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Posts published in “Essays”

What Lawrence Ferlinghetti Means To Me

The anarchist, pacifist poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom I knew for forty years was shy and introverted, even while he was a public figure who wanted to be recognized and appreciated as an artist. We performed…

Mendo DA William Poage

(Mendocino County District Attorney History Series, Part II. Compiled by DA Dave Eyster) UKIAH - At the end of the 19th century WILLIAM GUSTAVUS "W. G." POAGE (-1953) started his service as Mendocino County's 14th…

Nora Volkow, Neoprobe

Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is the great granddaughter of Leon Trotsky. She once told a mutual acquaintance that she still recalled the old man's jackets hanging in…

The Friday Evening Jamborees

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…

When Mars Crashed Near Boonville

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…

Ferlinghetti, R.I.P.

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,…

Wannabe Stormtroopers

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…

Signal Ridge, Or Cold Springs Mountain: A Little History

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…

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