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HIGH TEMPERATURES WILL BE WARM and summer-like today inland due to an upper level ridge that has remained over over the Western US during our holiday weekend. After a trough and subsequent cooler temperatures Tuesday, much warmer temperatures are expected late week and are eventually expected to peak on Friday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 44F with clear skies this Memorial Day on the coast. Today will be lovely, drizzle Tuesday morning, windy Wednesday, then generally clear the rest of the week. There you have it.
RETIRED ARMY MAJOR IN WILLITS DIDN’T SERVE IN VIETNAM, BUT WORKS TO HONOR THOSE WHO DID
Dennis Miner was driven to honor fallen Vietnam vets from Mendocino County – but also to make things right with his former neighbor, Helen Butler.
by Austin Murphy
Kenneth Butler was a passable rodeo cowboy and a kicker on the Willits High School football team. A handsome and confident young man, he graduated in 1966 and was drafted into the Army soon after.
Deployed to Vietnam in January 1968, he joined the C Troop 1/1 Armored Cavalry “Dragoons,” based northwest of Tam Ky, in the I Corps Tactical Zone.
On July 23 of that year, Butler was the track commander on an armored personnel carrier leading a convoy when it struck a land mine. He was the lone soldier killed.
The names of Butler and 21 others are engraved on a memorial of polished black granite, which stands beside the Mendocino County Museum in Willits.
That stark wall honors soldiers, sailors and airmen from Mendocino County who died in Vietnam. It was spearheaded and paid for by Dennis Miner, Butler’s former next-door neighbor.
“He was about four years older than me,” recalled Miner, now 72. And, while they weren’t close friends, “I did look up to him and listened to what he had to say about girls, cars and the military.”
Miner enlisted in the Army in 1971. He retired as a major 20 years later.
He didn’t deploy to Vietnam — he joined the service too late for that. But he has spent years in retirement working to honor those who did.
As a kind of follow-up and companion piece to that granite memorial in Willits, Miner compiled “Our Gallant Men,” a 60-page booklet providing detailed accounts of how and where each of those 22 Mendocino County service members died. He spent five years researching and writing it.
His “guiding principle” in chronicling those deaths, said Miner, was to share the following:
“Where they were. What their specific job was. What their unit was doing as it contributed to the war effort. And what happened to them while they were doing that job that made them a casualty.”
He undertook both projects to “honor the sacrifice” of the fallen, he said. In a narrower sense, Miner needed to make things right with Helen Butler.
Not long after Miner joined the Army, Kenny Butler’s mother, Helen, sent word that the next time he was home on leave, she would like to speak with him. But Miner never made it over to talk to her.
Condolences and catharsis
He was a professional warrior. But Miner was also afraid — that he lacked the words to properly console her.
Like Kenny Butler, Miner had specialized in armored cavalry.
“I couldn’t tell her that I’d been over in Germany, learning how to drive tanks, knocking down trees, having fun,” he recalled. “It wouldn’t have been appropriate.”
A half-century later, he found the words. Responding to a 2015 call for letters to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., he wrote to Helen — who’d been dead for two decades by then.
Still, Miner found it cathartic to compose these sentences:
“Kenny died so young and he missed so much. He missed not having children, birthdays, weddings, and reunions. He missed growing old with his wife and friends. Other classmates of his have died way too soon as well: a motorcycle accident by following too close, untreated cancer, drinking and driving, a drug addiction, etc. While those losses are tragic, they are without Honor. Kenny died while serving his country, doing what he thought was the right thing to do, like so many who have gone on before him, answering the Nation’s call … His name is etched in stone for future generations to see on The Wall and pay tribute. He is with good company.”
That was the year Miner executed his vision for a smaller “wall,” dedicated to fallen Vietnam vets from Mendocino County. The project was speedily approved, permitted and constructed — thanks in large part, Miner recalls, to the invaluable assistance of Linda Williams, a highly regarded reporter with the now-defunct Willits News.
“She’d been with the community paper all those years, went to all these meetings — she just knew how things worked, how to get things done,” says Miner.
Williams’ father was an Army veteran who’d served in Vietnam. She was happy to assist Miner, whom she recalls as “an interesting guy.”
“A lot of people don’t know how to approach government, or what you have to do to make things happen,” said Williams. She advised Miner to team up with the local American Legion chapter, and coached him on how to approach the county’s Board of Supervisors.
Conceived in May of 2015, the Fallen Vietnam War Veterans Memorial wasunveiled less than six months later, on Veterans Day. Noting to the assembled crowd of 300 people that half of all American veterans feel disconnected from their communities, Miner described the new memorial as “a bridge” to help close the divide.
Five-year passion project
“Our Gallant Men,”his accompanying booklet, had a longer gestation period.
As with the Mendocino County Wall, Miner’s mini-book was initially inspired by Helen Butler, who never did learn the details of her son’s combat death.
It was not uncommon, Miner recalls, for families of service members killed in Vietnam to get very few details from the Department of Defense on how their loved one died.
Overwhelmed by the number of casualties in Vietnam —58,220 of them fatal— “the military simply wasn’t prepared for the notification process,” said Miner.
A brief story in the Ukiah Daily Journal a few days after Butler’s death reported that he’d been killed “during a recent action ‘somewhere in Vietnam,’ according to word received Thursday by his mother, Mrs. Kenneth Butler of Willits. No details of the action were immediately available.”
A half-century later — motivated at least in part by the conversation he never had with Helen Butler — Miner vowed to unearth every possible detail around the death of her son.
There is Butler’s smiling face on page 35 of “Our Gallant Men” — whose title, incidentally, Miner borrowed from the song“Gallant Men,”which reached No. 6 on the country music charts in 1966. In addition to detailing how Butler died, Miner adds that his former neighbor was one of 20 members of “C” Troop Killed in Action in the seven months Butler was in-country. Casualty rates in I Corps were so high because allies faced “two implacable foes” in the area: Viet Cong guerrillas, and the infantry of the North Vietnamese Army.
After that deep dive on Butler, Miner realized he needed to devote similar efforts to the three other Willits soldiers who’d given “the last full measure of devotion” in Vietnam. He got a boost from Williams, of the Willits News, who’d tilled some of that soil already.
Marine Petty Officer Robert Lathrope, also of Willits, had been on R&R in Hong Kong when the C-130 transport plane ferrying him and 64 other passengers back to Vietnamcrashed shortly after takeoff on Aug. 24, 1965.Fifty-eight Marines, including Lathrope and Lance Corporal Ronald Wofford of Ukiah, were killed.
Another son of Willits, Army Sgt. Clinton Fackrell, was assigned to Base Camp Cu Chi, also known as “Hell’s Half Acre,” for its ongoing, intense fighting.
“Unknown at the time by U.S. forces,” writes Miner, “there were an estimated 200 square miles of tunnel networks beneath the Cu Chi area” — a virtual underground city.
In 1966 alone, the Army battalion operating out of Cu Chi had 176 men killed in action. Among them was Fackrell, hit by sniper fire while assisting a first lieutenant who’d been shot in the neck.
Also from Willits was the dashing Lee Adams, who’d captained the football team at Santa Rosa Junior College, then earned an appointment to the Air Force Academy, graduating in 1963.
In 1965, Air Force brass established a 100-combat mission quota for aircrews flying over North Vietnam and Laos. Pilots who completed the missions could return home.
Adams was flying his 90th mission on April 19, 1966. After bombing his target in North Vietnam, he circled back in his F-105D Thunderchief for “a strafing pass” on two trucks he’d spotted under camouflage. While firing on the trucks, he was hit, and crashed.
In 1993, forensic experts from the Pentagon’s POW/MIA accounting agency recovered bones from the crash site, found 11 years earlier by a farmer who’d been plowing his field. DNA analysis confirmed that the remains belonged to Adams.
Expanding the project
After chronicling those four Willits deaths, Miner felt compelled to widen his focus to all 22 of the Mendocino county Vietnam vets who didn’t make it home.
He was a mapgpie and detective, gathering facts and anecdotes from multiple sources. Miner’s most invaluable source, as he acknowledges in the booklet, was theCoffelt Database of Vietnam Casualties, which provided information on unit assignments, locations and incident details.
He also requested records from the Department of Defense on each fallen service member, and received some information on all but one of them.
The exception was Daniel Dawson of Fort Bragg, an Army pilot who on Nov. 6, 1964, was conducting reconnaissance, flying low over Viet Cong territory in his doughty, fixed wing Cessna 01-Bird Dog when he was shot out of the sky and never seen again.
Dawson’s brother, Donald, a civilian ship captain, vowed to find his brother. As chronicled in the pages of the March 12, 1965, “Life” magazine and ThePress Democrat 58 years later, Donald traveled to Vietnam, trekking into enemy territory in search of Daniel, whom he never found.
Because they appear chronologically — Dawson is first — the deaths in “Our Gallant Men” convey a sense of how the war was going. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t going well.)
Army Pfc. Dennis Dunsing, of Ukiah, arrived in-country on Feb. 24, 1968 — just in time for the “Tet Offensive,” hundreds of coordinated surprise attacks by North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas which starkly contradicted claims by U.S. military leaders that the war’s end had “come into view.”
Dunsing was “point man” on a patrol ordered to check on the possible presence of enemy soldiers at the edge of Fire Support Base Stephanie on May 6, 1968. After coming under fire, he continued moving forward, killing one “insurgent” before being mortally wounded, himself.
Dunsing was a proud Native American, like his friend U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Eugene Campbell from Redwood Valley.
Campbell’s letter to his father, following his participation in 1967 in the battle for Hill 861 in Khe Sanh, is among the booklet’s most riveting passages:
“As we got close to the top we were ambushed. The first five men got killed right off. We pulled back and tried to get on line. They called my squad up. As we moved, we were hit by a machine gun nest to our right flank … I called to my squad leader but he was dead. By this time I and two other people from my squad are the only ones not hit. They started to surround us. We could hear them talking and moving closer … We finally got some hand grenades and held them off until morning … That is when I got it” — shrapnel fragments in his left leg. “We had no corpsmen. They were all hit too … Dad, that was the worst battle I was ever in and I don’t ever want to be caught like that again.”
He wasn’t. Campbell died aboard a hospital ship three months later, a victim of malaria.
Historic battles
Miner’s “Gallant Men” saw action in other battles well known to military historians. Sgt. John Patton of Fort Bragg was a squad leader in “A” Company, part of the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade. After parachuting with his fellow “Sky Soldiers” into “a wide clearing in the jungle,” in February 1967, they moved north toward Dak To in the Central Highlands.
On the morning of June 22, 1967, “A” Company came in contact with a battalion-sized force of NVA regulars. They were badly outnumbered.
The ensuing battle has been described by military historians as “the costliest encounter by a single American unit in the entire war.”
That unit was Patton’s “A” Company. He was one of 76 American soldiers killed that day. Citing the Army Adjutant General database, Miner recounts that Patton died of “wounds from artillery, rocket, mortar.”
On May 11, 1969, two Marine companies engaged in a “search and clear operation” near the An Hoa Airfield were pinned down by heavy fire “in a large open expanse of rice paddies. Among the eight Marines killed from “Kilo” Company was Lance Corporal Michael Green of Ukiah. Fighting alongside them, “Lima” Company lost 17 Marines in the battle that came to be known as the Mother’s Day Massacre.
The booklet is packed with examples of selflessness, courage, and devotion to duty.
Charles Crain, of Redwood Valley, was an Army medic embedded with combat troops, trained to sprint toward the sound of gunfire, and “the desperate calls of young men screaming for ‘Medic!!!’”
He was killed by small-arms fire on July 2, 1967, shot while assisting others.
Clyde Lucas, of Mendocino, was a construction surveyor for the Army. He was lending a hand in an emergency on March 26, 1969, helping to carry a wounded comrade to safety, when the stretcher-bearers detonated a land mine, killing Lucas and three other soldiers.
Some of the men in the booklet died away from the battlefield.
John Hollister, of Comptche, a rough terrain forklift and loader operator with the Army’s Engineer Corps Branch, died in a “two-vehicle truck accident” just days before his one-year tour of duty ended.
Jeffrey Wesolowski of Ukiah, a helicopter mechanic in the Army’s aviation branch, died of “accidental self destruction” on June 1971, the last Mendocino County fatality in the Vietnam War.
That these men hadn’t died in combat did nothing to diminish the grief of their loved ones.
Phyllis Berglof is one of Weselowski’s five siblings. He was nine years older, and taught her to ride a bike, she recalls in a remembrance.
“I think of my brother often, and all that he is missing out on — his nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters.
“If only he would have been born in a different year.”
(pressdemocrat.com)
SWIFT VERDICT
A Mendocino County Superior Court jury returned from its deliberations in less than 30 minutes Wednesday afternoon to announce it had found the trial defendant guilty as charged.
Defendant Melissa Heather Derenia, age 37, of Covelo, was found guilty of both driving a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol .08 or greater, a misdemeanor, and unlawfully carrying a loaded firearm in a motor vehicle, also a misdemeanor.
After the jury was excused, a sentencing hearing was scheduled for June 14, 2024 at 1:30 o’clock in the afternoon in Department H of the downtown Ukiah courthouse. Defendant Derenia was ordered to return to court on that date and time for sentencing.
The law enforcement agencies that investigated the case and presented testimony at this week’s trial were the California Highway Patrol and the California Department of Justice forensic laboratory.
The prosecutor who presented the People’s evidence to the jury was Deputy District Attorney Joshua Hopps.
Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Keith Faulder presided over the three-day trial. Judge Faulder will preside over the sentencing hearing on June 14th.
MISSING WOMAN LOCATED DECEASED IN OREGON
by Kym Kemp
The search for Carol “Shelly” Mills, a beloved Hydesville resident who had been missing since the morning of May 22, has ended in tragedy. Mills was found deceased in Jackson County, Oregon, on the evening of May 25, according to a statement released today by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
Mills, 52, was last seen leaving her home at approximately 9:15 a.m. on May 22nd. She was reportedly headed to work in Eureka but never arrived.
Her daughter, Nastassia Lake, made a heartfelt plea to the community last week, seeking assistance in finding her mother. Lake described Mills’ last known whereabouts and provided detailed information about her appearance and the vehicle she was driving.
The discovery of Mills’ body in Jackson County, Oregon, ends days of searching and hope that she might be found safe. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office will be handling the release of any further information regarding the circ*mstances of her death.
The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office expressed their gratitude to those that assisted in the search efforts. “We would like to thank assisting law enforcement agencies and the community for their efforts in locating Mills,” the statement read.
(kymkemp.com)
STUDENT EXHIBITION WEDNESDAY!
Bring the family and join us for the Junior Senior High Student Exhibition on Wednesday, May 29 from 3:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Come admire students' work throughout the school and enjoy some light refreshments created by Miss Kira's class. See you then!
Take care,
Louise Simson, Superintendent
AV Unified School District
ARF!
The Mendocino County Animal Care Services Department, which operates the animal shelter in Ukiah on Plant Road, is hosting a community meeting on Thursday, May 30.
The meeting will be inside the Board of Supervisors Chambers, located at 501 Low Gap Road, and is scheduled from 4 to 5 p.m. on May 30.
The organizers of the event describe attendees as being able to:
- Gain insight into how operations work within our department, including animal rescue, shelter management and adoption procedures.
- Discover opportunities to get involved though volunteering, fostering or adopting.
- Share your feedback and suggestions to help us better serve our community’s furry friends.
Anyone who cannot attend in person can participate via Zoom at: mendocinocounty.zoom.us/j/86567377116
THE MEASURE B COMMITTEE: STILL INCONSEQUENTIAL AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.
by Mark Scaramella
The last time we watched a Measure B committee meeting they had decided to reduce their already minimal role in the “oversight” (hah) of the Measure B activity, by limiting what they would review and reducing the frequency of their meetings. This was in the wake of the Supervisors handing over the management of Measure B to Behavioral Health Director Jenine Miller whose primary function is financial management and administration of mental health programs, with delivery of mental health services basically an afterthought.
At that last meeting, Committee member Shannon Riley reminded her fellow committee persons that the text of Measure B requires that at least 25% of the revenues be spent on services (at least $8 million and counting, not that anyone is counting). But only a few hundred thousand has been spent on “services” (mostly on the inland crisis van). The committee ignored Ms. Riley’s reminder then and has continued to ignore the requirement ever since.
Ms. Riley wasn’t on hand on Wednesday, May 22 when they met in Dr. Miller’s conference room on South Dora, just down the hall from where the Veterans Service Office remains unmoved some three months after the Supervisors reversed their ill-advised and abrupt eviction of the VSO. The meeting place itself was a vivid reminder that Dr. Miller is in charge, not the Measure B committee or the Supervisors or the CEO.
If anyone strays from that party line or tries to dig into the Measure B particulars, former Sheriff Tom Allman is always on hand to steer any errant questions or remarks either to a future meeting or back into Dr. Miller’s lap.
Current Committee Chair Sherie Ebyam opened the meeting with a good faith question about plans to pay back the $7 million loan that the Supervisors took from the Measure B fund to help fund the huge overrun of the new wing of the jail which Allman (and others) insist is the “mental health wing.” Since Measure B finances are very much in limbo these days with the Psychiatric Health Facility (estimated at over $20 million at last check) finally going out to bid and the $7 million loan and the Board’s claimed intention to pay it back, and a $9.3 million state grant on the horizon and the Board nixing a $3 million Measure B expenditure for Ford Street (which Ford Street still wants), Ebyam wanted to know about the timing of the PHF and the payback and the state grant (which is a reimbursem*nt after Mendo spends the money — no money up front) and what contingencies are being made if things go awry.
Dr. Miller immediately suggested that that question be held off until later in the meeting.
When Ebyam asked about whether Measure B’s residual 1/8 cent sales tax would be spent or held as a contingency, Former Sheriff Allman immediately said that question should be put off for a future agenda.
Ms. Ebyam quickly and meekly backed off.
Acting Auditor-Controller Treasurer Tax Collector Sarah Pierce summarized loan repayment plan she proposed to the Supervisors in April — ten years at 2.5% — but which was shuttled to the back burner for future consideration. Pierce noted that she wouldn’t use the Measure B loan money until after all the other jail expansion funds were spent, so there’s no point in a repayment plan since theoretically they might not spend it all.
General Services Facilities manager Doug Anderson proudly announced that the Request for Proposals for the Psychiatric Health Facility had gone out just that day of the meeting.
For those keeping track, Measure B was approved with the specific intention of building a PHF back in 2017. Now almost seven years later they have finally released an RFP. (Never mind that the RFP is for a gold-plated facility that is twice the size necessary and includes millions of dollars for project management and overhead and other “soft costs.”
In a partial answer to Ms. Ebyam’s earlier question, Dr. Miller explained that the hoped-for $9.3 million state grant won’t be available until up to two years after construction is complete.
Doug Anderson said he expects construction to be complete in the fall of 2025, despite the County’s white-shoe consulting outfit Nacht & Lewis projecting a year longer than that in their last project report. (Maybe it depends on what “completion” means.)
Former Sheriff Allman was of course very pleased that the RFP for the PHF had finally gone out since the PHF and the new jail wing are his top Measure B priorities these days, not the services that were promised for street people when Allman spearheaded the sales job for the measure which produced its large majority approval in 2017.
As a sort of afterthought, Allman casually observed, “There’s a misunderstanding that we squandered money away which is all inaccurate.”
“Inaccurate”? We’re the only entity in the County claiming that Measure B money has been wasted, so let’s look at the record.
The County spent about $5 million on a substandard four-bedroom house which could have been purchased on the Ukiah housing market for less than $1 million and which is now being used exclusively for about a half dozen of Camille Schraeder’s paying customers (i.e., reimbursable mental patients).
That sure sounds like squandering to us, especially since Measure B never even called for the “Crisis Residential Treatment” facility next door to Ms. Schrader’s admin offices on Orchard Avenue. The CRT was only built because the state’s offer of a half-mil grant as part of the $5 mil cost had a hard deadline.
Then we have the PHF itself, a 16 bed facility, twice as big as what was recommended by Measure B consultant Lee Kemper in his $60k “needs assessment” which Allman himself promoted in the early days of Measure B and which the Supervisors officially designated as the Measure B “strategic plan.”
So that’s $4 million squandered on the CRT and at least $10 million squandered on the PHF and nearly nothing spent on services or Ford Street. If Mr. Allman has evidence that any of that squandering is “inaccurate” we’d be happy to look at it. The failure to spend much Measure B money for services isn’t squandering in the literal sense, but squandering it on overpriced buildings instead of on the services called for by Allman’s own measure is not what we’d call prudent.
Allman’s denial that Measure B money has been squandered reminded us of Claud co*ckburn’s paradoxical axiom: “Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.”
Allman did, however, bring up a good point about the upcoming PHF contract, asking Doug Anderson how the County/GSA would keep from being ripped off with sole-source change orders.
Anderson replied that they would try to see if the change order pricing was consistent with the basic contract and so forth.
There are two basic categories of change orders. 1. Add-ons and design changes initiated after the contract is awarded, and 2. Corrections to erroneous plans and specs that may be discovered by the contractor during construction.
The customer has some control over the first category because they don’t have to accept add-ons and revisions. But if the contractor finds errors in the plans and specs, or if certain specified equipment isn’t available and design changes are necessary to accommodate substitutes, those change orders can become a sole-source gold mine for a contractor, because the customer has very little choice but to approve them and pay for them, and the approval usually has to be fast because sitting on them would hold up progress while the change order is reviewed and processed.
If Mendo is lucky, their high-priced consultant/architect has provided solid plans and specs. If not, the cost and the schedule could become major problems.
Near the end of the meeting Chair Ebyam tried again to bring up the question of whether there would be any money left over for the services required by Measure B. Again Allman jumped in to suggest that the services question be put over to a future meeting.
Former Sheriff Allman concluded his remarks by requesting that the Measure B committee be ready for a special meeting between now and their next planned meeting on August 8 if something “goes awry,” such as if the bids in response to the RFP, currently planned to be opened near the end of June, are much higher than expected.
If the jail expansion project is any guide, the County may be in for serious sticker shock when those bids come in.
PONTIUS PALACE
Dear Ukiah City Council Members;
I can understand that the Council is sick of the Palace Hotel and the saga of its long decay and that the Council might just wish that the whole thing would just go away. I can understand that the Council might not want to spend any money on it and that you might welcome the chance to see it torn down using taxpayer money.
I am sure that the vision of something, anything, bright and shining and new standing there is captivating, and might be almost within reach just now, and I can see how the Council might be grasping for that straw.
But — standing here in Boonville with a more than 50 year history including lunch in the Black Bart Room and dinner at Pat Kuleto’s iteration of the place — I am asking you City Council people to step back and take another look at this thing. I am also asking that you facilitate a community discussion of the matter. You have shut down conversation about the Palace because, “it is not on the agenda.” Well, for crying out loud, why not put such a conversation on the agenda? I think that there is support in the community for that. I should think that you would want to do that so that you could hear all suggestions before making a decision about anything. It looks to me like you may be ready to accept a proposal without giving any other proposal even a hearing or even sharing whatever proposal you have received with the public.
Some of you are telling me that you have no control because the Palace is private property — but in fact you exercise some degree of control over all private property within the City. You can Issue or refuse to issue permits for construction or demolition and for water, sewer and electrical. You can ask for changes in the terms of proposals, with your approval contingent. You have special powers where health and public safety are concerned, including taking a property intro receivership - a power that you have used in the case of the Palace. You can condemn properties and you can make demands of the owners and then do nothing when those demands are not met. You are allowing restaurants to take over parts of public streets. Please do not try to tell me that the future of the Palace is out of your hands, even if you wish fervently that it was. I think that you have complete control…
Tom McFadden
Boonville
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R.D. BEACON
All too often we allow our fine historical monuments, to be destroyed, in the name of progress, by individuals that have it blurred, how important it is to keep history a lot, many of this in our past, are guilty, of being a little too, much of a hurry, to tear down and destroy, valuable part, the neighborhood, in the name of the almighty dollar, or the fact that we were too lazy, to repair what was broken, I can freely admit, that I am guilty like so many others, of making bad decisions, about old buildings, finding it was, more financially, beneficial, to replace an old structure, with a shiny new building, with more modern conveniences, in the name of progress, but as I've grown older, maybe, more wiser, I have deep regrets, about my past, with age, certain amount of wisdom, is bestowed upon us, realizing the value, or preserving our history, Mendocino County, as well as our nation, is one of the more important, projects, that we should all and of, it seems like, to save the Palace Hotel, did not go far enough, where is, city of Ukiah, the Mendocino County historical Society, and the shakers and movers within the community, without saying a little further, into the future, the building could be saved, and everybody in the county, could help save, as of for instance, if everybody in Mendocino County that was of voting age, donate $50, toward the project of saving the building, figuring there must be at least, 80,000 people here", would come up to about $4,250,000, and everybody in the county would own a piece of the project, given the fact, printing or certificate of joint ownership, would probably cost about $.30, or roughly $24,000 out of the project, but believing, that 4,000,000+ dollars would probably at least save the structure, from demolition, also believing, that if it was an ongoing, collection of money from other sources such as federal and state historical dollars, by selling shares in the building, to individual, tenants that would occupy the structure, we generate more dollars, by preserving the outer side structure, and having not only a working, hotel within the building, but some much-needed office space, and return some of the former types of business, such as a restaurant, co*cktail lounge, and other type businesses like a barbershop, beauty parlor, all of the businesses would create regular income, to kids can you preserving the structure, while providing public ownership of the building, may save it in the end, as well as a part of the structure could be maintained is a local museum preserving many of the artifacts, that what they will find, within the structure, reminding everyone about the effort, it was made to preserve, the old Navarro by the Sea building, which used to be occupied by, Capt. Fletcher, the building of equal age, which is the same history, the Palace Hotel shared, in Mendocino County in its early development, as a community, the shortsightedness, of the city, of Ukiah, while trying to preserve and protect some buildings in the community, that do not have, never will have, the kind of history, that a walk through its doors, like the Palace Hotel, and the fact, through history many famous people, have stayed in the building, and for various times in their lives, many of these people, called the hotel home, but there are other fine structures, not only in Ukiah, that need to be protected, there are a few up toward Willis, like the hotel in Willits another fine old building that is fallen into disrepair, over the years the environmental world, is work hard to protect land, but not protecting structures, of the historical value, of the county, all too often, in the name of progress, we bulldoze, fine structures, and make no effort, to preserve, to protect, and to defend history, if the newer generations, but people had their way, I believe most of the, would bulldoze, just about every old building, they can get their hands on, what is the saddest part of all of this, as we contribute to the delinquency, of other countries, supplying them with expensive homes and claims, which, the value of one of these objects, would more than pay for, the restoration of the hotel, while ours children, and young adults are protesting, or bad wars, they lift no effort, to try and put Defend, older buildings that need help, how society is broken so badly, that no one is standing up, to help preserve the past, while battling with everyone over the future, one of the many wars that we financed, through federal dollars, over the years I have seen people protest the cutting down of large trees, and jump up and down to save large tracts of old-growth timber, in the name of preservation, yet no one protests, caring down to look fine historical building, how broken does that make us, as a society, how shameful, does that make our elected officials, it will not take responsibility, to preserve history, but the reality is, nobody cares.
ED NOTES
VAL HANELT, keeper of the Valley’s Cemetery Chronicle, will be sure to correct me, but the Anderson Valley’s Evergreen cemetery, I think, is eternal home to veterans of every American war from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam, although I think the man who was alive during the Revolutionary War may not have been a veteran of our liberation from Mad King George. The Babco*ck Cemetery also goes way back. I've never taken a close look at Studebaker but it and Babco*ck are the most pleasingly located, especially Babco*ck with its panoramic view of much of Boonville and its enclosing east hills.
SOME of my facebook friends are complaining about tourists, which prompts me to remember being startled by a large woman in a mumu, ragged dog on a choke chain, who lobbed a little purple bag of dog poop onto my driveway from next door at the Redwood Drive-In as I was standing there in full view. For a nano-second I thought maybe she was aiming at me. “Hey!” I yelled. “You're setting a very bad example for your dog!” And damned if she didn't yell back, “You take care of yourself and I'll take care of my dog.” And she walked away, pulling her resisting mutt towards a battered van. I had to admire her royal sense of entitlement, but I'll bet she was local.
ON A SLO SUNDAY I’ll tell you my Sidney Poitier story. I met him once, and he made a lasting impression on me because he was so real, so gracious. I was driving a cab in San Francisco at the time, which was the pivotal year of 1968, the year the lights went out, politically speaking. I drove the 3pm to midnight shift. Days, I tried to overthrow the government, which is what my generation is best known for — that and self-indulgent idiocy, but don’t get me started.
I WAS DRIVING for Big Yellow the night the Zodiac killer shot Paul Stine to death. I knew Stine to say hello to because we worked the same hours and would occasionally get stuck out at the SF International in the cab lot trying to catch a fare going back into the city. The airport cab lot was the site of lots of informal seminars on all kinds of subjects because all kinds of lively but estranged persons were driving cabs at the time.
STINE, in my memory, was a studious-looking guy who looked like the graduate student he was. Zodiac had jumped in Stine’s cab at a downtown hotel, instructed Stine to drive him to, as I recall, an address on Cherry Street, off California on the edge of the Presidio. When Stine stopped the cab Zodiac put a pistol behind the young man’s ear and pulled the trigger.
THERE were witnesses. They called 911 but the dispatcher unaccountably broadcast the killer as a black man, so when the cops stopped the crewcut psycho as he casually walked into the Presidio, they asked him if he'd seen a suspicious black man in the neighborhood. Nope.
A FEW DAYS LATER, a piece of Stine’s bloody shirt accompanied one of Zodiac’s uniquely boastful letters identifying himself as Stine’s killer. I’ve always wished the cops had found Zodiac that night and finished him off, but they didn’t and he kept on killing people.
GETTING back to my friend Sid, he was utterly without famous-person pretense and altogether charming. I picked him up in Pacific Heights where he was staying, he said, while he was making a movie. He told me his brother drove a cab and asked me questions about what the job was like in Frisco and why was I doing it. We chatted like old pals all the way to a downtown restaurant where he tipped me something like $20 and said, “I hope you figure out what you want to do and have a good life doing it.”
I WAS FLABBERGASTED. I’d never met a famous person before. Never had the desire, frankly, before or since. But my encounter with Poitier made me understand charisma, which I’d never thought about. He had it, and then some. And I can tell you nobody has ever gotten away with saying a bad thing about Sidney Poitier in my presence, not that anybody has ever tried, but I'm ready if anybody does.
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
My sister lives somewhere over there, a good distance far off, and she and I do not overspend our time keeping the relationship fresh.
Petunia (not her real name) lives alone with a 17-year old cat, and a few weeks ago she purchased her first computer ever, a laptop she thought would help her learn tap dance routines. She is in her 80th year and neither computers nor tap dancing have played a part in the previous 79.
She is not by inclination bold and filled with determination to live life to its fullest climbing every mountain, swimming every sea and learning Esperanto. Bucket list? She doesn’t own a bucket let alone a list. But she’s always had an independent streak and a physical toughness that belies her age.
Mostly Petunia’s been quiet: She went through high school and college as anonymously as Jane Doe. I was surprised to learn she took up harmonica a few years back, gasping and wheezing her way through Hot Cross Buns, Freire Jacques and Three Blind Mice.
Recently she set aside her harp to take up tap dancing. Of course. What else? If not tap dancing it would have been potato collecting.
She told me a while ago in a random phone talk that her tap dance class planned to perform at a downtown theater. Swell, I thought, and maybe even said. Bear in mind that I live one block from the SPACE dance academy in Ukiah, a venue in which public dance performances performed by dancers who can’t dance are not at all rare.
Her tap group is a collection from various local troupes, almost 100% female and almost 100% young, meaning some little girls in it for the cute dresses, others into their teenage years, and a sizable number in college and early 20s. Some have been dancing 10 or 15 years.
They practice regularly and my sister gamely keeps up, albeit with the assistance of her laptop, mastering steps by hoofing about on her kitchen’s linoleum floor. She worked hard at it. I know my sister.
The big night grew near. Petunia fretted and worried and couldn’t sleep in anticipation of her onstage debut at the town’s biggest theater, then scolded herself for worrying so. What’s the big deal? What’s the worst that can happen” Flub a step? Miss a cue? Sheesh.
So she practiced more until she had it down as best anyone could who had never tapped a tap step until sometime in 2024. Then, her fragile confidence in precarious balance, she attended final rehearsals on the afternoon of the Main Event.
It was there that her drill instructor, aka dance teacher, singled out poor Petunia for inappropriate hairdo and for clumsy noises while tip-toeing (in tap shoes, but still) around backstage. As if her confidence needed undermining.
Later that evening the ensemble gathered at the two small dressing rooms in advance of their allotted appearance: half a dozen boys in one dressing room, two-and-a-half dozen girls in the other.
Have you ever worried and sweated over something and it turned out to be nothing? Then an insignificant detail suddenly surfaced and caused panic?
For Petunia, that “insignificant detail” erupted in the tiny, crowded girls’ dressing room. The room is A) covered wall-to-wall with big mirrors, and B) everyone is young, lovely, and in full blossom of youthful, goddess-like daffodil splendor.
Almost everybody. Petunia was startled to learn she’d have to completely disrobe, just like P.E. class circa 1960. She tried not to stare at her dance-mates but couldn’t help peeping at the long perfect legs and the gleaming lustrous hair. Not a single gray strand anywhere. No bumps, no sags, no lumps, no bags.
Just a crowded corral of beautiful, frisky ponies laughing, primping and twirling unconsciously about, the years of dance resulting in unintended benefits of taut muscles, creamy complexions and no blotchy, warty skin patches. All those females in the room, and only one knew of the word “cellulite.”
They took the stage. Her tap dance performance? Who knows? Who remembers? All her synchronized staccato steps accompanied by graceful arm movements and a fixed smile drifted off in a blur.
The show was over, but in fact had ended 40 minutes earlier in the dressing room. Petunia slunk out the back door and fought the urge to hit a nearby bar to throw down a couple bourbons.
Instead she went home and sat in a stupor for more than an hour, and then spent another three days defeated, home with her cat. On a Thursday night as her humiliation began to ebb, she called me.
She was suddenly aware, and in despair, of her frail, elderly old age. What next?
Well, according to Benjamin Franklin, what comes next is that we are food for worms.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, May 26, 2024
JESUS CALDERON, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.
VANESSA ELIZABETH, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, probation violation. (Frequent flyer.)
JOSUE GARCIA-RIVERA, Willits. DUI.
TIMOTHY HODGES, Redwood Valley. Battery with serious injury.
JOHN OAKLEY, Albion. Domestic abuse.
MICHAEL SHAW, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, probation violation.
ERIK SMITH, Potter Valley. Probation violation, resisting.
JASON STEEL, Ukiah. DUI.
LESLIE TROUP, Selma. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, stolen property, suspended license.
FIXING SOCIAL SECURITY
Editor:
“Social Security isn’t broke, but it’s badly broken,” columnist Michelle Singletary wrote. I think Singletary’s suggestions are fine for the working class stiff, but let’s also encourage readers to write their congressional representatives and ask why people earning over $160,200 a year don’t have to contribute the same as those earning less.
I think Social Security should be a truly equal opportunity: allow immigrants the status to immediately start paying into the program when they start working, and allow that 20% of fortunate wage-earners in the country to pay a full portion on their income instead of favoring them. Or maybe just roll back the 1983 Social Security reform that granted special status to high wage earners.
Susan Pareto
Petaluma
CALIFORNIA SENATE PASSES BILL TO ADD 'SPEED GOVERNORS' TO ALL NEW CARS
by Katie Dowd
If some California legislators have their way, your car could soon scold you if you exceed the speed limit.
On Tuesday, the state Senate passed SB 961, a bill sponsored by Sen. Scott Wiener. The bill requires passive speed governors to be added to all new cars manufactured or sold in California by 2032. Speed governors would alert drivers with “audible and visual signals when they exceed the speed limit by greater than 10 miles per hour,” a press release from Wiener’s office said.
“California, like the nation as a whole, is seeing a horrifying spike in traffic deaths, with thousands of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians dying each year on our roads,” Wiener said. “These deaths are preventable, and they’re occurring because of policy choices to tolerate dangerous roads.”
According to the California Office of Traffic Safety, speeding was a factor in one-third of traffic deaths between 2017 and 2021. That's in line with national averages; the National Transportation Safety Board estimates speeding causes one-third of the U.S.’s annual 43,000 traffic fatalities.
California's system would compare the GPS location of the vehicle with the posted speed limit and issue "a brief, one-time visual and audio signal" every time the driver exceeds the limit by over 10 mph. Emergency vehicles are exempt from speed governors.
SB 961 mandates that “every passenger vehicle, truck, and bus manufactured or sold in the state” will need a speed governor. That must be met by 2032, with a goal of half of the vehicles equipped by 2029. The bill passed the Senate 22-13 last week, and it next goes to the Assembly; it must be passed there by Aug. 31 to move forward.
The bill is in line with recommendations by NTSB. Last year, the agency pushed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to look into adding speed governors to new vehicles nationwide. In addition, the NTSB wants repeat speeding offenders to possibly have speed limiters added to their vehicles.
“We’re sick of not seeing action by NHTSA,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy told the Associated Press.
(SF Chronicle)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
You don’t understand why people care about the outcome of a game that they have bet upon? I don’t believe you.
I can’t believe that I need to explain this to anyone old enough to type: cheering for the local pro team is the best community-builder that mankind has ever had. It generates healthy rivalries for a healthy outlet of our tribal warlike nature. And it is kick-ass for economic activity.
NO POE
Mixed martial artist Bryce Mitchell said he fears public schools could turn his infant son into a communist, a Satan-worshipper, gay or subject to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
THE POGUES - The Band Played Waltzing Matilda: youtube.com/watch?v=TThjY_qlEfg
(via Bruce McEwen)
ISRAELI AIRSTRIKE KILLS DOZENS IN A RAFAH TENT CAMP, GAZAN AUTHORITIES SAY. ISRAEL SAYS IT TARGETED A HAMAS COMPOUND.
An Israeli airstrike on a makeshift tent camp for displaced Palestinians killed at least 35 people in Rafah on Sunday night, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The Israeli military said its operation was aimed at a Hamas compound.
Israeli aircraft had used “precise munitions” in the strike, the military said in a statement, adding that it was looking into reports that “several civilians in the area were harmed” by the strike and subsequent fire. A follow-up statement said two Hamas leaders had been killed in the strike.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said its ambulance crews had taken a “large” number of victims to the Tal as Sultan clinic and field hospitals in Rafah, where few functioning hospitals remain, and that “numerous” people were trapped in fires at the site of the strikes.
(Reuters)
DINING WITH THE ENEMY
by Anthony Bourdain
“Come on, Tony. How bad can it be? You’ve been to Cambodia, for Chrissakes! How bad can it be? This’ll be fun! They’re looking forward to cooking for you.”
What my producer had arranged, what he had in mind, was for me to venture into the real heart of darkness, deep, deep into enemy territory — to Berkeley, and a vegan potluck dinner.
I’ve said some pretty hateful things about vegetarians, I know. In spite of this, many of them have been very nice to me in the past year. Though I think I may have referred to them at various times as Hezbollah-like, and the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, they come to my readings, write me nice letters… My publicist in England, who I adore, is a veg, though I forced her at gunpoint to eat fish a few times, as are a couple of the shooters I’ve worked with. They’ve shown remarkable good humor considering how I feel about their predilictions.
There have been lots of veg-heads that have been very kind and generous these last few months in spite of the fact that they know that at the first opportunity, when they’re drunk or vulnerable, I’m gettin’ a bacon cheeseburger down their throats.
That doesn’t mean I wanted to sit in some hilltop a-frame eating lentils out of a pot with a bunch of Nader supporters and hairy-legged earth mothers in caftans. I certainly didn’t want to visit them on their home turf. If nothing else, I was reasonably certain that smoking would be a problem.
I’m gonna try, really try, to be nice here. I went along with the producer’s scheme. Fair is fair. The opposition should be given every chance to prove the righteousness of their cause, or at least the merits of their case.
The people coming to the potluck dinner, the folks who would be cooking for me, were all serious vegans. Cookbook authors. Vegan cookery teachers. People who spent lots of time going to seminars and classes, corresponding with others of their ilk on-line, in chatrooms, and at conventions and formal gatherings. Maybe, just maybe, they had something to show me. Maybe it was possible to make something good without meat or stock or butter or cheese or dairy products of any kind. Who was I to sneer? The world, as I had recently found out, was a big, strange and wonderful place. I’d eaten worms, and tree grubs, and sheep’s testicl*s. How bad could it be?
Bad.
The vegans I visited did not live in a converted ashram on a hilltop tending to their crops in bare feet or birkenstocks. No one was named Rainbow or Sunflower, only one person wore a sari. My host lived in a well-kempt modern luxury home in an exclusive area of the suburbs, surrounded by green lawns and shiny new BMWs and SUVs. They were, ALL of them, affluent looking professionals and executives, ranging in age from late 30s to early 50s — they were well-dressed, unfailingly nice, here to show me the other side of the argument.
And not one of them could cook a f*cking vegetable!
Fergus Henderson, Ireland’s grandmaster of blood and guts cookery, shows more respect for the simple side of sauteed baby spinach on some of his plates than any of these deluded vegans showed me in ten elaborate courses. Green salads were dressed hours before being served, assuring that they had wilted into nutrition-free sludge. The knife work, even from the cooking teachers present, was clumsy and inept, resembling the lesser members of the Barney Rubble clan. The vegetables, every time, were uniformly overcooked, underseasoned, nearly colorless and abused. Any flavor, texture and lingering vitamin content leached out. Painstaking recreations of “cheese,” “yogurt” and “cream” made from various unearthly soy products tasted invariably like caulking compound. And my hosts, though good humored and friendly to the hostile stranger in their midst, seemed terrified, even angry about something nebulous in their pasts.
Every time I asked one of them how and when, exactly, they had decided to forego all animal products the answer always seemed to involve a personal tragedy or disappointment unrelated to food. “I got a divorce,” began one. “I lost my job,” said another. “Heart attack,” offered another. “I broke up with my…,” “When I decided to move out of LA I started thinking about things…”
In every case, it appeared to me, in my jaundiced way of thinking anyway, that something had soured them on the world they’d once embraced and that they now sought new rules to live by, another othodoxy, something else to believe in.
“Did you read about the PCBs in striped bass?” one whispered urgently, as if comforted by the news. “I saw a picture of them pumping steroids into cattle,” said another, breathlessly. Every snippet of bad news from the health front was a victory for their cause.
They seemed to spend an awful lot of time confirming their fears and suspicions of the world outside their own. Combing the internet for stories of radioactive dairy products, genetically altered beets, polluted fish, carcinogenic sausages, spongiform-riddled meat, the hideous Granginole chamber of horror abattoirs and slaughter houses… They also seemed curiously oblivious to the fact that much of the world goes to bed hungry every night, that our basic design features as humans from the very beginnings of our evolution developed around a very real need to hunt down slower, stupider animals, kill them and eat them.
“Don’t you ever wake up in the middle of the night craving bacon?” I asked. “No, never,” replied every single one of them. “I never felt so healthy in my life.”
It was difficult for me to be polite, though I was outnumbered.
I’d recently returned from Cambodia where a chicken can be the difference between life and death. These people in their comfortable suburban digs were carping about cruelty to animals but suggesting that everyone in the world from suburban yuppie to starving Cambodian cyclo driver start buying organic vegetables and expensive soy substitutes.
To look down on entire cultures that have based everything on the gathering of fish and rice, seemed arrogant in the extreme. I’ve heard of vegetarians feeding their DOGS vegetarian meals. Now that’s cruelty to animals.
And the hypocrisy of it all pissed me off! Just being able to talk about this issue in reasonably grammatical language is a privilege, subsidized in a ying-yang sort of way somewhere by somebody taking it in the neck. Being able to read these words, no matter how stupid, offensive or wrong-headed is a privilege! Your reading skills are the end product of a level of education most of the world will never enjoy.
Our whole lives, the shoes we wear, the cars we drive, the food we eat… all built on a mountain of skulls. Meat, say the PETA folks, is murder. And yes the wide world of meat-eating can seem like a panorama of cruelty at times. But is meat murder? f*ck, no!
Go ahead. Hide in your fine homes and eat vegetables, I was thinking. Put a Greenpeace or NAACP bumpersticker on your beemer if it makes you feel better, and drive your kids to their all-white schools. Save the rainforests, by all means! So maybe you can visit it some day on an eco-tour, wearing comfortable shoes made by 12 year olds in forced labor. Save a whale while millions are still sold into slavery, starved or raped to death, tortured and forgotten. When you see cute little kids crying in rubble next to Sally Struthers somewhere, be sure to send a few dollars.
Damn, I was going to try to be nice.
POEMS BY RAYMOND CARVER
The Best Time Of The Day
Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.
Next to the early morning hours,
of course. And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love
these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.
--Raymond Carver
This Morning
This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk -- determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong -- duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I've trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back I didn't know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.
--Raymond Carver
Happiness
So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
--Raymond Carver
Grief
Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it.
Not until this morning.
--Raymond Carver
The Cobweb
A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck
of the house. From there I could see and hear the water,
and everything that's happened to me all these years.
It was hot and still. The tide was out.
No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing
a cobweb touched my forehead.
It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned
and went inside. There was no wind. The sea
was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.
Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath
touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.
Before long, before anyone realizes,
I'll be gone from here.
--Raymond Carver
