Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published by “Malcolm Macdonald”

The Dentist & Bigfoot

John Fleming Wheeler arrived in Mendocino City in the summer of 1878. He set up a dentist office within the Norton Hotel on Main Street. For a short while previously he had practiced dentistry in…

Congressional Attack (Part 2)

Last time we explored the details of the May 1856 beating of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The attacker was South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks who used a walking cane to repeatedly strike Sumner. Brooks was…

Congressional Attack

Preston Brooks entered the United States Senate chamber with a gutta percha walking cane in hand. The cane stood approximately waist high next to the thirty-six-year-old South Carolinian. The head of the cane was topped…

Secrecy at Coast Hospitality Center

The Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center in Fort Bragg receives hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in government funding. That's tax dollars from the public. Yet, in these Covid times the Hospitality Center Board of Directors…

The Pandemic Continues

From Fort Bragg: “The [pandemic] has taken a second start at this place as it has in similar other sections and some forty-five or fifty cases are reported. The Board of Health held a session…

Christmas 1918

Christmas fell on a Wednesday in 1918. Letters were still arriving in Mendocino from men who had fought the War to End All Wars. Though the armistice had been signed a month and a half…

Polliwog Eggs and a Duck

“Just before light… darkness, impenetrable.” So Aunt Mae would say, always placing the adjective at the tail end. I stayed with Aunt Mae and Uncle Carl when my sister was sick in the head. I'd…

Cape Horn On the Albion

As I write, rain is predicted to arrive in a day or two, with re-occurring precipitation of measurable amounts forecast throughout the coming week. Here, along the Albion, we can certainly use a downpour or…

Tainted Grants & Testy Gripes

The November Zoom meeting of the Mendocino Coast Recreation & Park District (MCRPD) Board of Directors lasted nineteen minutes. The most newsworthy item from the proceeding was the announcement that California State Parks had acknowledged…

-