50 Years Ago
To the Editor:
There must have been others beside myself upon seeing the American flag installed upon the moon, wished the United Nations could have been placed beside it.
-Richard Ward, Mill Valley
7/30/1969
40 Years Ago
We hear a lot about the need for low-income housing in Marin. Somehow we assume the amount of housing is static and the demand for it is increasing. The truth is we are losing what low-income housing we have at a rapid rate. “Social agency people” trying to help Marin’s newly homeless are heartsick. It’s like trying to stem an incoming tide with a floor mop.
Kay Valenica of Marin Emergency Housing, which offers meals and temporary shelter to people who have lost their homes through evictions, rising rents or natural disasters, is appalled at the rapid decrease in housing for the poor: “The old hotels are being closed down, old apartments are being converted, rents are going up — Proposition 13 hasn’t affected this county, rents have continued to climb all along. There has been a terrific increase in the number of people looking for housing.”
-Linda Xiques, Week of July 27 – August 2, 1979
30 Years Ago
There is not one emotionally honest moment in Nora Ephron’s and Rob Reiner’s new romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally… It is composed of sitcom one-liners, conventional sexual attitudes and a rose-colored homage to New York, New York that ought to send Woody Allen scurrying for his lawyers. Not even the score is credible. Composed of old pop-jazz faves sung by Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, it might click with Woody’s neurotic Manhattanites, but for a pair of transplanted University of Chicago grads, circa 1977, it’s pure anachronism.
…You see why the makeup is necessary when [Meg] Ryan goes on a crying jag; she’s pretty enough when perfectly made up, but that potatoey face crumples without its bulwark of Max Factor. Ryan’s excessive makeup is a major symptom of what is wrong with When Harry Met Sally. It not only isn’t real, it isn’t very romantic either — unless, like Harry, Sally and Jerry Brown, you have very lowered expectations.
-Stephanie von Buchau, Week of July 28, 1989
20 Years Ago
Rev Jorge Hume, caught stealing from church coffers, says Bishop Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa forced him to have sex so he would not report the theft. Hume filed suit claiming sexual coercion. Bishop Ziemann, who quit his post after the suit was filed, says the sex was consensual. And that Hume was trying to shake down the church for $8 million to keep quiet about it. In seven years there have been five cases of sexual misconduct by priests in the diocese, costing it at least $1.3 million.
-Steve McNamara, July 28 – August 3, 1999
The Pacific Sun Races are shifting into a new gear. After 21 years in happy partnership with Kees Tuinzing’s Total Race Systems, we have joined hands with the fabled Tamalpa Runners. As before, the Sun and Tamalpa race director Craig Stern will aim to link a quality race with great community feeling. That goes for the 10K, the 2.5 miler and the terrifically entertaining youth races held on the College of Marin track.
-Steve McNamara, same year.
