NORM CLOW WRITES: “Just saw your nice send-off for Gloria. This photo is the dedication page of our senior year, 1968 AVHS annual, wherein our first-year librarian was not only the advisor but also the dedicatee. Gloria is a shirt-tail relative through the Greenwood Road branch of the Clows via the Berry line, and also related to Ruth by marriage via the same connection. Absolutely wonderful lady and she is missed by many.”
ABOUT 9 Saturday night, a truck hauling one of the rides to this weekend’s Boonville Fair, went over on its side at the junction of 128 and 253. Which is not the half of it, or even half the half of what had happened. According to Anderson Valley Fire Chief Avila, the as yet unnamed driver of the rig did an absolutely heroic job in ensuring that nobody, including him, was hurt. The driver had lost his brakes two miles up the Ukiah Road, and had commenced a two-mile hurtle down that steep and winding two miles, barreling on through the one-way traffic light at construction project and on down the hill to the perilous intersection. Left with the choice of slamming into Clyde Doggett's house at the bottom of the hill, and still traveling at better than 50mph, the driver slammed the big rig on to its side, skidding the careening vehicle into the intersection, and sending remnants of the bucket ride he'd been hauling spiraling in all directions. Miraculously, the driver emerged from the wreckage unharmed, and no one else was harmed either. Chief Avila said Monday morning "the guy deserves a medal."·
IN A FRIDAY NIGHT disaster, Jake Waggoner conked out from a heart attack at the bar of the Buckhorn, but has survived to tell the tale. The guy’s maybe 25, but a young life of strenuous night life unleavened by correct nourishment, and here the guy is with the cardio apparatus of a 90-year-old. Glad he’s ok, but from here on it’s clean living or a very early grave for basically a nice kid.
THE AV Panther varsity football team lost Saturday's away non-conference game against Rincon Valley Christian by a score of 35-0. Next game Friday, Sep. 15 at 7pm at home against Calistoga, the annual Fair football game against, used to be, Mendocino. But Mendocino and Potter Valley have dropped football, and Calistoga will have to do.
THE LIGHT RAIN that fell on Mendo last Thursday was enough to prompt a hurry-up harvest of the wine grapes still on the vine, and the bud still on the leaf.
SO MUCH RUSH, in fact, that one Philo vineyard called in this mega-grape harvester, seen here in Boonville on its way back to Sonoma County.
VINEYARDS are having a hard time finding labor, marijuana prices have plummeted to an average of $500 a pound, if a buyer can be found. These are fraught times for Intoxicants County.
OUR SUPERVISORS constant revision of local pot rules clearly works to the advantage of large-scale grows, hence the appearance at Supe’s meetings of fresh-faced corporados who introduce themselves by saying, “I’m from the Silicon Valley and…. “ And…. Get back. The geniuses are here to save us from ourselves.
MEANWHILE, The County’s federally-reinforced pot raid team is making more busts than ever, some of them of people who’ve signed up with the county to grow legally but whose paperwork seems forever stuck somewhere in a Kafka-esque process.
ACCORDING TO THE NYT, “Police officers in Mendocino County said their priority was to go after people who cause environmental damage or who grow on public lands. So far this year they have raided 74 sites and eradicated more than 90,000 plants. Illegal plots are identified by helicopter and then destroyed by a convoy of well-armed police officers and a plant shredder towed by a pickup.”
AS THE DA points to FBI stats that we have a violent crime rate 7 times that of LA which, even allowing for the difference in populations, is an impressive violent crime rate.
A READER WRITES re the recent burglaries on Signal Ridge: “This is the driver for the two trespassers/thieves we caught on video last week. He’s driving a gray Ford Ranger pickup truck, license plate 5G88979. He was obviously on drugs and admitted to dropping off people for $100 bucks. I guess they have a trespass grow out on MRC or Redwood One land. We called 911 but they said they couldn’t do anything since he wasn’t currently breaking any laws, just parked on the side of a public road.”
AS THE MAJOR walked past a PG&E bucket crew about to ascend a power pole near the Boonville Hotel this morning he craned his busybody neck upwards and commented to the ground-man, “Yeah, that capacitor looks like it’s broken or loose. Thanks for fixing it.” The ground-man replied, “Oh no, they’re supposed to look like that. We’re going up to plug that woodpecker hole,” pointing up near the top of the pole. The Major thought he saw a tiny hole amongst the other flaws and discolorations in the bleached white pole-wood. “Oh, that little thing? Boy, that’s an impressive catch. Who noticed that?” “The smart guys who came before us,” replied the ground man. “We have to plug and seal those as early as possible or they can grow and split the pole. There are more woodpeckers around than you might think,” the ground man noted. And another argument for undergrounding power lines if we ever expect to present as Healdsburg.
ANDERSON VALLEY FILM CLUB will host Jesse Wakeman for the screening of his latest film, “Donald Cried,” 7:30 PM, Friday, September 22, at the Anderson Valley Grange in Philo. Wakeman has a lead acting role in the film and, along with Kyle Espeleta, was part of the creative team that made the film. Both men grew up in Anderson Valley. “Donald Cried” was selected as a “Critic¹s Pick” by the New York Times and Washington Post. Admission is free. There will be an opportunity to meet Wakeman and ask questions. The film is a dark comedy rated for mature audiences.
ENOUGH to make a paranoid out of a guy. Today's mail arrived with one of those priority mail boxes, a small one. It was addressed to a lady named Cynthia Kotsay with the return address as PO Box 459, Boonville which, of course, is the address of Boonville's beloved weekly newspaper.
THE POST OFFICE in Chandler, Arizona had been unable to find Ms. Kotsay, so the box had been returned to the alleged sender — us. Thing is, we hadn't mailed Ms. Kotsay anything. We'd never heard of her, and only have a hazy idea of where Chandler is in that dusty, politically backwards state.
SINCE the return address was us, and the box wasn't ticking, I opened it. Inside was a small, vacuum-sealed bag wrapped in thick brown paper. Inside the vacuum-sealed bag was a vial containing a golden, viscous liquid about the consistency of molasses.
CAREFULLY UNSCREWING the cap — hell, it could be disguised gelignite for all I knew — I was reassured at the faint smell of marijuana. "This must be the famous honey oil that doofuses all over the country are blowing themselves up trying to manufacture," I announced to an audience of two.
MENDOCINO COUNTY, being on the absolute cutting edge of all things marijuana, and the price of the old leafy stuff having fallen so far that lots of long-time growers have given up their gardens, the most enterprising, the most determined pot techs have turned to this new concoction.
TO BE CERTAIN what we had was honey oil, possession of which is a felony, which is why I quickly handed the mysterious vial to my colleague, The Major, and told him to put it in his pocket, I called up the ava's resident drug authority who, of course, must go un-named.
DRUG EXPERT HUSTLED right over, gave the stuff the sniff test and pronounced it, "Yup, Honey Oil, three, maybe four hundred buck's worth."
I'D ASSUMED the stuff had value given the careful packaging and $7.15 in US postage slapped on the little box just down the road at the Philo Post Office back on Monday, August 21st.
NOT BEING a drug person, the stuff had no value to me. I took it out back and drained it into a gopher hole, and that was that, except for a tiny residual irritation that someone had slapped our return address on Ms. Kotsay's dope.
OR WAS it her medicine? Further FaceBook investigation informed us that Ms. Kotsay may be a cancer patient, making me feel like an old school heel for not forwarding her the relief she seems to have sought from its Anderson Valley manufacturer. Her address was wrong because two of the four-digit street numbers were transposed. My colleague, The Major, pointed out that if I’d made the correction and sent the dope on I’d be “a Class One Felon, and Hoyle and Hendry will soon be kicking down the office door.” At my age, go ahead. Throw me in a geriatric unit of a federal pen. There are worse fates. But I regret pouring the honey oil down a gopher hole. I wish now I could have sent it on to the lady who needs it. Or thinks she needs it.
COMMUNITY CHURCH SERVICE
Boonville Fair Sunday
September 17th 2017, 8:30 AM
Apple Hall Auditorium, next to the Fair Office
Pastor Dave Kooyers from Valley Bible Fellowship will present;
- What does it mean to receive Jesus?”
- Why do some believe and yet not receive?
Free admission/Everyone Welcome
Please come and worship with us, and then enjoy the fair for the rest of the day.
For additional information please feel free to call Pastor Dave Kooyers (707) 895-2325, or the Fair Office at (707) 895-3011, or visit their website at;
10:00 am Sheep Dog Trials, Finals - Rodeo Arena
2:00 pm CCPRA Rodeo Finals - Rodeo Arena
A READER WRITES: “By the way, I keep meaning to tell you this: I do not seem to be able to find a reference for it but I have a strong recollection that there is a Boont term for stuff that, for one reason or another, was not making it into the 8-page paper as Homer, and even those other folks who came after, ran it. That term was "That goes on Page 9." or "Page 9 for that!" I have a strong recollection of it being used back in the day when a fairly prominent local family got busted for cultivation. The mom of the family worked downtown at the time. The story never made it into the paper. "Page 9 for that!" I thought it might be an amusing way to think about your online content that does not make it into print on pages 1-8.”
I REMEMBER PAGE 9 when Homer Mannix owned and edited the AVA. I marveled that Homer managed to produce a weekly newspaper at all on his ancient hot-lead press and a half-mad old school type setter, Marie, who plucked each letter for each word, thousands of words, from an overhead case. It was a truly amazing operation. And Homer got out his paper while also functioning as justice court judge, chairman of both the CSD and the school board, manager of his intriguing, labyrinthine Mannix Building, and volunteer fireman and ambulance crew guy. The Anderson Valley has never been better managed or served.
AS PRINT NEWSPAPERS recede into obscurity, us perhaps fading even faster, we are already producing a daily AVA on-line consisting of every bit of Mendo news that we can find, culling the most interesting of it for the print-print newspaper that still appears every Wednesday. Page 9 is an excellent choice for the on-line paper which, by the way, you can find at www.theava.com at the bargain price of $25 a year. I believe we may be among the very few newspapers of any size to successfully sell our paper on-line, success narrowly defined here as modest profit.
PHILO-GREENWOOD ROAD will be shut down starting Monday, September 18 until Tuesday, October 10. The signs were placed at mile markers .3 to 1.0. Cameron Road will be the only way around the construction while, as residents insist, the entire road needs work.
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