In the 1930s Sinclair Oil’s advertising execs and assorted flaks put their heads together to create a company logo. As the story goes, at the time the New York-based corporation’s oils and lubricants were refined…
Posts published in “Essays”
The fabled Reggae on the River festival has been through more trials and tribulations than your average 30-something native Californian, with a real rough patch in recent years due to disorganization, in-fighting, and financial struggles.…
Think of the 1950s and it’s hard not to think of the bomb, blonde bombshells like Marilyn Monroe, Beat Generation writers and that all-American ogre, Senator Joseph McCarthy who burned himself up and burned out…
In 1968, five years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing women the right to legal abortions (ironically also the year that Pope Paul VI declared his opposition to birth control pills),…
Yesterday I went to the San Francisco Department of Motor Vehicles, armed with all ID, to renew my driver's license. The female robo voice called my number and summoned me to "Window Number 21," staffed…
By November of 1770 the English organist, traveler, and man of letters, Charles Burney had been on the road for five months, touring the Continent doing research for his General History of Music; the first of…
Why does Ed Denson get to eat hamburgers, french fries, and a milk shake and I don't? Why does Ed get to live for now, eat anything he wants, and I have to worry about…
Twenty-two years ago, I moved away from Mendocino County and the Northern California coastal redwoods, and I returned to my childhood life outside of L.A. in Palos Verdes to live with my widowed mother and…
I was transferred back to the North Coast in 1965 by Ortho Chemical Company who I had worked for five years. I started with Ortho on the day my first of three daughters were born,…