HIGHWAY 128 BOONVILLE CALTRANS PROJECT ON PAUSE: COMMUNITY WORK CONTINUES
Update From the BoontWorks group
We are a volunteer group of Anderson Valley residents focused on gathering community feedback to influence the proposed Caltrans project to revamp Highway 128 as it passes from Highway 253 to Mountain View Road, Boonville.
The original schedule from Caltrans was that they were to begin designing the project this year. However, in December, the Caltrans project manager let us know that our project will be pushed off for about two years due to statewide budget constraints.
We plan to take advantage of this time. When Caltrans comes back to us, we want to be ready with what we want as a community. So, you will hear more from us in the near future. When we have enough to share, we’ll put out notices for the next community gathering to fill you in. In the meantime, you can find more information on the BoontWorks webpage at https://boontworks.org, and we’ll do our best to keep it updated.
If you are interested in helping, please contact any of us listed.
Best,
BoontWorks Group, Boonville
Sash Williams, Johnny Schmidt, Barbara Goodell, Jed Pogran, Philip Thomas, Lauren Keating, Steve Woods, Thom Elkjer, Francois Christen, Patrick Miller, Donna Pierson-Pugh
JENNIFER SOLANO and Ms. Swehla traveled to Santa Rosa JC's Shone Farm today for the North Coast Regional FFA Officer Candidate interviews. We are very excited and pleased to announce that Jennifer has been slated to the office of Mendo-Lake FFA Sectional/Regional Vice President. The election will occur in about 2 weeks at the North Coast Regional FFA Spring Meeting. Way to go Jennifer and Good Luck!
LUIS CHAVEZ (L&J Services, Boonville):
Hope everyone has had a great start to the year! It’s about that time where everything starts to grow out of control. If there's anyone looking for regular maintenance or simply just needs to get a project done please reach out, I or my team can help you out. The services we offer at L&J Services consist of land maintenance, tree work and a variety of other things. We install signs, and even help deliver or pick up your car from a shop. Like I said there's really too many things to list so if there's anyone looking for answers please don’t hesitate to reach out. Plenty of local reliable referrals. Thanks in advance. We look forward to helping you this season! We can be reached at 707/391-6907. Email: [email protected]
BOONVILLE HAIRSTYLIST
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WILD CHILD
by Bruce Anderson
Sean lived next door to us on AV Way with his single-parent dad when there were still children in the neighborhood, long before my oft-red tagged house was turned into a B&B owned by French nationals who live in San Francisco.
At one time my busy half-acre was home to a dozen people. Now, the unsuspecting pay $600 to spend one night.
The apartments across the street rang with Mexican kids playing soccer. The Anderson Valley could still refer to itself un-ironically as a community. Odd now to find the old highway a silent mile of widowed and single women. I knew things had changed when the Oakland-based harridan who still owns the apartments threatened to kill me when I reported a rape among her guests at one of her drunken weekends.
A lot happened on that stretch of Anderson Valley Way.
Wild Child, as we called Sean, was about ten when I first met him, a barely socialized boy, scrawny and wiry like his dad, a small boy with a voice like a foghorn and no brakes on his speech. His untamed tongue presented formidable difficulties for the elementary school down the street where, to their eternal credit, the school people stayed with the boy despite his verbal incontinence, his seeming every utterance sprinkled with f-grenades.
When Wild Child reached the 7th grade he arrived on the high school campus where Brian Schriener oversaw him in his special ed class; there was nothing wrong with the lad's intelligence but his tongue — flush with advanced adult obscenities — compelled the school to sequester him with the inexhaustibly patient Schreiner. Last time I saw him, Schreiner and I swapped Wild Child stories. Schreiner remembers asking Sean some trivial question as school let out one afternoon, "Hey, fuck you, Schreiner. Didn't you hear the bell?" came the reply.
Sean lived with his father just over the fence from our place. Dad, in his way, was a good parent. He took Sean everywhere with him. We'd see them late at night playing pool at the Mexican bar before it became Lauren's. Sean was still just a little guy but pool halls and biker runs were his life. Pop, judged objectively, would certainly come up short on some of the stricter parental model charts, but in the fundamental ways that count with a child Sean had a better parent than lots of children.
I heard them next door one day. Dad, a dedicated biker, was working on his Harley.
"Get me the wrench, Sean."
"I can't fuckin' find it, Pop."
Pop, louder, "Sean, get me the fuckin' wrench!"
"It fuckin' ain't here, Pop.
"Sean, you're a lyin' sacka shit. Get me that fuckin' wrench!"
Sean would often drop by the office on his way home from school, invariably to hit me up for a "loan."
My wife derives from a conservative Asian culture where outta control children are unknown. She was specifically annoyed by Sean. After his visits she would say, "Please don't encourage that little monster."
That plea came one afternoon when Sean had popped in for a "loan."
Sean: Where's Bruce?
Wife: He's not here, Go away.
Sean: I need a dollar.
Wife: You're not getting it from me. Go home.
Sean: I want a dollar.
Wife: I'm going to call Keith if you don't get out of here.
Sean: Like I give a shit.
I believe that confrontation ended when my wife picked up the newspaper's waxer and threatened to hit the boy with it. I'm sure that Sean, like all children raised in turbulent circumstances, respected violence, and the threat of it was enough to get his cooperation.
Another afternoon I was in the office when Sean appeared. He seemed to stagger beneath a bulging backpack.
I asked him what he was carrying.
Rocks.
Rocks?
Yeah, rocks, to throw at your spic buddies across the street.
Many afternoons, the Mexican kids across the street would recreationally waylay Sean on his way home from school. Prudent youngsters would simply run. Not Sean. He fought. Outnumbered and outsized, he'd windmill punch his way through his tormentors. Or engage his enemies long distance with missiles.
Last time I saw him, Sean, maybe 17, was out of school. He was huddled, shivering in front of Pick 'N Pay in the rain and cold. He was with a young girl. They looked bad, like they'd been tweaking.
"Bruce, you got five bucks? I can pay you back next week."
I hadn't thought of Wild Child for years until Brian Schreiner and I swapped memories. Then a friend sent along a notice from the Idaho Department of Corrections that said Sean Kibler, age 33, of Meridian, Idaho, had been arrested for failure to appear. A photo was attached. I could still recognize him. He looked good, and I've been happy for several days now at the news that Sean got to be 33.
THE LITTLE BLIND WINEMAKER
(Notes on the tumultuous life of Larry Parsons)
Pepperwood Springs was in some ways typical of the new wineries in Anderson Valley in the 1980s. Larry and Nicki Parsons had bought their hillside vineyard land in 1980 and had turned to winemaking as a way to make the most of their wine grapes. They got the name of their winery from springs that had been developed for livestock that were grazed on their land during the depression of the 1930s. What wasn't typical about Pepperwood Springs was that winemaker Larry Parsons was blind.
The Parsons had won design awards for their labels, but they were also unique in that their labels sported braille writing. The small, family winery attracted a lot of attention in the news media because of Larry’s blindness.
Reading Brad Wylie's vivid portraits of the Anderson Valley circa early 1970s, one of the characters who fascinated me was Larry Parsons, the blind winemaker, as unsympathetic a handicapped person as you are likely to meet. But to those of us who possess what might be called an elastic tolerance for unreasonable activity, the guy was the source of endless amusement.
I remember encountering Larry one night at the bar of the Boonville Hotel, where he was allowed one drink before he was led across the street to the more down-market Boonville Lodge. More than one drink and Larry became… uh, unruly. Before his gentle ejection from the hotel bar I had asked him about the tragic recent death of a blind friend of his. A couple of Parsons’ blind pals were visiting him from the Bay Area where they and Parsons maintained lucrative blind man concessions in federal buildings. The three blind guys had gotten drunk and drove around The Valley from one place to another getting drunker.
Blind men driving? It happened.
As Larry explained, one of the blind men had had enough and asked to be driven to a place on the west side of Anderson Creek where he was staying. To get there one had to drive across an ancient redwood bridge some 60 or so feet above the streambed. bed. The bridge itself seemed to defy the laws of both physics and gravity; it was hard to tell what was holding it up. At the east end of the bridge, the blind guy being driven home asked Larry to stop the car so he could relieve himself. Larry was at the wheel, although even at high noon on a cloudless day he could barely make out shadows of objects around him. The next thing anybody heard was a startled yelp and, a split second later, a thud. The blind man had stepped off the bridge and fallen to his death on the rocks below.
I asked Parsons what had happened. With a sinister little chuckle Larry said, “Heh-heh. I told him to watch that first step. Heh-heh.”
Parsons began life in the Anderson Valley as a pot grower, but had also installed a few grapevines at his home at the top of the Holmes Ranch as cover for his dope op. I first met him when an alarmed neighbor called me. “I just saw that blind guy’s kid driving him around up here while the blind guy shoots out the window of his truck. He told me he was hunting quail.” Larry’s son was ten or eleven at the time. He’d drive and aim Larry’s fire at wildlife. “Over there, Pop! A little more to the left…”
Parsons said he was originally from Oklahoma where his father had him selling light bulbs door-to-door, “when I was in the first grade.”
As an adult, Larry got a blind man’s concession in the Oakland federal building, which he parlayed into country property and then into his famous Pepperwood Springs winery.
Philo's enterprising blindman became nationally famous when his inspired braille wine labels not only made his wine a must-have among the trendys, the little blind winemaker became something of a media sensation, and soon there was a steady stream of traffic up the subdivision’s dusty roads, a subdivision that never expected a busy tasting room at its lofty ridgetop.
With his fame followed some shocked calls to the AVA from wine tasters, especially women who complained that Parsons had been “inappropriate” when they stopped in at his tasting room. “Inappropriate” could have been his middle name, because inappropriate occurrences were synonymous with him. A typical complaint went, “I was with my husband. We’d read about him in the New York Times, and being wine enthusiasts we wanted to meet him and buy his famous wine. We had a very hard time finding the place, and when we finally got up there it looked like a private home so we knocked on the door. A man yelled at us to ‘Come the hell in,’ like we were intruding. He was drunk and slumped in a corner of the room, but as soon as I entered he started saying things like, ‘Oh baby, this must be my lucky day. Sit right down next to me, honey. You sure smell good.’ Well, we just turned around and left.” There were several iterations of this experience from other women.
Larry died in an odd car crash on the far side of Yorkville in the middle 1980s. His underage daughter was driving, his girlfriend was in the passenger seat, little Larry was in the backseat with big Larry, but big Larry was the only person injured in the crash, and he was dead on impact when the car left the highway and hit a tree.
Larry Parsons, the famous little blind winemaker of the Holmes Ranch, creator of the braille wine label, died in something of a fluke. His underage daughter at the wheel with Larry in the back seat, daughter piled into an unyielding madrone on the far side of Yorkville. Of the four persons in the car, only Larry died. Not a scratch on anybody else.
Larry Parsons, The Blind Winemaker Of Pepperwood Springs
Interviewed by Bruce Anderson (November, 1984)
What is most impressive about Larry Parsons is his utter lack of self pity. There are people who say that not only does Parsons lack self pity but that he is feisty and aggressive, standing on its head the stereotype of the dependent sightless. Parsons was born to a family of prune and cotton pickers in Bakersfield 37 years ago. He has overcome the double whammy of extreme poverty and his disability to achieve an enviable and unique place among California winemakers. It’s been a tough road but Parsons is a tough cookie.
AVA: I must say I admire you enormously. You are not regarded as a handicapped person by the locals, which means to me that your strength of personality has caused people to forget or ignore it. The quiche eaters seem rather fearful of you, another plus. Right off I wanted him to tell me if this story was true. I’d heard a lot of Larry Parsons stories, but this one was my favorite:
One day, deputies were called to the Holmes Ranch because a posse of immediate neighbors.was claiming that he was hunting quail by leaning out his window and blasting away while the kid who was driving directed fire by shouting, “Left, right, up more, down…’’ and so forth.
Parsons: Absolutely untrue. I happened to be in the vehicle of a local high school student who was hunting. I was just along for the ride.
AVA: How do you account for the extreme hostility directed your way by certain persons?
PARSONS: I think some of it arises from the fact that people resent me because I have something going and they don’t. That along with mistrust of business people generally and the fact that my winery is out of sync with the neighborhood. They would probably rather have me down on 128 with all the other wineries. The have-nots have to learn that the haves will not be pushed around. I won’t tolerate any kind of harassment.
AVA: When did you move up here to the Holmes Ranch?
Parsons: We arrived in May of 1980. There was a barn-like structure on the property we connected to the home we built. Five acres of grapes were here, planted by an airline pilot and a school teacher.
AVA: What attracted you to Anderson Valley?
Parsons: It’s a wonderful mixed bag of people. We have an opportunity for relationships of any and all styles. In the city you tend to associate only with people like yourself. It’s the variety that makes living here very attractive. Plus, I’m not far from business interests I maintain in the Bay Area.
AVA: I’m trying to inform myself about wines and the wine industry so I hope you will tolerate some of the dumb questions coming up. What attracted you to making wines?
Parsons: I come from a family of alcoholics! I think the interest grew naturally out of my family circumstances. I started tinkering when I was about six, trying to make wine and beer at home.
AVA: Why did it take so long for Anderson Valley to become a recognizable area for growing premium grapes?
Parsons: Probably because of its isolation. The Napa Valley is much closer to the markets and only recently has there been an awareness of the unique growing conditions of Anderson Valley. There is now much more awareness of quality wines.
AVA: Is the Valley well-known among people who fancy wine?
Parsons: It is still little-known. Anderson Valley is often confused with Alexander Valley in Sonoma County. But it is obviously becoming more and more identifiable as a distinct area. The New Boonville Hotel, the wines, the wineries, your newspaper, Boontling, all seem to be putting the place on the map.
AVA: It seems to me, as a person ignorant of the industry, that every weekend there is a wine contest somewhere and all the wineries award one another gold medals, sort of like little league awards dinner, everyone gets a trophy. Last year, there was a very amusing story in the Press Democrat about a hot-shot European wine writer whose trip out here was financed by Napa Valley wineries. In the course of a talk, the wine critic said that 80 percent of American wines weren’t worth a damn. He quickly reneged when he realized that wineries weren’t going to pass out freebies to their critics. So what are the standards? How can you tell a mediocre wine from a good one?
Parsons: We are influenced by marketing strategies. Probably most people’s wine buying is determined by advertisements of one kind or another. The truly sophisticated let their palates be their guide. There are four and five dollar bottles of wine superior to twenty dollar bottles, let me tell you. But there are all sorts of prejudices at work that determine the success of certain wines and wineries. A number of California winemakers know that our wines are as good as any European wine. But many Europeans have a bias against anything American, especially wines because they have seniority in the field. A good wine is one you like. It can be that simple. Don’t let the experts tell you different. My advice is to stop reading and start tasting!
AVA: How about the wine experts, the judges at all these contests?
Parsons: Most are terrifically prejudiced. They taste all day. Their palates are overwhelmed. Many of them don’t have the same taste as John Doe Public. The small wineries have to compete for the attention of the wine-buying public so competitions are important, like them or not.
AVA: Did the fact that Reagan took Husch wines to China with him make any difference?
Parsons: Of course it did! The publicity and resulting name recognition that came to Husch as a result of Reagan’s purchase was invaluable to Husch.
AVA: Are wine critics corruptible? Can you buy good press?
Parsons: If you can I’ve never heard of it happening. They must get tons of free wines but I’m not aware that gifts of wine influence their opinions.
AVA: Is it possible for these huge wineries to make quality wine?
Parsons: It’s possible, but the bigger you get, the more difficult it is because of the increase of variables, more things can go wrong.
AVA: Do you make any attempt to sell your wines locally? .
Parsons: Vernon Rollins, at the New Boonville Hotel, helps all the Valley wineries enormously because he stocks them all. But some places, like the Heritage House, still have all out-of-county wines for sale. I understand, though, the Heritage House will soon go local. I’m the new kid on the block in this business so I’ve got to work hard for recognition.
AVA: Will you still be making wine when you’re an old man?
PARSONS: Yes! I love wines and winemaking. I love the romance of the industry.
AVA: How dependable is your labor force? I understand there was intense competition among wineries for pickers this season.
Parsons: The Mexican workforce is becoming more sophisticated. Harvests are their big chance of the year to make some real money and they informally have banded together to get top dollar. More power to them. They are wonderful. hard working people. Some entrepreneurs of engineering should move to the Valley to employ these people. They wouldn't regret it.
AVA: Have you a parting remark or shot for us?
Parsons: Yes. If more people would learn braille, all the blind drunks could find my wines on the shelves easier!
Larry spent his final hours enjoying the company of a new lady friend in his rented home on Manchester Road. Larry had separated from his wife, Nikki, leaving her and his winery at the top of the Holmes Ranch for a rented house west of Boonville. Dale Campbell, a Boonville realtor, was the property agent for Larry's new love interest. Piling irony upon coincidence, Campbell was himself to die the same afternoon Larry died in a car crash. Campbell was carried off by a massive heart attack not long after his place was raided by the marijuana cops.
Lots happened in the Anderson Valley in those days.
Early the Saturday morning of his death, Larry and his new lady friend, Christy Williams, had decided to take their children to Marriott's Great America. Miss Williams had just moved herself and her two children in with Parsons.
Somewhere between Boonville and the crest of the little rollercoaster hill outside of Yorkville, Miss Williams became incapacitated and unable to drive. Larry’s daughter, Michelle Parsons, a fifteen-year-old student at Anderson Valley High School, who was living on Manchester Road with her father and his new love, found herself at the wheel of the little car, which contained Larry Parsons senior and Larry Parsons junior, Michelle Parsons, Miss Williams and her two children. The underage and unlicensed chauffeur, Michelle, had lost control of the speeding vehicle, which went airborne, turned over twice before slamming into an ancient madrone. The blind winemaker was dead.
Passersby dragged the injured parties from the wreckage. Michelle, in a state of shock, pleaded with them to wait for the EMTs before anybody attempted first aid. She said she was going for help and was next seen at Ukiah General Hospital an hour later being treated for her injuries. The little red car was crushed like an accordion.
The first call from the scene was placed by a weekender who called for the 911 emergency number from the 894- Yorkville prefix. Rescue units were therefore dispatched from Sonoma County while units from nearby Yorkville and Ukiah were called some minutes later. Soon, Anita DeWitt and Renee Diamond from Yorkville were on the scene. Their deft first aid work was noted by the crowd of onlookers.
Altogether, 33 specially-trained personnel were to appear at the accident, including two helicopters. The aircraft ferried off the most seriously injured who turned out to be, aside from the deceased Larry Parsons, Miss Williams and her nine-year-old daughter; the child suffered two broken arms, two leg fractures and a ruptured spleen. Her mother was in serious condition with a variety of injuries from which she eventually recovered. The two thirteen-year-old boys sustained cracked ribs and broken hips. The rescue and removal of the injured was coordinated by Fire Chief Dave Hutchinson and Cecil Gowan of Anderson Valley. Larry Parsons was the only fatality.
The county belatedly discovered that there had been a sort-of tasting room at Parson’s place when the Widow Parsons sold the place to an about-to-be beleaguered couple named Kaliher, who apparently bought the blind winemaker’s property without being aware that most neighbors, and most members of the Holmes Ranch Housing Association, did not want a tasting room at the top of a ridge served by a dirt road that they all had to pay annually to maintain. The increased traffic would probably mean increased road maintenance, and road maintenance was expensive. The Kalihers, weary of fending off the Holmes Ranch Association, sold to a family named Sterling who re-christened the blind winemaker’s ridge-top winery, Esterlina. Their tasting room controversy, never having been resolved to the satisfaction of anyone, lives on.
The Anderson Valley went fast from 19th century old timers to arky and oakie loggers and millworkers in the fifties to hippie back to the landers in the late 60s, to the wine and gastro mania dominant today.
Larry Parsons, the little blind winemaker of Anderson Valley came back to the land in the middle 1970’s to grow dope, not wine,
Parsons bought property deep in the subdivided hills of the Holmes Ranch near Navarro — him, his battered wife and their two little disturbed special ed kids, a fire-starting little boy and a little girl who wore lipstick to pre-school. Larry was four miles off the pavement, up on a ridge pretty much alone for a few years with his marijuana business until wealthy people began buying in around him, which is when I began to get calls about him. “Mr. Anderson, I'm new to the valley and my neighbor is this alleged blind man down the road who I just saw driving around shooting at quail with a shotgun from inside his car. His little boy was apparently telling his father which way to shoot. “A little more to the left, dad. That kind of thing.”
Larry was sometimes blinder than he really was, depending on the situation. When the authorities, such as they were and are in Mendocino County, came snooping around he’d put on impenetrably black glasses and stumble around with his blindman cane, tapping his way to the intruding vehicle as if he were barely familiar with his own driveway.
We got to be friends. Larry said he was a dust bowl oakie who grew up in Bakersfield where his dad “beat me like a dog and blinded me then he made me sell light bulbs door to door and beat me again if I didn’t sell enough of them. I got a blindman concession in Oakland. Another blind guy runs it for me so I can stay up here most of the time.”
A lean man with reddish-brown hair who managed a steady but unmistakable menace, Larry talked low and slow out of the side of his mouth, looking straight ahead. He kept his place so brightly lit at night it looked like a spaceship from down on the valley floor. Locals knew he regularly beat his wife and wondered why she couldn't get out of the way of a blindman. But this blindman was as agile as a cat, and who knew how blind he really was?
One night this sorely abused woman retaliated by setting Larry’s shirt on fire. Larry called 911. Deputy Squires, who had a low opinion of the famous winemaker, promised the injured man, “I’ll meet you at the bottom of the hill and take a report.”
Parsons walked four miles down to the highway in the dark, drunk, tired, burnt up his back, hurt.
Deputy Squires arrived and, faking concern, took a cursory look at Larry’s back.“You’ll be all right.”
”Can I have a ride back up the hill, Keith?”
”Sorry, Larry. Gotta go. Got another call.”
Larry got popped a couple of times for pot growing. The authorities were still arresting and prosecuting people for growing back then, and there seemed to be more people growing in the Anderson Valley than not growing.
Then Larry had his epiphany.
After several pot arrests at his house, which was a cross between a yurt and a swiss chalet, he bought a load of grapes, brewed up some wine and, genius on top of genius, slapped a braille wine label on the bottle. Took the New York Times about a month to find out about the little blind winemaker of Anderson Valley. Larry was instantly famous. He couldn’t make enough wine fast enough. And he quickly became a legend at wine and cheese events, disrupting more of them than any ten upscale drunks could do.
Which is when a woman called one day to say, “Mr. Anderson I read about your little blind winemaker in the New York Times so my husband and I drove up to your beautiful Anderson Valley to visit his tasting room.”
I was already laughing. Larry’s tasting room was his down market livingroom where most afternoons his unsavory pals hung out with him, the whole gang drinking themselves into stupors on Larry's seconds.
The visitor went on. “I knocked on the door. Someone yelled out for me to ‘come on the fuck in.’ At which point we should have left, but like a fool we walked on in and there was Mr. Parsons with his dark glasses on. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Oh baby, I like someone’s perfume. This party just keeps on getting better! God damn! What’s that I smell, honey? I think I'm in love.’ Then one of the men in the room tried to start a fight with my husband. Mr. Anderson I really don’t think your chamber of commerce should have Mr. Parsons’ tasting room in its visitor’s guide.”
When Anderson Valley went suburban, tolerance for aberrant behavior, aka local color, decreased dramatically. It's just another place these days.
— Bruce Anderson
THE DEPUTY
SLIM PICKENS was a rodeo caller before he became a movie star. He said Boonville was the roughest town he ever worked in, which is saying something given all the tough rodeo towns there are. I was mildly shocked in my first years at Fair Time when the rodeo announcers, pros like Pickens from the outside, told “nigger jokes” to the great merriment of the crowd. (Mexicans were still invisible here in 1970)
Local friends of mine told me when they were little kids they'd sit outside the Boonville bars on weekends to watch all the fights. Up through around 1980, Fair Time still saw a lot of fights, many of them in the middle of Highway 128. The cops were out in force all weekend. Nearly sixty years later our town is famous for food, drink and tame men. There are no fightin' bars like the old Boonville Lodge, or even any fights to speak of, let alone celebrate.
IN the early 70s the Anderson Valley still had enough recreational violence and petty criminals to warrant a full-time resident deputy, a deputy big and strong enough to effectively maintain order in the town's night spots.
Enter Deputy Squires, whose predecessor had had his hat pulled down over his head and his gun stolen before he was shoved out the door of the Lodge. This wouldn't do, and here came “Keith” to work his entire career in the Anderson Valley, the most central figure in the community for thirty years.
I'm not saying it's true, but it soon went around that “Keith” seemed to have been instructed by his Ukiah headquarters to do what is necessary to maintain order. “Respectable people over there are complaining,” the Sheriff said. “Some hippie told me he'd been kidnapped. ‘I stopped in at the Boonville bar to get a six pack on my way to Mendocino and these cowboy-looking guys hooked up my VW Van up to their pickup with me in it and drove all over town. I thought they were going to kill me’.”
The Sheriff was tired of hearing what amounted to a low roar of complaints wafting over the hill to his otherwise silent cop shop out on Low Gap Road.
The new deputy was immediately tested by the Boonville night crew, and soon there were pleased rumors around town that Squires had “beat the shit out of so and so and dumped him off at his driveway.”
After hours order had been restored.
And the thieves soon knew that it would only be a matter of time before Squires showed up at their door, an experience I had firsthand when a family of crooks visited my wife's garage sale, leaving with items that weren't for sale. I called the deputy. “What'd they look like?” he asked.
The stuff was back in our possession in an hour.
The deputy lived not far from the center of Boonville, not nearly far enough, I'm sure, for Mrs. Squires. People wouldn't bother calling 911; they called Squires at home. Or show up at his front door at all hours. A tribe might have their chief, a commune their guru, the Anderson Valley had Deputy Squires.
He was laughing when he told me about the Boonville Mexicans who appeared at his door one night to complain that gunmen out of the Bay Area had just taken off with a whole season's worth of product. “They even hit us with their guns, Keith.” The southbound bandits had been intercepted at Santa Rosa and here the vics were asking, “Keith, can you get our property back?”
When the deputy sold his house and he and Mrs. Deputy moved to Sonoma County the curtain came down on the old Boonville. For almost four decades The Deputy, and he was the deputy all that time, had been a central figure in the life of The Valley.
The Deputy didn't miss much, if he missed anything, which made him an excellent cop. And he was fair. I don't know of anyone, including the most recent immigrant, who was reluctant to go straight to “Keith,” with a grievance. The guy was never off duty. We all knew where he lived, and we all had his home telephone number. Imagine that burden!
But at even the hint of gratitude for services rendered Deputy Squires would divert the comment away from himself. He saved the County huge amounts of time and money by working out a lot of stuff informally. He knew who had “to go over the hill,” and who only needed to be told to go home and stay there. And he seemed to know without even leaving his house who was doing what.
Apart from being on duty even when he was theoretically off, Keith and his wife Debbie devoted countless hours to the community, especially to youth sports. I can't count the number of letters we received at the newspaper asking us about Deputy Squires. Visitors would ask, “We want to meet Deputy Squires. Show us Deputy Squires.” We got more questions, by far, about The Deputy than we did about Hendy Woods or other local landmarks.
The Valley changed so fast and so fundamentally, and our few anchoring figures are either dead or gone, it's painful to write about The Deputy in the past tense. But he's gone. The Deputy never was indecisive.
(Bruce Anderson)
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