The Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show 2014 has come and gone. As always I went all three days and what a pageant and procession it was. Although the fair is very much the same…
Posts tagged as “essays”
Madison Bumgarner, the Giants’ formidable leftie known as Mad Bum or simply Bum, stands tall atop the mound on a cool Friday night in September—the famous San Francisco fog not yet manifest, a soft breeze…
I grew up near Cleveland, Ohio in Seven Hills and received my Journalism Degree from Bowling Green University in Ohio, worked for the Plain Dealer as a reporter, but didn’t want to live in Cleveland, so I moved out here during the seventies and worked at the Santa Rosa New Herald, a weekly now gone… then the Cloverdale Reveille, which is still around… then the Mendocino Grapevine which some people remember.
My nieces were working in the city at the time, close by. I checked with my brother, everyone was okay. But the rest of those in the Towers and those coming to their aid… I…
Last week’s 6.0 earthquake epicentered in California’s Napa Valley was taken by a few evangelical types as a warning sign from God against the endemic decadence of wine country, not only a condemnation of the…
Angel Pagan, the switch-hitting leadoff batter for the Giants, one of the swiftest outfielders in the game, takes a short lead off first base and tries to ignore his inner dialogue about base stealing while…
The first 25-30 years of logging near the Mendocino Coast was accomplished by men with axes, chopping down huge old growth redwoods that stood very close to our coastal streams. The logs were rolled, often with jackscrews, into the rivers then floated down to holding areas called booms and on to the sawmills located at or near the mouths of the rivers. The first sawmill on the Albion started operations in 1852 more or less at the same time as on Big River. By 1856 Alexander Macpherson had sawmills operating on both the Albion and Noyo Rivers.
I grew up in Santa Cruz. My dad was in mid-level management at a disk manufacturer in Scotts Valley. We lived in a suburban neighborhood that was fortunately across the road from Henry Cowell Redwood State Park near Felton, which I really treasure. Most everything I understand about our relationship with ecosystems I learned from the redwood forest. My mom was a stay-at-home mom for a big part of my child, an incredibly sharp, intelligent person who went back to school when she was in her 40s and got an advanced math degree. Now she’s a community college instructor. So I had a caring and intellectually-oriented mom who had a big influence on me.