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Posts published in “Essays”

Midtown Manhattan in the Mid–70s

I was starting my first year at Rutgers Law School in Newark, following a zigzag (should I say Zig Zag?) course that had taken me from a small hill farm in northern Vermont, to Harvard…

Caspar’s ‘Vess’ Nolan

New characters in the panoply of history come to light at the Kelley House on a regular basis, often due to generous donations of time and materials to the archives and museum. A case in…

Yorkville Highlands, 1971

Two nights after we'd established our raucous brood in Mendocino County's serene summer hills, not far from the unsuspecting hamlet of Boonville, we got our first lesson in the psycho-pathology of the pre-pube criminal, the…

Raconteur Gerd Stern Remembers

“He’s wasn’t a nice guy,” Gerd Stern said on a Saturday afternoon at the Sonoma Valley Museum in Sonoma, California, where Jack London once lived, farmed and wrote fiction and non-fiction. Stern was talking about…

Drowning In Regs

Last week’s column discussed marijuana legalization and some of the adverse consequences, especially economic consequences, it’s having on local communities such as Laytonville. I argued that there are one too many sets of regulations with…

A Solution For Homelessness?

Did you ever have that neighbor you’ve known for years offer a proposal for solving a societal problem that just blows you away? Practical or not, this person looked at the problem of homelessness and…

Dr. Preston & Captain Clark

Dr. Russell Preston served the town of Mendocino as physician for thirty years, from 1909 to 1939. Even after his retirement he still saw some of his patients for assistance with their milder maladies. Preston…

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