One century, one decade, a year, and a day before our current publication date, Mark Twain died. A day earlier Halley’s Comet had reached perihelion (the point at which a comet’s orbit is closest to…
Posts published in “Essays”
Every late winter or early spring a great migration takes place from Clear Lake into some or all of it’s 17 main tributaries, involving mainly two species of it’s inhabitants, the Sacramento Suckers and Clear…
Even before the dawning of Corona Time, the present age was marked by its inward-looking obsessions—selfie, blog, podcast, Facebook, Twitter. The desire to eat the carefully prepared supper must wait until the urge to Instagram…
In 1967, the year Terence "Kayo" Hallinan was sworn in as a lawyer, thousands of young people would come to San Francisco for the "Summer of Love" and many thousands more would go to Vietnam,…
Twenty-five days (as of last week) into an historic statewide lockdown, Fort Bragg is feeling the strain. Like Mendocino County as a whole, the town is seeing a marked surge in interfamily disputes, domestic violence,…
Like his father before him, Terence Hallinan was prevented from practicing law by the California Bar Association. Vincent Hallinan's license had been suspended for three years (1957-1960) after he was convicted of federal income tax…
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO I pulled one of the dumbest stunts of my life: I started a band with a 14-year-old bassist who’d never played bass, a 12-year-old drummer who’d never played drums, and considerably older…
I read with great interest Chris Calder’s two great articles back to back on Sheriff Kendall in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. What spiked my interest was that the Sheriff came to Santa Rosa when he…