Graduation season is everywhere, and be happy if you needn’t sit through yawn-inducing ceremonies celebrating the most recent students bumped from the educational assembly line. School administrators permit speakers to address graduates only if they…
Posts published in “Essays”
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…
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…