Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
A week before Christmas the Fort Bragg Planning Commission denied Robert Affinito a use permit to convert his property at the corner of Franklin and South Streets into a Dollar Store. That’s been reported in several papers including the AVA. When the vote was completed nearly all involved exited the building, the victorious contingent so noisily they had to be cautioned that the commission meeting was still going on. Fort Bragg Community Development Director Marie Jones even said to the boisterous, crowd words to the effect, ‘You might want to stay, there’s other important business you’ll be interested in.’

   No one heeded her words, so in a nearly vacant hall, the same planning commission adopted a resolution recommending to the Fort Bragg City Council that any retail business over 5, 000 square feet, in any district, require a use permit.

     Right now any large retail business structure in Fort Bragg can be sold to another business without any permitting.  Community Development Director Jones put it thusly: The way the Land Use and Development Code is written now, if Harvest Market moves or goes out of business, and Discount Grocery wants to go in, we have little to say about that.

     The point of this is that much happens at the end of meetings with rooms nearly empty of public onlookers. Another case in point was the December get together of the Mendocino County Mental Health Board. These monthly meetings tend to go on and on, up to six hours. However, the bulk of the time is spent on fairly slick presentations by the newly privatized sector: Redwood Quality Management Company (RQMC), which oversees Redwood Children’s Crisis Center, and Ortner Management Group (OMG), which is paid millions to provide mental health services to everyone in this county aged twenty-one and up. After the exhaustingly long-winded offerings that all is moving forward (at several of these affairs I’ve kept running counts of how many times Ortner’s Mark Montgomery emits phrases with “move forward” in them – the other harbinger that b.s. will soon follow is “We’re excited about…”) almost everyone in the room leaves.

     At the December meeting, even the Grand Jury left too soon. Yes, two Mendocino Grand Jury members attended the December convergence. When the last Grand Juror to leave was finally able to ask a question, her queries included: How many of the thirty county wide crisis workers (Almost all, if not every last one, are clustered in Ukiah, Fort Bragg, and Willits offices with practically none located in outlying areas of Mendocino County) possess registered nursing (RN) or psychiatric licenses?

     Jenine Miller, subbing for the ill Mental Health Director, Tom Pinizzotto, did not give a precise number answer, but stated that crisis workers have years of experience. Ortner’s man, Mark Montgomery, cited the one or two psychiatrists Ortner employs. No one asked how often these psychiatrists are actually on site. The answer is: rarely.

     The grand juror departed and the Mental Health Board was left to its own devices – to complain about how little time they were leaving to do their own work. Promises were made to curtail the RQMC and Ortner presentations. 2014 time will tell if this resolution is followed through.

     What is clear is that mental health clients continue to fall between the cracks within the new, supposedly improved privatized system. One Board member recited the weeks long anguish of a parent unable to get adequate help for an eighteen year old relative, the mental health ball apparently fumbled somewhere between the county and RQMC. The citizens involved are well acquainted with one of the Mental Health Board members or their problematic situation might still be falling on deaf ears. Near the end of the meeting Jenine Miller huddled with that Board member, presumably in an attempt to aid in the situation.

     In those last minutes of the Mental Health Board meeting, the Grand Jury members could have heard widely held skepticism of the privatized presentations, particularly Ortner’s. Also prevalent throughout the boardroom was a sense of frustration at time wasted during the meetings, at a lack of press coverage by any outlet other than the AVA and a frustration that mental health programs already in place are not being successfully communicated to those who need to know about them. Board member Jane McCabe mentioned “the woeful lack of patient rights advocates.” Currently there appears to be a total of one for the county.

     2014 will bring a new chair to the head of the table (place your bets now on Littleriver’s John Wetzler).  Whether or not the Mental Health Board manages its time to actually get things done remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen if the Grand Jury is willing to stick with it long enough to see what’s truly going on with our mental health system or base their findings on the first two and a half hours of a single Board meeting.

     The privatized companies have been on the job now for six months. So far they seem best at lobbing snow jobs at the Board, but there is very little snow left on the ground in this county.

                                                                                                        Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
   I spent several days in mid-December in the Sierra. Most of the time was occupied with backpacking from the Donner Summit area north by northwest to the Peter Grubb Hut. It was constructed in the late 1930s as a memorial to Galileo High School graduate and outdoor enthusiast Peter Grubb. Peter died, at eighteen, while on a bicycle tour of Europe.

     The hut has undergone extensive repairs this fall. Many of the Sierra Clubbers who performed various difficult labors at the hut in November were along for the December trek through more snow than you might imagine given the lack of precipitation this autumn.

     The night before setting out for Peter Grubb was spent in the Sierra Club’s Clair Tappaan Lodge. Built in the mid-1930s by Sierra Club volunteers, the lodge was then only a couple of hundred feet north of the Lincoln Highway, the main east-west thoroughfare of the time. The Southern Pacific Railroad had a stop another hundred feet below. Though prices for an overnight stay at Clair Tappaan have risen to the level of moderate motels, the charge includes a dinner that surpasses most roadside eateries by a landslide. The lodge will also supply hikers with material for a sack lunch, but you have to be up and at ‘em early for the best sandwich fixin’s.

     One of the nicest spots at Clair Tappaan Lodge is a secluded library, complete with its own small wood stove, tables, couches, and an antique desk. I bee-lined to the old registers from the various Sierra Club huts. Finding one that encompassed all the 1960s entries penned and penciled in by skiers, snowshoers, and hikers who’d made it to Peter Grubb I settled in to see if there were any reactions to JFK’s assassination. Finding none, I thumbed through harrowing accounts of parties stranded in the dark winter woods above the Grubb hut (it is off the beaten path even in summer). Fortunately all that I read were penned by survivors.

     Today, the journey to Peter Grubb begins with a parking pass near the Boreal Inn exit off Interstate 80, where it intersects the Pacific Crest Trail. The early 1960s register entries tell of starting directly from Clair Tappaan Lodge then crossing the construction site for the “new” highway.

     Of course, if you write in a hut register and sign your name, you put yourself at risk of being discovered decades later. The Peter Grubb register included a note from a long time Mendocino Coaster, then a student at Santa Rosa Junior College and a member of that institution’s hiking club. Here’s his January, 1963 entry in the Peter Grubb Hut register:  

     NOTICE: The SRJC Hiking Club is hereby responsible for any snow that may have occurred during their stay in the Sierras. We expect due credit from those who follow in our snowshoe tracks for our noble effort in bringing at least one foot of snow to this devastated and sunstruck region.

     To Rodunga, the Rock – God of the SRJCHC, we send gifts of our usual iniquity for his noble gift of the first snow since XMAS.

     10% of profits from those who use Sierra ski slopes on our snow are payable to the SRJCHC, Santa Rosa, Calif.

     X  Stu Tregoning DHS

     President, SRJCHC INC.

     After chuckling at the Tregoning note, which included scores of various “Hearts” card games played over three days and nights, I dispensed with the hut registers and moved on to old Sierra Club Bulletins from the 1920s, with accounts of John Muir by people who had actually known and hiked with him. Something about this library room must make people of all ages feel like they are a part of times long gone by or might become a part of history in decades still to come. Inside a book which I will not identify for reasons that should be clear in another paragraph or so, I found a crinkled, lone note page, not as large as a 3 x 5 card.

 

“Hello, my name is Laura Neef. I just thought it

would be cool to leave a note for anyone who happens

to find it here in the library. Today is November 16, 2013.

This place is really old, so I am hoping that someone

will find this a long time from now and it will

be an antique or something. If you find this only like

a month after I wrote it, please just put it back

where you found it. Anyway, I love it up here. It is

nice to be away from all of the crazynesses of life, if

only for 2 days. I had to bring my homework

here, but I like doing it at the old wooden desk by the

fire. We just got back from Donner Party Museum, which

is small but nice and very eerie. They did a pretty good job

considering that it is very hard to portray the absolute

terror those people were going through. It’s really sad

how people can have such good intentions, but poor

planning can turn anything into a disaster. Anyway,

I have to start homework, but flip to the back of this

paper for things that are going on right now.”

     On the backside Laura included the following:

          “President: Barack Obama

            Popular artists: 1 Direction

                                         Imagine Dragons

                                        1 Republic

                                        Taylor Swift

                                        Miley Cyrus

                                        (there are a lot more but I don’t want 2 take up an entire page)

          Latest Inventions: filter straw

                                           electric cars

          Latest news:          Phillipeans hurricain (I am pretty sure I spelled that wrong)

                                          U.S. House trying to shoot down Obamacare

          Latest fashions:   I’m not really good with fashion, but I have heard teal was the “in” color.

                                     There are also a lot of crop-tops, combat boots, and wrap-around scarves.”

     It was almost exactly a month later that your note was discovered, Laura. But in keeping with your wishes and the spirit of the holiday season, it has been secreted inside that same book on the shelves of the Clair Tappaan Library.

                                                                                                       Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
It has been a cold, cold December by California standards, though by the time this is read nighttime temperatures should return to seasonal norms. What is abnormal is the lack of autumn rainfall. Walking upstream alongside the Albion, there are still many places where the river can be hopped over with a single bound. One of those areas exists on the “forty” that has been in our family’s possession for a century, but is separated from the home place by about a half mile of corporate, logged over, timberland. At the eastern edge of that “forty,” on the south side of the river, stands a blackened redwood stump with the remote scars of something once having been wrapped around it. That something was a cable, but not for logging purposes.

     A century back my father’s youngest maternal uncle, Will Robertson, constructed a narrow swinging footbridge above the Albion River there. He used this swaying boardwalk to go to and from Bill Donovan’s place, which adjoined the southeast corner of our “forty.”

     Bill Donovan was a Spanish-American War veteran, whose benefits helped him purchase his own forty acre parcel. Donovan used the footbridge to access the railroad, which brought him supplies from Albion, his daily mail, along with providing passenger and freight service.

    Will Robertson made ties on Donovan’s place and farther up the hill toward Albion Ridge. The ties were carried across the river, either by tromping through shallow water or on the swaying footbridge during winter high water that occasionally slammed damaging driftwood into the bridge.

     Uncle Will labored at various alternatives to woods work. He planted three fields of ginseng at Donovan’s, from expensive mail order bulbs. He tended the crop inside pole fences for three years (ginseng takes several years to mature before it can be harvested), only to have it all eaten in one night by deer.

    Will Robertson also traveled up a wagon road from the upriver “forty” to Albion Ridge where he sometimes split ties with one of his nephews, Albion Ernest Anderson, in the years immediately preceding World War I.  Later on, during “the war to end all wars,” Ernest (as he was known to nearly all) cut pine trees to be used as fortifications in the trenches.

     Where the wagon road reached the ridge lived a family named DeRosier. Annie and Henry DeRosier’s daughter, Dorothy, married into the Hulbert family of Anderson Valley (no relation to my Andersons of Albion). In the early 1920s one of the DeRosier sons, Emil, drove what must have been an old Ford that gathered up fellow students on the ridge, depositing them in the town of Albion where they transferred to Mr. Alinsky’s hog truck. The hog truck drove up the coast from Greenwood (Elk), eventually carrying twenty or more students to Mendocino on bouncing benches in the vehicle’s bed.

     That footbridge over the Albion also led Will Robertson to another Albion Ridge work partner, George Bailey. The two of them trapped furs for a living for a number of years. We still have one of his large spring loaded traps tucked away safely in the corner of a garage. With only a few years of formal schooling, Will Robertson essentially educated himself. He possessed and read large volumes on a variety of subjects, including comprehensive tomes on moths and butterflies. He planted mulberry bushes to attract them then collected an array of specimens as well as selling them to other collectors.

     For the last four decades of his life Will Robertson made the Macdonald Ranch his home base. When here he lived in a cabin originally constructed for his father (John Robertson) by his brother-in-law, John Macdonald. Well into his sixties Great Uncle Will fought fires for what was then called the Division of Forestry.

     The following is a letter he wrote when he was sixty-three to his sister (my grandmother), Lillian Robertson Macdonald. Many of the names and locales should ring bells with far flung readers in this county as well as help us appreciate how long these firefighters spent away from home.

     “Division of Forestry, Gualala Supp. Camp, Oct. 22, 1936

Dear Sister: Your letter of Sept. 8th received while on a fire back of Iverson’s Landing south of Point Arena on Oct. 16th… the dispatcher wrote me a note of apology. They are sure some careless. We have been on 14 fires up to date. The largest 3,000 acres on the North Fork of the Gualala River and another one of 2,000 acres near Yorkville and Henry Hickey’s mill. Been lucky so far as only one small house was burnt on the Zeni Ranch. Tell John [his brother, John Finley Robertson] we were on a fire at Camp 11 on Alder Creek near Frank Piper’s. We suppressed this fire and I gave him a permit to burn 200 acres on Adams Ridge…

     Cha’ Sparks and Buff Mallory [real name: Lester – Lester Mallory was married to the sister of Will’s ridge cousin Albion Ernest Anderson] were out near here on a fire on Maguire Ridge near Wes Rickert’s place and stopped with us two nights in our tent. Lester and Sparks are sure tired of so much fire fighting as well as the rest of us. If it doesn’t rain soon don’t know how long the fire[i]season will last. Hope the rain comes soon. Lester wants me to go on a goose hunt with him and his dad the first of next month…

  With love, W.C. Robertson”

      To say that history is an important part of my family is an understatement. When I visit Lester’s

now elderly daughter, Lois, in Fort Bragg, she can still ramble on about “Buff’s” long ago hunting

trips. Perhaps if I listen closely I’ll even learn a thing or two new about our shared great uncle, Will.


 

                                                                                                       Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
Fifty years on and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a national puzzle wrapped inside the enigmatic riddle that was Lee Harvey Oswald. Did he act alone? Or was JFK killed by a conspiracy that involved the mob, the Soviets, pro-Castro Cubans, anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, or some combination?

     Theories have run the gamut over the years, from grand conspiracy to lone gunman, but most people have drawn their conclusion with a dearth of facts.  Believing that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK has been pretty much a rite of passage to prove oneself among certain groups. And it has always seemed somehow logical to refuse to accept that one “nobody” could have killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  

     For the longest time I would have bet on the conspiracy side. There were other home movies taken on November 22, 1963 besides the famous Zapruder film. I wanted one of these or an undiscovered one to surface, a camera that faced the grassy knoll and definitively showed gunshots fired from atop that position. Alas, that has not come to pass in a half century of wishing. Some of the non-Zapruder home movies do look at parts of the grassy knoll, but there is no slam dunk evidence of a second gunman there.

    Many readers will have noticed the phrase “second gunman” is almost always used in reference to the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. The second gunman phrase inherently accepts that there was a first gunman, a rifleman, who fired shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building. An eyewitness saw the rifle barrel poking out an open window on the sixth floor. Other witnesses on the fifth floor have testified to hearing the report of three shots from directly above.

     On the morning of November 22, 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald rode to his job at the School Book Depository Building in the car of a fellow worker. The fellow worker noticed the large package Oswald brought with him. When asked what was inside, Oswald replied, “Curtain rods.”

     During the lunch hour other co-workers left Oswald alone on the sixth floor of the Book Depository. At 12:30 the shots rang out.

     Approximately forty-five minutes after President Kennedy was rushed to Parkland Hospital, Lee Harvey Oswald used a handgun to shoot and kill Dallas Police officer J.D. Tippit. As many as nine eyewitnesses identified Oswald as the man who fired four rounds at Tippit near the corner of East 10th Street and North Patton Avenue.

    Several minutes after shooting Officer Tippit, Oswald was confronted in the Texas Theater movie house by Officer Nick McDonald. A revolver was tucked in the front of Oswald’s pants. He jerked it out, pointed it at McDonald and pulled the trigger. But in his haste Oswald had grabbed the gun awkwardly. The hammer slammed down on the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. McDonald knocked Oswald to the floor and several other officers swarmed in, assisting in subduing and handcuffing him.

     Another hour or so later, on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, law enforcement officers discovered a package identical to the one noticed by Oswald’s fellow worker on the drive into Dallas that morning. The package was just the right size to wrap around a rifle as well as curtain rods.

     Under a pile of boxes on the same sixth floor, officers also found a rifle, a Carcano Model 91/38. Using its serial number, the ownership of the rifle was traced through a mail order gun business. The rifle had been shipped in March of 1963 to one Alek Hidell at P.O. Box 2915, Dallas, Texas. Box 2915 had been rented by Lee Harvey Oswald. His wife, Marina, confirmed that her husband had used the Hidell name as an alias, including while ordering a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver through the mail in late January of 1963. The cartridge casings found at the scene of Officer Tippit’s murder matched Oswald’s .38.

     There is no doubt Oswald killed Officer Tippit. There is no doubt he was in the Texas School Book Depository Building at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, very likely alone on the sixth floor. The rifle found there was the same one Oswald ordered through the mail eight months earlier.  Eyewitnesses saw and heard rifle shots fired from the sixth floor at 12:30 p.m. that November day.  

     With this information any prosecutor could get a conviction of Oswald for the murder of Officer Tippit. With this information the same prosecutor could get an indictment for killing the president. The circumstantial evidence alone might be enough to convict on that charge.

     Could this be as simple as it appears, an open and shut case? To understand what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 we have to go back to the 1950s when Lee Harvey Oswald attended a variety of schools in his native New Orleans and in New York, where he read as many books as he could get his hands on, but failed at spelling and cut school so often in junior high he was sent to a juvenile reformatory for psychiatric evaluation. In his report the psychiatrist stated that Oswald had a “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.”

     The doctor recommended further treatment, but Oswald’s mother took him back to New Orleans instead. At fifteen, in 1954, he wrote in his diary, “I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature. I had to dig for my books in the back, dusty shelves of libraries.”

     During the summer of 1955, Oswald began attending meetings of a local branch of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol (CAP). At least once, at a CAP cookout, Oswald was photographed in the presence of David Ferrie, then a thirty-seven year old pilot for Eastern Airlines. We will return to Ferrie later.

      After living in twenty-two different houses and apartments and attending a dozen schools, Oswald quit school at age seventeen to join the Marines in 1956. In his first year in the Marines Oswald tested out as a sharpshooter with a rifle. In 1959 his score dropped slightly to the upper end of the marksman level. At both levels he hit targets at a distance of 200 yards, while firing in rapid succession.

     While in the service Oswald taught himself basic Russian. Some of his fellow Leathernecks called him “Oswaldkovich.” He was court-martialed twice and finally granted a hardship discharge on September 11, 1959, due to his mother’s illness.

     Within a week Oswald left his mother in Texas, traveling first to New Orleans then by ship to France and on to Southampton, England, where he caught a flight to Helsinki, Finland. There he obtained a visa to enter the Soviet Union. He reached Moscow on October 16th, with permission to stay for one week. He delayed his departure by cutting his wrist severely enough to be placed in a hospital under psychiatric observation.

      On Halloween Oswald showed up at the American Embassy in Moscow, denouncing his U.S. citizenship, but not formally renouncing it. This event was shocking enough at the time that it made the front pages in several U.S. newspapers, under headlines such as the Dallas Morning News, “Texan in Russia: He Wants to Stay.”

     The Soviets sent Oswald to Minsk to work as a lathe operator at an electronics factory. Within fifteen months he grew so bored he wrote a diary entry stating, “I am starting to reconsider my desire about staying.”

     Two months later he met Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, a pharmacology student. By April of 1961 they were married. A daughter, June, was born just hours after Valentine’s Day of 1962. In late May of that year Marina applied for documents from the U.S. Embassy that would allow her to immigrate. In June, with the paperwork approved, the three Oswalds departed the Soviet Union with very little fanfare, though a few, smaller American papers noted the move.

     Back in the Dallas area Lee Harvey Oswald was soon hired by a welding company. He lasted three months before quitting to join a graphic arts firm as a photo print trainee. In early October, 1962, Oswald read a story in The Worker, the Communist Party newspaper in the U.S., concerning General Edwin Walker.

     Edwin Walker is a sidebar in the November 22, 1963 story, but an important one. Walker resigned his army command after it came to light that he had been incorporating a program called “Pro-Blue.” Among other things “Pro-Blue” encouraged his troops to read from segregationist writings and John Birch Society material. Walker retired to Dallas to pursue his brand of extreme conservative politics, finishing sixth in a six man race for governor of Texas.

     In September of 1962, Walker helped organize protests against the federal troops sent to enforce the enrollment of African-American student James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. Walker’s radio and television exhortations ignited a riot that lasted fifteen hours on the campus, resulting in the shooting of six federal marshals, hundreds of injuries, and the deaths of two people. Walker was arrested, charged with sedition and insurrection against the United States government then, under orders from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, held in a mental institution.

     When Walker was released from the asylum, a grand jury failed to indict him, the charges against him were dropped in late January, 1963, and five days later Oswald ordered the revolver through the mail, using the alias Alek Hidell. During February and March, 1963, Walker traveled with segregationist preacher Billy Joe Hargis on a tour called “Operation Midnight Ride.” In a March 5, 1963 speech, reported in Dallas newspapers, Walker called for the U.S. military to “liquidate the scourge that has descended on the island of Cuba.”

     At least three of Oswald’s friends and acquaintances recalled commenting critically on Walker’s words in conversations with Oswald around this time. On March 12, 1963 Oswald ordered the Carcano rifle through the mail, using the same Hidell alias.

    During the evening of April 10, 1963 someone fired a rifle shot at General Walker while he sat at his desk in his Dallas home. The bullet hit a window’s wooden frame, deflecting its trajectory enough so that Walker was only struck in the forearm by fragments. Neighbors claimed to have witnessed two men fleeing the scene, but no identification of the possible shooter was known until after President Kennedy’s assassination. Ballistics tests on the damaged bullet were inconclusive in 1963; however, by the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings in 1978, Dr. Vincent Guinn testified that by using neutron activation analysis he determined that the bullet fragments from the Walker shooting were “extremely likely” to have come from a Carcano rifle.

     Additionally, Oswald left a note which his wife found while he was away on the night of April 10, 1963. The note was undated, but gave basic household instructions (what bills were paid, where the mailbox key was located, etc.) for her in case he (Oswald) did not return. When he finally did show up, Marina Oswald confronted her husband and, according to her later testimony, he confessed to shooting at General Walker.

     Two weeks after the Walker shooting Lee Harvey Oswald returned to his hometown, New Orleans. He got a job as a machinery greaser at the Reily Coffee Company. Its owner was active with an anti-Castro group called the Crusade to Free Cuba Committee. Marina joined her husband in New Orleans during the second week in May, 1963.

     By June, despite being turned down by the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization, Oswald formed his own one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, with the fictitious A.J. Hidell named as chapter president on the membership cards Oswald had printed up.

      According to his employer, Oswald spent too much time at a neighboring garage reading gun and hunting magazines, so he was fired from the coffee company in July. Later that month Oswald traveled with Marina to Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, to give a fairly uneventful talk to Jesuit students on life in the Soviet Union.

     By early August Oswald was seen several times in downtown New Orleans passing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. On one such occasion he got into a pushing and shoving match with an anti-Castro man, a scuffle that landed them both in jail. Oswald was bailed out by a friend of his uncle only to return to the streets to hand out more leaflets.

     After an embarrassing performance on local radio defending Castro, Oswald turned his attentions to obtaining a travel visa to Cuba. Apparently, he viewed that young nation as a worthy alternative to the boring existence he had fled in the Soviet Union. In late September, witnesses placed Oswald on a bus traveling to Mexico City. While in that city he seemingly tried and failed to get a visa to Cuba, in part because he was told that he needed the approval of the Soviet consulate as well as the Cuban Embassy.  Unable to get quick Soviet approval, he returned to Dallas on October 3, 1963. He learned of a job opening at the Texas School Book Depository and was hired there on October 16th. Two days later, his visa was approved by the Cuban Embassy, but Oswald was seemingly no longer interested.  On November 11th he wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C., “Had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana, as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business.”

     While he worked at the Book Depository in October and November, Oswald stayed at a rooming house in Dallas (1026 North Beckley Avenue- rent: $8 a week). On weekends he rode with a fellow worker to Irving to see Marina, who was living with friends there. At the rooming house Oswald used the alias O.H. Lee.

     On November 22, 1963 Oswald returned, on foot, to the Beckley Avenue rooming house around one p.m., about a half hour after President Kennedy was shot. He was seen leaving in a hurry by a cleaning woman who noticed that he had put on a jacket. From the rooming house he walked to a bus stop near the location where he shot Officer Tippit approximately fifteen minutes later.

     The case against Lee Harvey Oswald seems open and shut. He killed Tippit in view of numerous eyewitnesses. He had attempted to assassinate another public figure just seven months prior to President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas. Oswald had means and opportunity. His motive may have been as thin as in the Walker shooting. Perhaps he viewed Kennedy as too anti-Castro, ant- Cuba; this was only a year removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis and another year away from the aborted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

     Oswald’s presence in Dallas was known by the FBI at least as early as March of 1963. FBI Agent James Hosty had been interested in both Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald off and on up to and including November of 1963. In the eyes of the J. Edgar Hoover led FBI, at the height of the Cold War, a Marine who seemingly defected to the Soviet Union and his Russian wife, were worthy of observation when they returned to the United States. Agent Hosty lost track of the Oswalds when they moved to New Orleans in the spring of ’63, but when they returned to the Dallas area in the fall Hosty actually visited Marina’s place of residence in Irving, not once but twice in late October and early November. Ten days before the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald went to the Dallas FBI office and left a note for Hosty which said, “If you have anything you want to learn about me, come talk to me directly. If you don’t cease bothering my wife, I will take the appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities.”

     The note was unsigned and Hosty dismissed it as the usual “guff” from one of the subjects in the thirty-five or more cases he was following at the time. Whether the FBI surveillance triggered Oswald’s actions ten days later would be pure supposition at this point.

     Hosty’s role in the assassination story was distorted and blown out of proportion in the Oliver Stone film JFK. Many other elements of conspiracy theory have been debunked over the years, including the idea that the photograph of Oswald holding the Carcano rifle was somehow doctored. It was not. There were actually several similar photos of Oswald with the Carcano rifle taken in March 1963 by Marina Oswald; at least one original in the possession of non-family members.

     Oswald did it, BUT…

      The movie JFK was based on the investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. If there was a conspiracy, Garrison may have been only slightly off track. Remember the name David Ferrie? He was the pilot Oswald met while in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in 1955. When Ferrie took his firing by Eastern Airlines to a grievance board in 1962 his attorney was G. Wray Grill (you cannot make up some names!). G. Wray Grill was also the attorney for New Orleans mobster Carlos “The Little Man” Marcello.

     Marcello had been the subject of government investigations for years, particularly at the behest of Robert Kennedy. Next, remember the little detail about Oswald getting bailed out of a New Orleans jail in August, 1963, by a friend of his uncle. The friend of Oswald’s uncle was Emile Bruneau. Bruneau was an associate of Carlos Marcello. Oswald’s uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret was a bookie in New Orleans, who also had links to, you guessed it, Carlos Marcello.

     Ferrie sometimes acted as Marcello’s personal pilot, perhaps including a flight that returned Marcello to the United States in 1962 after he had been unceremoniously deported to Guatemala. A connection between Oswald and David Ferrie in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 appears improbable when seen in the light of Ferrie having been active in anti-Castro groups and Oswald passing out pro-Castro leaflets. Yet, Oswald is known to have made at least one friendly overture toward Carlos Bringuier, an anti-Castro activist in New Orleans. Oswald even offered Bringuier his assistance in military training for Cuban exiles.

     Witnesses placed Ferrie and Oswald together in Clinton, Louisiana in early September, 1963. Direct known links between the two end there.

     The New Orleans – Marcello crime syndicate connection to the assassination does not end there though: Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald dead while national TV cameras looked on had ties to the Marcello mob. Ruby’s phone records include an October 30, 1963 call to Nofio Pecora, an associate of both Carlos Marcello and Emile Bruneau, the man who bailed Oswald out of jail in August. In June and again in October Ruby took meetings with four of Marcello’s New Orleans night club owning crime associates. It is also intriguing to note that the volume of Ruby’s phone calls tripled in the two months prior to the assassination.

     The day before the assassination Jack Ruby visited Joe Campisi, a Dallas underworld figure, at his restaurant. The Dallas crime syndicate was considered in many circles to be a subsidiary of Marcello’s mob family. Ruby’s first outside visitor after he’d been jailed for killing Oswald? Bingo: Joe Campisi.

     This brings us back to Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans crime boss who had felt hounded by the Kennedys, Jack and especially Bobby, for years. Carlos was in federal prison in the 1980s when the FBI placed an informant, Jack Van Laningham, in Marcello’s cell. According to Van Laningham (who is still alive) Marcello told him, “I had the bastard killed,” or words to that effect. There is an extant note from Van Laningham’s FBI handler that verifies such a conversation. Van Laningham has recounted the details of how the Marcello “hit” on JFK was pulled off. According to Van Laningham’s recollections, Joe Campisi essentially employed two hit men from overseas, bringing them to the U.S. via Canada, and used Jack Ruby as the silencer of the “patsy” Oswald.

      That’s pretty much the conspiracy case that’s left, boys and girls; albeit the conspiracy might have further tentacles, if true.

     And where was Carlos Marcello on November 22, 1963? He was in a New Orleans courtroom, being acquitted on federal charges.

                                                                                                      Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
We’re the bright young men, who want to go back to Nineteen-Ten, we’re Barry’s Boys.

  We’re the kids with a cause, yes a government like grandmama’s, we’re Barry’s boys.

  We’re the new kind of youth at your alma mater,

  Back to silver standards and solid Goldwater

  Back to when the poor were poor and the rich were rich…

     Those are the opening lines of a satirical ditty sung by the Chad Mitchell Trio back in 1964. Senator Barry Goldwater seemed like an arch conservative Republican war monger to most Americans in those days. In 2013 Goldwater would probably be deemed too progressive for Republican Party politics.

     The times they are still a-changin’, so it may not come as much of a surprise to learn that one of the current paragons of liberal/progressive broadcasting (right up there with the supposedly sainted Amy Goodman), Thom Hartmann, was a teenage Barry’s boy in 1964, walking door to door in his Michigan hometown handing out Goldwater for President leaflets.

     Thom Hartmann, for those who don’t know, is a nationally syndicated radio and TV talk show host with an average daily following in the millions. A good number of his positions represent a common sense approach to politics and society, but like so many local Mendo Libs Hartmann loves the sound of his own voice too much to put a lid (Loco vocal is the Latin derivative) on it.

     The issue Hartmann has gone off the deep end over is the United States Supreme Court. Hartmann’s hackles were rightly raised over the Citizens United ruling of our highest court, the 2010 decision that further broadened the influence of corporations and big money on the electoral process. In the years since, Hartmann’s disdain for the Supreme Court has expanded to the point that he believes the Constitution granted the Supreme Court only very limited powers.

     Hartmann appeared on local public radio during the Thanksgiving week as part of the Corporations and Democracy program, claiming that the Supreme Court has no real power to declare the actions of the other two branches of government (Congress and the President) to be unconstitutional. On the radio Hartmann repeatedly said that we the citizens of the United States are living in a “constitutional monarchy,” with the nine justices of the Supreme Court our kings and queens. Hartmann made this claim so many times he must have convinced himself it is true.

     No matter how many times he might say it, and no matter how far out of step from societal reality some of our present justices are, Supreme Court Justices are not literally wielding power in the same way as a tyrannical king or queen. 

     Hartman says that the Constitutional founders never meant for the Supreme Court to have as much power as they do. To back this up he does what the worst of the worst on the far right, the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys do, he cherry picks facts. Hartmann quotes from Section 2 of Article III of the U.S. Constitution. Here’s the entirety of Section 2: The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;--to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state;--between citizens of different states;--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.

     In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

    The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury; and such trial shall be held in the state where the said crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any state, the trial shall be at such place or places as the Congress may by law have directed.

     Hartmann wants us to focus on the words, “with such, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.” He interprets that to mean Congress can control the actions of the Supreme Court.

     Leaving aside the sorry inability of our current Congress to pass any meaningful legislation, Hartmann disingenuously avoids the opening of Section 2, which states, “The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution…”

     Interpreting the Constitution can sometimes be a tricky thing, but not impossible. Can Congress overturn a Supreme Court decision? Yes, but that power is laid out in Article V, which details how an amendment can be proposed by a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (to become law three-fourths of the states must approve such a Congressional proposal).

     Contrary to Hartmann’s demagoguery, the “Founders” were already aware of the power of the judicial branch to review the actions of the legislative and executive branches when they formulated the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Hartmann wants us to believe this: “For the first fourteen years of our government no one even considered the idea” that the Supreme Court could strike down as unconstitutional any law passed by Congress and signed by the President.

     Liberals, conservatives, progressives, libertarians, do not be fooled. The concept of “judicial review” predates our Constitution, it predates the Declaration of Independence. The concept first came into practice with England’s Chief Justice Edward Coke in a 1610 case. Before the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787 as many as seven different state courts had struck down laws passed by their legislatures and signed by governors.

     Hartmann would have you believe that the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison was a lightning bolt out of the blue, establishing the power of the judiciary to review the actions of the legislative and executive branches of government. Marbury v. Madison deserves an entire article, but what is most disturbing about Hartmann’s characterization of the case is his description of the Chief Justice of the time, John Marshall, as “an extreme right-winger.” This is the kind of scapegoat labeling that still exists in good old Mendocino County. I dare say, it sometimes pervades (see the recent Fort Bragg Senior Center debacle – see the rare strong-minded editorial of October 3,2013 in the Beacon or Advocate-News).

     This so-called right wing extremist, John Marshall, was the same Chef Justice whose 1832 decision (Worcester v. Georgia) opposed the forced relocation of Cherokees on what came to be called “The Trail of Tears.”

     Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are right wing extremists not John Marshall. If progressives, from Mendocino County to Washington D.C., want to be taken seriously they have to stop using misleading photos and language in their brochures; they cannot continue to cherry pick from amongst historical facts; nor can they mischaracterize the deeds of actual people simply to promote their own misguided pet projects.

                                                                                                         Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
Open enrollment for health insurance under the Affordable Health Care Act began on October 1st.  Anthem Blue Cross, California’s largest for-profit health insurance company, sent out notices of open enrollment that didn’t reach many customers until November. A typical mailing from Anthem started out with wording like this: “Thank you for choosing Anthem Blue Cross Life and Health Insurance for your individual health coverage.”

     If we each had a dollar for every time a huge corporation uses the phony four word phrase, “Thank you for choosing,” we’d all be able to afford high quality health insurance.

     The Anthem letters go on to state the absurdly obvious, “As you may have heard in the news, key requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will be effective in January 2014. People are talking more about state marketplaces created by the ACA, including Covered California, which offers an Open Enrollment period from October 1, 2013 through March 31, 2014.” The letterhead for this particular mailing said October 30, 2013; thirty days after the enrollment process began. By the time the addressee received the mailing only six weeks remained before the December 15th enrollment deadline that makes sure your health insurance kicks in promptly on January 1, 2014.

     The tardy Anthem letter went on to inform: “Because of the requirements of the new laws, we can no longer offer your current individual health benefit plan and you will need to change to an ACA compliant health benefit plan, which will become effective January 1, 2014.”

     Many thousands of California’s individual health insurance consumers are in a similar boat to the Anthem letter recipient cited above. The December 15th deadline means that you must choose a new insurance plan in the next six weeks or else.

    Or else what? In the case followed above, Anthem assures the consumer that “We will move you to a new suggested Anthem plan.” In this case that means a monthly raise in rates of 91%. In dollars and cents, that would mean an increase of more than $2, 600 per year.

     When the federal government found out about the tardy letters, the President issued a directive that would allow those insurance consumers who received the letters to continue in their same plans through March of 2014. However, on November 21st, Covered California rejected that offer, meaning the deadline for Californians who need to shift plans is still December 15th in order to make sure your new health care plan will be effective on Jan. 1, 2014.

     The good news is this: Covered California appears to be running much more smoothly than the federal counterpart. The consumer cited herein went online to coveredca.com where its phone number, 800-300-1506, is easily seen. When calling during midday you will be told to expect a wait time of a half hour. Our caller’s first attempt was dropped after about fifteen minutes. A second call was answered after only a fifteen minute wait, something approximating a wash.

     With the verbal assistance of a Covered California agent, navigating the Covered California website to fill out applications online becomes much easier; without the Covered California agent, not so simple.  The online application process may take as much as an hour (there are five security questions alone to answer, such as color of your first pet, name of your oldest niece, etc.).

     Further good news for the consumer followed by River Views was that through Covered California the consumer’s current health insurance costs would be cut more than in half. This is due to the Affordable Health Care Act and Covered California providing subsidies based on annual income (home ownership, property or other possessions do not factor into the subsidy equation). In the case followed by River Views, the consumer, who would not qualify for Medi Cal, will actually have a slightly better Anthem Blue Cross policy, but more than 80% of that policy will be underwritten by Covered California and the Affordable Care Act.

     The success of the health care law and the Covered California health care exchange is enrolling enough healthy young people to subsidize older, sicker enrollees. So, another bit of good news is that 18-34 year olds in California are enrolling at a slightly higher than per capita rate.

                                                                                                        Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
  Last week some local newspapers published what was essentially a press release from Mendocino County’s Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA). The article opens with the line, “Responding to ‘local media (reports) of allegations of poor mental health services,’ the Mendocino County HHSA on Monday issued a statement explaining that mental health services still exist, and inviting the public to participate in the process.”

     The nameless, faceless folks heading the Health and Human Services Agency would like anybody in Mendocino County to participate as long as those participants don’t criticize what is going on with mental health services in this county. As readers will remember, Mendocino County privatized its mental health services as of July 1, 2013. Redwood Quality Management Company (RQMC) will receive $8.8 million for fiscal year 2013-2014 to provide mental health services to children and youths under the age of twenty-one. The for-profit Ortner Management Group is receiving $6.7 million for adult mental health services. Ortner was also allotted $79,754 for preparation and transition during the month of June, 2013. RQMC, despite a larger contract, was allotted $68,000 for the transitional month. Could this be because RQMC has already been providing services in this county for years?

     Given that the contracts indicate a starting date of July 1st, notice this line from the HHSA press release, “the contractors on July 15th began answering the mental health services crisis line.”

     What happened to people in crisis from July 1 to July 14? Did Mendocino County receive a refund for the lack of services provided for the first two weeks of the contracted period? If not, why not? Maybe taxpayers should get two weeks subtracted from their bills this year? Apparently, the reverse is true; Mendocino County taxpayers are paying for two weeks worth of contracted mental health service that did not occur. Two weeks of this privatized mental health service costs the county approximately $595,000! Ortner’s share of that is about $257,000!

     Last week’s press release from Mendocino County’s HHSA makes no mention of the fact that Ukiah’s Ford Street Project backed out of a subcontract with Ortner Management Group because Ford Street wasn’t being compensated for the amount of time its staff put into organizing the operational procedures for the new system of services.   

     The HHSA press release also claims, “During the transition, services have actually been enhanced,” and that the rollover of the crisis line from county staff to the contractors “went smoothly and was seamless to the public.”

     It certainly wasn’t seamless for the person who sent this email about the crisis line: “Mendocino County has just informed me that they lost all records of my August [dates deleted to protect privacy] phone calls to the Mental Health Crisis Line to get help for my son.”

     The email goes on to say: “Please create a crisis communication system that works as this is unacceptable. My calls went to 800-555-5906, one of seven Mendocino County Crisis Lines.”

     That 800-555-5906 number is still the one plastered across Mendocino County’s HHSA homepage for Behavioral Health & Recovery Services as the crisis line. Hopefully, it works better in late November than it did in August, a month for which Ortner Management Group was doled out more than $558, 000 to provide mental health care for the citizens of Mendocino County.

     The AVA and this writer followed the case of that parent and adult child from that point on (see AVA issues of September 11, 25, and October 16, 2013). The HHSA press release characterizes such reporting thus: “It is especially unfortunate that some individuals choose to discuss knowledge of very particular cases, something that providers cannot respond to out of courtesy to the families involved and due to strict confidentiality laws and HIPAA requirements. No story is one-dimensional. Often there are many, many facets to consider. Certainly they are not to be played out in the pages of any local media outlet. To do so is to risk victimizing the patient, their family and friends.”

     Readers should know that the parent whose emails were quoted here, and in earlier issues, brought the story to us, through an intermediary at first, then at times directly, either via email or phone conversations. The parent was extremely frustrated with the lack of and/or quality of mental health services being provided for the adult patient. Furthermore, copies of the email quoted above, and many more, were also sent to the county’s mental health director, two county supervisors, the county sheriff, a local police chief, and many of the members of the county mental health board. In the AVA the names of the parent and the adult child were changed to protect their identity. The same can’t be said for one publicly attended Mendocino County Mental Health Board meeting at which the full name of one of these people was blurted out by an official who should know better. The reality is that the case of the adult patient might not have progressed as far as it has to date if the parent wasn’t willing to be so publicly vocal.

     The hierarchy of Mendocino County’s Heath and Human Services Agency (Stacey Cryer is the agency director, Tom Pinizzotto is assistant director/ head of Mental Health Services) would do far better to concern themselves with making privatized companies such as Ortner Management Group more accountable than spending taxpayer time and money worrying about press coverage that brings problems with the current mental health service system to the light of day.

                                                                                                       Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
When Fort Bragg Police Chief Scott Mayberry comes to the Ten Mile Court and stays for over an hour and his name isn’t on any witness or subpoena list, then something is up. When Judge Clayton Brennan speaks to defense attorney Mark Kalina in open court mentioning “the articles by Malcolm Macdonald,” you can’t help but take notice.

     Such were circumstances at the Ten Mile courthouse, Wednesday morning, November 6, 2013. The case: The State of California v. Karen and John Brittingham. The Brittinghams were arrested on November 23, 2012 outside the Company Store in Fort Bragg, and charged with a felony violation of California’s Penal Code 69. The key phrase in Penal Code 69 is: “Every person who attempts, by means of any threat or violence, to deter or prevent an executive officer from performing any duty…” This can be read to mean that the Brittinghams got into some sort of physical altercation with one or more Fort Bragg Police officers.

     In court, two Fort Bragg police officers were seated immediately behind Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen: Sgt. Brandon Lee and Officer Jonathan McLaughlin, whose name is on the booking log for this case. But there was another officer at the scene, whose name was barely mumbled by Stoen when he began the day’s proceedings, but the officer’s name was pronounced clearly and repetitively by Kalina. That third officer, not present in court, is none other than Craig Guydan, who has been on the force since May of 2012, and has already been the subject of numerous articles in the AVA (see March 6, 13, and 20th, June 19th, and October 9th issues). Briefly: Guydan was the only Fort Bragg PD officer to discharge his gun while on duty in 2012. That December 21, 2012 shooting of a dog occurred after ten seconds of barking outside a Walnut Street house. The event became the subject of one Fort Bragg citizen’s formal complaint against Guydan. Coast Copwatch (of which I am a member) filed another formal complaint against Guydan based on the dog shooting as well as a January 7, 2013 incident in which Guydan drew his gun while pursuing what turned out to be a group of youths playing football by streetlight, and several other incidents in which Guydan falsely accused coastal citizens and business owners of a variety of crimes.

     The November 6th Ten Mile Court proceedings were scheduled as a preliminary hearing in the State v. Karen and John Brittingham, but that was put off until late January, 2014. What ensued on the first Wednesday in November were arguments over Stoen’s motion to quash Kalina’s subpoena directed at Fort Bragg City Manager Linda Ruffing.

     Astute readers will remember that Ruffing was also a subject of the October 9th AVA article regarding the investigation into Guydan’s actions. More background: The investigation was conducted by Chuck Lebak, who served on the Redding, CA, police force at roughly the same time as current Fort Bragg Police Chief Scott Mayberry. That conflict of interest aside, Lebak failed to interview three key, first hand, witnesses to Guydan’s wrongful actions. During his investigation, Lebak went out of his way to verbally denigrate two other FBPD officers to local citizens; two officers who had virtually no connection to Guydan’s actions. The October 9th AVA piece detailed how another member of Coast Copwatch and myself met with Ruffing in August  about the woeful nature of Lebak’s investigation. At the end of the hour long meeting, Ruffing promised to look into the matter herself. Her response time was not quick. After two months and many unanswered messages went by, Ruffing finally responded with an email on October 16th that said: “The Police Department has a process for investigating complaints and the details of internal investigations are confidential personnel records. While I cannot divulge any information regarding internal investigations, I can assure you that Chief Mayberry has established high standards of conduct for our police officers. The command staff at the Police Department work very hard to train our less experienced officers and to help them develop the “soft skills” that are necessary in community-oriented policing. Since Chief Mayberry took the helm at the Police Department, we have hired six new police officers. From my vantage point, each and every one of these officers is an asset to the Department and to our community.”

     Ruffing also responded, kinda-sorta, to Coast Copwatch’s questions about investigator Lebak: “In the course of our conversation, you expressed concerns about Chuck Lebak, an independent investigator who has performed services for the Fort Bragg Police Department. The concerns were about Mr. Lebak’s independence given that he worked for many years at the Redding Police Department, as did Chief Mayberry. You also expressed concerns about specific comments that Mr. Lebak made while interviewing you. I have passed these concerns along to Chief Mayberry. The Chief and I believe it is a good management practice to rotate investigators and, should additional internal investigations be needed in the future, other investigators will be called upon.”

     Though Ruffing acknowledged that Lebak needs to be replaced as an investigator, she failed to mention anything about the next logical conclusion: that Lebak’s investigation into Guydan’s actions needs to be performed anew with a truly independent investigator or investigators.

     In response to Coast Copwatch’s call for a Citizen’s Oversight Committee Ruffing offered the same old same old: “The City Council has a “Public Safety Committee” comprised of two Councilmembers. The Committee meets monthly and provides a forum for community input into Police Department activities.  I would encourage folks who want a greater voice regarding public safety matters to attend the Public Safety Committee meetings or to communicate directly with Councilmembers Deitz and Kraut, as well as Chief Mayberry and me.”

     Ms. Ruffing must think that Coast Copwatch members are all afflicted with some sort of short term memory loss. Coast Copwatch members have attended the Public Safety Committee meetings and City Council meetings, calling for citizen oversight boards, committees, and/or panels at both— with no response whatsoever from City Council members, the Police Chief, or the City Manager, not even to bring up the matter and vote it down.

     The last sentence of City Manager Ruffing’s Oct. 16th response to Coast Copwatch, “I would encourage folks who want a greater voice regarding public safety matters to attend the Public Safety Committee meetings or to communicate directly with Councilmembers Deitz and Kraut, as well as Chief Mayberry and me,” is telling and it will bring us back to the Brittingham case and their attorney, Mark Kalina. By the time of Copwatch’s August meeting, Ruffing was aware of some of the citizens who investigator Lebak failed to contact concerning Officer Guydan’s wrongful actions. These citizens may have also talked to Mayor Dave Turner. Keep in mind other citizens have called and emailed Chief Mayberry about Guydan’s misdeeds, but the catch is that only two written complaints were ever formally lodged. Thus only two exist in Guydan’s personnel records. The further catch is that the only “investigation” conducted about Guydan was the entirely inappropriate, unprofessional one done by Chuck Lebak.

     The Brittinghams attorney, Mark Kalina, included Linda Ruffing on a list of subpoenaed witnesses. Assistant District Attorney Stoen presented a motion to quash such a subpoena stating that Ruffing’s testimony about citizen complaints would only amount to hearsay, adding that other complaints against Guydan did not involve the physical confrontation that occurred in the Brittingham case. Kalina cited the dog shooting as evidence of Guydan’s overly aggressive policing methods. Stoen called Kalina’s subpoena of Ruffing “a fishing expedition.”

     Judge Brennan sided with Stoen, quashing Kalina’s subpoena of Ruffing, but he did leave the door open for Kalina to file a Pitchess Motion.

     What is a Pitchess Motion, you ask? Peter Pitchess was the Sheriff of Los Angeles County in the 1970s. The California Supreme Court case that derives from his name established the right of a defendant to access a law enforcement officer’s personnel records when the defendant alleges that the officer used excessive force and/or lied about the events that led to the defendant’s arrest. Of course, a law enforcement officer, like any employee, has the right to assume his/her personnel files will remain private. Therefore, a defendant must write and sign an affidavit that details specific facts establishing a plausible foundation for an allegation of officer misconduct. 

     Whether Kalina can establish a compelling enough link between the Brittinghams seemingly violent confrontation with Officer Guydan and the complaints of citizens passed along to City Manager Ruffing remains to be seen. What Kalina’s legal maneuvering makes clear is that Ruffing, the so-called Public Safety Committee, with two City Council members, and Police Chief Mayberry have inadvertently, or not, created something of a shell game for anyone questioning the authority of the Fort Bragg Police Department. If you complain about police misconduct to a council member or the city manager the Police Department can say, “You didn’t complain formally.” If you complain formally, another complainant won’t know about your complaint unless you hire a lawyer and file a successful Pitchess Motion.

     Another difficulty in getting to the bottom of police officer misconduct is the fear factor. Some of the Fort Bragg citizens contacted by Coast Copwatch are in a similar boat with the people who sent Copwatch this email message earlier this year: “While we would be happy to sign a petition or otherwise be part of a united citizen's complaint about Guydan such as what you have been organizing, we are a bit reluctant to be singled out as the point people attacking him because once that fact became known in the police department, it could make it very uncomfortable for us… [driving] around town in a very distinctive [business] car that could become a easy magnet for extra police attention.”

     Whether the Brittinghams are guilty or not, what their case demonstrates is that Officer Guydan’s misdeeds may still come home to roost, not just for him, but for the leadership of the FBPD and the city government that has done everything it can to ignore and cover-up not only his misdeeds, but their own preposterous investigation.

                                                                                                         Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
When I was a pre-school child, the beginning of November meant going out at the crisp crack of dawn with my father to help cut cypress branches, miniature Christmas trees, salal, and white fir branches. As the youngest and lightest weight child one of my jobs was climbing to the tops of cypress trees for branch cutting. The cypress was baled together in bunches weighing approximately twenty-five pounds each. Along with the miniature Christmas trees the cypress bundles were loaded into the bed of dad’s pickup until it was nearly overflowing, cinched down tight with ropes, driven to Fort Bragg to be shipped, usually by Willig freight trucks, to the Avansino-Mortenson Nursery in San Francisco. The remainder of the cypress, white fir, and salal would be used in the construction of Christmas wreathes of various sizes. Many of these were also shipped to Avansino-Mortenson.

     The original Avansino-Mortenson nursery was established in San Leandro and some readers may remember their fern nursery in San Bruno, west of the old Tanforan race track. Much of modern day San Bruno County was part of a single 1820s Mexican land grant to Jose Antonio Sanchez. The Tanforan family was a part of his family tree.

     The gathering and selling of Christmas wreathes and seasonal ornamentals was an offshoot of my parents earlier work gathering local ferns for Avansino-Mortenson during the 1940s. Once a 4-H club was established on the Mendocino Coast, my parents became leaders in the Spartan 4-H club. For decades my father was the primary labor source in an operation that included the 4-H club and the County of Mendocino. Much of the cutting for wreathes, cypress bundles, and small Christmas trees was done on the Mendocino County property surrounding the Littleriver Airport. For a nominal fee to the county, Lorne Macdonald provided the labor (which for the first couple of decades meant himself and his family), and the 4-H club received approximately half of the proceeds. Pretty good deal for 4-H.

     California 4-H clubs first came into being a century ago, as an agricultural club at the college of agriculture at Davis. Within a year, seven dozen high school agricultural clubs sprung up around the state. By the 1920s, there were 400 or so adult leaders and more than 5,000 youths involved in what came to be called 4-H clubs (the four H’s standing for: Head, Heart, Hands, and Health). By the early 1950s 4-H had a university extension farm advisor assigned to each branch as well as adult volunteer leaders like my parents.

     In many counties and states 4-H clubs work together with Farm Bureau organizations. The foundation of the Farm Bureau followed a different path than other traditionally farm based groups like the Grange.  The Farm Bureau grew out of the same college extension program concept that spawned 4-H clubs. The first countywide farm bureau was founded by a Cornell graduate in New York state in the 1910s. Farm bureaus spread across the country rapidly. By 1920 the American Farm Bureau Federation was founded. In its early years Farm Bureau remained non-partisan in statewide and national politics. Rather than endorse candidates it pushed for farm-favorable legislation.

     Along with his work with local 4-H my father was a Farm Bureau member and eventually a countywide officer. The Macdonald Ranch once proudly displayed large Farm Bureau signs at its entrance, but not any more. My father’s disillusion with the statewide and national farm bureau organizations began when he attended a December, 1966 farm bureau convention in Las Vegas. As if holding a convention of farmers in the mecca of gambling wasn’t dismaying enough, the keynote speaker was Richard Nixon.

     My father gracefully disentangled himself from leadership positions in Mendocino County Farm Bureau and eventually from any membership at all. I joined the Farm Bureau about twenty years ago for one reason, lower rates on health insurance. Through Farm Bureau membership, in the early 1990s, a fairly comprehensive individual health care policy could be had for a little less than a thousand dollars per year with only a $500 deductible.

     From the turn of the millennium onward, the rates on the Farm Bureau attached health insurance policy climbed steeply. By 2008 yearly rates for an individual health care policy through the Farm Bureau had risen to well over $6,000 annually, and only that low if you accepted a deductible of more than $5,000. I have switched to a more reasonable rate under Anthem Blue Cross.

     The Farm Bureau has publicly opposed federal health care insurance for more than a half century. The Farm Bureau adamantly opposed Cesar Chavez and striking grape pickers from the earliest stages of attempts to organize farm laborers. In late September, 2013 Governor Brown signed a law that would raise the minimum wage in California to $10 per hour by 2016. Keep in mind that a person making $10 per hour is still living below the poverty line. The California Farm Bureau opposed this legislation. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration recently finalized regulation changes for commercial truck drivers of livestock. The regulations require that drivers be allowed two 30 minute rest periods for every fourteen hours on duty. The previous regulation provided for only one thirty minute break for a driver every fourteen hours. Farm Bureau opposes the new regulation under the pretext that leaving livestock in an immobile truck for an hour creates a risk to the health of the animals. This is how backward Farm Bureau has become. The Farm Bureau literature on this topic doesn’t even mention the dangers to the health of the driver of a truck who has no more than a half hour break in fourteen hours. Most national and regional long haul trucking companies will literally shut down a truck after a driver has been behind the wheel for eleven hours.

     Last year the California Farm Bureau opposed legislation that would make failure to provide adequate shade and drinking water to field workers a crime rather than just a civil penalty. Occasionally, the Farm Bureau is on the correct side of rules that allow teenagers to willingly work extra hours on farms and ranches, but predominantly the Farm Bureau has become a regressive, out of date tool of big business. Like my parents, I have let my membership lapse.

                                                                                                         Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com 

A sidebar to the October 16th Mendocino County Mental Health Board meeting occurred during a discussion about responding to a letter written by Sonya Nesch, a former member of the Mental Health Board and current member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Nesch’s letter, directed at the Board of Supervisors, asked some tough questions about the current state of affairs within this county’s mental health care system. At some point the Mental Health Board discussion of Oct. 16 expanded to press coverage and to other letters sent to newspapers on the topic of mental health care. The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors representative to the Mental Health Board, Dan Hamburg, could clearly be heard to say that anonymous letter writers were chickenbleep.

     On the spot I immediately thought of the letter sent to the AVA and first published online as part of “Mendocino County Today,” September 29th. That lengthy letter described the work life of someone who had been a crisis worker for the Hospitality Center, a coastal subcontractor for the new for-profit mental health care provider, Ortner Management Group. If that unsigned letter was the one referred to by Supervisor Hamburg (there aren’t really any other likely suspects) then what we have here is Dan Hamburg calling a potential whistleblower “chickenbleep” (That was his actual word, not chickenshit or chickenblank or some other variation on the former).

     In most areas Hamburg appears a quintessential liberal. At the same Mental Health Board meeting he seemed to be a backer of implementing Laura’s Law in Mendocino County. At last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting he favored the “Sensitive Coastal Resource Area” provision to Mendocino’s Town Plan. Hamburg frequently posts on the Mendocino Community Network (MCN) Discussion Lists, usually referencing national or international liberal/progressive causes.

     However, posting Noam Chomsky articles on the MCN Discussion List does not give a Mendocino County lib the right or authority to off-handedly condemn local whistleblowers as “chickenbleep” because the whistleblower chooses to protect his/her anonymity. As Hamburg should well be aware, whistleblowers are not being championed on the national level. Hamburg’s dismissive rebuke only further emboldens those in positions of power locally to ignore calls for accountability and transparency. Dan Hamburg should not only know better, he should think longer and harder before he speaks in public.

     The letter writer in question has not only written to the editor of newspapers, the letter writer is also forwarding similar material to the county grand jury.

     Another example of mindlessness from our local so-called liberals came to me in the form of an October 10th email from Victoria Brandon, the Chair of the Sierra Club Redwood Chapter. Brandon wrote encouraging local Sierra Club members to send letters to the Coastal Commission supporting State Parks proposed removal of 2.7 miles of remnant sections of the old Union Lumber Company Haul Road north of Fort Bragg. Along with her basic appeal, Brandon included a five paragraph, word-for-word, sample letter and thirteen additional talking points.

     I replied to Ms. Brandon in part by saying, “Apparently, the local chapter of the Sierra Club is naively unaware that many entities, from newspapers, to elected boards and appointed commissions, now discard most letters that appear to be written from the same set of pre-established talking points; in other words, letters that essentially copy each other serve as negatives in the eyes of the members of many boards and commissions receiving such letters. The Sierra Club should display more confidence in the innate intelligence of its members. Members are fully capable of writing their own thoughts and ideas about the Ten Mile dunes without a "Big Brother" or “Big Sister" telling them what to do. Personally, I find the idea that all Sierra Club members should color-inside-the-same-talking-points-lines concept insulting.”

     The next day Sierra Club Redwood Chapter Chair Brandon responded, “The reason for asking Club members to send what amounts to form letters is to counter a similar campaign that has been instigated by the appellants: governmental entities do not place much weight on such communications (though they don't "discard" them either), but if the correspondence received is one-sided it can establish what might be an incorrect sense of the preponderance of public opinion. Many members welcome appeals of this sort since they provide an opportunity to take action without having to research issues or compose their own letters.”

     Later that day I sent one more email to Ms. Brandon: “Your last sentence states that many Sierra Club members would prefer to write letters to public entities, such as the Coastal Commission, without researching the subject they are writing about. Thinking like that clearly negates any claim to an ethical high road for the Sierra Club on this topic.”

     I have had no further correspondence from Ms. Brandon or the Sierra Club on this issue.

     This follow-the-leader attitude in the world of Mendo Lib is appalling. Equally appalling is the flippant public dismissal of whistleblowers by leaders of the Mendo-Lib ilk.