The other day, my housemate thought she saw flames on the adjoining property. She called the fire department in Cotati, California where we live. Two fire trucks arrived with fire fighters loaded for bear. The…
Posts published in “Essays”
It has been a few weeks since I last sat down to write. It has been a tough couple of weeks, mostly due to health concerns. We are all healthy now, or at least on…
John Fleming Wheeler arrived in Mendocino City in the summer of 1878. He set up a dentist office within the Norton Hotel on Main Street. For a short while previously he had practiced dentistry in…
It was Halloween inching toward the witching hour of midnight, as two young women navigated the dark and winding Highway 128 through Anderson Valley. As their car lights illuminated the black asphalt before them, they…
Joe D. Goldstrich, MD, is 82 and sharp as a tack. In 1963, as a fourth-year medical student on the neurosurgical service at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, he was one of the doctors in the…
On the evening of May 28, 1915, 25-year-old Clarence Tracy set out on horseback from his mother's home in the Cummings-Spy Rock district, northern Mendocino County. He was headed to his own cabin less than…
The most compelling argument against the existence of a vast conspiracy orchestrating the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy is that the brothers were never threats to ruling power. The Kennedys were card-carrying members of…
A year or so ago I received a call from a couple of young friends of mine all excited that they were announcing their engagement to get married. This was not a great surprise to…
It wasn’t until I was around the age of twenty that my impressions of the cops really began to take form, with some of my earliest encounters with the men in blue being a couple…