The Kelley House may be one of the jewels in Mendocino’s quaint Victorian crown, but it took a lot of work over almost fifty years by many generous people to make it look this good. When Beth Stebbins and Dorothy Bear first clapped eyes on it in 1969, it was dilapidated and, in Stebbins’ words, “very unprepossessing.” A rental property since pioneer Eliza Owen Kelley followed [...]
It’s not surprising that many of the Mendocino coastal communities have embraced the concept of little free libraries. On roadsides, street corners, and front yards from Fort Bragg to Gualala, pretty wooden boxes on posts offer books for the taking. Some of the book houses are registered by their builders and sponsors with the Little Free Library organization and some are not, but all operate on [...]
The big trees in the background reveal that these festival goers were not at Woodstock, but rather the Albion People’s Fair, a few years later. They are Katy and David Tahja on the right and Susan Alban and Wesley Stoft on the left. On the August weekend in 1969 that saw nearly half a million children of God on their way to Yasgur’s farm in [...]
Dancing at a picnic on the Albion River with the Stevens, Gray and Pullen families. (Kelley House Museum Photo Archives, gift of Steve & Sue Sanor) When the dancers start busting their moves at the up-coming Woodstock 50th Anniversary Dance Party at Crown Hall on August 17th, they will not only be celebrating the golden jubilee of that iconic rock festival, but also taking their places [...]
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 [...]