From his cell within the Mendocino County Jail, Dr. John Wheeler told Ukiah City Press editor A.O. Carpenter that he was innocent of any connection to the ambush murder of two Mendocino City citizens in…
Posts published in “Essays”
My parents had many droll and irreverent friends, among them their orthopedist, who declared (most likely after a few belts at one of their circa 1950s cocktail parties) that the human knee was God’s little…
Before I went to bed, Mommy told me tales of genies, demons, and magic. One story, relayed to her by an uncle in Lebanon, haunted me for years. Long ago a farmer’s daughter named Livy…
Albion's Pebbles Trippet grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As our nation is now acknowledging, in 1921 the prosperous Black section of Tulsa, Greenwood, was utterly destroyed by the White Citizens backed by Law Enforcement. I asked our…
(Ed note: We are reprinting this 2009 Steve Sparks interview of Don Shanley, a long-time resident of the Anderson Valley who survived, just barely, some of the most intense combat in Vietnam.) * * *…
I was introduced to Guenoc Ranch in the late 1960s. I was selling fertilizer and Guenoc Ranch would use a large amount of fertilizer on its reported 19,000 acres of pasture and rangeland. I remember…
We step back from the disorders and idiocies of the moment to wish Bob Dylan a happy 80th birthday. He entered the scene in a previous moment of national disorder, the Sixties, as we call…
I was born in 1970. That makes me a textbook Generation X poster boy. My parents were honeymooning in Italy during Apollo XI’s landing on the Moon. I was born during the time Sticky Fingers…
A drifting skiff and an attentive night watchman kicked off one of Mendocino County’s strangest maritime mysteries one quiet afternoon in 1921. Around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, November 13th, had you been looking out to…