Once upon a time in Mendocino, a hundred years and more ago, children walked miles through downpours along Little Lake Road before splashing their way on up the rise to school. By 1912, the parents…
Posts published in “Essays”
A while back in the Letters section of this august journal there was an ongoing impromptu forum discussing folks’ top ten literary pics. I enjoyed reading our readership’s lists and was by turns impressed, amused,…
Okay, the grand experiment is over. Amazingly, a black man was elected president. It can't happen again until after 2050, the projected time when whites will be officially a minority. We see what happened -…
My father Carlo came to Northern California in 1900-1901. He worked in the woods in Cleone and also worked loading lumber boats.
The Marley estate plans to use Bob Marley's name or image on a vast array of products, from Marley coffee (the slogan: 'Stir it Up') to soccer balls, bedsheets, and a Grand Theft Auto-ish video…
Count me as one. I was two, my brother one, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. My brother and I were born in Honolulu where our paternal grandfather, a Scots immigrant,…
In the wake of the lumber boom of the late 1800s that swept the North Coast, numerous saloons sprang up in Mendocino and other Mendocino County towns. A Saturday night spent leaning on the bar…
The week before Thanksgiving, we pre-ordered our organic, free-range, successfully psychoanalyzed, thrice-blessed, kosher, Pulitzer-Prize-winning turkey from Harvest Market and then drove to Santa Rosa to spend a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving with Marcia’s mother Opal at Spring Lake Village, a groovy retirement community where Opal has lived for many years.
The Byrnes family arrived in Mendocino County around 1880. The patriarch, Michael J. Byrnes had been born in Boston, Massachusetts either in 1840 or 1841. He headed westward in 1862. One might guess that he…