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Valley People (Aug. 30, 2017)

THE ANDERSON VALLEY is saddened by news of the death of Gloria Ross, a native daughter of Mendocino County, a revered teacher of many years with the Anderson Valley schools, a long-time resident of Boonville, and the woman behind many community fundraising events, most famously the annual crab feed at the Boonville Fairgrounds. Gloria had never fully recovered from a badly damaged lung sustained in a roll-over accident two miles from Boonville earlier this month. 84 at the time of her passing early Saturday morning, Gloria's death is mourned by everyone who knew her.

GLORIA would have loved it. The Lion’s Club annual tri-tip dinner at the Fairgrounds attracted a huge crowd, perhaps the largest in the history of the popular annual event. Al Green’s yeoman’s work on publicity certainly helped swell the crowd and, as one attendee speculated, “the heat may have contributed to it as well. Who wants to cook in this weather?”

THE CELEBRATION of semi-raw meat was not without its emergencies. Volunteer chef Kevin Lee peeled his thumb with the meat slicer but, as he has a thousand times over the years, Doc Apfel hustled Kevin over to the Boonville Clinic for a dozen stitches. While Doc Apfel was sewing up Kevin’s thumb, a heart attack patient arrived along with a number of mixed AVVFD/Ambulance personnel, and for a few minutes, as one local described it, “it seemed like the tri tip after party had moved to the clinic.”

FIRE CHIEF ANDRES AVILA reported last week that, “after interviewing three other applicants, the Fire Protection Committee hired Angela DeWitt as part time Administrative Assistant to the EMSO,” i.e., the Emergency Medical Services Officer. Ms. DeWitt “will assist Clay Eubanks with the coordination of staffing, medical supply, and regular checks of the ambulance and ambulance barn,” and act as ambulance manager in Eubanks’ absence. “Initially she will be conducting an overhaul of our online documents (i.e., map books, protocols, maps), reviewing our website for currency and appeal, creating an online ambulance membership access and payment system, and we will be kicking off a review of ambulance services during the winter.”

WITH THE MERGER Mr. Eubanks, who was the part-time ambulance manager before the merger, assisted by part time assistant Aaron ‘Cobb’ Martin, becomes a full time employee of Fire Department splitting his time between ambulance manager and fire department training officer.

THE NEWLY MERGED AMBULANCE and fire department (as of July 1) has been working out “relatively well” so far. Chief Avila reports that volunteer training for ambulance and fire responders is being combined and coordinated so that the crews can work more effectively together both during training and on calls. (Mark Scaramella)

LOCAL SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT Michelle Hutchins said Thursday that K-12 enrollment so far this school year is “482 but growing.” Ms. Hutchins also said that the district’s lawyers had advised her that the payout amount to former Elementary School principal Katherine Reddick upon Ms. Reddick’s stormy departure was confidential, as agreed upon by both parties, those parties being Ms. Reddick and the school district. Be that as it probably is, expenditures of public money are public information, but since I seem to be the only person interested I’ll forego a FOIA argument with the district’s dependably wrong easy-over attorneys and say the payout was probably in the neighborhood of $80,000, Ms. Reddick’s contract for the second year of work she did not do plus her legal fees. Quick editorial aside: Used to be the assumption was that publicly-employed people spent public money like their own, frugally. That standard flew out the window years ago. Now, when you have tax-paid lawyers (all of them otherwise unemployable) like our school district’s Santa Rosa-based seraglio, advising our tax-funded school district, with an oversight school board bamboozled by legal mumbo jumbo, if the entire apparatus flew off to Acapulco for a week of “in-service seminars,” the public wouldn’t know anything was amiss until AV Unified’s school buildings were put up for sale on E-Bay.

SOCCER COACH ABEL MALDONADO reports that his undefeated Panther athletes cruised by Middletown on Friday, 6-1, tuning up for the Lake County squad by defeating Willits 5-0 and Kelseyville 4-0. Middletown, Coach M. noted, inspired a spasm of anxiety into his powerhouse team when they jumped out to an early 1-0 lead, the first and only time they’d lead. “Our record is now 3 and 0. We have a young (only three seniors) but very talented team and they are playing well as a team. The coach cited his goalie turned forward, Jose Magaña, “who scored a beautiful diving header playing forward for the first time.” Over all, Coach Maldonado singled out Ulises Garcia and Brian Bucio as “men of the match.”

THERE’S FUTBOL AND FOOTBALL here in Mendocino County’s most happening community. Our first home football game is this Friday against Cornerstone Christian at 6 pm, Boonville Fairgrounds. We have some good returning players led by JT Carlin at QB hoping to fill the monster-size shoes of all-everything Tony Pardini, last year’s quarterback now an engineering student at UC Davis.

A BOONVILLE READER WRITES:

“A weatherlink system map/data is available to anyone at: http://www.weatherlink.com/map.php

You can enter a location name or zip code and see how many collection stations are there (25,952 stations worldwide). Zooming in on the map reveals individual stations. Clicking on a dot shows the station name and a description of current conditions. Clicking on the station name gives the "My Weather" screen like the one in the AVA this morning. Clicking on the "Summary" tab shows more detail (current, high, low, etc.).”

ATTORNEY HANNAH NELSON to discuss legal issues on the next Cannabis Hour, Thursday, Sept. 7, 9 a.m. on KZYX.

Ever wonder if anyone reads the volumes of paperwork generated by the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors each time it changes its cannabis ordinances? Does the fine print really matter? Fort Bragg attorney Hannah Nelson will talk with host Jane Futcher on the legal details and big issues that worry Nelson and her cultivator clients the most. That’s Thursday, September 7, 9 a.m., on KZYX --90.7 FM, Philo; KZYX, 91.5 FM, Willits and Ukiah; and Fort Bragg, 88.1 FM. You can stream the show on the Web, at kzyx.org or listen to programs you may have missed at jukebox.kzyx.org. (Jane Futcher)

107? CAN IT BE? Yep, 107 in Boonville on Sunday afternoon, and globally toasted again Monday as the temps again soared over a hundred here at the AVA bunker.

IT WON'T happen here, but it should: Second home buyers in Healdsburg could be looking at a city tax designed to crack down on tourist rentals over permanent rentals for people who live and work in Healdsburg.

FOOTBALL AND CONCUSSIONS. A 17-year-old Fortuna football player will probably emerge mentally intact from his medically-induced coma after he fainted and began vomiting blood Friday night as the Fortuna vs. Cardinal Newman game in Santa Rosa was winding down. One huge problem with football at the high school level is the physical difference between 15 and 16-year-olds and 17- and 18-year olds. And perennial powerhouse football teams like Cardinal Newman up against a good but usually overmatched team like Fortuna, means Division One college recruits will be playing against kids who won't have the physical tools to play college football. In this particular mis-match, Fortuna seems to have given Newman a game, final score: 41-18.

ELK IN ELK? “It appears that there are elk in Elk. They were reintroduced to California in Humboldt County probably 20 years ago, you can see the resident wild herd as you head north on Highway 101. They were seen in the Willits area, about 15 years ago, and it's very likely they've migrated and started to repopulate the Mendocino coast. Keep your eyes open. Eagles are starting to come back, no reason the elk aren't following their example. Anyone seen elk in the Comptche area?” (Ronnie James. Ms. James is the go-to animal person for the Mendocino Coast)

ATTABOY with oak leaf cluster for Dave the Bookmobile guy for passing out free eclipse glasses. Dave the Bookmobile guy replaces Robert the Bookmobile guy who is now the librarian at Mendo College.

MY INTERFACE WITH KZYX: When I first came here in 2008, during the financial debacle, that perilous autumn, I was amazed at how straitlaced and prissy the local public radio was, KZYX. The tone of local news was a passive rote-reading of press releases or puff-pieces on innocuous events such as little old ladies who knitted sweaters for puppies at the dog pound. Later, when I met program director Mary Aigner, I began to understand the devious ploy she had engineered to hide the underground local economy which she was a part of, under a bushel of respectability, in just the same way my neighbor at the Seniors-Only trailer park in Ukiah, used Neighborhood Watch posters and planters full of begonias and geraniums, along with the outdoor knickknacks any 1950s grandma would decorate her yard with, in order to camouflage his retail meth outlet.

I had spent some time in Redway and Garberville, and much admired how the growers of SoHum had taken their own public radio in hand, and made KMUD — “The MUDD” — an organ of their refreshingly anarchistic, half radical/half libertarian political dichotomy.

But from Redway to Philo was an incredible stretch in the public airwaves. The only other public radio station I had ever been exposed to that was as cautious, careful, humorless (not to mention dull) as KZYX was KUSU in Logan, Utah. So it was not entirely surprising that the current KZYX news director, Sheri Quinn, came to us from that balefully Mormonesque station.

Ms. Quinn made one – and one only – trip to the courthouse, and I’ll never forget how arrogant and rude she was to my colleague Tiffany Revelle, then reporting for the Ukiah Daily Journal. Very professionally, Tiffany went up to Ms. Quinn, smiled warmly, and said, “Tiffany Revelle, The Ukiah Daily Journal…?” Quinn stood and glowered down her nose at Tiffany. Finally, her hand still extended, Tiff added, superfluously, “and you are…?”

“And I am here,” Quinn hissed. She then turned on her heel and marched out, never, thank God, to return.

Now that other organs, run for the benefit of and advertising from, the underground economy are coming out of the proverbial closet, why is it that KZYX continues to affect the ersatz posturing of a strait-laced AM station from the 1950s, using the same old false piety, repeating with tireless reverence all the silly euphemisms that no longer apply? And why are they still devoted to a propaganda of pretentiousness that is no longer necessary? Could it be, possibly, that they’ve finally become the mean little reactionaries they pretended to be for so long? I have to wonder. (Bruce McEwen)

FROM THE SF CHRON: "Saturday will be a good day to walk to Union Square, do some tourist mocking, eat lunch, and walk back. Anyone thinking of going anywhere near Crissy Field is either, 1) a Nazi who just wants to get into a fight, 2) a Nazi sympathizer who just wants to get into a fight, 3) a leftist wacko who just wants to get into a fight, 4) an idiot ‘journalist’ who's hoping to see a fight, or 5) a plain old idiot.”

I QUALIFY as an idiot journalist and a plain old idiot, and I'm going and, truth to tell, for two reasons: (1) The theater of it, (2) And I think a fascist rally less than a mile from the San Francisco National Cemetery and its thousands of graves of young men who died fighting fascism is a double provocation. I also think the fascisti should be confronted wherever they appear and, in the more restrained venues, argued with, not banned. I really don't want the Democratic National Committee and, closer to home, Mendolib, telling me who can talk and who can't, what I can read and what I can't. Closer to home, a friend told me that when a nazi called in one of KZYX's rare open lines shows the other night the host simply hung up on him. The guy should have been engaged, argued with, shown up, not hung up on.

AND NOTHING much will happen in Frisco tomorrow. There might be some heavy huffing and puffing but the nazis will be heavily out-numbered, and we're not at the gun stage yet. If the fascisti held their rally in, say, Redding, where there's only six liberals, three of them confined to a rest home, no attention would be paid to them. But the mere possibility of an errant political opinion mobilizes the entire Bay Area. Which is why the fascists choose the Bay Area and communities like it in other parts of the US for provocations. They know they'll either be banned or attacked. Or both. Either way they think they win because, as they inevitably claim, "See, the great defenders of free speech won't let us talk," as if they let our side talk at their many more prevalent sites.

UPDATE: THE FASCISTS cancelled their appearance, sooooo I guess I'll put away my helmet and mace and go to a movie.

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