Last week’s Floodgate story mentioned that the gyppo logging company working for Masonite Corporation in the seventies, Shuster Enterprises (!), provided its crews with transportation to jobsite, important for those living on the Ukiah side…
Posts published in “Essays”
This story is dedicated to AVA reader Richard Hargreaves of Redding, who is pushing 90 years of age and has vivid history memories. It’s how one story can lead to another, then another. Several weeks…
It was a cold early Summer night in 1963, when I first set foot in City Lights, the now legendary bookstore. Much has been made since of how unusual City Lights, then ten yers old,…
It was the virus that undid Trump. Without Covid-19 and the misery, devastation and economic shock it brought with it, he would have almost certainly have won the 2020 presidential election, perhaps by a wide…
Thanks to “Abhorrent in Albion” for the inspiration for this article (what a moniker, maybe not hiding your identity would be better than labeling yourself as abhorrent?). I often struggle to find topics to write…
February 15th marked the 400th anniversary of Michael Praetorius’s death. It passed without fanfare or flourish, though this musical titan was a master of both. His gifts served the devotional, but, from the intimate to…
UKIAH - During the first half of the 1890's, JAMES EMMONS PEMBERTON served as Mendocino County District Attorney. The terms in office at that time were two years and he served two terms (1891-1892, and…
I don't know which chemicals are released in which parts of the brain, but there's a pleasurable rush when you find yourself in agreement with someone who has been observing the same scene from a…
Buttercup was crying the other morning out in the corral. Well, actually, she was bleating. Because Buttercup is a really old rather broken down black and white horned pygmy goat. My “critter mom” “spidey senses”…