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Posts published in “Essays”

Ladies Of The Night

In the wake of the lumber boom of the late 1800s that swept the North Coast, numerous saloons sprang up in Mendocino and other Mendocino County towns. A Saturday night spent leaning on the bar…

Multiple Thanks

The week before Thanksgiving, we pre-ordered our organic, free-range, successfully psychoanalyzed, thrice-blessed, kosher, Pulitzer-Prize-winning turkey from Harvest Market and then drove to Santa Rosa to spend a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving with Marcia’s mother Opal at Spring Lake Village, a groovy retirement community where Opal has lived for many years.

The Sheriff’s Tragic Accident

The Byrnes family arrived in Mendocino County around 1880. The patriarch, Michael J. Byrnes had been born in Boston, Massachusetts either in 1840 or 1841. He headed westward in 1862. One might guess that he…

Wild Man Still On The Loose

To this day “Oh, Lord, it’s Jerry Lee Lewis,” or some variation of that, is probably a fairly common response to any encounter with Jerry Lee; his reputation has always preceded him. It was pretty much my reaction when I heard there was yet another Jerry Lee Lewis book on the horizon.

Power Over

I first heard of Bill Cosby in 1964 when I was working as a counselor at a summer camp for kids from East Palo Alto. One day, as I was imitating my fast-talking uncle Howard to entertain my group of ten and eleven-year-old boys, one of my charges opined, “You sound like Bill Cosby.”

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