They’re demonized and exploited, revered for their youth and reviled simply because they’re young. They are today’s teenagers, the post-millennials, who came of age during Trump’s nightmare presidency, the flowering of the Black Lives Matter…
Posts published in “Essays”
On October 15, 1879, four gunmen, intent on robbing the county sheriff, ambushed a posse of civilians in the woods east of Mendocino. Store owner Tom Dollard was murdered on the spot. Townsman Jim Nichols…
The anarchist, pacifist poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom I knew for forty years was shy and introverted, even while he was a public figure who wanted to be recognized and appreciated as an artist. We performed…
(Mendocino County District Attorney History Series, Part II. Compiled by DA Dave Eyster) UKIAH - At the end of the 19th century WILLIAM GUSTAVUS "W. G." POAGE (-1953) started his service as Mendocino County's 14th…
Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is the great granddaughter of Leon Trotsky. She once told a mutual acquaintance that she still recalled the old man's jackets hanging in…
Last week’s Floodgate story mentioned that the gyppo logging company working for Masonite Corporation in the seventies, Shuster Enterprises (!), provided its crews with transportation to jobsite, important for those living on the Ukiah side…
This story is dedicated to AVA reader Richard Hargreaves of Redding, who is pushing 90 years of age and has vivid history memories. It’s how one story can lead to another, then another. Several weeks…
It was a cold early Summer night in 1963, when I first set foot in City Lights, the now legendary bookstore. Much has been made since of how unusual City Lights, then ten yers old,…
It was the virus that undid Trump. Without Covid-19 and the misery, devastation and economic shock it brought with it, he would have almost certainly have won the 2020 presidential election, perhaps by a wide…