No one among my early seventies local history educators ever mentioned town-wide sports in Navarro. In my generation the Navarro Clams slow pitch softball team evolved from Valley-wide informal sports activities circulating around Boonville. Formal…
Posts published by “Brad Wiley”
For those of us lucky enough to live here in The Valley one of the enjoyable pieces of reminiscence among friends and neighbors is the “who was the first hippie” discussion. The first settler, the…
Though in my last I described The Store as the geographical, economic and social center of the town in 1971, my consort and I soon learned to value the rest of the local inhabitants for…
As one of my previous articles noted, the actual population of the 1971 village was not too different from what the State Highway sign declares today, Pop. 67. And that would include Russian Hill, the…
This reporter and his consort arrived in Navarro on 31 March, 1971. Over prior months we had rented a small cabin above the dump on Pine Mountain, Cloverdale and spent the winter exploring Sonoma and…
I wonder how many isolated rural milltowns there were in California when the Wendling mill started production in 1907. I say dozens, perhaps hundreds along the redwood belt alone. Think of Aptos and the Santa…
Your remarks about the Navarro Ice House in the May 27 AVA Valley People provoked my own reflections about the place and a multitude of memories of the characters and activities inhabiting the Deep End…
There is a timelessness to Marshall Newman's recollections of the "way it used to be" in pre-urbanized Anderson Valley (not The Anderson Valley you and Jed Steele imagine exists). His perspective, however, on the rarity…
One of the ways this reporter has lived the Navarro River is visiting its swimming holes on those steamy hundred degree days in August when there's nowhere else in the Valley to be after 11…