I met with Via at her house that she shares with partner Dave Martin on the Prather Ranch, just off Hwy 128 past The Grange Hall. She made a good strong cup of coffee and…
Posts tagged as “Lives & Times”
I drove down to The Floodgate Store a couple of miles south of Navarro and pulled up the driveway behind to the home of Butch and Buffy Paula. They gave me a delicious cup of…
I met with Leslie a week or so ago at her home overlooking the Valley from the low hills behind the airport on Mountain View Road. After enjoying the view and the affection of Grace…
As the rain came pouring down I drove to the outskirts of Boonville and met with June at her home on Ornbaun Road. She graciously offered me either a tuna or ham sandwich for lunch…
I drove above Ornbaun Road to meet with Bill at the house he and wife Eva have called home since 1976. We sat down with some coffee and a plate of Oreo cookies and began…
Wallen Summers becomes our third guest from the Valley who was born outside the US. He ‘arrived’ in Shanghai, China, in 1932, the second child of Sarci Chen and his American wife, Ann Summers. “My father was a sophisticated, modern guy of the 1920s who had been educated at Worcester Tech in Massachusetts and upon his return to China he became an electrical engineer with his own business. My older sister and I grew up in a middle class household and we were very close. She is a retired psychiatrist in San Francisco who has hung on to her Chinese roots far more than I have. She even changed her name from June back to Mai Long and to this day continues to have very negative feelings towards the Japanese after our experiences in the Second World War, perhaps because she is four years older than me and was a teenager at that time."
With Fred living at one end of the Valley and myself at the other, and no obvious quiet spot in town to meet, we decided to ‘risk’ The Redwood Drive-In on a Friday morning and…