Local history explorations often start with something as simple as a piece of paper. Walking into the Comptche store recently owner Belinda Pollack handed me a sheet of paper and asked “Who was Amanda Newman?”…
Posts published in “Essays”
As the stock market was rising to ever-higher heights in the summer of 1929, Claud Cockburn got assigned by The Times to its New York office. (Whereas The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times,…
The saga of John F. Wheeler did not come to an end when Chester Ford deposited him in the county jail at Ukiah. The rest of the Mendocino Outlaws were still at large. Wheeler's connection…
Boonville, California, the town which provides a home for the Anderson Valley Advertiser — the newspaper you’re reading — has a population of about one thousand people. I know three of Boonville’s citizens: Bruce Anderson,…
Sporadically deadly, choosy in its victims, the COVID-19 era is staggering into the dumpster of obsolete diseases. Luck and science will soon end it and medical historians will then go about comparing it to previous…
Claud Cockburn —father of Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick, three brilliant journalists— was the original model. In 1967 his three volumes of autobiography were consolidated and published by Penguin as I Claud... It's hard to find a copy,…
As I rambled along in my previous Floodgate stories articles, little vignettes would illuminate themselves in dusty corners of the cerebral warehouse where the larger memories were stored so many years ago. Some of them…