Gary Womack, 1940-2021, was not of our Valley; he was born and raised in a small town in southern Oregon few of us have ever…
Posts published by “Brad Wiley”
As I rambled along in my previous Floodgate stories articles, little vignettes would illuminate themselves in dusty corners of the cerebral warehouse where the larger…
It's time to get down to the biography of Sam and Marguerite Avery's life in Anderson Valley, 1946-77. In preparation I went back to my…
As I've described previously Floodgate Store was a complex retail business operation with long daily hours. During the day Marguerite Avery was the sole attendant…
Last week’s Floodgate story mentioned that the gyppo logging company working for Masonite Corporation in the seventies, Shuster Enterprises (!), provided its crews with transportation…
New Year's Eve, 1971-2, my consort and my first in Anderson Valley. We had moved here from San Francisco on April Fools Day, been in…
Down at the Deep End the Valley's vistas become more telescopic as the flatland gives way to rolling hills, tightening ridges framing the more evident…
Over the decades it wasn't just helping Sam Prather manage his sheep bands that introduced me to other ridgetops around The Valley. Sometimes it was…
Sometime in the nineteen seventies, after I had started running my own sheep band at the home ranch, Sam Prather and I began exploring a partnership…
Running sheep on the hillsides framing Anderson Valley provides the herder with a way of seeing Anderson Valley very different than from your car as…
One day last summer I was showing a recent Valley settler neighbor the historic sights of Navarro town and reminiscing about "the good old days."…