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Posts published in “Essays”

Murder On Asylum Road

(research by Deborah Silva) Wednesday, July 9, 1919 — Mendocino County's celebrated law man, Sheriff Ralph Byrnes, was in Fort Bragg when he got the chilling news: a newlywed woman was found murdered in her…

Kids & Cannabis Today

They’re demonized and exploited, revered for their youth and reviled simply because they’re young. They are today’s teenagers, the post-millennials, who came of age during Trump’s nightmare presidency, the flowering of the Black Lives Matter…

Dr. Wheeler and the Mendocino Outlaws

On October 15, 1879, four gunmen, intent on robbing the county sheriff, ambushed a posse of civilians in the woods east of Mendocino. Store owner Tom Dollard was murdered on the spot. Townsman Jim Nichols…

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…

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