If you hiked to the top floor of the Eureka Municipal Auditorium last Saturday night, it might have made you dizzy. No, not the height – though it was plummetous – but the action down below on the dance floor. Nearly 2,000 people had unwittingly formed themselves into a pulsing neon arrow (sans the real […]
News (NCJ)
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Pedagogue Cobb
A few weeks past, an explosion was reported at Arcata High School. Witnesses said that it seemed to issue from Doug Johnson’s AP Government class and that it had a vaguely Texan accent. That explosion was David Cobb. Cobb was the last in a trio of speakers to visit the 16 Arcata High AP Government […]
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Broadband to the Backwoods
The cream-colored box marked "RuralConnect™Trailblazer™" is just a display model mounted on a telescoping pole in the large, dark garage in what was once the Arcata headquarters of Yakima, now home to Carlson Wireless Technologies Inc. It’s one element in an exhibit the company is assembling for an upcoming telecom trade show. The square, gunmetal […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Fa Show
It was chilly last Thursday night at 9 o’clock. Too cold, in my opinion, to be outside wearing a tank top. But there they were, maybe a dozen girls and women, high schoolers and twentysomethings, shivering on the 5th Street sidewalk in spaghetti strap tops. Just looking at their neon-lit arms gave me goosebumps. All […]
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No Work? No Workers!
Vince Campbell, he just got sick of it. He’d worked for Eel River Sawmills for 20 years as the environment and safety director. A good job. But for years, it seemed, the wood products industry had been crashing around him. A mill closed here, another mill closed there. When it was Eel River’s time to […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Logger Heaven
There it was, corralled behind a thin rope inside a grassy expanse at Redwood Acres: the retired figure-conscious logger’s dreambike. No, nothing noisy or fume-spewing, chrome-boasting or rubber-laying – those kinds of bikes are for sissies. This was a deceptively delicate, spindly blond wood affair, stationary, with the playful look of an old Flexible Flyer© […]
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Scotia Past
Throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s, HSU art professor Ellen Land-Weber made numerous visits to Scotia to document life in one of the last company towns in America through photographs and interviews. Only fragments of her work have been published; only a fragment of it is published here. In it, people of Scotia […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Which vets vend free?
Usually Henry Robertson is busy jar-ring organic olives, but lately he’s been sidetracked by a can of worms. In recent weeks Robertson, a Vietnam veteran and owner of Henry’s Olives in Cutten, has been wrangling with various local government agencies over their non-compliance with state law. The snafu surfaced last month when Robertson, 58, stopped […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Wounded Healers
For almost three years doctors had been assuring Bonnie Etz that the large lump she felt in her breast was probably just dense fiber, nothing to worry about. So when Etz found out in 2004 that she had a rare and advanced case of breast cancer she felt betrayed and distraught. But her husband was […]