Mendocino County Today: Monday, July 10, 2017

• Pets of the Week
• Scapegoating the Homeless
• Arky Vaughan Biography
• Bluster Brothers
• Vinegar Gargle
• Hospital Info
• No Patchouli
• Seniors Sue
• Vineyard Labor
• Resilient Reed
• Yesterday's Catch
• Strike Three
• Science
• Little Dog
• Many People
• Pet Genocide
• Childhood
• Palm Beach

PETS OF THE WEEK

J.W. is is a senior, special-needs cat, looking for a certain new someone. J.W. has a solar-induced squamous cell carcinoma, caused/aggravated by prolonged sun exposure. He's a sweet soul in need of a kind person to take him in and provide a comfy home for him to live out the rest of his days. J.W. is a 9 year old, neutered, male Siamese cat who will need an indoor-only home. Do you have room in your heart for this very sweet cat? If so, come down and meet J.W. today and take advantage of his reduced adoption fee.

Clover is a 6 year old spayed female mixed breed dog who currently weighs 64 pounds. Clover is living in a foster home, but her temporary guardian would be happy to set up an appointment for a meet and greet with this very sweet dog. Clover is amazingly patient with dogs, puppies, and humans. She is quiet and rarely barks, and she's perfectly house trained. Clover sleeps wherever you ask her (usually the couch or the bed), and loves to go on her daily walks. She love, loves to go for rides in the car. In general she is a very easy going gal. We have lots more information about Clover from her foster person on our website, but we like to say that Clover is outstanding in her field!

The Ukiah Animal Shelter is located at 298 Plant Road in Ukiah; adoption hours are Tuesday-Saturday 10 am to 4:30 pm and Wednesday till 6:30 pm. To view photos and bios of our adoptable dogs and cats, please visit online at www.mendoanimalshelter.com or visit the shelter. Join us the 2nd Saturday of every month for our "Empty the Shelter" pack walk and help us get every dog out for some exercise! For more information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.

IT’S NOT THE HOMELESS

To the Editor:

I read last week's article in the Ukiah Daily Journal about Lake Mendocino recreation areas with a sense of dismay that the improper slant towards the problem of homeless and drawing a line between that and the Lake's recreation area closures. I was there just this weekend and did indeed see the closures, but the homeless "problem" is nothing new.

The improper journalistic slant in that article that I perceived was helped by the quote from Mike Dillabough, Lake Mendocino's acting manager in his capacity as Chief of the Operations and Readiness Division for the San Francisco District. Said paraphrasing by Mr. Dillabough in the article stated that he "noticed a spike in homeless camps around the lake." If Mr. Dillabough visited the lake more often he'd know that the homeless have camped in and around the lake for the past 25 years in similar proportions. This is nothing new.

Rather, the homeless "spike" serves as a convenient scapegoat to cover Mr. Dillabough's diversion of staffing resources away from the lake, most likely towards Sonoma County Water Agency and its facilities. They own Lake Mendocino anyway and are the ones who actually call the shots, not Mr. Dillabough.

Brandon Merritt

Ukiah

WHO REMEMBERS ARKY VAUGHAN?

AVA,

I am in the process of writing a biography of Hall of Fame baseball player Arky Vaughan, and I wondered if you knew of anyone in that area who might be willing to talk to me about him. At this point, I’m hoping to find people who might have been fans of Arky, although I realize that’s a long shot, given that he played so long ago. This would have to be people who were very young (teens or pre-teens) who were fans when Arky was playing in the 1930s and 40s.

If you know of anyone interested, please share my contact information. I live in the Pittsburgh area (western Pennsylvania) but still have a 209 area code on my cell phone, as I worked in the Central Valley (Modesto area) and Sierra foothills (Calaveras County) for most of my adult life.

Thanks in advance,

Frank Garland
814-871-5808 (office)
209-605-8008 (cell)
garland003@gannon.edu

ED NOTE: Joseph Floyd ‘Arky’ Vaughan was born on March 9, 1912, in Clifty, Arkansas, a farm village about 25 miles northeast of Fayetteville. When Arky was seven months old, his parents, Robert and Laura Vaughan, moved the family, including two older sisters, to Potter Valley, and then to Ukiah in Mendocino County. They later relocated to Fullerton, California, where Robert found work in the California oilfields. Joseph Floyd Vaughan’s childhood friends began calling him Arky as soon as they learned of his birthplace, and he was known as Arky Vaughan for the rest of his life. Vaughan drowned on Aug. 30, 1952, in Eagleville (Modoc County) in a tragic fishing accident in a lake at the age of 40.

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-01-13/sports/sp-27753_1_arky-vaughan

IF BLUSTER were reality, Kim Jong Un already would have died from fright at Trump's promises to "do something" about him. But, as Mark Bowden explains in the current edition of the Atlantic, "every option the United States has for dealing with North Korea is bad. But accepting it as a nuclear power may be the least bad." At the slightest hint that he's about to be attacked, Kim has the will and the means to destroy Seoul and Tokyo. The situation is perilous indeed because, basically, the fate of much of the world is in the hands of the two most unstable people in it. Bowden makes a strong case for doing nothing about Kim while peaceful means are pursued to cool him out.

HICCUPS. Why thank you for asking. I finally knocked them out in the middle of the night with a fearsome dose of gargled vinegar. The first two vinegar attempts didn't stop the serial mini-quakes, and I was twice roused by them from the deep sleep of the righteous and the true I typically enjoy. The third time, in pure desperation to permanently rid myself of the pesky irritation, I pounded down a drunkard's gulp of the searing liquid, gave it a prolonged esophageal churning and accompanying Niagra-like rumbling so loud it roused my long-suffering wife, and announced to the neighborhood, "Got the bastards this time." I'd had panicked thoughts that dying of hiccups would be the final indignity and promised myself to be more respectful of my body bag.

WHY HIDE THE NUMBERS?

Editor:

The recent town hall meeting about obstetrics service at the Mendocino Coast Hospital was rooted in the difficult economics of the hospital. The projected budget for 2017-18 is continued debt. Inpatient care, while medically necessary, is not very productive in an economic sense. The North Coast Family Health Center is still losing more than it earns. Laboratory and radiology departments help the hospital's bottom line, but other departments cost more than they generate.

The administration suggested to the board that several million dollars could be earned by a pain program, an ophthalmologist, and a second orthopedist. The board agreed and the services were started several years ago. The costs include guaranteed annual incomes for each of the doctors.

There have been repeated requests to the administration for information about the overall costs and benefits of these programs. The administration has refused to provide this information which should also be public and is thereby impeding the fiduciary responsibilities of the members of the board.

The administration's persistent silence has finally led me to file a formal Freedom of Information request to obtain a report for the fiscal year of 2016 about these programs' performances and their economic status. Are those programs generating income for the hospital, or are they costing the hospital more than they generate? Why is the hospital providing a guaranteed minimum income for each, and how much? And, incidentally, and curiously, why do these doctors not have individual Fort Bragg business licenses?

Peter Glusker, M.D.

Mendocino Coast District Hospital Board Member

Fort Bragg

WELCOME TO GARBERVILLE

LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST OWNERS AND MANAGEMENT OF VINTAGE AT BENNETT VALLEY APARTMENTS

Vintage at Bennett Valley Apartments were formerly known as Vista Sonoma Senior Apartments. Name change seems to be to escape critical evaluations of the mismanagement done by FPT Management company of Folsom, California.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7156475-181/santa-rosa-tenants-sue-over

SONOMA COUNTY WINERIES reach out to foreign visa workers to fill void in tight labor market.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/7144348-181/sonoma-county-vineyard-companies-look

MENDOCINO HIGH ALUM REED CARTER STRIDING THROUGH ADVERSITY

by Chris Smith

When my friend Bob Padecky, the formidable and durable and lyrical sports columnist, retired from full-time work nearly four years ago, he listed in his sign-off commentary some of his favorites among the legions of athletes and coaches and such he’d met over 50 years.

He mentioned fourth a Mendocino High school football player, Reed Carter.

Bob wrote that Reed “has the kind of courage I have not seen in the NFL, NBA or MLB. In a 13-month period that started when he was 12, Reed’s mother died in a car accident, his brother spent six months in a body brace and his father was diagnosed with cancer that required him to live apart from the family for five months. Reed has gone through hell and back and he didn’t do it for money or fame or acclaim. He refused to submit because he wanted to make something of his life. And he has, stunningly.”

Reed, a two-time North Central League III MVP who in 2013 was elected Mendocino’s homecoming king and his then-girlfriend Shanti Marecello the homecoming queen, is 21 now. He’s closing in on a degree in construction management from Chico State University.

And he’s still moving his life forward while confronting extreme crisis in his family.

When we spoke by phone Friday he was at the home in Mendocino that his father, Mike, has been ordered to vacate.

The 75-year-old cancer survivor hasn’t made mortgage payments since about the time he fell off the roof during his son’s freshman year of college and was paralyzed from the waist down.

Reed is doing what he can for him. The former Mendocino Cardinal said of his dad, “As much as he wants help, he doesn’t at the same time.”

Reed has invited Mike to live with him, though such an arrangement would be especially tricky just now.

This summer before his senior year, Reed works as an intern with the Ghilotti Bros. construction company and lives both with a cousin in Windsor and with a friend in San Rafael. Among the projects he’s cutting his teeth on are stops along the SMART rail route.

Reed aspires to land a job in project management with Ghilotti Bros. once he receives his degree next year.

His father said he’s hoping to make it to the graduation ceremony in Davis. Mike said also that he’s thinking he is mobile enough to move out of his foreclosed home and onto a boat and sail somewhere, perhaps the Philippines.

Football was great for Reed in high school and before, and he definitely made his mark on the game. Bob Padecky described how he shone in a game against Anderson Valley and afterward the parents of opposing players approached to tell him, “I love you, man. You’re so special.”

As he prepared for college, Reed struggled before declaring that he wouldn’t play any more football. “I battle with that (decision) all the time,” he said.

Tough, too, was accepting after he chose Chico State and Shanti picked San Diego State that they’d have to break up. But it’s summertime and they get back together when they can up in Mendocino.

Life has never been easy for Reed but he continues to tackle the challenges and opportunities like someone worthy of high-up inclusion on Padecky’s most-memorable list.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

(Reed and his father Mike on the bluff where the two spread the ashes of Reed’s mother on the Mendocino Headlands.)

CATCH OF THE DAY, July 9, 2017

LUIS AREVALO-RODRIGUEZ, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

ANTHONY BILLY, Hopland. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JARED BOW, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse.

MARK GAVASSE, Aptos/Willits. DUI.

DANIEL GILKISON, Fresno/Ukiah. Controlled substance, taking vehicle without owner’s consent, burglary tools, escape while charged with felony.

JOSHUA GUEVARA, Ukiah. Concealed weapon.

ANTHONY HIDALGO, Ukiah. DUI.

LAMONT JONES, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

TIMOTHY MARTIN, Willits. Brandishing.

MARIO PONTELLO, Ukiah. Domestic battery, probation revocation.

BURKE POWERS, Fort Bragg. Failure to appear.

CHERRI ROBERTS, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent Flyer)

JOSE RODRIGUEZ, Ukiah. Controlled substance, smoking-injecting device, unlawful registration.

TANYA SALMERON, Morgan/Ukiah. DUI.

CHARLES ZUBIA, Burglary, controlled substance.

CALLED THIRD STRIKES (Belt should be fined.)

It was the last of the ninth, two outs, two men on base, the Giants were losing, and Brandon Belt took a called third strike to end the game last night. The pitch may have been slightly outside, and Belt argued with the umpire about it.

But it was Belt's failure to remember one of the first lessons for a hitter in baseball:

Anyone who plays baseball learns in Little League to swing at anything close when he/she has two strikes. Standing with the bat on your shoulder and taking a called third strike is shameful, especially when it's done by major league players.

With two strikes, you have to be ready hit, to swing at any pitch that's close, even if you're fooled. Taking called third strikes seems like a kind of mental error---not being ready to hit, with, as a last resort, an emergency swing and a chance to foul the pitch off and stay alive.

Otherwise, you allow the umpire to take away your at-bat by calling a strike.

Bochy should have a policy of fining hitters that take called third strikes. Buster Posey took a called third strike in tonight's came, but it was the first inning and the pitch was a great curve.

Since Belt's called third strike last night was the last pitch of the game, it was particularly egregious. Under my rule, he would have been fined more than Posey.

And, by the way, Belt has a hitch in his swing that he could do without. Maybe that's why he's hitting .238. The below video is a typical Belt swing, as he twitches the bat just before the swing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ec_wYkcAi0

(Rob Anderson)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

15000 years ago a child brought some nuts into the family cave. The mother, recognizing them as toxic, promptly threw them into the fire along with the carcass of a rat she killed and an old threadbare loincloth. Obviously, archaeologists have determined that these people roasted nuts and rats in a ritualistic funeral fire. Making up shit is a science.

LITTLE DOG SAYS: "The dog days of summer." First off, I don't like the negative implication of that phrase. Us dogs don't like consecutive hot days any better than anyone else, so why pin unpleasantness on us? An old convict friend of mine always said, "Walk slow and drink a lot of water." That's me on a hot day exactly.

ALL FULL

by Manuel Vicent

(Translated by Louis S. Bedrock)

The rebellion of the masses has not been convoked to take political power but to occupy all physical space. The masses form a kind of human lava stream that pursue you for the sole purpose of swallowing and destroying you. This and nothing else is the social revolution we are facing.

Wherever you go—stadia, airports, stations, sidewalks, museums, concerts, shopping centers, meetings, parties, civic or religious gatherings, the masses impose the law, which is generated by the emotional center of the brain. In fact, the overflowing stands in a soccer stadium have the collective mentality of an eight year old child.

The importance of a spectacle is proportional to the amount of people it attracts and, in turn, its success is measured by the tons of garbage it generates. The day after an event, you are informed of the huge number of sanitation trucks and workers that were needed to clean up the area—whether it was a rock concert or a Papal visit.

Wherever you go, the masses have already arrived ahead of you. Is not your own body like the body that has formed in front of The Gioconda at the Louvre or the one that coats the Rialto Bridge like it was a human escalope?

The masses today have assumed the form of tourists. They are like a seventh continent composed of a billion univocal human beings in constant motion, who have become a planetary epidemic since they devour cities, monuments, temples, palaces, and gardens in their path. Their only destination is consumption: dressing, eating, drinking, dancing, seeing, hearing, and saying the same things. You’re not even safe at home. This completely stifling sensation produced by the masses is also disseminated by the social media which goes right through the walls to let you know that whatever you have thought and written has been thought and written by millions of people before.

IN THE FIRST WEEK OF THE WAR in September 1939, at least 400,000 cats and dogs in London were destroyed. Pet owners themselves took the decision to kill their animals; the British government had not issued a diktat or emergency measures requiring mass killing, which was criticized at the time by animal charities and individual animal supporters. The popular disc jockey Christopher Stone broadcast to the nation in November 1939 that "to destroy a faithful friend where there is no need to do so is yet another way of letting war creep into your home." Nina, Duchess of Hamilton, a co-founder of the Animal Defense Society, declared, "We should be horrified if this had happened abroad. How can we explain such a thing to our foreign friends in this so-called animal-loving England."

— Hilda Kean, "The Great Cat & Dog Massacres: The Real Story of World War Two's Unknown Tragedy"

WHAT IS A FAMILY? A group of people who live together. They form relationships, which may be strong or weak, solid or slippery. It is the place whence the child looks out on the rest of the world. Families can be awful, repressive, obsessive, or cool and uncaring and distracted, or toxic, tainted and maggoty. Very often they are like that. But a child needs one all the same... Maybe he grows up unhappy in his family, he's ashamed of it, hates it, but it's an unhappiness memory can feed on... In the future he will go back in his mind to that thick and woody forest. Move a child when he's young and you damage him. Now he has to look at the world from a new place. The old place and the new place clash. A war starts. And that war may be worse than unhappiness, because in the future, going back to all this upheaval, he won't be able to track down his childhood.

— Natalia Ginzburg

PALM BEACH

by Jeff Costello

Palm Beach — this exclusive enclave of the ultra-wealthy has gotten a lot of press lately thanks to Trump and his Mar-A-Lago resort. I'd never have gone there if not for a music gig. My band had been playing at Trude Heller's club in Greenwich Village, close to the "hip" folk clubs where Dylan and others got their start, but culturally a world away. At Trude Heller's, upper-crust New York society types came to see and be seen. Thanks to this booking, the band was mentioned in Suzy Knickerbocker's society gossip column. But the bands, the music, didn't matter. It was all image, with a gaggle of dancers there encouraging the swells to dance.

It so happened that Ms. Heller was about to open a second club in Palm Beach. This was notable for the fact that Heller was first Jew, and a holocaust survivor to boot, to open a business in the ultra WASPish town. Our manager, ever the showbiz hustler, convinced her that we should play there for the opening. It would be Joey Dee and the Starlighters, and us. January in New York, a good time to go to Florida.

We set off in the beat-up blue Ford Econoline van, down the mid-Atlantic coast and into the confederate southern states. Somewhere there is a photo of the band posing in front of the capitol building in Washington DC. Our manager's idea, but how this related to music or anything cool, was beyond me. I remember buying untaxed cigarettes in North Carolina, less than half the normal price. Crossing into South Carolina one is confronted with South of the Border, a fireworks superstore and theme park. No liberal-influenced safety laws to inhibit the good ol' boy desire to blow things up. Georgia? Lots of pig themed restaurants, the only thing I really noticed besides segregated bathrooms. Northern Florida, not much to see until you reach the spring break zone. Southern Florida, Jews and Cubans.

But Palm Beach? Another planet between and entirely separate from it all. Nobody, certainly no tourists, on the beach. It was 1967, both Trump and I were 21, before his acquisition of Mar-a-Lago. Best I can guess, it means Sea at the Lake. Make what you will of that, but linguistic brilliance it is not.

We rolled into Palm Beach in the beat-up van and got our reserved hotel rooms. It was a working class place, not for the normal crowd there. We wouldn't have gotten through the door at most of the hotels. The town was very clean with only high-end clothing and jewelry stores that I could see. But at Trude Heller's new club we were somebody, sort of. You were somebody or you were not, and if you were not, you didn't last long. There was by necessity one all-night restaurant, where entertainers could go in the late hours after work.

We went to the club to set up for opening night. Joey Dee, still coasting on his Peppermint Twist fame, had a six-piece band with no remnants of the original Peppermint Lounge band. Eddie Brigati was flying high with the Rascals, and the drummer, Willie Davis, had fallen on hard times and went around to small-town clubs playing on the tables ala Stepin Fetchit with his drumsticks for tips and drinks.

Opening night -The Trude Heller club was pretty big, with a lot of dance floor. The stage was large enough to accommodate two alternating bands. Rumors of big stars and celebrities. The biggest talk was that Jackie Gleason would be there. He never showed, but the table just to the right of the stage was occupied by Lucille Ball and Hugh O'Brian, the TV Wyatt Earp actor. They were joined later by movie actor Kevin McCarthy, and the biggest Palm Beach personage of all, Dina Merrill. Merrill, who did some acting, was the billionaire heir to the Post cereal fortune and daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post, who used the Post Toasties fortune to build Mar-a-Lago, unwittingly setting the stage for you-know-who. Damn.

Amid all this fabulous wealth, somehow there was no money to pay the hotel bill when we left. So at 4:30 in the morning, we lowered our suitcases out the window and made a run for it.