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Posts published by “Bruce Anderson”

Arriving In An Unwelcoming Place

The local old timers called all us new arrivals of the early 1970s “hippies” regardless of our relative commitments to drugs, promiscuous sex, bad housekeeping, and George McGovern, the whole package being Boonville code for…

Buck Clark

Buck Clark admits to having been an occasional participant in what he called “the fightin’ and the fussin’” during the county’s logging boom of the 1950s, but it never got in the way of a…

Notes From A Paradise Lost

Where there were once hop fields, apple orchards and sheep in the Anderson Valley, by the middle 1970s there was marijuana and an outlaw population of people who weren’t really outlaws, but middleclass back-to-the-landers forced…

When Boonville Was A Fightin’, Dyin’ Kinda Town

I was on my way to the Lodge one Saturday morning to pick up a six-pack for later that night when the bar’s door suddenly banged open and a small, wiry young man came flying…

Huelga!

Cesar Chavez's Birthday was Thursday, March 31st. As we remember the crucial movement Chavez launched, we remind persons interested in Chavez and the UFW that the best book on Chavez is Frank Bardacke's Cesar Chavez…

Olompali’s Tragic History

Olompali, translated from the Miwok as “southern people” or “southern village,” lies just north of Novato, directly off Highway 101. It’s a state park these days but goes way back as the site of a…

Cold Steel vs the 1972 Hippies

Boonville’s first-wave hippies called a meeting one Sunday afternoon to discuss what to do about a loose knit, perhaps mythical, Boonville vigilante crew calling itself Cold Steel, whose stated purpose, if you could find it,…

Anderson Valley’s First & Only Black Family

In Boonville, real wilderness can often begin a few feet from the pavement, as it does throughout the Anderson Valley and much of Mendocino County. I would hike due west from my house, down into…

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