Youngsters take the field [Daily Triplicate]
DN Little League opens new season
It’s become something of a phenomenon here in Del Norte County.
Each spring, hundreds of kids, from as young as 4 to teens up to 16,
get out their bats and balls and take the community out to the ball
game for Del Norte Little League baseball and softball action.
Arcata officials are discouraging residents from visiting Redwood Park on Tuesday for the spontaneous, and costly, unofficial marijuana holiday. April 20 has become something of a spectacle in Arcata, with anywhere from hundreds to thousands of
More to help out, less to pick up [Daily Triplicate]
About 200 turn out to clean river areas, plant trees
Something amazing happened during the ninth annual Klamath River Cleanup on Saturday.
There wasn’t enough trash to pick up to keep all the volunteers busy, so Americorps volunteers had people sign up for another beautifying event — tree planting.
The tree-planting may become a permanent part of the event, according to Americorps volunteers.
Does your family come together for dinner on weeknights? Does it sometimes feel like a battle to get the kids to turn off the TV, turn off the computer or put their cell phones away when it’s dinnertime?
DUNSMUIR – Babe Ruth played an exhibition game at its ballpark in 1924, trains brought swagger and jobs, but the flowering dogwood may give Dunsmuir its most enduring legacy.
That’s not what Cindy Foreman had in mind last spring when she planted four dogwood trees across the street from her Brown Trout Cafe and Gallery.
She wanted only to create a living memorial to her mother, Mary Kingsford, who had recently died.
After Foreman bought the cafe five years ago her mother often visited and critiqued Foreman’s view of the drab fence line separating the railroad tracks from Sacramento Avenue.
“She would say to me, ‘Honey, you need something planted over there.’ She loved flowering trees, and so I planted dogwoods to honor her,” Foreman said.
Her friends were so moved by the gesture that they wanted to expand the project. “Some community efforts are slow getting started, but this one just caught fire in the town,” said Barbara Cross.
She joined Foreman, Cheryl Petty of Window Box Nursery and Linda Price of Boxcar Gallery on a committee overseeing the plantings.
“We sold over 50 trees in a matter of months,” said Cross, president of the Dunsmuir Chamber of Commerce. “Most are planted in memory of a loved one.”
The seven varieties – with blossoms in shades of white, pink, deep rose, peach and even an uncommon yellow – will bloom from mid-April through early summer.
The majority of the dogwoods spruce up a section of Sacramento Street that extends to the town’s Amtrak station. Another grouping is in Hedge Creek Park near a waterfall. A few will shed their delicate butterfly-like petals in private yards and through other parts of town.
The dogwood, indigenous to the area, blooms amid fir trees covering the mountains around Dunsmuir. In 1985 it became the town’s official tree.
This year the committee hopes to plant another 50 trees down Dunsmuir Avenue, the main thoroughfare.
Dunsmuir will celebrate its blooming season Saturday, May 29, with a Dogwood Daze festival.
With Kingsford’s living memorial about to bloom for the first time, how does Foreman think her mother would feel about all those blossoms across the street from her daughter’s cafe? “She’d be thrilled,” Foreman said.
DOGWOOD DAZE
For more information about Dogwood Daze, call the Dunsmuir Chamber of Commerce at (530) 235-2177 or go to http://dunsmuir.com
On April 8, 1988, 27-year-old was reported missing to Humboldt County law enforcement. Few leads were founds and Ms. Turpin was never found. In February of 2010 a man now living in North Carolina contacted the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and said when he was 16 years-old he had witnessed his father murder Ms. Turpin. The man reported that in 1988 his father, Ernest Samuel Christie Jr., murdered Ms. Turpin near their Fieldbrook home. The man was able to provide Sheriff’s Detectives with a map of the location where her body had been disposed of.
During the ensuing investigation, Christie’s son went on to explain that his father was violent and abusive and was a frequent user of methamphetamine. His son – now 38 – explained that in 1988 his father brought Ms. Turpin to their residence in Fieldbrook. Christie held Mr. Turpin at the house for several weeks and killed her after weeks of abuse. After killing Ms. Turpin, Christie made his son help dump her body in a ditch, cover it with tires, douse it in gasoline and set it on fire.
Sheriff’s Detectives, Deputies, and the Sheriff’s Evidence Technician searched the area marked on the maps provided by Christie’s son. The area was a now-overgrown ditch in a wooden area near Fieldbrook. The search yielded teeth, clothing, and charred bones. Yesterday a forensic odontologist positively identified the remains as Lysandra Turpin.
When asked if he remembered if his father had been involved in any other killings, Christie’s son reported that his father once held a woman prisoner inside a Redwood tree stump. She was able to escape and did not report her ordeal to law enforcement. He provided a description of the location and Sheriff’s personnel located the tree stump. Hollowed out, and only accessible by climbing over the top and back down inside of it, Special Services Deputies made access into the stump from the ground with a chainsaw. Inside they found a carpet, plastic jugs, a hypodermic syringe, and clothing. The victim in this incident has since passed away of natural causes.
Christie’s son related other accounts of his father terrorizing women, once taking a woman out to his fishing boat, tying her up and telling her he was going to kill her. She was able to escape when Christie became distracted. Detectives interviewed this victim recently when the case came to light. She confirmed the incident.
Ernest Samuel Christie Jr. died on June 29, 2006. His son, who came forward with the information, Ernest Samuel Christie III, was 16 years-old when his father forced him to witness the murder of Ms. Turpin. He is not facing criminal charges.
City to save $2M on state loan for treatment plant [Daily Triplicate]
Sewer rate changes now subject to state approval
Crescent City will save an additional $2 million in debt repayment on a $43 million infrastructure loan with the State Water Resources Control Board to improve the municipal wastewater treatment plant due to an unexpected provision in an amendment to the finance agreement that was approved Monday by the City Council.
In October, the state allowed the city to extend the repayment term of its loan from 20 to 30 years, something that would increase the total amount of interest accrued on the principal but ease the burden on ratepayers who had seen their bills rise to help pay for the new sewer plant.
[Guest post by Kathy Srabian.]
Home Depot was feeling good in 2005. CEO Bob Nardelli was seeing unlimited growth for the nationwide chain.
In 2006 Eureka hears that Home Depot wants to sit in the proposed “Marina Center” development. The dust raises as locals begin to argue. It gets so thick that no one notices Home Depot has probably lost interest.
Times changed and Mr. Nardelli — with his vision of unlimited growth — was replaced by a new CEO in January of 2007. The new chief, Frank Blake, issued the following statement:
“By building fewer stores, in the best locations, and making sure our existing stores are profitable, our company will be in a much stronger competitive position.”
The Associated Press reported that “Home Depot said it will no longer pursue opening the roughly 50 U.S. stores in its new store pipeline, in some cases for more than 10 years.”
The Home Depot that said they were coming to Eureka is not the Home Depot of today.
The “Marina Center” has become synonymous with “Home Depot.” But do you really think Home Depot is coming here? Convince me with something other than a 2006 North Coast Journal or a pastel picture from the Marina Center website.
Not all is rosy in the realm of the solo entrepreneur. When something goes awry, whatever buck I should be inclined to pass has nowhere to land except at my desk.
Darian Ahler, in plaid shirt, brainstorms with other young Christians earlier this week in San Francisco about what they can do to honor Jesus.
SAN FRANCISCO – When Darian Ahler leaves for church, he walks from his bedroom to his living room.
The congregation – San Francisco hipsters in their 20s and 30s – comes to him. No one delivers a sermon. No one sings. The group brainstorms together on what they can do to honor Jesus, besides just pray to him.
“These days, religion is intellectual masturbation. It’s not experimental enough,” said Mark Scandrette, the founder of the group, called ReImagine, and author of the book “Soul Graffiti.”
“We look at what Jesus taught,” Scandrette said, “then we try to develop an experiment that helps us learn that.”
The group is one of a growing number of do-it-yourself Christian communities forming in the Bay Area, looking for alternatives to institutional churches and what its members see as their passive rituals. As other Christians attend church Sunday, ReImagine members will celebrate Easter by heading to the beach.
“The modern version of worship, of sitting on a bench and being read to, is on the way out. It’s boring everybody, including the pastors,” said Matthew Fox, an Oakland pastor and author of several books on spirituality. “People are hungry and thirsty for something to touch their hearts and souls.”
Researchers at the Ventura-based Barna Group, which studies trends in religious beliefs and practices, have seen alternative Christian groups rise in popularity. About 6 percent of adults surveyed last year said they met regularly with a self-governed Christian group, and 33 percent said they had attended a worship service outside of a conventional church in the previous month.
‘Like a Jesus dojo’
After Scandrette moved to San Francisco from Minnesota 12 years ago, he began calling himself a recovered fundamentalist Christian. He says he was like many young Christians who migrate to the Bay Area from a conservative setting: burned out on institutional Christianity, but not ready to give up on Jesus. Rather than focus on the savior from eternal damnation, he wanted to focus on Jesus as a guru of simplicity, a fighter against poverty and oppression.
“We think spiritual formation that’s really vibrant looks more like a karate studio than a conference hall,” he said. “It’s like a Jesus dojo.”
So on Thursday nights, at Ahler’s two-bedroom apartment overlooking Valencia and 22nd streets, about 15 Christian hipsters gather to eat pizza and sip beer. They squeeze onto the Craigslist couches and compliment each other’s cuffed jeans and neat bangs.
At one gathering, Ahler’s roommate Adam Klein read a short passage from the Gospel of Luke, the part where Jesus tells the rich folk to invite the poor wretches to their feasts. Then they separated into groups of four.
They filled out a worksheet cataloguing their material vs. non-material riches, and discussed simplicity. The following week: personal budgets. The following month: Jesus on creativity. Easter time: conversations about truth. When people want to take their translation of faith into action even further, they can sign on to one of ReImagine’s activist campaigns to combat human trafficking, neighborhood crime or hunger.
“Bible groups are more focused on orthodoxy,” said Ahler, 26, a mechanical engineer and regular dojo member. “ReImagine is more orthopraxy, where the focus is more doing than talking.”
Raves, minus the drugs
For Fox, the Oakland minister, the focus is more dancing than talking. Fox has long recognized that church hymns make the best lullabies. Years ago, he looked to raves for spiritual inspiration. He spent months talking to ravers, developing his own Christian version, the Cosmic Mass, melding prayer and multimedia images of Jesus with electronica, house and jungle beats.
“If you connect the liturgical message to the rave, you don’t need the drugs,” Fox said. “We can create a form that makes getting high possible again.”
Hundreds of people line up outside Sweet’s Ballroom in Oakland on Cosmic Mass nights – repeated once a month at first, now down to twice a year because of difficulty raising funds. Images of Christ and other holy figures from all religious backgrounds are projected onto several screens for people to meditate on while they dance. The computer effects and the fractals that break through the images are today’s stained glass, Fox says.
The ritual uses dance to escort participants through feelings of ecstasy, anger, grief, and recovery. So many people have been moved by the experience, Fox has consulted with others who’ve started Cosmic Masses around the world, from Kansas City to Melbourne, Australia.
Place not needed
When people first move to a new city, many spend a couple of weeks shopping for a church. They’ll settle on one for a month or two. Then, pastors are noticing, small groups will break off from the Sunday regulars and form their own weekly gathering at someone’s home, or a café, or a bar.
“It’s not a particular place or mode of how we do things that is sacred,” said coffee shop churchgoer Jason Kuo, “but it’s the belief that God is present in all places and following Jesus can be something that can be done in any sphere of life.”
Church, Kuo says, is an identity that need not be secluded behind private walls. So he and his friends meet at a café on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, to make their faith part of the city landscape rather than separated from it. They take turns reading from the Bible, writing down reflections, and praying.
“You can still be the church if you’re in a coffee shop, in a pub, in a park, or at a basketball gym,” Kuo said. “You’re participating in blessing the local neighborhood.”
As more people become interested in implementing their own vision of worship, ReImagine is getting more hits on its Web site. And Scandrette and Klein are getting calls from people all over the country who want to start their own local tribe, their own experiment.
“This movement is to look for what you want and find it,” Klein said. “And if you can’t find it, create it.”
At Darian Ahler’s two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, about 15 Christian hipsters gather on Thursday evenings to eat pizza, sip beer – and discuss the role of faith in their lives.
Eureka Police Department’s Problem Oriented Policing Unit arrested six people Thursday in the course of an ongoing methamphetamine investigation. The EPD said warrants were served at a motel on the 2200 block of Broadway around 7:40 a.
‘A small town boy’ [Daily Triplicate]
Family recalls murder victim’s ‘generous soul’
Taylor Powell came back to Del Norte County to stay out of trouble.
While Powell was born at Seaside Hospital in Crescent City in 1988, his parents moved to Tacoma, Wash., when he was about 12. It was a transition they thought would be good for their son, and something that would provide better learning opportunities for him.
But according to his parents and other family members, he never quite acclimated to life in Washington, and after a few years decided to move back to Del Norte County to live with aunts and uncles.
Two arrested in meth deal stabbing case [Daily Triplicate]
Local men suspected of assaulting 3rd man
Two Crescent City men have been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder in connection with a methamphetamine deal.
Crescent City Police officers apprehended Rigoberto Mendoza, 21, and Daniel Nuttall, 29, at separate residences early Friday after officials received information that the two might have been involved in a March 19 stabbing near the Seagull Villa apartments on Pacific Avenue.
Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputies arrested a Southern California man Saturday night after finding him in possession of 30 grams of methamphetamine. At about 9:15 p.m., a deputy sheriff conducted a traffic stop on Redwood Drive in Redway for an equipment violation. The vehicle yielded and the deputy contacted the two men inside the vehicle. The men kept reaching around inside the vehicle so the deputy asked them to step out. A second deputy arrived to assist. The driver, John Makua Sanborn, 60 of Perris, kept reaching in his pockets. The deputy conducted a cursory search of Sanborn for weapons and found 30 grams of methamphetamine in his coat pocket. Deputies arrested Sanborn and his passenger was released at the scene.
Sanborn indicated he had been staying at a motel in Garberville. Deputies went to the motel and contacted a man who was staying with Sanborn. The man consented to a search of the room. Inside the motel room deputies found more than 4,000 pills in containers marked “Stimulant Capsules.” There were three different types of pills in the containers, all of which could be used in the manufacturing of methamphetamine. Deputies also found a digital scale and 236 additional pills, including Soma, Vicodin, and Trazadone.
Sanborn was transported to the Humboldt County Correctional facility where he was booked for possession of a controlled substance for sale and the transportation of a controlled substance. He posted bail in the amount of $25,000 and is scheduled to me arraigned April 9, 2010.
Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested a Southern California man Saturday night after allegedly finding him in possession of 30 grams of methamphetamine.
