This is an addendum to the recently published history of Allied Grape Growers, 1951-2011 celebrating the 60-year history of the grape growing cooperative. My family grew grapes in Hopland, Mendocino County, and delivered the grapes…
Posts published in “Essays”
Will has been making and teaching music around Mendocino and Lake counties for many years. He and his various band ensembles can play blues and rock one night out in Upper Lake; then bluegrass…
I've always been a sucker for music. I don't mean that I love it, although I do; I mean I'm susceptible in the extreme to the power of music to sway, influence, manipulate and take…
It's a dramatic, shocking and violent film. Some 200 uniformed policemen armed with billy clubs, revolvers and tear gas angrily charge an unarmed crowd of several hundred striking steelworkers and their wives and children who…
Anderson Valley has five cemeteries, though only four are in general use. All are old, all are still active, all have rustic character befitting the valley – no manicured lawns here — and all abound with historic family names, many that still had a strong presence in the valley during the years of my youth there in the late 1950s and 1960s. A few of those families remain in the valley today, others have passed on or moved on. Still, the cemeteries are snapshots of the valley, past and present.
Buzzards swoop on the wind drafts in the draw that extends from below my house to the bottom lands next to the remains of Uncle Charlie’s cabin. The same wind currents that provide the swirling,…
Apple Blossom School has a nice ring to it, as does the Orchard View School at its side. The nearby Tree House Hollow pre-school, with children as young as two and three years old, continues…
My parents were both active duty World War II. My mom was a Marine when she conceived me. My dad was a Navy Corpsman. When I was little, my really nasty paternal grandmother told me that my mom had me in order to get out of the military. When my parents divorced, I went to live with my mother and her family in Chicago, which didn’t go well. My grandfather, Eddie Carr, had run a speakeasy and was a straight up mobster. I was told that “your grandpa, Eddie, is sleeping at the bottom of the Calumet canal with his friends.” That turned out not to be true… he had escaped to Pennsylvania and had lived and died under an assumed name.
In 1969 Curtis Knight was still recording at PPX Studios on West 55th St., just off Broadway in Manhattan. Jimi Hendrix had left Curtis’ band, gone to England with Chas Chandler, the bass player from…