Hey folks, the Flashbacks were dropped last week so we’re running a special double-length column this week! Enjoy.
20 Years Ago
“. . . Politicians love to win, so sooner or later the Republican Party has to come to its senses and boot the right wing out of the party or it will fade into irrelevancy and eventual extinction.” —Letter to the Editor, George Fulford of Mill Valley, 1999
40 Years Ago
“America’s corporate executives and pop culture moguls seem to know something the rest of us don’t. While Congress debates spending a few million more dollars on a civil defense program against nuclear attack, the likes of Mobil Oil, IBM, Bank of America and even Rolling Stone magazine are busily stashing their most precious documents in nuclear-proof vaults deep in the bowels of the earth.
. . .‘The threat of enemy aggression grows with each passing year,’ warns a sales brochure from Western States Atomic Vaults, Inc. (WSAV), a 25-year-old veteran of the Cold War. WSAV and similar companies are making sure that when the time comes, or passes, the documents that made America great will still be around for future generations, if there are any.” —Mark Schapiro, March 30, 1979
“Three men from Mill Valley can’t find any sane reason for marijuana being illegal and they are doing their best to help repeal the 1937 state law against marijuana and hashish. The three are Stephen Samuels, Richard Moon and Paul Ehrlich. They’re spearheading the northern California campaign to circulate enough petitions to qualify for the June 1980 ballot.
Just think of what the tax-poor cities and the county of Marin could do with the cannabis sales tax, folks. Our worries would be over.
But what bothers the proponents of the initiative even more is that it costs $600 million tax dollars a year to enforce outdated marijuana laws. ‘It’s a $48 billion industry gone underground, untaxed,’ said Samuels this week as he distributed quantities of petitions around the county.” —Joanne Williams, March 23, 1979
50 Years Ago
“A bit of confusion enveloped a natural gas fire that burned for nearly six hours at a construction site in the Brete Harte Heights area of San Rafael. A tractor “blew up” and the county fire department fought the blaze for three hours. Finally, realizing that 60 gallons of diesel couldn’t burn THAT long, the firemen called PG&E. After another long delay, the utility crew found and shut off a gas line which had been ruptured by the tractor.” —Newsgram, April 3, 1969
“The county’s intrepid dope squad came up with two intriguing, if not particularly weighty, raids. Nailed were a cleaning place in Larkspur where LSD was allegedly being dispensed, and a birthday party in San Rafael where the cook had purportedly improved on Alice B. Toklas and her marijuana brownies by putting grass in the birthday cake. However, out in West Marin the raiders drew a complete blank. A ten-man swoop on a ranch house provided not so much as a single marijuana seed.” —Newsgram, April 27, 1969
Compiled by Alex T. Randolph
