Introduction
By Mitch Mendosa

Bruce Levene, an author of many local history books, interviewed my uncle, Bill Mendosa, in 1976 for his book entitled Mendocino Remembered. It has become a family treasure because it captures the stories of my family’s struggle to establish roots and begin a business on the Northern California coast. It is still a powerful experience for me to read my now deceased uncle’s words.
As an educator, I’ve found it extremely valuable to involve students in the process of collecting our community’s stories. Our children are far too removed from the people around them. The numerous distractions that our youth are exposed to make it very difficult for them to gain a true sense of the diversity and history of their communities. Also, we spend a great deal of time focusing on historical events in places far away, and too often miss the richness of what’s in our own backyard. Enabling students to go out into their communities with the important task of collecting and preserving local history connects them with their neighbors in a meaningful way. The students and I came away from each interview with a sense that something special had just occurred and that learning had taken on new meaning. This, in my mind, is one of the most powerful educational experiences we can offer our students.

This wasn’t the first time I attempted a project of this sort. Three of my summer school classes published The Oral Histories of Anderson Valley- Volumes I, II, and III. Although there are some wonderful stories in these publications, it was difficult to get much depth during brief summer sessions. Our access to technology was also limited to whatever cassette recorders we could find, Apple IIe computers, and a copy machine. My current assignment as the Anderson Valley Coordinator of the North Coast Rural Challenge Network (www.ncrcn.org) has given me the rare opportunity to facilitate many projects including the Oral History Project of which this book is a result.

The work you see in the following pages began in the fall of 1997 with a group of seventh-grade students. These kids had a vacant slot in their school schedules and, having taught them all in fifth grade, I jumped at the chance to work with them again. It was an ideal opportunity to begin the project that I had previously thought beyond the scope of a classroom.

During our first meetings, we read passages out of Mendocino Remembered, and other local history publications. When they were adequately convinced of the importance of this kind of work, we began to design the Oral History Project and they immediately took on the role of historians. These young scholars collectively set goals, made all the important decisions and worked very hard at every aspect of the project. They were clearly interested in not only preserving stories for history’s sake, but also reaching out to many different interest groups in the Valley in order to gain a good understanding.

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