Columns

The beginning of this story about this local newspaper has only been told to a few people. In 1995, the Walnut Creek-based corporation that owned this and three other local newspapers decided to shut them all down after failing to find a new corporate...

With Astronauts gracing the covers of LIFE and Look and other weekly magazines, the American space program was big news in the '60s. These brave test pilots were presented as the epitome of American maleness, and the only females we saw who were part of the space program were the women who quilted the multiple layers of fabric for each custom-fitted space suit! Fifty years later, Theodore Melfi’s perfectly named film Hidden Figures brings the unsung heroes of the space program out from the shadows—and we finally discover that several of the mathematical geniuses who made the program a success were female African Americans! In this retelling of the quintessential American fable, those dashing spacemen are little more than passengers aboard a heaving, clunking, fuel-spewing chunk of hardware. The real heroes are the genius “slide-rule-jockey’s-of-color” (beautifully portrayed by Viola Davis, Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae), who figured out how to loosen gravity’s inexorable hold on we frail human beings. It’s nice to have a film where the audience cheers for the underlying decency and determined humanity epitomized by the three women combating the solidly built wall of racism, sexism and chauvinism that were signatures for that time and place.

Events at the Windsor Senior Center

Next week (March 12-18) is when newspapers and journalists annually celebrate “National Sunshine Week,” dedicated to the preservation of freedom of the press, open government and the foundations of our people’s government as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

There is an effort to direct interest away from 3 North St. (the Cerri Building) and the offer to fund the community pavilion/farmers market home. The disinformation being distributed in town abuses the SDAT report to abandon years of planning and support for the repurposing of the Cerri building. This attempt to derail the Foley Family Foundation‘s pledge of $7 million to build the long-planned project is misguided. Healdsburg 2040, as the custodians of the SDAT process, want to correct the record. We feel supported by over 1,000 residents, who in one week only signed a petition to the city council to accept the gift, And the signatures are still coming …

There are 500,000 people living in Sonoma County and each of us has our own “sense of place” depending on many things, including when and how we got here. We all tend to think of the place where we live by our first impressions, our early school years or first homes, first jobs or first dates. We think of physical landmarks that by now may only exist in our personal memories.

In response to President Trump’s unprecedented refusal to share basic information with American public, new bill will require that all presidential candidates release tax returns in order to appear on California ballot

Be careful what you wish for was a phrase my mother whipped out on appropriate occasions. As the temperatures soar into the 90s to bring in June, I remember a scant few weeks it ago, when it was pouring and I was visualizing a...

It’s been five months since any Country Roads column has been written  and I’ve missed the bi-weekly walk with you. My reasons for not writing seemed important back in October, but that was during the threatening fires, drought, and uncertainty if Sonoma County would still be in existence once rains returned to dampen down and finish off the fires.