My Greyhound Bus ride from Milwaukee to Madison cost one dollar and ninety cents. The date, according to my old journal, was March 24, 1969.…
Posts published by “Jim Gibbons”
My first semester was over and now I needed a summer job. I had worked on the Mendocino County road crew out of the Laytonville…
Going back to college to get my degree and a teaching credential after dropping out nine years earlier was tough in a lot of ways.…
In November of 1969 three boats took members of twenty tribes from all over the country to occupy Alcatraz, reclaiming it as “Indian land and demanding fairness and respect for Indian Peoples.” The spokesman for the Indians was a Mohawk from New York named Richard Oakes, who offered the U.S. Government “$24 in glass beads and red cloth.” Oakes said, “We hold The Rock,” and that became the movement’s motto. Unfortunately, a few months later his 12-year-old daughter fell from a three-story structure in the prison and died. He left the Island shortly after, as did many others during the 18-month occupation.
I first came to Willits in late summer of 1971 because a fellow worker at the Tides Bookstore in Sausalito invited me up to see…
After digging out of the Big Snow of ’75 I checked in at the Mendocino County unemployment office in Ukiah because my six months of…
The recent drought in Northern California made me think of the last one back in the mid-seventies when I was living about six miles up…
Drought has a way of changing everything. The latest mandatory rationing in Brooktrails is 110 gallons a day per household. In Willits it’s 150
My first day at Willits High School (1984-1985) was very interesting in a weird sort of way. I had no literature classes, just 8th, 9th…
There I was up on stage with my four teammates in front of the entire student body being praised by my coach for qualifying to…
It was my very first sixth-grade faculty meeting at Little Lake Valley Middle School. There were just four of us, all men, but we were…