled to just above freezing quickly to preserve texture and flavor. Flake ice, in particular, clings to fish and cools evenly, making it the industry standard for small and mid-sized vessels.

For a port like Noyo Harbor, which has supplied California with seafood for generations, reliable ice is not a luxury but a necessity. In other West Coast communities, broken or outdated ice plants have forced fishermen to haul ice from miles away, cutting into profits and sometimes costing days of work. The new facility is designed to prevent that scenario, ensuring Fort Bragg’s fleet can keep fishing and keep its catch fresh.

The public tour will take place at 19101 S. Harbor Drive between 11 a.m. and noon on Oct. 7, according to the release.

For more information, the Noyo Harbor District can be reached at 707-964-4719 or [email protected].

(mendofever.com)

LONELY PLANET AT THE MENDOCINO THEATER COMPANY

Set in the 1970s, when AIDS cast a deadly shadow over the gay community and medical answers were nonexistent, the play follows two friends, Steven Jordon (Jody) and Brady Voss (Carl). On the surface, their dialogue seems casual, yet beneath it lies a deep terror—fear of succumbing to the same fate as so many of the men they know.

Their interactions reveal profound caring, empathy, and courage.

The play made me laugh, and it made me cry.

It is deeply moving—an MTC production not to be missed.

Margaret M ORourke, [email protected]

MANSON FAMILY'S FAILED PLOT TO EXPAND TO NORTHERN CALIF. MAY HAVE ENDED IN MURDER

A forgotten arrest and an unsolved double homicide tether Mendocino County to California's darkest cult

by Matt LaFever

Nothing symbolized the death of the peace-and-love era more than the Manson murders in Los Angeles. In August 1969, a message scrawled in blood — “Pig” — marked the scene where actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and four others were slaughtered inside her Hollywood Hills home. The following night, Charles Manson’s followers struck again, killing Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and leaving behind the words “Death to pigs” and “Helter Skelter.” These crimes brought the utopian dreams of the 1960s crashing down, cementing Manson as a dark icon in American culture.

The Tate and LaBianca murders defined the end of the ’60s. Yet a year earlier, far from Hollywood, Manson’s shadow passed through Mendocino County.

The Witches of Mendocino

In June 1968 — just weeks after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles — an “irate mother” in rural Mendocino County called deputies with a chilling report: Her teenage son had come home “under the influence” after being drugged with LSD. The Ukiah Daily Journal splashed the headline: “Angry Mother Triggers County Marijuana Raid.”

Deputies descended on a house tucked between Boonville and Philo, today the heart of Anderson Valley wine country. Inside, they found marijuana, LSD and a loose collective of young drifters. Nine adults and three 17-year-olds were arrested. Only two of the adults were locals; the rest were branded “hippies” and “floaters.” Among them were two women whose names would later echo through America’s darkest headlines: Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins.

Brunner, a former UC Berkeley assistant librarian, was Manson’s first true disciple — the woman who took him in when he was fresh out of prison. She followed him from the Haight to Mendocino to Spahn Ranch and later bore his first child. Though not present at the Tate murders, her loyalty carried her into later violence: In 1971, she joined Manson Family members in a notorious armed standoff at a Los Angeles gun store. She was sentenced to two decades behind bars but was paroled in 1977.

Susan Atkins, who gave deputies that night her alias of “Sadie Mae Glutz,” was perhaps the most infamous of Manson’s women. Atkins was one of four who stormed Sharon Tate’s Benedict Canyon home in August 1969. In her early confessions, she admitted stabbing the actress, who was eight months pregnant, and smearing the word “PIG” on the front door in Tate’s blood — details she later recanted but that cemented her notoriety. She had called Manson Christlike and reportedly bragged about the killings to her cellmates.

Both Atkins and Brunner also played roles in the Family’s first murder: the July 1969 torture and killing of Gary Hinman, a UCLA grad student and musician. Over two days in his Topanga Canyon home, Manson slashed Hinman’s ear before leaving Atkins and Brunner with Bobby Beausoleil, who ultimately stabbed Hinman to death. Before fleeing, one of them smeared “Political Piggy” on the wall in Hinman’s blood — a rehearsal for the carnage still to come.

Author Jess Bravin’s account in “Squeaky,” about Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, makes clear that this was the prelude: In the months before deputies swept in, Manson had sent the women north, hoping to “branch out to other places” and build a base in Mendocino.

They settled in a remote cabin, spreading drugs and free love among the locals. It didn’t take long for resentment to build. Older men in the area bristled at the women’s preference for teenage and 20-something companions. After deputies hauled the women off to jail, those spurned men turned vindictive. They ransacked the cabin, smashing the stereo, destroying the women’s bus and scattering their clothes across the yard. In orange paint, they splattered the walls and scrawled a warning: “GET OUT OF HERE OR ELSE.”

After the bust, Brunner, Atkins and the others were booked into Mendocino County Jail. The Ukiah Daily Journal described them as “dressed to the teeth” when they appeared in court, a stark contrast to the jailhouse blues they had worn earlier. On Aug. 30, 1968, they were sentenced to 60 days in jail and handed a three-year suspended sentence.

Occupation: ‘Minister’

Another of Manson’s followers, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, was just 19 when she met him in 1967. She quickly became one of his most loyal devotees — not part of the Tate–LaBianca murders but a visible defender of Manson who decades later would serve more than 30 years in prison for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford.

Fromme’s story, as chronicled by Bravin, reveals the context for Manson’s arrest by Mendocino deputies.

In the summer of 1967, Manson, Fromme and Brunner were hitchhiking through the tiny town of Leggett, where Humboldt and Mendocino counties meet. They encountered local minister Dean Morehouse, and Manson quickly insinuated himself into the household. According to Bravin’s book, Manson gave Morehouse LSD and began a sexual relationship with the minister’s 15-year-old daughter, Ruth.

On July 28, 1967, deputies arrested Manson after Ruth’s mother reported her daughter was living “unchaperoned” with him. When officers arrived, Manson told them they’d have to take her “by force.” He was booked on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and delaying peace officers in carrying out their duties. On his jail intake form, he listed his occupation as “minister.”

Bravin recalls that Ruth’s connection to Manson continued even after his arrest. He visited her at the home she shared with her boyfriend, where he led her into a bedroom for what he called a “conjugal welcome.” The encounter became even more disturbing when Manson brought Fromme into the bed with them.

The Trolls

Author Jeff Guinn, in “Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson,” describes another short-lived episode: a visit by Manson, Brunner and Fromme to the Mendocino Coast. At the time, Mendocino was a bohemian haven. The group slept in a Volkswagen bus parked on the bluffs but quickly wore out their welcome. The women wore skirts sewn from old blankets, trash piled up around their van, and locals began to see them as a nuisance. Among themselves, they called the group the Trolls.

One evening, when a local man joined their circle and drew attention away from him, Manson snapped. He hurled a cup of wine at the man in a flash of rage, and the next day, the Trolls packed up and left town, their coastal experiment cut short.

‘Mommy and Grandma Are Dead’

Just after 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 14, 1968, a 7-year-old boy left his home near Ukiah to look for his mother. Instead, he found her lying on the ground outside — the victim, as the Ukiah Daily Journal described, of a “brutal strangler.” Shocked, he ran to his great-grandmother’s house next door, only to discover her dead on the floor as well. He then sought help from a neighbor, telling them simply: “Mommy and grandma are dead.”

The victims were Nancy Warren, 64, and her pregnant granddaughter, Clyda Jean Dulaney, 24. Both women had been strangled with new leather bootlaces and were fully clothed. Investigators at first suggested robbery as a motive, noting that both appeared to have been “savagely beaten,” particularly Warren.

The night before, the women had been dropped off at the rural property by Clyda’s husband, Don Dulaney, a local California Highway Patrol officer. He told authorities he was headed to an academy refresher course that evening. Warren was well known in the community as the proprietor of an antique shop, located on the same property where she was killed.

Later reports indicated that a jewelry box containing $5,000 worth of stones was missing from a closet in Clyda’s trailer. Strangely, investigators noted, a plastic box and a glass jar holding about $300 in cash — stored in the same closet — had not been taken. A heavy overnight downpour obscured any footprints, and fingerprints lifted from the scene proved “inconclusive.”

With few leads, the case quickly went cold. But in December 1969, just months after the Tate–LaBianca murders in Los Angeles, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office reopened the file. Sheriff Reno Bartolomie told reporters there was a “slight possibility” of a connection between the Ukiah killings and the Manson murders, pointing out that both crimes were “senseless” and appeared to lack any clear motive. Like the Warren–Dulaney case, the Tate and LaBianca homes had valuables left untouched.

Bartolomie later said the idea of a link first occurred to him while watching television coverage of the Tate killings, when a broadcaster mentioned Susan Atkins. According to the Daily Journal, Bartolomie noted that several individuals connected to the “Witches of Mendocino” Boonville raid were in Ukiah “while awaiting disposition of their cases” during and after the time of the Warren and Dulaney killings. Charles Manson himself was also reported to have visited Atkins while she awaited trial.

To this day, the double homicide remains unsolved. No definitive evidence has tied the Manson Family to the crime, but in Mendocino County, the shadow of that possibility has never fully lifted.

ED NOTES:

The Manson Girls lived on Gwschwend Road, Navarro
Most of the people who remember the Dulaney case remember it only in the bizarre context of the Manson Family because it's mentioned in the books on Manson, and it's mentioned in these books because the Manson Family lived in the Anderson Valley at the time.

On the rainy morning of October 14th, 1968, six miles south of Ukiah, a seven-year-old boy ran out of his trailer home and found his mother dead on the wet ground outside the front door. The boy ran for his grandmother's trailer nearby. She was dead too, garroted like the boy's mother with a pair of long leather boot laces.

The dead women were Nancy Warren, 64, and her granddaughter, Clyda Jean Dulaney, 24, wife of CHP officer, Don Delaney.

Clyda was 8 months pregnant.

The seven-year-old was Johnny Ussery whose younger brothers Lane, 5, and Brett, 4, were still asleep. The three boys were from Clyda's first marriage to a logger named John Ussery of Eugene, Oregon. Clyda had left Ussery for Don Dulaney, a Ukiah-based CHP officer twice her age. She was pregnant with Dulaney's child when she was murdered.

Clyda's former husband was quickly eliminated as a suspect when it was verified that he'd been in Medford, Oregon, at the time of the murders.

Finding his mother and his grandmother dead, Johnny had calmly returned to his trailer to get his younger brothers dressed, then, his two little brothers in tow, the three boys trudged south to the home of Don Torell where Johnny told Mr. and Mrs. Torrell that “Mommy and Grandma are dead.”

A swarm of deputies led by Sheriff Reno Bartolomie was soon on the scene.

The sole witness to the previous night's mayhem, which occurred in a driving rain that obliterated the footprints assumed to have surrounded Clyda Dulaney's outdoors corpse, was Mrs. Warren's miniature dachshund.

The two dead women were fully clothed. They'd both been brutally beaten about the face before they'd been strangled with brand new hightop leather boot laces, two turns of which had been pulled tight around the neck before the laces were knotted in back.

Mrs. Warren operated Nancy’s Antique Sales on Highway 101 south of Burke Hill on the two-lane portion of the highway about where the strawberry fields and sales stand are today. Clyda Dulaney was a graduate of Ukiah high school who, only months before, had left her husband for officer Dulaney, 49, a man several years older than her father.

Clyda's former husband had been engaged in a bitter custody dispute with Clyda for his three boys. Mr. Ussery said Clyda had deserted him and the boys for Dulaney, evidence, he insisted, that Clyda was unstable and therefore not a fit mother.

Robbery was the apparent motive. A metal cash box had been rifled and left on a table although a plastic box and glass jar containing approximately $300 in cash rested in plain sight in a closet of the older woman’s trailer.

Officer Dulaney lived in Ukiah with a teenage daughter from his previous marriage while Clyda and her children lived on her grandmother's property at the south end of Burke Hill. Dulaney said they lived apart while he looked for a house in the Ukiah area that would accommodate him, his pregnant new wife Clyda, her three boys and his daughter. When Clyda gave birth to their child, Dulaney would be supporting a family of seven, and he said he wanted a house big enough for all of them.

Dulaney was in Sacramento for a special CHP training course when his new wife and her grandmother were found dead. The investigative assumption from the beginning was that the two women were murdered after he was either in Sacramento or on the road there.

The CHP officer told the Sheriff’s office that he dropped his wife and stepchildren at Nancy’s Antique Shop at 9:30 the previous night with the intention of continuing on to Sacramento. But, he said, he'd forgotten his uniform, so he returned to his Ukiah apartment, picked up the uniform and continued on to Sacramento via Highway 20 east where he signed in at the Academy at 1:45am.

A neighbor said she saw a blue pickup truck leaving an orchard near the antique shop about 8:15 the morning the women were found. She said five persons "wearing hippie-type clothing" were in the vehicle.

Dulaney, 49, who was described as genuinely distraught by investigators, quickly returned to Ukiah.

“The only information I had was what I had read in the newspapers," Dulaney told the Ukiah Daily Journal. He said he and his expanded family had been watching The Wonderful World of Disney at Dulaney’s Ukiah apartment before he, Clyda and the boys headed south for Clyda Dulaney's trailer six miles to the south. The family had left Ukiah about 8:45. Dulaney said he dropped his wife and the three boys off at their temporary home and headed for Sacramento where he was scheduled to begin a CHP refresher course the next day, Monday morning. Dulaney said that he had reached Highway 20 before remembering that he had failed to bring his uniform. He then returned to Ukiah picked up his uniform and resumed his trip to Sacramento where he logged in at 1:45am.

Dulaney hired Timothy O’Brien, a Ukiah attorney who often represented law enforcement people. O'Brien, who soon afterwards became a superior court judge, said that Dulaney had been "deeply concerned over any false impression which might have been gained regarding his cooperation with the Sheriff’s Department following the death of his wife and child."

O'Brien helped Dulaney with his statement for the police. “When the statement was completed, I signed it,” Dulaney said. “There was no lack of consideration.”

Sheriff Bartolomie said he interviewed 35 suspects, referring in one newspaper account to "the hamstrings of the Warren Court " which, the Sheriff suggested, had prevented him from detaining a trio of roaming purse snatchers who'd robbed a Ukiah matron in the days prior to the Burke Hill murders. The Sheriff thought the three transients could well have murdered the two women, but, lacking evidence to hold them, sent them on their itinerant way.

A year later, in 1969, following the gruesome killings of Sharon Tate and friends in Los Angeles, Bartolomie said he thought the Manson Family may have also been responsible for the unsolved murders of Clyda Dulaney and Mrs. Warren. The Sheriff said both the Tate murders and the two murders south of Ukiah were “in the senseless category.”

And the Manson Family had been in Mendocino County at the time of the Dulaney and Warren murders.

Seven persons belonging to a nomadic cult were arrested on drug charges in Navarro in the Anderson Valley on June 22, 1968. Susan Denise Atkins, 19, aka Sadie Mae Glutz, was among those arrested. Additionally, “Several Mansonites were guests of a Ukiah man at his home off Boonville Road,” reported the Ukiah Daily Journal.

But there was never any evidence linking the Manson Family or Dulaney or Clyda Dulaney's former husband to the crime. Someone or someones came in off 101 in the night, took the money they could see, strangled the two women they found there, and continued their journey to whatever unlucky destination called them. (Research by Deborah Silva)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, September 26, 2025

DUSTIN ALLEN, 36, Willits. Under influence, drinking in public, contempt of court.

JORGE ALVARADO, 19, Ukiah. Concealed dirk-dagger.

CURTIS EVANS, 43, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

MANUEL GUZMAN, 50, Ukiah. DUI with priors.

SHAUN LELL, 46, Ukiah. Disobeying court order.

JOHN MURPHY, 39, Ukiah Controlled substance, paraphernalia.

MARIA PEREIRA, 31, Fort Bragg. Disobeying court order.

RYAN TERZAN, 49, Petaluma/Ukiah. DUI with priors.

KEVIN WORLEY, 33, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

SACRAMENTO GROUPS SAY NO TO TRUMP REGIME'S RACIAL PROFILING AND VIOLENCE AGAINST IMMIGRANTS

by Dan Bacher

NorCal Resist, the Center on Race, Immigration, and Social Justice at Sacramento State and the Sacramento Poor People’s Campaign held a vigil and rally at the Robert Matsui Federal Courthouse in Sacramento on Thursday, September 18, to loudly say NO to racial profiling and NO to ICE’s lawless violence against immigrant workers in Sacramento and across the country.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/24/2345205/-Sacramento-Groups-Say-No-to-Trump-Regime-s-Racial-Profiling-and-Violence-Against-Immigrants

*La Blanche et la Noire* (1913) by Félix Vallotton

THE LAKE PILLSBURY DILEMMA

by Betsy Cawn

A couple of weeks ago, Fred Gardner asked what my thoughts are about the Lake Pillsbury dilemma are, and here is my reply:

I have followed the Lake Pillsbury dilemma since 2006, and during the years since Congressman Huffman got involved, kept up with the various governmental exchanges — mostly by a newly attentive Board of Supervisors, and especially by the District 3 Supervisor Ed Crandell.

I’ve also maintained attention to the water storage and distribution services in both Mendocino and Lake Counties, with a closer eye on special districts and their innovative collaboration in the Ukiah Valley, for example.

I cannot provide any reasoned (or legally citable) argument for what I would prefer as the “solution” to the problem, but for what it's worth:

1. The State (Governor, Governor’s Office of Land Use and Innovation — formerly the Office of Planning and Research, Departments of Conservation, Water Resources, Forestry and Fire Protection, Public Health, et cetera) should — through the California Public Utilities Commission — take eminent domain control of PG&E’s Lake Pillsbury and delegate ownership of the lake to the County, through the State Lands Commission (as it did in 1973, with the disposition of Clear Lake as a Public Trust Asset “managed” by the County of Lake).

2. Surrounding beneficiary counties (Humboldt, Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, Solano, and Yolo) should be required to compensate the county for the water received from Lake County’s headwaters, for the purpose of maintaining the headwater facilities within Lake County that provide water supplies to those outside counties.

3. PG&E should be required to provide resources to install the originally-required fish ladder(s) that were supposed to be part of the original construction project, in line with its 2005 statewide “Land Stewardship Program.”

4. The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board should revisit its role as the authority governing the Eel River Watershed, and provide technical watershed restoration and economic sustainability of the Humboldt and Mendocino County Public Trust Asset.

[Legal “ownership” of the Eel River Watershed was claimed by NCRWQCB in 2005, within the contents of that Board’s Prop. 50-funded Integrated Regional Water Management Plan. Lake County’s official responsible for Lake’s IRWMP explained that the County did not want to get into a battle over water rights when the Lake County Board of Supervisors approved the 2005 NCRWQCB plan without dispute.]

5. The US Forestry Service should create mutually beneficial road and public safety service agreements* with the County of Lake, and the Forestry Service should provide Snow Mountain Watershed and the Snow Mountain - Berryessa Wilderness with ecosystem management services including the private lands belonging to the County of Lake’s unincorporated territories (within the jurisdictional boundary of the county’s Watershed Protection District).

6. The Mendocino Inland Power & Water District, Russian River Water District, Redwood Valley Water District, et al, should enter into water delivery contracts amounting to the cost of maintaining the Potter Valley components of the system. [I think some of this is already being done.]

7. The US Armey Corps of Engineers should be assigned the responsibility for maintenance of all of the facilities on the “South Fork” of the Eel River, and work with the available supplier agreements to support enlargement of Lake Mendocino and operational sustainability of Coyote Dam.

8. Jared Huffman should . . . [expletive deleted].

I know I don’t have all the parts and pieces correctly specified, but how is that for a start?

Betsy

*For good measure, the USFS should enforce the federal laws prohibiting the transport of cannabis and cannabis related materials on federal roads in the County of Lake. The other counties may or may not want that option, but I and several other environmental advocates in Lake County do.

FIGURING OUT HOW MANY HOMES CALIFORNIA NEEDS IS MORE ART THAN SCIENCE

by Ben Christopher

Imagine you’ve finally taken your car to the mechanic to investigate that mysterious warning light that’s been flashing on your dashboard for the past week and a half.

The mechanic informs you that your car’s brake fluid is too low. Dangerously low. Your brake fluid supply, he says, has reached “crisis” levels, which sounds both scary and very expensive.

Naturally, you would prefer that your car have a non-critical amount of brake fluid. “How much more do I need?” you ask.

“A quart,” the mechanic responds. “No, actually, three quarts. Or maybe seven gallons — but only routed to your rear brakes. Actually, let’s settle on half an ounce.”

Such is the situation with California’s housing shortage.

For nearly a decade now, the Legislature has been churning out bills, Attorney General Rob Bonta has been filing lawsuits and Gov. Gavin Newsom has been revamping agencies, dashing off executive orders and quoting Ezra Klein with the explicit goal of easing the state’s chronic undersupply of places to live.

California simply doesn’t have enough housing and this shortage is the leading cause of our housing affordability concerns — virtually everyone in and around the state government, along with the vast majority of academics who have studied the issue, seems now to agree on this point.

This consensus was on display this year when lawmakers passed two sweeping changes to state housing law, one that shields apartment developments from environmental litigation and the other that would permit denser development near major public transit stops in big cities. Both were legislative non-starters just a few years ago. These days even the opponents of these bills have accepted the premise that the state faces a “housing shortage,” a term evoked at least 30 times in committee hearings and floor speeches this year.

Now, if only anyone could agree on how big the housing shortage actually is.

Plenty of people have tried to put a number on the problem.

In 2015, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which serves as a policy analysis shop and think tank for the Legislature, took an early crack at quantifying the state’s shortage by calculating how many additional units major metro areas would have had to build over the prior three decades to keep housing cost inflation on par with that of the rest of the country.

It came up with 2.7 million missing units.

A year later, consulting giant McKinsey one-upped the LAO, putting the state’s “housing shortfall” at 3.5 million houses, apartments and condos, a number Newsom campaigned on.

Not all estimates hit seven digits. In 2024, the housing policy nonprofit Up For Growth published the more modest estimated shortfall of 840,000 units, which comes pretty close to the 820,000 Freddie Mac put forward a few years earlier.

California Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing, has counted the deficit at 1.3 million units — but not just any units. That’s how many homes the state needs to add that are affordable to people making under a certain income.

Then, this summer, a group of housing analysts including an economist at Moody’s Analytics, came up with the strikingly low figure of just 56,000 — though the authors acknowledged that it’s probably an underestimate.

Estimates of the nation’s overall housing supply are similarly all over the place: From as high as 8.2 million to 1.5 million (and, in one controversial paper, zero).

What Even Is A Housing Shortage?

The concept of a “housing shortage” is, in theory, pretty simple, said Anjali Kolachalam, an analyst at Up For Growth.

“It’s basically just the gap between the housing you have and the housing you need,” she said.

In practice, defining and then setting out to quantify the “housing you need” is an exercise fraught with messy data, guestimation and an inconvenient need for judgement calls.

Most estimates begin with a target vacancy rate. In any reasonably well-functioning housing market, the logic goes, some houses and apartments sit empty, either because they’re between renters, they’ve just been built or sold, they’re being fixed or renovated or they’re someone’s second home. A modest vacancy rate is what allows you to pull up Zillow or Craigslist and not get a “No Results Found” error. A very low one suggests there aren’t enough homes to go around.

But choosing a “healthy” vacancy rate — one that reflects a functional housing market — and then backing out the number of additional homes needed to hit it, is more art than science. Most estimates turn to historical data to find some level when supply and demand weren’t completely out of whack. Whether that halcyon period of relative affordability is 2015 or 2006 or 2000 or 1980 varies by researcher and, likely, by the region being considered.

Beyond that, many researchers have tried to put a value on what is sometimes called “pent up” demand or “missing households.” Those are all the people who would have gone off and gotten their own apartment or bought their own place, but, because of the unavailability of affordable places to live, have opted to keep living with housemates, with parents or, in more extreme cases, without shelter of any kind.

Absent a survey of every living person, there’s no way to precisely measure how many people fall into this camp.

“This notion of ‘pent up demand’ is necessarily in an economist’s judgment call,” said Elena Patel, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who helped put together a nationwide shortage estimate last year (4.9 million).

These variations in methods help explain some of the differences in the shortage estimates. Other differences pop-up thanks to the vagaries of data.

The Moody’s Analytics-led report, for example, calculated a national shortage of roughly 2 million units by adding together both the number of new units needed to raise the overall vacancy rate and the homes needed to backfill their measure of “pent up” demand. But for its California-specific estimate, the data wasn’t available to do the latter, potentially leaving out a big chunk of the statewide shortage.

Then some estimates differ because the analysts are defining the shortage in a completely different way.

The California Housing Partnership looks at the difference between the number of households deemed by federal housing guidelines to have “very” or “extremely” low incomes and the number of units that those households could conceivably rent with less than 30% of their incomes.

That gap of 1.3 million gets at a problem totally distinct from an overall shortage of homes.

Finally, there’s the question of scale. Housing markets are, on the whole, local. A national shortage is going to add together San Francisco and Detroit, masking the extremes of both. A shortage estimate for a state as large and diverse as California may have the same problem.

“It is like looking for a weather forecast for a trip to the beach and being told that the average temperature nationwide is likely to be 67 degrees,” the authors of the Moody’s-led analysis wrote.

Why Estimate A Shortage?

What might be more valuable than fixating on any one shortage estimate, said Daniel McCue, a researcher at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, is to look at all the estimates together and appreciate that, by and large, they’re all huge.

“Whether it’s one-and-a-half million or five-and-a-half million, these are big numbers,” he said. That leads to an inescapable takeaway, he said. “There’s so much to do. There’s so far to go.”

Patel, from Brookings, said trying to put a precise tally on what is ultimately the somewhat nebulous concept of a “housing shortage” is still a worthwhile exercise because it gives lawmakers and planners a benchmark against which to measure progress.

How much additional taxpayer money should a state throw at affordable housing development? How aggressive should a locality be in pursuing changes to local zoning? “The more concrete you can be in policy making land, the better,” she said.

The State of California does in fact have its own set of concrete numbers.

Every eight years, the Department of Housing and Community Development issues planning goals to regions across the state — a number of additional homes, broken down by affordability level, that every municipality should plan for. These are, effectively, California government’s official estimates of the state shortage.

To cobble together these numbers, state regulators look at projections of population growth to accommodate the need for future homes and then tack on adjustments to account for all the homes that weren’t built in prior periods, but perhaps ought to have been. If a region has an excess number of households deemed overcrowded, it gets more units. If vacancy rates are below a predetermined level, it gets more units. If there is a bevy of people spending more than 30% of their incomes on rent, more (affordable) units.

It’s a process that the state regulators have come to take somewhat more seriously in recent years, engendering an ongoing political backlash from density-averse local governments and neighborhood activists.

In the state’s last estimate, the topline total was 2.5 million units.

This coming cycle, which has already begun in the rural north and will slowly roll out across the state in the coming years, will produce yet another number. That will be one more estimate for state lawmakers of how much brake fluid the car needs.

(CalMatters.org)

READING BETWEEN THE LINES: THE STORY BEHIND THE SELLING OF THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

by Bill Meagher

“Owning a newspaper is a license to print money.”—well-known quote, widely attributed to 20th century media mogul Roy Thomson

The saga of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat sale to Alden Global Capital in May raised more questions than answers. But the primary question goes like this: Why would an ownership group trumpeting the importance of community journalism sell its respected local daily to a company described as “the most reviled newspaper owner in the business”?

Other colorful descriptors of Alden Global include “the grim reaper of American newspapers” and a company “seemingly intent on destroying local journalism.”

In his message to the employees announcing the sale, former PD majority owner Darius Anderson promised Alden Global would ensure the “highest-caliber local journalism for future North Bay generations.”

But no one familiar with Alden Global’s reputation for draconian cost cutting and layoffs was buying it.

It’s been four months since the sale sent shockwaves through the Press Democrat building at 416 B St. in Santa Rosa—and the tale is even less clear now than when it was completed.

Since the deal was announced May 1, NorthBay biz has spoken with many sources at the Press Democrat and beyond in an effort to piece together the puzzle of how a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper was sold off to a New York investment firm carrying a brutal journalistic reputation.

Besides the PD, other publications in the sale by parent company Sonoma Media Investments LLC (SMI) included the North Bay Business Journal, the Sonoma Index-Tribune, Sonoma magazine and Petaluma Argus Courier. For the purposes of brevity, we will examine the sale from the PD perspective.

[Reporter’s Note: NBb reached out to more than a dozen sources for this story. Almost all of them wouldn’t allow their name to be used for fear of reprisal from Alden Global or SMI. Some cited non-disclosure agreements. Others simply feared for their jobs.]

The PD’s Many Suitors

To fully understand how an independent newspaper went from local ownership to being one of hundreds owned by the second largest owner of newspapers in the country, let’s go back to 2024. At that time Hearst Corp., owner of the San Francisco Chronicle among other publications, was in discussion with SMI and its group of local investors led by managing partner Darius Anderson about acquiring the Press Democrat. Hearst performed almost seven months of due diligence, according to a former PD employee. But the deal fell out of bed for unknown reasons.

SMI then approached North Bay developer and Poppy Bank founder Bill Gallaher about submitting an offer. Gallaher put a group together and offered $15 million, according to a source involved in the offer—but nothing came of that effort either. [Gallaher is bound by a non-disclosure agreement and would not discuss that offer with NBb.]

But in 2025 Hearst wanted a second bite at the apple, approaching SMI early in the year about a sale with $9 million emerging as a potential offer. Hearst told the PD its distribution needed improvement and its union needed to essentially abandon its contract, according to sources familiar with the talks. While unhappy regarding the potential loss of the union contract, the PD staff was willing to discuss changes to the contract for the sake of being acquired by Hearst, which at least had deep journalism experience. In addition to the San Francisco Chronicle, its other media properties include SF Gate, the Houston Chronicle, plus Cosmopolitan and Esquire magazines.

Meanwhile, Steve Falk, former publisher and CEO of SMI who retired in 2022, was brought in by SMI to get a sale done. Falk advised the PD staff that if the union didn’t agree to concessions, SMI would be forced to sell to another party—and that party could be Alden Global Capital.

An Alden Global sale was treated by the staff as a threat given Alden’s dismal reputation in journalism circles.

Then the Hearst deal once again disappeared. After SMI managing partner Darius Anderson reached out to Gallaher again, the Poppy Bank founder put a group together, and this time the bid was $12 million, all cash.

But that wasn’t the only offer SMI was entertaining. Alden Global heard the PD was on the block and submitted an unsolicited offer of $10 million.

[Disclosure: The publisher of NorthBay biz, Lawrence Amaturo, was part of the Gallaher group that made the $12 million offer to buy the SMI assets. And while Amaturo was among a group of sources who spoke both on the record and off for this story, this article was written independently.]

An editorial employee at the PD said while the staff had no say in who would ultimately buy the newspaper, it favored a sale to Hearst rather than the Gallaher group because Hearst had extensive media experience. The employee also said Gallaher was considered by some in the newsroom to be “Sonoma County’s Trump,” a moniker that made the newsroom nervous, given the president’s often-contentious relationship with the press.

Gallaher has been active in local politics and has pursued a variety of charitable endeavors in the North Bay. He often chafed at the coverage he received from the PD, according to sources with knowledge of his desire to purchase the newspaper. Gallaher sued the Press Democrat in 2016 for libel over a series of stories covering political donations. The lawsuit was eventually tossed out.

While Gallaher’s group waited by the phone, with radio silence coming from SMI, it took the unusual step of putting out a press release in March 2025 about its desire to purchase the PD and other media assets. Gallaher was wary of his bid disappearing without any acknowledgement or back and forth with SMI because of the 2024 experience. The group’s statement said, in part, that they wanted to “preserve and enhance local journalism by keeping these publications community-owned and operated.”

The group’s $12 million offer was based on a report by a consultant, who first recommended the group propose a lower offer amount, based on a multiple of the newspaper’s revenue. But, according to a member of the local group, the consultant’s recommendation was rejected in favor of an offer that would be considered more generous. It also came with a promise to honor the union contract and retain at least 90% of all non-union staff.

But Gallaher’s group heard nothing. No reply or negotiation for better terms was forthcoming from SMI.

Meanwhile, Alden was busy behind the scenes—and, in a whirlwind romance, Alden and SMI worked out a deal in a matter of weeks.

But SMI never warned the PD staff about the coming sale to Alden.

A Newsroom Surprise

An announcement of the sale arrived in the PD newsroom May 1 via an email from Alden, which for many on staff landed in their junk folder. “A lot of us thought it was a joke when we saw the email,” said one newsroom employee. After the email was deemed genuine, nobody was laughing.

Later that day, in a press release announcing the Alden Global ownership, Anderson and Falk said “economic challenges” facing the newspaper industry made it “difficult for [SMI’s] small group of local investors to guarantee the paper’s long-term future.” They also said the sale to Alden would best serve the newspaper and the public, a sentiment greeted in the newsroom with disbelief.

In the days following the sale, Sharon Ryan, an exec vice president with a subsidiary of Alden, came to talk to the PD staff. Ryan assured the staff Alden was dedicated to keeping local journalism strong and treating employees the right way. A PD employee asked if she meant the PD staff would be treated like employees at the San Jose Mercury News—which came under Alden following its purchase of the Merc’s parent-company MediaNews Group in 2010, and was subsequently gutted. The remark was not well received by Ryan and at least one of the PD staff in that conversation has since been pink slipped.

NorthBay biz tried reaching Ryan with no success.

NorthBay biz also reached out multiple times to Anderson, to better understand why the sale was necessary and how the transaction was completed. A Novato native and current Sonoma Valley resident, Anderson wears many hats as a well-known political lobbyist, fundraiser extraordinaire, developer, Jack London buff and, until recently, managing partner of SMI. Messages were left for him at Platinum Advisors, the Sacramento-based lobbying company he owns; Kenwood Investments, his Sonoma real estate company; as well as his cell phone.

But like Gallaher and the PD staff, NorthBay biz never heard from Anderson.

Private Investment Firm, Or ‘Destroyer Of Newspapers’?

So who is Alden Global—the now proud owner of the PD? The investment firm has about $1 billion under management, not too large in the Wall Street domain.

But when it comes to size in the newspaper industry, Alden subsidiary MediaNews Group takes a backseat to almost no one. It holds 77 daily newspapers and more than 150 weekly publications in its portfolio, according to its website. The company is known for taking a private equity approach to the assets it owns. That is, it gravitates toward entities that are distressed, purchasing them at a bargain price and then looking for opportunities to cut costs and profit from the sale of portions of the operations.

These days Alden prefers to be known as a private investment firm. In the past, it was referred to as a hedge fund. Like all things hedge fund, ownership is a lesson in hide and seek. Smith Management LLC owns Alden Global. In turn, Alden owns MediaNews Group. MediaNews Group owns the Bay Area News Group and Southern California Newspaper Group. Then there is Tribune Publishing, California Newspaper Partnership and Digital First Media.

Among the newspapers owned by Alden’s MediaNews are the Denver Post, Boston Herald, Orange County Register, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Jose Mercury News. Local properties owned by MediaNews include the Marin Independent Journal and the East Bay Times.

The investment firm created a company called Twenty Lake Holdings to manage and, in some cases, dispose of real estate gained in the acquisitions of publications—everything from office buildings to printing facilities.

To say that Alden and MediaNews are viewed with distrust and animosity in the journalism community is to drastically understate the case. The criticism dished toward Alden is an excursion into the most colorful descriptions. A simple web search will show the hedge fund described in the media as “vulture capitalists,” “the most reviled newspaper owner in the business,” “predatory,” “secretive,” an “archvillain,” “a destroyer of newspapers” and, as Vanity Fair put it, “the grim reaper of American newspapers.”

[Reporter’s Note: I’ve spent more time than I care to admit dealing with private investment firms as a financial journalist. And, to be fair, secrecy and discretion are how the private investment world operates. The investment titans that own these entities pride themselves on being first into markets and first out. The old line about being the smartest guys in the room was likely written by a hedge funder as he gazed into a mirror thinking how much he liked what he saw. It’s very much a “boys club” overrun with testosterone and ego.]

For its part, here’s how MediaNews describes its focus on the company’s website: “We are proud of our long history of community service, providing essential news to our readers for more than 175 years. We believe that a free press is fundamental to a healthy democracy, and we are committed to building a sustainable future for our journalism.”

NorthBay biz also reached out to representatives at Alden Global Capital to get its side of how the Press Democrat and its various publications joined the Alden portfolio. But Alden didn’t respond.

Investors Kept In The Dark

Gary Nelson is a successful North Bay businessman, having founded staffing stalwart Nelson Connects more than 50 years ago—and he is a known active member in the community. He also held about 15% of the equity in Sonoma Media Investments LLC as a limited partner.

So imagine Nelson’s surprise when he learned from a casual conversation around town that the Press Democrat was being sold. The surprise continued when the sale price of $10 million was revealed and the transaction was to a New York investor. While the deal was a revelation, the fact that a local group offered more money—and was ignored—was a shock.

Especially since Nelson had invested in SMI to keep the Press Democrat in local hands.

In an interview with NorthBay biz, Nelson said that, as a limited partner with SMI, the investment entity had no legal requirement to share information about the deal with him. And, as far as he knew, the other limited partners had been kept in the dark about the sale as well. Those local investors in SMI included former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, former Dolby Sound CEO Bill Jasper, former Congressman Doug Bosco, retired Intel executive Les Vadasz, and Jean Schulz, wife of the late Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.

Nelson said he was paid $1.5 million for his 15% of SMI. Nelson also said he didn’t know what would become of the Press Democrat under its new ownership, and he preferred not to speculate.

Nelson’s not being informed he was getting cashed out may have been legal, but a former PD exec questioned Anderson’s approach to those who invested alongside him in 2012. “There is your legal responsibility, and then there is your moral obligation, doing the right thing. But ask around, that’s how he [Anderson] operates.”

Information gathered from a number of sources familiar with the deal point toward Anderson making decisions about the transaction mostly on his own or, at the very least, not sharing information with his limited partners nor anyone at the newspaper.

Michael Fitzgerald, a former journalism professor at Sacramento State University and former editor at both the Chico Enterprise-Record and the Oroville Mercury Register (both papers are owned by Alden), offered his opinion on what the sale is likely to mean to the Press Democrat and the community. “The destruction of so many newspapers under Alden’s management has been a tragedy for community journalism across the country,” Fitzgerald told NBb. “It’s a tragedy for democracy not to have honest newspapers and journalists providing the kind of day-to-day coverage that knits communities together and keeps politicians from letting their worst instincts run wild.”

The Story of the Press Democrat

The PD was first published as the Santa Rosa Democrat in 1857; it was Sonoma County’s first newspaper. The paper was sold and merged a number of times throughout its first century, but always remained under local ownership. In 1985, however, the newspaper was sold to the New York Times, which invested in a new printing facility in Rohnert Park. The Gray Lady offered the staff more resources—and coverage of both local and regional subjects reflected the new ownership.

But in 2012, the Times sold the PD to Halifax Media Holdings, a Florida-based company. The Halifax ownership lasted less than a year. A local group of investors, formed by Anderson under the Sonoma Media Investments LLC (SMI), purchased the Press Democrat with the intention of keeping the news outlet under local ownership.

In 2018, the newspaper received a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the tragic North Bay fires.

The Pulitzer meant a lot to the newspaper and its staff—a triumph at a time when the newspaper universe was continuing to shrink, and independent locally owned papers were becoming rare. The Press Democrat wasn’t owned by a conglomerate or chain. Rather it was independent, it had supportive ownership that had the good sense to stand back and let the publication perform. In turn, the PD had staff of long standing, reflecting both a larger pool of developed talent and a desire by staffers to stick around. The Press Democrat punched above its weight in terms of coverage and has both supporters and detractors in the community.

But Alden has drained the talent pool. According to a former Press Democrat employee, 52 staffers have been let go in the four months since Alden took over (that source is among those former staffers looking for a new gig). To be clear, this is the way Alden does business. One Press Democrat employee said that a trio of cuts has been made to the editorial staff, with more job loss anticipated. One staffer said the newsroom atmosphere is one of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It’s worth looking at the business of journalism as a whole to better place the PD. Since 2005, 3,300 newspapers have closed, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. There are roughly 6,000 newspapers remaining in the U.S., with the strong majority of those publications being weeklies. More than half the counties in the U.S. no longer have a newspaper.

Last year, 258 newspapers were sold in 75 transactions, so the sale of the Press Democrat and its sister publications is not unusual in the industry.

And a purchase by a private equity firm or institutional investor isn’t out of the ordinary either. Fortress Investment Group has purchased newspapers over the years. Apollo Global Management has bankrolled some newspaper deals, making a $1.8 billion loan to Fortress at a whopping 11.5% interest rate. The mutual fund BlackRock owns interests in newspapers as well.

Though the North Bay is in no danger of becoming a news desert, there’s a chance Alden may feel consolidation makes sense. It now owns a trio of newspapers in Sonoma County—the daily PD and the Petaluma and Sonoma weeklies—as well as the Marin Independent Journal in San Rafael.

Alden has owned the Marin IJ since 2010. Speaking with a source at that publication, the picture they paint is not pretty. “We really are down to a skeleton crew. And when someone is out or on vacation, it gets even harder. Raises are pretty much non-existent. There are janitors at the [Marin] Civic Center making more than I do. The morale is so low, they have trouble recruiting if someone leaves. We thought [previous owner] Gannett was bad, but Alden is worse.”

The PD’s prospects going forward under Alden ownership are not promising. A study at the University of North Carolina showed that Alden cuts staffing levels at twice the rate of the rest of the industry.

The environment for the media in recent years—especially since media adversary Donald Trump’s first term—has been toxic. While some of the issues were media creations, the low regard and hostility directed at the press by both those in office and internet keyboard warriors is unprecedented. Media outlets which are independent, as the Press Democrat was under SMI, have more freedom to deal with those issues in swift and creative ways. On the other hand, given Alden’s reputation as an investment entity worried about profits above the bottom line rather than what’s running above the fold, the PD staff is likely to run into more and not less pushback as a so-called “enemy of the people.”

The pursuit and purchase of the PD hasn’t slowed Alden even a step. It’s currently chasing the Dallas Morning News in Texas. While rebuffed on at least two occasions, its response is to throw more money at the publication. Ironically, Hearst is also courting the Dallas newspaper.

In the end, without Anderson responding to NBb’s questions about the deal, no one can say for sure why Alden won the sale and why Anderson left a local offer worth at least $2 million more on the table. Anderson and Gallaher have been on opposite sides of some local issues. For instance, Gallaher led a public fight against the SMART train, and Anderson’s Platinum Advisors had a $600,000 lobbying contract with the public agency. [Whether those opposite positions had any bearing on SMI selling to Alden instead of Gallaher’s local group is pure speculation and only offered to demonstrate that the deal didn’t operate in a vacuum.]

What is not speculation is the likely path for the Press Democrat. More staff will leave, either by choice, buyouts or firings. The paper’s resources will be reduced. The coverage of local issues will suffer in the long term. Local advertisers may elect to abandon the paper based on those impacts.

What’s more, public confidence in the local newspaper will suffer—not because the staff isn’t trying, but because there are fewer reporters and editors. And it isn’t like the media is being bathed in the warmth of public love these days anyway.

This story started with an old quote about newspapers from a bygone era. Here’s a more recent one from Richard Kluger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist: “Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism.”

If that quote doesn’t resonate, you aren’t paying attention.

(Northbaybiz.com)

WILLY ADAMES, WHO WON S.F. GIANTS' TEAM HONOR EARLIER, HOMERS IN WIN

by Susan Slusser

Giants shortstop Willy Adames hits a two-run home run during the first inning of Friday's game against the Rockies at Oracle Park. (Jeff Chiu/Associated Press)

Willy Adames likes the spotlight — the San Francisco Giants shortstop homered when he returned to Milwaukee this year after getting a huge ovation, and Friday at Oracle Park, half an hour after winning the Willie Mac Award and soaking in more applause, Adames belted his 29th homer.

“It felt like it was something that was meant to happen,” Adames said.

That two-run shot in the first inning and Heliot Ramos’ three-run homer in the second helped the Giants down the Rockies 6-3, a .500 record remaining in San Francisco’s sights. Also on the table: the potential for the first 30-homer season by a Giants’ player since Barry Bonds hit 45 in 2004.

“Obviously, it’s a big deal,” Adames said. “But for me, I don’t really care about 30 — I want to do it, but you know next year Rafi (Devers) is going to do it for sure, and (Matt Chapman) if they stay healthy. For me, it’s all about winning. (Hitting 30) it’s not my main focus.”

The Willie Mac Award? That’s another story. Adames knows exactly what that means and he was thrilled to be the recipient of the award honoring the team’s most inspirational player.

“That is the biggest award that you can win as a Giant, it’s just an honor, truly special,” he said. “It’s voted by my teammates, the coaches and staff and the fans, that’s what makes it even more special, the respect from my teammates and the people around me. It’s something surreal.”

Manager Bob Melvin mentioned the homer in Milwaukee when asked about Friday’s homer following the Willie Mac ceremony. “He’s got a little flair for the dramatic,” Melvin said of Adames, who spent the previous 3½ seasons with Milwaukee.

Another nice story line Friday for a club licking its wounds after being eliminated from playoff contention earlier in the week: Trevor McDonald is putting himself in a real position for a rotation spot next year if he looks as good next spring as he has this month with San Francisco, including a 10-strikeout night against the Rockies.

McDonald, 24, worked six innings and allowed one run in the Giants’ win at Los Angeles on Sunday, and Friday, he worked seven innings and gave up three runs, all of them on one swing, Ezequiel Tovar’s three-run shot on a hanging curveball with two outs in the fifth.

That inning, the Rockies appeared to be sitting on McDonald’s curve, with all three hits coming on the pitch; at times, he was throwing the pitch more than 60% of the time. He got 15 swings-and-misses with the pitch, five called strikes and 14 foul balls, and when he was mixing in his sinker, it was making the curve all the more effective. He got a very healthy 18 swings-and-misses in all, tied with Seattle’s George Kirby for the most Friday night.

“I think just adding a little bit of velocity to it this year, getting it up, you know, 86-87 mph instead of 82-83 like it was earlier in the year, I think that’s helped a lot, just to help it play off that sinker,” McDonald said.

McDonald got the traditional laundry-cart condiment dousing for recording his first big league win.

“I just pulled shaving cream out of my ear before I walked over here,” he said. Anything else? “Applesauce, probably my least favorite. I think there’s still some in my hair,” he said.

This stretch versus the Dodgers and Rockies will give him plenty of confidence going into next year, McDonald reckons, and he said he plans to refine all of his stuff even more this winter, “and obviously the goal is to come back and break with the team.”

“He’s really impressed me,” Adames said. “I like the way that he’s carrying himself. I mean, you saw him in LA, he was shoving against the Dodgers, which is not something easy. Today, he was competing every at-bat, every pitch, he was dialed in and looked really good.

“There’s something that the fans should be excited about, the way that he’s finished the season. Hopefully he can come next year healthy and go out there and continue to do that.”

Adames’ blast off Germán Márquez snapped a 14-game homerless span. Jung Hoo Lee had a three-hit evening, and his second-inning triple was his 12th of the season, the most by a Giants player since Angel Pagan’s 15 in 2012. Lee also had one of the more mortifying moments of the season, forgetting how many outs there were in the eighth and winging the ball into the crowd in center after catching Hunter Goodman’s flyball — for the second out.

Chapman recorded his 1,000th career hit and got the lineup card for his efforts; he and rookie first baseman Bryce Eldridge teamed for an excellent play in the third, when Chapman went into foul ground for Tovar’s chopper and zipped a throw to first that the 6-foor-7 Eldridge collected with a stretch.

San Francisco is coming off back-to-back losing seasons after finishing .500 in 2022, a major disappointment after winning 107 games the year before that.

The Giants could still finish in third place in the NL West after three consecutive fourth-place finishes; they’re one game behind the Diamondbacks with two games left, both against Colorado.

San Francisco is 9-2 against the Rockies this year and has Justin Verlander going Saturday and Logan Webb on Sunday.

(sfchronicle.com)

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

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is five or six or so. If that's too soon, send it any time after that and I'll read it next Friday. That's fine. There's no pressure.

I think Maria of the Seattle band Acapulco Lips might call around 10:30. I'll make room for that.

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

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

Velvet Underground - Sister Ray, live and long. https://youtu.be/_RPCI2H1sV4?si=eIoPQLPQKpegxN-f

"I killed this for you." "I killed this for /you/." (via Fark) https://assets.apnews.com/e6/6d/dc1a4715f353ad15914eee657c04/915004877d7e48cabdbf1a65bb38cd98

And a story about a bathroom. So much drama in a two-minute film. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/09/no-project-without-drama.html

Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

LET OUR ACTIONS DEFINE THE FINER POINTS OF OUR PHILOSOPHY

Warmest spiritual greetings,

Continuously silently chanting OM on the outbreath ensures that the Divine Absolute is what is identified with, and that the body-mind complex is its instrument. This ensures a zero margin of error insofar as engaging in revolutionary ecological action.

At this time, the necessity is for spiritual nomadic action groups to destroy the demonic and return this world to righteousness. Simple as that.

Please know that I have acquired a Washington, D.C. driver's license. The supplemental security income is being restarted. The District of Columbia EBT account has been approved. Continuing to take shelter at the Catholic Charities place in the industrial northeast section by the night clubs; interesting that the club across from the shelter is named Karma.

I am seeking others to intervene in history. Are we ready?

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

BILL KIMBERLIN:

This is the "D" building screening room of Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic in about 1985 or later. Creative people are traditionally thought to be very difficult to manage, but they add something even more difficult to define. A lot of the folks we sourced locally. We had to, because in the early days Hollywood crews were not willing to come North to a one studio town. Who could blame them. We interviewed one guy in a Fairfax barroom.

ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE: ON GOLOGORSKY’S ‘ANGLE OF FALLING LIGHT’

by Jonah Raskin

More than two decades ago, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Elizabeth Strout, wrote a blurb for the contemporary fiction writer Beverly Gologorsky, then the author of Stop Here (2013) her second novel about working class characters published by Seven Stories. “Gologorsky looks straight into the face of class in this country,” Stout wrote. Seven Stories is still using those words to promote Gologorsky’s most recent work of fiction, The Angle of Falling Light (2025). Strout’s blurb is too good not to use again and again, but it doesn’t do justice to The Angle, which approaches class obliquely not directly.

As Gologorsky’s six works of fiction show, there’s more than one way to tell a good story about class: from the woman’s angle, the soldier’s angle, the opioid addict’s angle, which plays a major role in her latest work, and also from the angle of loneliness. Still, Strout’s words might mislead readers looking for class-conscious and class obsessed characters caught up in dramatic class conflicts.

It’s not that there isn’t class-related stuff in The Angle. Several of the characters have dead end jobs, go to work and belong to the precariat. But class is not the dominant chord that the author strikes. The “point of production,” as economists call it, isn’t the principal setting. More often than not, Gologorsky situates her characters in bedrooms, bars, kitchens and on a beach on Long Island where the population is divided between summer people and year-round people, a significant distinction in the narrative.

What causes the year-round people, the major characters, their emotional and psychological pain, including the pain of acute depression and loneliness, aren’t working conditions, lousy wages, a boss or exploitation, but rather their own denials and self-destructive behaviors. Like the characters in Barbara Kingsolver 2024 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Demon Copperfield —set in opioid Appalachia and an homage to Charles Dickens —many of the characters in The Angle are hooked on pills.

The novel might be regarded as a fractured homage to Jane Austen —the only author mentioned by name in The Angle— who delineated English social classes in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, which begins famously, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Perhaps as true a statement in 2025 as it was in 1813 when Austen was 21.

One of the novel’s minor characters, a fellow named Greg, asks Tessa, the first person “I” narrator, and protagonist, “What are you reading?” She says, “Jane Austen” and adds, “Austen advises men of their flaws so politely, nary a curse word passes her mouth.” The same cannot be said for Gologorsky and her characters who can and do curse. The author of The Angle goes far beyond politeness and impoliteness and skewers men not only for bad manners but also for blatant varieties of misogyny. Curiously or perhaps not, Jane Austen readers are celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of her birth on December 16, 1775. Tessa belongs to the family of Austen fans. And perhaps Gologorsky does, too. So there is more than one way the novel is timely and relevant.

The characters, male and female, are alone and lonely; the narrator and main character Tessa, rightly wonders, “Is my life so unpeopled?” It’s an unusual word. It’s not “unpeople,” which means to remove humans which is what’s happening in Gaza. Tessa’s life is often unpeopled, though she has family, friends and companions. Her loneliness is the loneliness born of the crowd. The vital connection in her life isn’t to another human being. but rather to a camera which enables her to become a photographer, to adopt a point of view that’s liberating and that also helps her escape from the kind of depressed, addled and isolated life that destroyed her own sister and that threatens to destroy her.

“Now I have the camera,” she exclaims as though she’s won the key to her freedom. In these pages, characters belong to a dark world in which they struggle to evade the “nothingness of everything” and the “fucking desert of fuck ups.” The deserts that matter most here are the fuck-up deserts of domestic life, not the hot sandy deserts of Iraq, though some of the characters are veterans of the wars the U.S. military fought in the deserts of the Middle East where soldiers became addicts. “Always, we could take another sip, drag, or snort,” one veteran explains. “That’s what we did when we weren’t killing or being killed.” State-side, the hospital wards are “filled with wounded soldiers” that leave emotional holes in the heart of a waitress and a mother who aims to protect her daughters against a ravenous world that would entrap them and exploit them. Nearly every character is a member of the platoon of the walking wounded.

At Christmas (yes, this is in part a Christmas novel) one character thinks that if he were to go out of his house, “Other people’s revelry would only deepen the aloneness” that he feels. The only song that’s sung in the novel is the Beatles “Eleanor Rigby.” One of the characters hears the line, “all the lonely people” which makes him want to be with people, but he doesn’t reach out to another human being Alone and in the solitude of his room, he switches on the radio, and turns the dial. Gologorsky writes “nothing pleases, switches it off. He prefers to be in his head.” So, too, Tessa prefers to be in her head as she wanders about Manhattan and the Bronx with its racist graffiti and depressing apartments.

Despite the caveat about cursing, Gologorsky has more in common with the author of Pride and Prejudice than might meet the casual eye. Like Austen, she’s attentive to manners and morals, with bad manners a sign of a lack of clear moral standards. Like Austen, Gologorsky is a novelist of domestic life, closely observed details and the kinds of social clashes that unfold at home, not on distant battlefields. Characters die but no one is shot and killed; there are no explosions and no chases on foot or by car.

The narrative shifts profoundly when an elderly woman slips on a patch of ice, injures herself and is hospitalized. That’s the kind of Austen-like dramatic action that generates emotional charges in The Angle.

The novel comes closest to, say, Pride and Prejudice, when Tessa becomes romantically involved with Greg, a young doctor from a wealthy New York family, who owns a comfortable Manhattan apartment and who, like the gentlemen in an Austen novel, seeks a wife. But marriage to him is not an option for Tessa who is determined to carve out her own path in a world in which fragility and unpredictability rule. She means to “enjoy everything before it disappears.” At the end of the narrative, the “first blood streaks of sun appear in the sky.” Tessa stops “to watch the darkness fade away.” It’s not a Jane Austen happy ending, but it’s the only ending that Gologorsky can honestly provide in an unpeopled and lonely world. If you want a timely and entertaining novel about alienated and addicted Americans this is it.

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

ON THE RUN from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin took his own life in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Anca Pusca, author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change, reflects on the relevance of Benjamin's oeuvre in a digital age, and the implications of his work becoming freely available online.

Benjamin’s passport photograph from 1928 — courtesy of the Walter Benjamin Archiv, Berlin.

ON BENJAMIN’S PUBLIC (OEUVRE)

by Anca Pusca

Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish intellectual of kaleidoscopic abilities and interests — literary critic, philosopher, translator, essayist, radio presenter — has always fascinated academics and intellectuals. His dense academic prose, his unique reading of Marxism, his fascination with Jewish mysticism, but more importantly, his ability to capture some of the major transformations of the early 19th century Europe in a series of literal and temporal frames that distilled the very material which gave it consistency — iron, concrete, shopping arcades, new technologies such as photography and film, ideological propaganda — into words, earned Benjamin a cult-like following which continues today. Artists, philosophers, theorists from every discipline, continue to offer different readings and meanings to his work, which remains strikingly relevant to social and political transformations today.…

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/on-benjamins-public-oeuvre

BILL KIMBERLIN: "Paul Thomas Anderson's new film, One Battle After Another, was shot on film using the VistaVision format, which employs large-format 35mm film to capture a larger, sharper negative for higher-quality images and is being shown in very limited, specialized theaters. The film was also printed onto 70mm film stock and will be presented in several formats, including IMAX, to take advantage of the larger frame and achieve a more authentic viewing experience."

THAT WAS FAST: "Sinclair and Nexstar, which operate local ABC affiliates around the U.S., will end their boycott of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show." (nytimes.com)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Charlie Kirk …he'll be eclipsed by Kimmel, then Comey until the next sex/murder school shooting grabs America's attention.

“SHE THOUGHT too that women didn't know what to do with themselves these days which could turn them into harridans. Hardly a female friend she knew wasn't miserable. Either mind dumb with children, or in the married condition married to an earnest toiler, or lonely unmarried in their successful career.”

― J.P. Donleavy

SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER

lyrics by Sid Wayne and Sherman Edwards (1958)

I'll be alone each and every night
While you're away, don't forget to write

Bye-bye, so long, farewell
Bye-bye, so long

See you in September
See you when the summer's through

Here we are (bye, baby, goodbye)
Saying goodbye at the station (bye, baby, goodbye)
Summer vacation (bye, baby, bye, baby)
Is taking you away (bye, baby, goodbye)

Have a good time, but remember
There is danger in the summer moon above
Will I see you in September
Or lose you to a summer love?
(Counting the days 'til I'll be with you)
(Counting the hours and the minutes, too)

Bye, baby, goodbye
Bye, baby, goodbye
(Bye-bye, so long, farewell) bye, baby, goodbye
(Bye-bye, so long) bye, baby, goodbye

Have a good time, but remember
There is danger in the summer moon above
Will I see you in September
Or lose you to a summer love?
(I'll be alone each and every night)
(While you're away, don't forget to write)

See you (bye-bye, so long, farewell)
In September (bye-bye, so long, farewell)
I'm hopin' I'll see you (bye-bye, so long, farewell)
In September (bye-bye, so long, farewell)
Well, maybe I'll see you (bye-bye, so long, farewell)
In September...

THE WAR ON TYLENOL

Trump and RFK Are Presiding Over a Massacre of the Innocents

This week was full of absurdity. RFK Jr. launched an attack on a new false culprit for autism: Tylenol. As our public health correspondent Gregg Gonsalves explained, running a fever while pregnant poses more risks to one’s fetus than the pain reliever ever could. In making a claim to the contrary, RFK Jr. and Trump have done something wildly irresponsible—shocking!

Meanwhile, after ABC announced that it was kicking Jimmy Kimmel off his late night-show and Trump joked that he would replace him with Marco Rubio, the studio swiftly reversed its decision. “It’s not worth it to appease a bully,” Ben Schwartz surmised. “The company may have come to the belated conclusion that simply doing the right thing and keeping Kimmel on the air would prove cheaper than facing a never-ending regress of Trump administration shakedowns.”

If that weren’t enough, the right continues to make false claims that trans people are “prone to violence,” a dangerous statement that swirled about this month after politicians and media organizations made baseless allegations about perpetrators of mass shootings this month. As our senior editor Jack Mirkinson wrote, people across the establishment are making this worse. “The only thing” that will stop the persecution of this marginalized group is if the rest of us refuse “to join this elite war of extermination.”

— Alana Pockros

IT’S BEEN 60 YEARS since The New Yorker began publishing Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as a four-part series. Before it became a book, it appeared in the magazine introducing readers to a new form of nonfiction writing.

The choice to print a piece like this was unusual for the time. Rather than a short feature or a single article, readers were given a sprawling, novel-like account of a case in rural Kansas involving the Suttle Family. It unfolded with the suspense of fiction, but every detail was drawn from reporting.

The approach was groundbreaking, drawing attention to the subtle line between fact seeking and storytelling, all of which built anticipation for the book release the following January.

Capote’s research in Kansas was thorough, but he did not do it alone. His close friend since childhood, author Harper Lee accompanied him, with her down-to-earth style and no nonsense approach, Lee helped the eccentric Capote connect with rural residents and establish the trust needed for interviews.

Yet their friendship could not withstand the weight of success. In later years, Lee wrote that Capote “never forgave” her after her novel received the 1961 Pulitzer. Even so, their collaboration definitely left a lasting mark, especially on how accounts of cases such as these could be reported with the depth of a novel and the detail of journalism.

DAYS OF JUDGMENT

by James Kunstler

“If you're want a friend in DC, get a dog. We're coming for you.” —Dan Bongino, Deputy Director, FBI

You better believe Martha Stewart baked a cake last night — the lovely Gâteau Opéra perhaps? — when she got the news that the ham sandwich known as James Comey got indicted by a federal grand jury twenty-two years after that same ham sandwich indicted the goddess of hearth and home for lying to the FBI and the SEC over a trumped-up insider-trading rap, and sent her to federal prison for a five-month stretch plus five additional months of confined home-making and two years of supervised redecorating.

Mr. Comey’s indictment is probably just the opening salvo in what will be a barrage of indictments coming down against government officials who used their powers-under-law to harass, disable, cancel, dis-bar, bankrupt, persecute and ruin thousands of their fellow citizens, including especially the 45th president and the people who worked for him.

Jim Comey was the engine who pulled the choo-choo train of seditious fakery known as RussiaGate (Donald Trump colluding with Vladimir Putin) into America’s public life, which then expanded into the years-long ass-covering operations of the Mueller Investigation, then Impeachments One and Two, then the J-6 FBI-engineered “insurrection,” then Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional J-6 committee gong show, and then the four various fugazi prosecutions against Mr. Trump in 2024 designed to derail his re-run for office bankrupt his family, and stuff him in prison for the rest of his life.

Mr. Comey and his associates must be astounded that none of that worked. It really was a mighty organized criminal endeavor. And, as such, it stands to be prosecutable under the RICO statutes, which means that these current two charges against Mr. Comey should be a coming attraction of much more to come against him and many other familiar characters, possibly including his successor as FBI Director Christopher Wray. (The Blaze reports overnight that the FBI deployed roughly 275 plainclothes agents into the J-6 protest crowd at the US Capitol, as opposed to the 26 agents that Mr. Wray testified about to Congress.)

The smuggery of this gang in the years since all this business started in 2016 has also been out of this world. Mr. Comey dropped one rancid video after another either making threats or sanctimoniously declaring his sainthood, as if he expected the dreadful day would never come that he might face charges. Likewise, former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe ran his mouth all over CNN for years, former CIA Director John Brennan spun fibs on MSNBC, while FBI RussiaGate straw-boss Peter Strzok rode shotgun regularly with fake news confabulator Rachel Maddow. All of it was designed to bamboozle the public, and it worked!

You can expect more than one RICO case to come because these crimes against our country occurred in many discrete episodes of organized misconduct over many years. The RussiaGate op involving Comey, Brennan, Hillary, Obama, Biden, et al., was quite separate from Adam Schiff’s orchestrated seditious Impeachment #1 featuring CIA mole Eric Ciaramella, Col. Alexander Vindman, and ICIG Michael Atkinson. As was the activity of the Mueller group actually supervised by Andrew Weissmann (because Robert Mueller was secretly non compos mentis). As were the J-6 shenanigans of Mr. Wray’s FBI, including the DNC Pipe Bomb sideshow. As were the Lawfare exploits of Norm Eisen and Mary McCord conniving with “Joe Biden’s” White House to arrange the Trump prosecutions by DA Alvin Bragg and AG Letitia James in New York and DA Fani Willis in Fulton County, GA. As were the dark deeds of Merrick Garland and his Special Counsels Jake Smith, David Weiss, and Robert Hur. As were the 2020 and 2022 election-rigging capers of Marc Elias & Company. As were whatever peculiar directives were ordered by Alejandro Mayorkas to throw the US borders wide open. As was the “autopen” abuse by the White House staff and their cover-up of “Joe Biden’s” mental decline.

All of these vile pranks would have to be prosecuted in separate packets of cases. You might think it’s just too much for this Department of Justice, and that the three remaining years of Trump 2.0 are not enough time for so much action. But they represent extremely serious breaches of official duty verging on treason. There are probably aspects of it all and additional characters involved who I have left out. They have gravely injured our country and turned us against each other. Their prosecutions will will be heavy lifting, but it has to be done.

One prediction I’ll venture. Jim Comey’s defense will be based on “altitude sickness.”

Le Moissonneur [The Reaper] by François Millet (1866) & Vincent van Gogh (1889)

WHY WE NEED DOROTHY PARKER: PRETTY GAROTTE

by Kasia Boddy

Dorothy Parker dreaded repetition and found it everywhere. In 1919, when she was just 25 and only months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theater critic, she already claimed enough “bitter experience” to know that “one successful play of a certain type” would result in a “vast horde of copycats, all built on exactly the same lines.” In quantity at least, this was Broadway’s golden age, just before radio and the movies ate up its audiences. At least five new shows opened each week and Parker sat through all the popular formulae: “crook plays”; Southern melodramas; bedroom farces; musical comedies; plays in which “everybody talks in similes”; and Westerns in which gold was “sure to be discovered at five minutes to eleven.”

Topical themes promised “novelty” but that dwindled in the inevitable “follow-ups.” Parker noted a bevy of plays dealing with Prohibition, the “Irish question” (“what a rough day it will be for the drama when Ireland is freed’) and, worst of all, a “mighty army of war plays” (“I have been through so many … that I feel like a veteran”). Eventually the battlefield smoke cleared from the theaters, but the next slew of melodramas, about returning soldiers, was even more tedious. “Heaven knows the war was hard enough,” she grumbled. “Now the playwrights are doing their best to ruin the peace for us.”

Once she had identified a formula, Parker didn’t devote much space to individual plays. Those she didn’t like could be summed up quickly - “The House Beautiful is the play lousy” — while those she admired, such as Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape,’ made her coy: “One is ashamed to place neat little bouquets of praise on this mighty conception.” On the whole, she preferred “little, bitter twists of line and incident” to “any amount of connected story” and always had time for dog actors, swashbucklers and songs that rhymed “license” with “five cents.” It was also easy to praise performances, whether on stage (Eddie Cantor, Jacob Ben-Ami and the “flawless” Barrymore brothers were favorites) or in the stalls.

Germs of short stories can be found in her descriptions of the couple who argue over Bernard Shaw’s symbols, the woman who “speculates, never in silence” about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who “condescendingly translated” bits of French to his girl. “You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.”

Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz Ziegfeld’s wife. She continued as a drama critic at Ainslee’s for another three years and then, in 1927, spent twelve months as “Constant Reader,” writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a “mountain of indebtedness.” “Her Constant Reader,” he insisted, did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.”

Parker approached books in the same way as she had plays. That is, she tended to dodge analysis of works she admired: “What more are you going to say of a great thing [in this case, Ring Lardner’s collected stories] than that it is great?” Instead, she preferred what Sloane Crosley calls the “low-hanging fruit” of Elinor Glyn, Emily Post and Winnie the Pooh, at whose insistent whimsy “Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up.”

The main draw was always Parker herself.

Never mind the book, what readers wanted to know was that she’d hurled it across the room or assessed it as “second only to rubber duck” as a “bathtub companion.” “And if it slips down the drainpipe, all right, it slips down the drainpipe.” And how could she be expected to finish Mussolini’s ‘The Cardinal’s Mistress’ (“the Lord knows I tried”) or ‘Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts’ (“conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood”)? When Dwight Macdonald identified “amiability” as the distinctive quality of New Yorker criticism, he wasn’t thinking of Parker.

(London Review of Books)

PAUL GIRARD:

But what about the last several years/decades? The loss of freedom with GW Bush's Patriot Act? The death and destruction (that qualifies as violence) around the world with forever wars - for sure both parties are culpable. What does not wash is saying one side is to blame. Both have been terrible. Both have locked up reporters for trying to tell the truth. Both have censored. Both have been full bore violent.

Fine if you want to believe one side is your salvation, but I've now lived enough and seen enough to disagree. Admittedly, it is a tough pill to swallow. Too much power in any group of humans and they will abuse it.

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AUNT HELEN

by T.S. Eliot (1915)

Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
Cared for by servants to the number of four.
Now when she died there was silence in heaven
And silence at her end of the street.
The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet—
He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
The dogs were handsomely provided for,
But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
And the footman sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees—
Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

10 Comments

Paul Modic September 27, 2025

DA Dave Eyster is a liar and a bully and should resign or be removed as District Attorney as soon as possible to spare Mendocino more needless expense and embarrassment. (The case has already cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars and when Chamise Cubbison wins her lawsuit against the county for illegally suspending an elected official it could be in the millions.)
I’ve followed this from the beginning, his case against Cubbison has always seemed bogus and then a judge finally dismissed all the charges, implying that pro-Eyster government employees were lying on the witness stand at the preliminary hearing. Eyster is a vindictive child who couldn’t get his way over a strong women so he set out to ruin her career over a $3600 restaurant bill he didn’t want to pay, which she said he was legally responsible for.
Good luck with the recall.

Harvey Reading September 27, 2025

Well, bidness as usual here in la-la land, aka the US…

Chuck Artigues September 27, 2025

IMHO a large part of the so called housing problem is that houses have become assets to be manipulated and exploited for profit as much as homes to be lived in. Last year 27% of home sales went to investors! How many homes have been converted to airbnbs and no longer serve as homes for families? If we could simply stop the exploitation of the housing market and put people and families first a large part of the problem would melt away.

- Harvey Reading September 27, 2025
  
  Not unless it’s accompanied by a rapid decline in human population…back to about 150 million in the U.S.. Easy enough to do: mandatory birth control, including vasectomies and tubal ligations for those over 30. And, you Bible thumpers, save your typical responses…I put religion into the trash, where it belongs, long ago.
  
- Chuck Dunbar September 27, 2025
  
  +1. Yes, your points are a critical reason that regular folks, regular families, are finding it so hard to get affordable housing. It’s a really big deal.
  Politicians who want to be taken seriously should be jumping on this issue, taking it on, making it right. This issue is a truly populist one.
  
- Whyte Owen September 27, 2025
  
  Looking through sites that document housing units per adult, which largely agree, there is never a category for short term rentals of homes or condos. Airbnb and VRBO are complicated because many units are accessory dwellings not suitable for more than STR’s. Good data on the breakdown would be helpful, especially as CA, like the US, has hit ZPG.
  
John Sakowicz September 27, 2025

To the Editor:

Why single out DA Dave Eyster for a recall?

Every county actor tainted by the Cubbison affair needs to go. Cubbison, who was constitutionally elected to her position, was illegally suspended without pay by the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors with input from the County CEO and County Counsel.

Supervisors Maureen Mulheren, Ted Williams and John Haschak need to resign or be recalled. (Supervisor Bernie Norvell and Supervisor Madeline Cline are blameless — they were not yet elected at the time of Cubbison’s suspension.)

CEO Darcie Antle needs to be immediately fired.

That’s just a start.

Everyone in the County Counsel’s office involved in the Cubbison case needs to go, too.

As a county, we, the people, need to ask: Leading up to Cubbison being charged, who was involved? Who fabricated a case against Cubbison?

And after Cubbison was charged, for the next two years, as the case wend its way through court, we need to ask: Who obstructed justice? Who didn’t respond truthfully to discoveries? Who destroyed or falsified evidence? Who perjured themselves? Who intimidated witnesses?

Stop singling out DA Dave Eyster!

John Sakowicz
Ukiah

- Paul Modic September 27, 2025
  
  That’s a joke, Eyster was behind the whole thing and influenced all those others you list to do his dirty work.
  (Why did the board unanimously go along with him?
  Were they afraid of him? Why?
  Because they were all friends? Because he had been there longer than anyone else, had the institutional mojo and was the top cop?)
  
Jim Armstrong September 27, 2025

After many tries, I gave up on Mr. Flamming’s dates of service in FSN.

I also gave up on the long discourse on the SRPD without discovering that fact that the whole staff was offered buyouts not too long ago and at least 30 took them, including one of the best after 32 years.
I have paid a year in advance for 53 years, but only a month last week (after a pushy phone call from an English-challenged guy and the first second notice ever sent).
I learned how to read on daily papers and it is going to be a hard Jones to break.

- Chuck Dunbar September 27, 2025
  
  Yes to that last sentence, Jim. The paper edition of the news that both my wife and I read daily–not happily due the world’s ongoing descent–still comes to our driveway. When it stops coming, as no doubt someday it will, we will be sad, bereft.

10 Comments

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