When I moved here in 1996 SoHum had one paper – The Life and Times, run by a very nice man who unfortunately had no stomach for covering controversy. In June of that year Garberville hosted a Rodeo Parade in which some geniuses decided to enter a float consisting of a car with an torso effigy of Judi Bari coming out of the hood and an effigy of Darryl Cherney being dragged behind by rope. According to a friend of mine, somebody got up from his seat in the Woodrose restaurant and went outside to take photographs where he was physically threatened by bystanders. Meanwhile, I was present with a child behind the crowd as the MC chuckled about it, and I decided to leave the event as I didn’t think it was an appropriate display for children.
The Life and Times refused to publish the photos and pretty much swept the matter under the rug.
Within a year or two I was invited to a meeting held at a picnic bench in Tooby Park. A group of locals wanted to start a paper that would actually provide some coverage of news other than announcements of Rotary Club events and high school sports scores. I volunteered some time to help set up a fictitious business name: The Independent. Within a few years the Life and Times shut down and the TS backed Redwood Times arrived thereafter. Both papers are willing to cover controversy and the community is much better off for it.
Sometimes there’s a bit of redundancy, particularly in the letters pages, but this week they seem to have tag teamed parallel stories. The RT covered the follow-up Mateel Board meeting and the 2005 ROR audit, while the Independent covered the Mateel censorship meeting – overlap in the players but two very different controversies.
I’ll have some thoughts on both stories later.
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November 29, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Heraldo
It would be great for the Independent to go on-line.
November 29, 2006 at 7:51 pm
Anonymous
That would solve so many problems.
November 29, 2006 at 8:23 pm
Anonymous
Comments not heading in the direction you expected Erik?
November 29, 2006 at 8:38 pm
Eric V. Kirk
Quite the contrary given the anonymous crowd here.
November 29, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Anonymous
That deal with mocking Bari and Cherney is awful but stack it up against Darryl with his EF! crew trespassing on John Campbell’s property at Christmas time singing Christmas carols where Darryl changed the words to include lyrics accusing John of murder and rape of the forest.
Then Darryl’s boys and girls thoughtfully placed redwood rounds with Christmas ribbons on the Campbell doorstep as presents for the Campbell family at Christmas time.
Then there’s the dead deer some activists put in the Campbell’s swimming pool. In terms of locals doing nasty tricks to opponents, activists win the contest hands down.
November 29, 2006 at 9:42 pm
Eric V. Kirk
I don’t agree with protests at peoples’ homes, particularly with innocent family present. However, I’ve never believed the dead deer story.
November 29, 2006 at 10:25 pm
ED Denson
There was a lot of controversy about the picket at Campbell’s house when it occured. The swimming pool charge raised then, as I recall it, was not a dead deer, but rather damage to the cover of the pool (and that damage accidental). I think that damage turned out to be by some local kids not associated with EF!. Still, I don’t think the picket at home tactic was considered a good idea in the long run, and don’t think it was repeated.
November 29, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Anonymous
Why not? Politics? or you’re inability to resist contradicting what people say? Ask John Campbell himself if you don’t believe me. Or check the SoHum police record if one still exists for the incident.
November 29, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Anonymous
As for witnesses for Darryl’s pranks, I was there, I saw the stumps on the front porch myself because my girlfriend, a cousin of John Campbell’s first wife, was living in the Campbell guest cabin at the time. She was terrified of Earth First!ers trespassing and doing their thing while the Campbells were away.
November 29, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Eric V. Kirk
Steve – as I recall, the pumphouse or some outbuilding was painted, with Earthfirst slogans and a hammer and sickle, the latter of which tells me that it was a prank as Ed suggests by some dumb kids who hadn’t yet learn rudimentary politics and thought it would be funny to inflame the situation.
And I don’t believe that Earthfirsters would throw a dead deer into his swimming pool. That’s not their M.O., regardless of what Campbell has to say about it.
November 29, 2006 at 11:55 pm
Anonymous
Back to why there’s cooperative coverage, as it were, between the two papers; Christina and Mary have a pretty good working relationship. Hell, they go to all the meetings and what-not of these controversies and sit near each other whenever possible. I’m sure they’ve got their own system worked out and it works quite well.
Mary Anderson had her own paper in the 70′s early 80′s called The Star Route. It was actually quite good and informative of the counterculture, especially to newcomers, like myself, who wanted to know what made this place tick. So she has a ton of journalist experience. She doesn’t check the spelling on some of the names of people in her stories sometimes, but other than that very professional.
Skip Stone has done a much better job at the RT than I thought would be the norm for a local Rotary guy. No offense Rotary Club peoples out there, but Rotary Roddy kissed the asses of his CofC advertizers big time ,(as every news mogol has to do adroitly), and he couldn’t tolerate criticism of anything he did – unless it came from the aforementioned. He always got the last word on any perceived attack upon his journalistic integrity and only a fool would argue with him. It’s his paper and that’s all there was to that.
Agreed, vast improvement.
November 29, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Anonymous
Maybe they pushed a living deer into the pool and it unexpectedly expired.
November 30, 2006 at 12:28 am
Anonymous
“Steve – as I recall, the pumphouse or some outbuilding was painted, with Earthfirst slogans and a hammer and sickle, the latter of which tells me that it was a prank as Ed suggests by some dumb kids who hadn’t yet learn rudimentary politics and thought it would be funny to inflame the situation.”
“as I recall..”? Eric, didn’t you just post that you arrived in SoHum in 1996? We’re talking Christmas of 1990. Who’s feeding you your talking points?
November 30, 2006 at 1:02 am
Eric V. Kirk
I started reading the AVA in about 1986 or 87. Frequent trips to Willits and the Mendo Coast. And I was well aware of the bombing in Oakland, as well as Redwood Summer which the Bay Area progressive media covered pretty regularly.
I thought this particular event was much later than 1990, and I’ve heard the dead deer story, even claims that his home was “firebombed.”
I’m fairly certain that the hammer and sickle incident was either in 1996 or just before I moved up in 1995.
November 30, 2006 at 1:06 am
Eric V. Kirk
There have also been a number of hoaxes.
November 30, 2006 at 1:53 am
Anonymous
Oh, reading the AVA makes you an expert I gather in what happened here before you arrived.
November 30, 2006 at 5:13 am
Anonymous
What was the disreputable thing that the AVA did back in those days? I can’t remember what it was, but it sure got a lot of people mad at the Editor/publisher.
November 30, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Hank Sims
What was the disreputable thing that the AVA did back in those days?
The disreputable thing? You mean there was only one?
November 30, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Anonymous
Just FYI:
Mary and I do get along very well and have had a number of wonderful conversations (especially about the stories we’ve both covered). As I’m sure readers of both papers have noticed, she attends a lot more of the regular meetings (hospital, water district, etc.) than I do — which I would love to do but can’t due to time constraints with daughter’s school, basketball, KMUD, etc.
We do both attend school-board meetings and sit next to each other, yes. However, we do not have a “system worked out.”
As a fairly-recent (Oct. ’02) resident who reads the RT, T-S, ER, NCJ and sometimes Eye on a regular basis, I do appreciate all the time Mary puts in to meetings and stories. My understanding is that she’s semi-retired and basically does it because she loves writing.
November 30, 2006 at 5:20 pm
Eric V. Kirk
The disreputable thing? You mean there was only one?
I had him on my radio show to talk about his Bari/Cherney bombing theories. Then I had Daryll on the next show. Quite the circus.
December 1, 2006 at 12:17 am
Anonymous
Of course Star Root, (original name) was founded in 1976, first issue Feb 77, by a motley crew, many of whom are still around. We laid out the first issues on the floor of the health center, after hours. I don’t recall Mary being there at the start, though she endured after many of the rest of us retired, and sold the paper (which made some of the original folks very mad) to a dude who put out a parody for a time (and was run out of town, yet another tale). Mary then brought back the paper in a new guise with a slightly different name, as the Star Route Journal.
Ah, them was the days. The Redwood Record was the “other” paper, run by an earnest and tottering guy whose name I no longer recall..oh, damn, what was it?? and his wife. He kind of looked as though he’d died a few decades previously, and ran into problems in the early 70′s with a stance on the school board. A controversy I no longer recall. Memory fades, when it so crammed with…um, stuff.
December 1, 2006 at 3:08 am
Anonymous
Mary ran an essay contest in Star Root in 1988 on the topic of legalization of marijuana. $50 first prize which I won and which Mary was no doubt not please pay as I had become politically incorrect in her book.
December 1, 2006 at 4:09 pm
Eric V. Kirk
And of course there is also Greenfuse. Sorry Paul!
December 2, 2006 at 1:54 am
Anonymous
Greenfuse crew (on deadline and slightly out of our minds) accepts apology (not necessary). You might note that more than one person posts from our site–don’t blame Paul for all those anonymous comments you can track back here!
December 3, 2006 at 10:37 pm
Eric V. Kirk
Is there a Greenfuse website? Can you provide a link?