My first few weeks living at Waldo Point made me realize that I wasn’t going anywhere else anytime soon. I liked hanging out on the Sausalito waterfront, meeting Becker’s friends and neighbors, mostly boat people,…
Posts published by “Jim Gibbons”
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. Madison was the first leg of my journey to California.…
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 Yard the past two seasons as part of the C.E.T.A…
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. The first was that the closest college to Willits was…
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 the property his girlfriend’s family bought north of Willits. Daniel,…
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 $31 a week had run out. I was asked about…