Peg Melnik wrote an excellent article on the Barron Herzog Wines several weeks ago in the Press Democrat. She included some of the history of the Herzog Family starting in 1840. I am going to…
Posts published in “Essays”
It was the last hours of 1999. Lots of people who should know better had predicted that the world would end at midnight. The computers that run industrial civilization wouldn’t be able to make the…
OK, here’s your civics quiz for the week. Who said the following? “It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing…
Now’s the time of year we bore readers with New Year Resolutions, in which talent-free columnists promise to lose weight, learn a foreign language, volunteer at the library, join a health club, go vegan and…
With the local timber industry ever waning in Mendocino County it’s educational to look back and see what a role logging railroads and lumber mills once played in the local economy. Take logging railroads —…
World War II hit Baghdad by the Bay like a ton of block busters. Overnight the self-contained, self-satisfied city whose population had stood absolutely still for a decade was transformed into a major Port of…
I have seen the future of footgear, and its name is Hey Dude. Despite the improbable brand label, Hey Dude shoes will soon sweep the country like hula hoops, Beanie Babies and Taylor Swift all…
Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘A Christmas Ghost-Story’ was published in the England’s Westminster Gazette in December 1899, two months after the start of the Second Anglo-Boer War. The ghost is that of a soldier, and the…
It’s a hot quiet weekday morning in Falls City, Oregon, which is more of a town than a city, at least by the standards of a northern Californian who has lived in Santa Rosa and…