A poet who captured the culture of Dust Bowl refugees, lived in the San Joaquin Valley, and most of us have never heard of her! Pick Up Your Name and Write: The Life of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel is part of Betty Blanks’ crusade to change that lack of knowledge.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
The fog was otherworldly that morning, as if a ravenous ghost had swallowed the Central Valley whole. Blanketing California’s agricultural heartland in a spectral haze of bone-chilling mist, it swept over the dormant vegetation in swirling tendrils of unearthly murk.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Emma Theresa Cole Barrett Williams McVicar LeDoux was promptly charged with the premeditated, first-degree murder of one Albert Newton McVicar, and she pleaded not guilty to the charge.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Albert N. McVicar was most definitely dead.
With his 6’4”, 185-lb. frame doubled up like a pretzel inside the four-foot Saratoga steamer trunk, his “corpse was found curled up with wounds on his head,” writes true crime author J’aime Rubio. “His nose had been completely fractured…Blood that poured from his head and nose settled at the bottom corner of the trunk…”
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
It took a fiery earthquake—and over 3,000 lost lives—to boot Mrs. Emma Ledoux to page two. Mother Nature had to literally move Heaven and Earth herself to wipe the smirk of the simpering, beautiful murderess from the front of every single newspaper across the Golden State.
The man crept down the long hall. Passing doors, he tried not to look in, knowing how much he guarded what little privacy he had. The hospital in Los Angeles was too far away from his home in Georgia for any of his friends and most of his family to ever come visit. This was one of the largest military hospitals in the country and, in 1944, was full of combat injuries or mental problems. He knew he was getting the best of care and wondered if it would be enough.
Blood was not on the menu the night of Thursday, April 5, 1962, as far as Kings County Deputy Jailer Raymond Van Dyke was concerned. But the spray of crimson erupting in the steely wake of a razor could never have been mistaken for ketchup.
Heavy footsteps shook the hot, dusty air, jolting us out of our downstairs vigil; all eyes shot up to the Bastille’s second-floor VIP section — what had once been the women and children’s ward of the former Kings County Jail.
As frost and fog envelop the Central Valley in the ghostly shroud of winter, thoughts drift inward to the warmth of family, home, and the holidays. But as the Christmas tree is lit and the New Year rung in with loved ones, the season’s longest, darkest nights recall a time when ghost stories and spooky soirees were the otherworldly order of the day.
Take a time machine to the time of King Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More. It is cleverly disguised as the Good Company Players’ 2nd Space Theatre production of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. The time machine is only available through October 16.
