When Terence Hallinan asked me to be his press secretary in December, 1999, I was 58 and in my 13th year as managing editor of Synapse, UCSF's internal weekly. The benefits were good and if I…
Posts published in June 2020
While many of my peers were celebrating at Woodstock, from August 15 to August 17 of 1969, I was defending America from Communism, irony intended, and more specifically, preparing our squadron of T-28 trainer aircraft…
This reporter and his consort arrived in Navarro on 31 March, 1971. Over prior months we had rented a small cabin above the dump on Pine Mountain, Cloverdale and spent the winter exploring Sonoma and…
Supervisor John McCowen, as noted by Supervisor Ted Williams as the “primary architect” of the County’s unworkable and overcomplicated pot cultivation ordinance, summarized his proposal to totally revamp the program on Tuesday by pointing out…
One of my favorite discoveries studying history is how creativity and ingenuity solved problems, like moving really BIG things. Incline railways were one such invention. These rail lines had nicknames for their many parts—they were…
AN MCN COMMENT deserves a reply, and by golly I'm at the ready: “According to Ted and Johnny’s excellent and clear questions and answers, it appears that there is no oversight authority for the sheriff’s…
Somewhere in my mother’s photo albums is a picture taken by my father of the teenage me standing on a viewing platform above the Dry Coulee Dam in central Washington State. Behind me, like a…
A TRAVELER WRITES: “I was driving back from Manchester towards Boonville on Mountain View Road on Tuesday, 16 June at around 7pm. All of a sudden I saw blinking red lights in a place where I…