If you have the time, and the cavalry has all the time in the world, there's no better way to learn how to ride a horse than the cavalry way. Horses are big, and they…
Posts published in “Essays”
Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sighs and pleads in counterpoint with the airport announcements. The melody is barely audible but still unmistakable above the thunderous whisper of a thousand four-wheeled suitcases rolling across granite floors, the centripetal…
The sixties was the decade when the frightened cry of “Timber!” was everywhere in the unclean air of publishing. The flow of competitive daily newspapers dried up, and magazines great and small fell like the…
There are people who have lived all their lives in Mendocino County who don’t know where Island Mountain is and have never been to Covelo. This County is a big place with secrets and mysteries…
Way back at the start of senior year at our coastal Southern California high school, one of my very best friends Tom said to me “My big brother is living at a small commune up…
Vietnam, G.I. was a first-rate newspaper founded and edited by SP/5 Jeff Sharlet in January 1968. It was an almost-monthly tabloid. This piece is from the September 1968 issue. The last issue came out in…
It was the winter of 1956. The Vice President of the United States, Richard Nixon, was trying to convince voters that he would be a wise choice in the upcoming Presidential primaries. His advisers had…
Bainbridge Island, Washington. It was 1973. I was eight years old and Hollywood was into disaster movies. Somehow, I fibbed my way with a friend and his teenage, baby-sitting sister into a matinee screening of…
Some 23 years ago I had some free time and I wanted to serve on a Sonoma County Fair Board. This honor is an appointment made by the Governor. Ironically of all the appointments made…