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Mr. Anderson: Thank you for inviting me to be interviewed. Kelsey: Would you tell us why, when and how you came to Anderson Valley? Mr. Anderson: I came to Anderson Valley in search of a property to operate a group home for delinquent boys. Basically, I was just driving around north of San Francisco. My brother and I came through Anderson Valley. We stopped to buy a tank of gas. The then superintendent of the Anderson Valley schools happened to also be purchasing gas that day and told us about a ranch for lease at the south end of Anderson Valley, the Mathias Ranch. We made arrangements to lease it and moved up in September of 1971. Kelsey: What happened to the delinquent boys group home? Mr. Anderson: The delinquent boys continued to be delinquent, because that’s what delinquent boys do. Our idea was, and it turned out to be quite a naïve one, was that delinquent boys are less delinquent in the country than they are in the city. We thought that there are fewer opportunities in the country to get in trouble and supervision would be simplified. That turned out not to be the case, because delinquent boys are delinquent whether they are standing under a streetlight or a redwood tree. But, it wasn’t all that bad. Some did well; some didn’t do so well. Unfortunately, quite a number went into the adult prison system, but then quite a few went on to become respectable citizens, holding jobs, raising families and so forth. Kelsey: Do they still live here, or did they move out? Mr. Anderson: No, none live here, but quite a number often come to visit. I suppose our home was quite unique at the time anyway, because the boys living with us were all black, and of course this was a white area. But they were not the first black students to come to Anderson Valley or Anderson Valley High School. Just before me, Jim Jones enrolled a number of black kids at the Anderson Valley High School. Before him, there was a family of homesteaders in Anderson Valley that went quite far back in local history, who lived out in Ham Canyon. So there have been black people in the area all along. Kelsey: Is it just a coincidence that your name is Anderson and this is Anderson Valley? Mr. Anderson: Pure coincidence. When I came up here we were just driving through; actually, we were on our way to Fort Bragg. I wasn’t even sure there was a community here. I had never heard of Boonville. I remember vaguely when I was a high school student passing through here to play baseball in Fort Bragg during Paul Bunyan days, but otherwise I was completely unaware of Anderson Valley. Kelsey: Why did you decide to stay here in Anderson Valley? Mr. Anderson: I think like lots of people, I was attracted by its beauty and it suited our purposes for what we were doing. We thought that the property we leased was perfect for our plans, and so we stayed. But it was a pure accident that I arrived here. An accident that I’m sure has disgusted many people over the years. (chuckle) Kelsey: I’m sure it has. The criticism in the paper is very prominent, I’ve noticed. Mr. Anderson: Right. Kelsey: What do you like about Anderson Valley? Mr. Anderson: I’ve always liked it. I thought my family and the boys I was responsible for fit pretty well here. I was young then and the people I worked with were still playing sports, so right away we joined the local fast-pitch softball league in Cloverdale; there was a Boonville team in it. We had our own basketball team, and we competed around here in men’s league basketball tournaments. In fact our team was strong enough to beat the local teams. We made a lot of friends immediately, mostly through sports. A number of the boys I was responsible for enrolled at Anderson Valley High School and they joined the sports teams. We always felt welcome here and right at home. So, we stayed. Kelsey: How has Anderson Valley changed since you came here? Mr. Anderson: When we arrived, it was right in the teeth of the counter-culture, or hippies, the back-to-the-land movement. Although we weren’t part of that, and weren’t at all interested in being hippies. The Valley was still quite divided, I think, as it remains so today because lots of the local people who were more traditional and more conventional resented the newcomers, the so-called hippies, and didn’t like anything about them from the way they looked to the way they lived. Because people were confused about what exactly we were. We usually got lumped in with the hippies. Kelsey: But you weren’t, you were just people who were passing through. Mr. Anderson: We weren’t just passing through; we’d come here to stay. We didn’t identify with hippies, but ,of course, most of our friends were so-called hippies, and I’d been active in left-wing politics, and pretty much everyone who was active in San Francisco and Berkeley in left-wing politics looked like a hippie, even if they weren’t. Kelsey: What do you think is your most memorable moment in Anderson Valley? Mr. Anderson: I’ve had quite a few of them actually. The most memorable? Gee, I don’t know off the top. I really couldn’t say. I think probably when my own children were admitted to colleges, competitive colleges, and when one of the delinquent boys I was responsible for won the $5,000 Georgia-Pacific college scholarship. I was very proud of that. That was certainly a memorable moment. So, there have been a lot of moments like that, and then some spectacular episodes associated with my newspaper, maybe we can get into that. Kelsey: Do you have any interesting or funny stories about your life in Anderson Valley? Mr. Anderson: I have quite a few interesting stories. Interesting to me, anyway. They may not be amusing to people listening to this or reading it later on, but funny, yes. Well actually, a lot of the funny encounters I’ve had over the years have been with the schools and some of the superintendents that we’ve had. One of them I used to call Wobbling Eagle. I was in a lot of fights with him. I mean, not physical fights, wars of words. I was held responsible for him leaving finally. The idea was that he was too full of it to fly--Wobbling Eagle. Kelsey: How did you get into the newspaper business? Mr. Anderson: As a kid, or at least as a much younger person, and even as a group-home proprietor here working with delinquent boys, I’d written for outside publications as what’s called a freelancer. So I’d written for magazines like California Magazine on various subjects (once on Boontling, actually, when I discovered there was a Boontling language), The Nation magazine, a magazine called The Minority of One, and other liberal and left-wing magazines. I’d always made a little bit of extra money doing that, and I was always interested in writing. Anderson Valley’s history, apart from Boontling, interested me. Anderson Valley in the middle of the 19th century, up until the 1930’s was a fairly isolated place, because much of the commercial traffic in Mendocino County went up and down the coast by sea. Even the big mill at Navarro shipped their logs out to the coast to Albion and then they were on-loaded to ships and shipped south. So, Anderson Valley being an isolated place with an isolated population, a very clever segment of that population developed a little language of their own and they could use it to insult and make fun of the outsiders without those outsiders knowing what they were talking about. It’s a very clever language and a very funny language and often an abusive and not politically correct language, but it did reflect people’s attitudes at the time that lived in rural, isolated communities. I think the closest we would have to Boontling in this country would be pigeon English and some of the southern dialects of isolated communities in the South. Kelsey: Are there any newspaper stories that you have? Mr. Anderson: I have quite a few newspaper stories because when I bought the newspaper in January of 1984, when I took it over, there was a sort of shock in Anderson Valley because I changed its direction dramatically with my first issue. My idea was that I would attempt to put out an honest paper and let the chips fall where they may. The first chips of course, fell on my head. Most of the advertisers left and so the paper had to support itself through subscriptions and newsstand sales, which it’s done ever since. I thought that I’d probably last six months to a year, but 15 years later we’re still here and its become quite a well-known newspaper. Kelsey: Yeah, I have some friends down in Berkeley who get the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Mr. Anderson: We have quite a few sales in the Bay Area. All over the country, actually, and even a few in Europe. Kelsey: Really? Wow, that’s pretty amazing for a local paper. Mr. Anderson: I think it’s pretty good for a local paper, I must say. Kelsey: Do you remember any other early residents or neighbors? Mr. Anderson: I remember most of them and the newspaper over the years has tried to interview many of them. We try to interview as many of the old-timers as possible. In fact I’m doing interviews right now with a man named Wayne McGimpsey who goes way back. You may have him on your own list of people to interview. He’s very interesting because he was born and raised here. He’s the first person I’ve met here in Anderson Valley who knows the Valley with a degree of intimacy or detail that’s like a history itself. I’ve known other old-timers who knew a lot about Anderson Valley, but he knows even more, everything about the wildlife, right down to the earth itself. So, I think he certainly stands out as an interesting person. Kelsey: Could you tell us about your family? Mr. Anderson: I’m married to a woman by the name of Ling who I met when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Borneo state of Sarawak. I was in the first group of Americans, the first wave of Peace Corps volunteers in 1963, to be assigned there, and she was an elementary school teacher at the time. She’d begun teaching school when she was 14, and I was assigned to an isolated little town nearby. I was a high school teacher, of all things. It was a British system of education, and I had to teach subjects I had no knowledge of. For instance, British colonial history was one of the subjects I had to teach to young kids straight out of the jungle, in some cases very smart kids. I met my wife, and we came back to the United States in 1967 and to Boonville in ’71. We have three children who are all self-supporting and on their own. And that’s that side of the family. Kelsey: How did you teach British colonial history without knowing anything about it? Mr. Anderson: I had to teach it because Sarawak had been a British colony and the British still ran the educational system. At the end of the sixth grade, every kid in the country took an examination and if you failed the examination you were out of school. That was it. Then you would take an examination at the end of your freshmen year in high school. You either passed that or were out of school forever. At the level I was teaching, in the whole country, there were only about four hundred kids left in the educational system and their English was very good, which always amazed me considering it was not their native tongue. And so we had to teach a British curriculum and that was one of the subjects I had to teach, along with Shakespeare, geography and a variety of subjects that I was usually about one page ahead of the students on. Kelsey: I bet it was hard to be a teacher. Mr. Anderson: If you do it right, it’s very hard. I’ll tell you our biggest discipline problem, and this will be interesting to Americans. Our biggest discipline problem at this school, which was a boarding school--kids came from miles around up river. At night, students would stay up much later than was healthy, to study, not to fool around. It was a very competitive examination system, so they were studying all the time. Lots of written work, lots of memory work. Very much unlike our system. The students would get very impatient if you strayed from getting them ready for these examinations. Kelsey: It sounds a lot different from now. Mr.
Anderson: A lot different. Well, a lot different than here anyway. Later in ’67 and ’68 we were with a group of friends who were very active in the anti-war movement. I was arrested, let’s see, three times during those demonstrations and in a demonstration in Berkeley. So, I was no stranger to demonstrations and getting arrested. The idea, when I bought the paper, was to use the paper to advance ideas important to me and I was not surprised to become involved in controversies here. I’ve been arrested three times in association with the newspaper in Mendocino County. Once it was my own fault when I actually committed a crime in a “scuffle” I prefer to call it, with the County Superintendent during an Earth First! demonstration at Albion. And most recently having to do with the Bear Lincoln trial. The prosecution wanted a letter I didn’t want them to have, or didn’t think they had any right to have. I was held in an isolation cell for two weeks in Ukiah. The paper does seem to make the authorities angry. But the paper has also had a number of victories, I think, over some bad people and over some bad practices in Mendocino County. Kelsey: Yeah, I remember the story about the letter. Mr. Anderson: That’s fairly recent. Actually that happened at the end of last year and I went to jail on that. I’d never been in an isolation cell before that. I had always been in regular inmate population in my stays in jail before, and the longest I’d been in jail was a month. In the 60’s jails were a lot worse, much more violent, a very unhappy place and the police were much more violent than they are now. Police are actually fairly benign by earlier standards. But of all my stays at jail, the one in the isolation cell was actually the most enjoyable because I was all by myself. There is absolutely nothing to do but read, so I was able to read some long novels that otherwise I would not have had time to read. Kelsey: Most people don’t see prison as an opportunity to finish books they want to read. Mr. Anderson: A few do though. That’s the overlooked benefit of prison. It’s no fun if you’re not a reader. Kelsey: Thank you very much Mr. Anderson, for sharing your stories with us. This has been Kelsey Harnist, a 7th grader from the Anderson Valley NCRCN Oral History Project. Mr. Anderson: Thank you.. |
