Hunter Fields hard at work in the Kelley House Museum When I met with Hunter Fields last week in the Kelley House Office, he was organizing two file boxes of CDs with old-timer interviews. Hunter is a high school student who volunteers with Kelley House a few hours per week in order to fulfill his community service requirement. He is going to graduate from dear old [...]
Phil Carnahan at his scanner. The boxes under his window contain all the microfilm he’s using for his project, and there are more on the way. History and genealogy buffs in Mendocino County have recently been given a great resource by Phil Carnahan, a tech-savvy buff himself who has undertaken to scan and make searchable documents of all the microfilm from the newspapers published in the [...]
One hundred years ago today, on February 14, 1919, the Mendocino Study Club held a special evening meeting to celebrate both the triumph of Cupid and the end of World War I. The armistice with Germany had been signed November 11, 1918, and the Paris Peace Conference had begun on January 18, 1919, so the Study Club event was timely. Almost three million American men had [...]
Over the past couple of months I have had the pleasure of driving to Ukiah weekly to see a foot doctor. This has given me the opportunity to become familiar as never before with every twist, turn, and straightaway on Highway 20, and to notice for the first time the little red schoolhouse tucked into the woods on the east end of the meadow at the [...]
As the Miss America pageant prepares for its annual show this Sunday in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it is trying to remake itself. Among its changes, Miss America 2.0, as it calls itself, has gotten rid of the swimsuit competition! That made me think back to 1925, when the pageant didn’t pretend to be anything but a beauty contest (notwithstanding those ugly gabardine swimming [...]
I celebrated National Lighthouse Day on Tuesday by reading through the memoirs of Cora Isabel Owens, the wife of William Owens, the last civilian light keeper at the Point Cabrillo Light Station who served from 1952 to 1963. After her husband died in 1984, Cora and her daughters wrote down their recollections of life at four California lighthouses, and a copy of their manuscript is in [...]
What better way to celebrate Mother’s Day than by looking at this interesting four-generation photograph of women who, among them, brought 21 children into the world and look none the worse for wear. The photo, from the Kelley House Museum archives, was taken in Fort Bragg in 1921, when little Florence Amelia Goldsam was just over one year old. Her mother was 31, her grandmother 51, [...]
Because we mark the 110th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake this week, I decided to spend a little time sifting through our seismic past. Though named after one city, the April 18, 1906 quake roared along a 290-mile rupture of the San Andreas fault from San Juan Bautista to Shelter Cove. Accounts in the Kelley House archives reveal that, from Manchester to Usal, landslides [...]
“A rough and tumble with a grizzly,” watercolor by H. Bullock Webster, 1878, from the University of British Columbia collection. Whether or not Cuffey’s Cove got its name from the grizzlies in the area (Mendocino Beacon, Kelley House Calendar, February 18, 2016), bears were abundant there—at least until the European settlers started shooting them in the early 1850s. Among the first documented Cuffey’s Cove bear [...]
When their VW busses brought the first flower children to the Mendocino Coast in the late 1960s, the locals—who had lived in a sort of time warp for the previous 30 years—did not know what to make of them. Mostly, they took a dim view of their abundant hair, their communal lifestyles, and their use of mind-altering substances. When the local newspaper reported that a “hippie [...]