The nude body of 18-year-old Barbara Stroud was found by a County road crew north of Willits on Wednesday, January 10th, 1973. The honors graduate of Willits High School had been missing since the previous…
Posts published in “Essays”
Permits from the city for the Emporium—a combination bar and arcade on Divisadero—dragged on and the Chicago-born and raised entrepreneur, Danny Marks began to fret. “I asked a friend if I was supposed to grease…
I was on my way to visit the bustling metropolis of Leggett for the very first time, riding shotgun in an early-90s vintage Buick having the unfortunate color scheme so prevalent on GM cars of…
I had a wonderful trip to Philly and New York. It started out a little rough as I missed my flight out of SF at 8:30am – there was a lot more traffic than I…
As everyone knows, the villain in any prison story is the warden. Of course, prison being what it is, a kind of central receiving for villains, it's chock-full of them, but the real bull-goose villain,…
This is a story about something that isn’t supposed to happen. It illustrates the strangeness of the world of marijuana, and for that reason no so-called “reputable” newspaper or magazine wants to touch it. It…
Most voters may have stayed at home but nevertheless Measure B, a one-half cent tax to improve abysmal mental health services in this county, won going away with 83 percent approving basically the same initiative…
When getting ready for bed around 11:30pm Sunday night, October 8, 2017, my 87-year-old dad heard loud noises from outside, 60-65 mph winds. He looked out his bedroom window. He saw dots on the hill behind his house and thought there was a fire.
My old friend Gibbons sent me a copy to review for – what else? – the AVA. Jim and I are AVA old-timers, and my first exposure to the paper was in 1988 at his…