The last chapter of the Murray clan migration from Missouri to Rancheria Creek in 1856-7 concluded with the family finding their new homestead site on the flat west of where Beebe Creek and Rancheria Creek…
Posts published in “Essays”
When I was in high school my father would get home from his San Francisco law office at around 7 and, much to my mother’s chagrin as she shushed two hungry, complaining teenagers, walked over…
Either Mussolini or my high school civics teacher defined fascism as “government, business and labor working together in the interests of business.” By this definition fascism isn’t looming in the US, fascism is here, having…
While vacationing on the East Coast in September, I watched TV and couldn't help noticing that Queen Elizabeth died, her scoundrel son, Charles, was the king and that there had been a changing of the…
We celebrated President’s Day in February, so it seemed like a good time to look beneath the blizzard of conventional admiration for George Washington, the nation’s founding realtor. America’s founders were eloquent in their speeches…
A half century ago Duke University graduate Paulette Arnold arrived in Ukiah, one of the ‘back to landers’ who would transform the cultural landscape of Mendocino County. For the newcomers, the 1970s were liberating: a…
It is not only a “case,” but a man and a book. Salman Rushdie has suffered unconscionably as a human being. In hiding for four years, he has lost his personal life and all personal…
“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” — Joseph Conrad Mendocino…
A journey of 3000 miles begins with a flight delay as someone probably once said, along with the Death of Her Majesty, as Agatha Christie probably once wrote. There are worse place to be marooned…