The year was 1968. The place was Eureka, Calif. Down near the waterfront on C Street, the finest fish cuisine and the most popular joint in town sat on the right on the pier, overlooking the bay full of sailboats and the skeleton of the nearly built Samoa Bridge. At the renowned Lazio’s Seafood Restaurant, […]
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Posted inArts + Scene
Save the Trees!
Engineering consultants to the City of Fortuna have recommended that a new, 2-million-gallon water tank be built in the city’s Rohner Park Forest. It would mean cutting at least 69 trees — many of them towering, 100-year-old second-growth redwoods and firs — and 18 gigantic old-growth stumps that have become raised islands of hoary forest […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Return to Black Bear
We had celebrated the seasonal holidays, the equinoxes and the solstices, from the time we started the Black Bear Ranch Commune in 1968. I thought about those early days as we navigated the tangle of log roads leading into Black Bear for what would be the 40th summer solstice this June. A couple hundred people […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Rekindling Magic
The Feet First Dancers of Southern Humboldt present the world premier of the original musical Beyond the Paille: Further Adventures in Clowntown, July 3-6 at the Mateel Community Center in Redway. Performances begin at 7 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday; Sunday’s final show is a matinee beginning at 2 p.m. Bleacher and balcony seats are […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
The Iceman Cometh
Spanish translation by Larry and Ana Maria Mease Alejandro couldn’t have been all that surprised when on the afternoon of Monday, June 9, his employer, Sun Valley Floral Farms, told him not to come to work the next day. The flower growers had received a letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a week earlier […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Can’t Swim
Monday, 6:30 a.m.: Swimming instructor Jan Carroll sits on a table at one end of the 25-yard, six-lane Eureka High School pool going over paperwork. She’s been here half an hour already, shepherding swimmers in her Eureka Adult School class as they do their laps. Light filters through the swampy bank of windows on one […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Crude Figures
Last Wednesday Shelly O’Brien climbed up a rickety old ladder in front of her one-pump, two-nozzle gas station on Myrtle Avenue in Eureka and raised the price of regular unleaded 14 cents to $4.52 per gallon. "Maybe one of these days I’ll be rich enough I can buy myself a new ladder," O’Brien joked on […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Ends Meet
"Animals are my passion. Animals are my life … Animals are my reason for being," Jennifer Raymond told me as we stood in the shade of an outbuilding at the Mad River Stables in Arcata at the tail end of the recent heat wave. Raymond founded the Humboldt Spay/Neuter Network and her enthusiasm for animals […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Summer of Fun
Humboldt County has a wealth of organized summer activities for children. This is just a survey of what’s available. For more information, contact your school, church or pick up a copy of the Humboldt Kid’s Digest at a branch of the Humboldt County Library, the Eureka Chamber of Commerce or county agencies. Most of these […]
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All The Pieces
FIRST DISTRICT Jimmy Smith What do you do for a living? I retired from commercial fishing and am a full-time supervisor. Why are you running for Supervisor? To continue my work as a regional (seven-county) leader and secure badly needed water and wastewater systems and watershed funding, and to hopefully expand the region’s scope to […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Nobody’s Fault
In January, journalism students from HSU, as part of an investigative reporting class taught by Assistant Professor Marcy Burstiner, set out to understand the intersection of the mental health and criminal justice systems in Humboldt County by investigating the death of one man: James Lee Peters, a Hoopa resident who committed suicide in the Humboldt […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Seeing Red
It was the first time I had ever heard the words "dialectical materialism" uttered inside a doublewide trailer. It was also my first glimpse into Humboldt County’s small community of communists. I had come to the right place. Sitting on a twin bed with his dog stretched out beside him in a sunlight-filled room in […]