From the 1870s to the 1920s according to Richard W. Fox’s 1978 study ‘So Far Disordered In Mind: Insanity in California, 1870-1930,’ California had a higher rate of commitment for insanity than any other state…
Posts published in “Essays”
If you think of the weed world as a chair with four legs then the legs are the grower, the dealer, the go-between and the consumer. Each plays an essential part, though the go-between or…
I did what Americans Jews are supposed to do on Christmas. I ate Chinese food. Not alone, but with three other members of my family: my two younger brothers and my sister-in-law who was born…
When we were growing up around Laytonville in the 1900s, Papa used to say that folks in California need never go hungry if they have piece of ground and are willing and able to work.…
Some sleuths have a detective gene. One of them is my brother Adam, a PI for the past 40 years who tells me that everyone lies: cops, criminals, judges and lawyers. I think of Mark…
Christmas Cookies. Just the thought of warm freshly-baked cookies gives one a cozy, fuzzy holiday feeling. That’s what I was thinking when, a couple of days after Thanksgiving, I realized that soon Christmas would be…
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…
A put-down of George Butterworth, the head of gang-related prosecutions during Terence Hallinan's eight years as San Francisco District Attorney, drew a response from AVA reader Jim Miller, a retired SFPD officer. He wrote that…
The roll out of both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines have gone much more smoothly than many other aspects of battling this pandemic have so far...