Dead, Not Forgotten

Lilly Baker contributed greatly to preserving the art of Maidu basket weaving, and in doing so she has preserved so much more.

I first heard of the ConCow Maidu people from a TV documentary which in part described a shocking and shameful event when these original inhabitants of Northern California were deprived of their lands by the U.S. government and sequestered in a corral where many died from deprivation and disease. Now through the art of Lilly Baker I am pleased and saddened to learn more of the Maidu people. The abuse that they suffered at the hands of government and settlers alike is very hard to read about but I am happy to say that they survived and continue to contribute to our world.

A wonderful way that they have done so recently, and Lilly Baker was part of it, is through a pilot land management program in cooperation with the National Forest Service. Forest Service land in the area of the tribe’s original range are now being cared for by tribe members using traditional Maidu husbandry techniques that selectively trim or remove vegetation to encourage the health of the natural environment.

So what do you do with the trimmings? That’s right, you make baskets! Lilly taught her students that one must weave the energy of the plant materials into the baskets they made and collecting your materials yourself while you improve environmental health can only help to understand this.

Her family’s story of basket making was documented in a video produced by the Plumas County Museum called “Dancing with the Bears.”

Born July 6, 1911, Lilly Baker died at the Indian Valley Long-Term Care Facility in Greenville, CA on Monday, Nov. 2, 2006 at age 95.

Read the Plumas County News obituary

Learn more about the Maidu people

See Maidu baskets

Popularity: 32%

Our culture has been fascinated by spies, both real and imagined, for as long as I remember. Even today the cultural phenomenon continues to spawn offshoots such as the popular music genre of “Spy Music.”

Yesterday, November 9 2006, Markus Wolf, an example of the real-deal, passed away in Berlin Germany.

Born in 1923, son of a father who was a member of Germany’s Communist Party and of Jewish descent, Wolf and his family were exiled to France in 1933 and moved to Russia the following year. He returned to Germany in 1943 with a group of journalists covering the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

After a short stint as a counselor at East Germany’s embassy, Wolf joined East Germany’s newly formed foreign intelligence service, Stasi, in 1951. He became its leader the following year, and stayed in the job until his retirement in 1986.

Known as the man without a face for his ability to avoid photographers, Markus Wolf achieved great success in inserting his spies in the governmental, political and business circles of West Germany. His placement of Günter Guillaume as a top aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt led to Brandt’s fall in 1974.

In his 1997 book “Memoirs of a Spymaster,” Wolf wrote that, “if I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.” He used Romeo agents to steal secrets from government secretaries with lonesome love lives.

A supporter of the Glasnost and Perestroika policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Markus Wolf fled East Germany just before the reunification of Germany but soon returned when he was denied political asylum in both Russia and Austria. In 1993 he was convicted of treason and sentenced to six years imprisonment though his conviction was later repealed. In 1997 he was convicted of unlawful detention, coercion, and bodily harm, and was given a suspended sentence of two years imprisonment.

It is believed by many that John le Carré’s spymaster Karla, who appears in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”, “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People,” is modeled on Wolf.

Popularity: 13%

To U.S. school children of the 1950s and 60s, Sid Davis was the maestro of mirth control with his 180 films designed to influence students on issues of safety and social guidance.

Davis started his Hollywood career as a child extra, including stints on the “Our Gang” series. Soon he grew too tall, apparently by a long shot, as he eventually became John Wayne’s movie stand-in from 1941 to 1952. In fact, it was John Wayne who lent him the money to bankroll his production company, Sid Davis Productions. When Davis later wrote Wayne a $5,000 check in repayment, Wayne tore the check up telling him to put it back in the company.

With titles such as “The Dangerous Stranger” (1950), “Live and Learn” (1951), “What Made Sammy Speed?” (1957), and “The Dropout” (1962) it sounds to me that a Sid Davis Film Festival is in order.

Imagine seeing his hilarious 1961 release “Boys Beware” about the dangers of homosexuality. It includes the line “What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick–a sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious–a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual: a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex.” The film ends with the line, “One never knows when a homosexual is about. He may appear normal and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill.”

Given their ability to rival “Reefer Madness” with inaccurate representations of perceived social ills, these are some films that the baby boomers just might want to see again!

Sid Davis died of lung cancer on October 16 2006 at age 90 in Palm Desert, California.

Popularity: 23%

Though the U.S. music charts of the mid to late 1960s were often dominated by bands associated with the “British Invasion,” in February 1968 the top spot was occupied by Frenchman Paul Mauriat and his orchestra. Their number one song was “Love is Blue” written by André Popp.

With harpsichord backings and lush strings on the melody the instrumental hit proved, if nothing else, that those days on American radio were quite varied, if not totally impossible to predict. Preceding it in the number one spot was the psychedelic pop tune “Green Tambourine,” by The Lemon Pipers. Taking over its position was soulful “Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding.

The last time I heard “Love is Blue” was a couple of weeks ago at Yokohama Japanese Bistro in Los Gatos, CA. I didn’t think much about it at the time but it might have been more than a coincidence as it turns out that Mauriat was very popular in Japan and South Korea having performed more than 1,200 concerts in those countries.

Paul Mauriat died on November 3, 2006 in the French city of Perpignan at age 81.

Popularity: 11%

Older readers of this blog will remember the days when Polio, and its eradication, were on the minds of everyone. In the 1940s and 1950s hundreds of thousands cases of Polio constituted a viral invasion of the nation. After the development of an effective killed-virus version of a vaccine by Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh, the fight was popularized by The March of Dimes, then known as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Though the Salk vaccine was replaced after eight years by the more common oral vaccine used now, it led the battle against this public health hazard that forced many to live their lives confined to an iron lung.

So, who was the first to administer the Salk vaccine? Richard Mulvaney, a Virginia physician who died October 26, 2006 of congestive heart failure in Fairfax, Va. He was 88. He was the first of many volunteers to administer the vaccine in its public trials. His first patient, 6-year-old Randy Kerr of Falls Church, Va. became instantly famous when a photo of his April 26, 1954 inoculation was sent over news wires to papers nationwide.

The U.S. saw its last wild virus in 1979 and the Americas region was certified Polio free in 1994. Still, sporadic occurances of the virus occur to this day in the U.S. and Polio is still a major health problem in a number of regions in the world.

Popularity: 19%