Malaysia RPCV Bruce Anderson, the town muckraker and ranter in chief, KZYX was a "hippie-ding enterprise," a symbol of the "wine-and-cheese gentry," the "lib-lab yuppie hypocrites," the "educrats," the "thumbsuckers," the "New Age barnacles," the "feral enviro-Druids" and other well-meaning ineffectual "Nice People" who flocked to hippie festivals in the early 1970's and stayed
He Ranted, He Raved, He Rode Out on His Own Rail
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: November 30, 2004
Caption: Bruce Anderson has already unpacked his pen in Eugene, Ore. Do the "lib-lab yuppie hypocrites" miss him? Photo: Lori Cain for The New York Times
BOONVILLE, Calif., Nov. 26 - Annie Esposito, the news director at KZYX, the local public radio station, is one of many people here who were not exactly heartbroken when Bruce Anderson, the rapier-witted, acid-penned editor of the weekly Anderson Valley Advertiser, announced that he was moving to Oregon.
To Mr. Anderson, the town muckraker and ranter in chief, KZYX was a "hippie-ding enterprise," a symbol of the "wine-and-cheese gentry," the "lib-lab yuppie hypocrites," the "educrats," the "thumbsuckers," the "New Age barnacles," the "feral enviro-Druids" and other well-meaning ineffectual "Nice People" who flocked to hippie festivals in the early 1970's and stayed.
"There were all sorts of theories about Bruce," said Ms. Esposito, 62, whose offices include an old caboose. "That he was crazy. That he worked for the F.B.I. But the real reason he flamed us horrible wimpy liberals was, it sells newspapers."
In 1984, after stints in the Marines and the Peace Corps and running a foster home for delinquent boys, Mr. Anderson bought the boosterish local paper for $20,000. Borrowing mottos from the French Revolution - Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces! - he transformed it into one of the country's most idiosyncratic and contentious weeklies. Half of its 2,500 readers live safely out of firing range outside Northern California.
In its Dickensian pages unfolded the texture of life in this isolated, now chic and ethereally beautiful region about 120 miles north of San Francisco. Once best known for Boontling, a strange turn-of-the-century jargon, Anderson Valley, named for an early settler not related to the editor, was home to loggers, sheep ranchers and apple farmers, then hippies and back-to-the-landers. In its latest incarnation as the next Napa Valley, gourmands and oenophiles jet in to sample the acclaimed sparkling wines and pinot noir with cherry overtones as migrant workers struggle to find housing.
Armed with a satirist's eye and occasionally a fiction writer's imagination, Mr. Anderson and his newspaper combined exposés on corruption in high places with weekly columns on marijuana, long letters to the editor (with acerbic replies) and folksy news about the blueberry cobbler at the senior center and gophers decimating the football field.
No one was spared, not local celebrities like Alice Walker, not the transplanted suburbanite "hill muffins," not even children on electric scooters ("Why aren't the little pre-diabetic pudges encouraged to propel themselves on their own?").
Like Giverny to Monet, Boonville was Mr. Anderson's canvas, minus the lilies. "It was a case of an unexploded bomb finally finding a fuse," said Alexander Cockburn, the politically left-wing columnist and regular contributor to the newspaper.
Mr. Anderson, who is 65, sold the paper four months ago for the same price he paid for it. The buyer was David Severn, 62, known as King Fix-It, a volunteer ambulance technician, a hardware store clerk and a father of eight who writes "Vine Watch," a column on the "imperialist colonizers," as he calls the wine industry. Mr. Severn and Mark Scaramella, 60, the paper's longtime lead reporter, continue to publish out of The Advertiser's headquarters, "Fort Despair," a scrappy fenced compound where a poster of Lenin communes on a wall with Babe Ruth.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Anderson said his reasons for leaving were both professional and personal. His wife, Ling, whom he met while a Peace Corps volunteer in east Malaysia, had begun to feel "oppressed," wearying of her husband's notoriety and "drunks in the middle of the night wanting to talk about the Kennedy assassination and tourists stopping by at all hours wanting to meet the crazy, cranky editor."
The changing nature of the valley was also a factor, Mr. Anderson said. "Suddenly it became a wine region, with total strangers dominating the political life," he said. "I began daydreaming about murdering certain people. I said, you know, this place isn't really healthy for me anymore."
Mr. Anderson leaves a tidal wave of opinion in his wake.
"A lot of people feel there were two Bruces," said K. C. Meadows, the managing editor of The Ukiah Daily Journal. "There was the nice, caring guy who loved his community. Then there was the Bruce who sat down behind that typewriter and just slammed people."
Mr. Anderson has been jailed several times, most notably for punching a former superintendent at a school board meeting ("He called me a 10th-rate McCarthyite," Mr. Anderson said. "I thought I was at least first-rate").
Over the years, Mr. Anderson broke stories about a school official's financial improprieties, exposed illegal practices at a foster home and wrote ceaselessly about Eugene Lincoln, or Bear, who was accused of killing a sheriff's deputy in a shootout in 1995 on an Indian reservation and was eventually acquitted of murder.
At times, he has strayed into fiction. Two years ago, he published a bogus interview with Mike Sweeney, the former husband of an Earth First activist, Judi Bari, in which Mr. Sweeney confessed to having planted the bomb that maimed her in 1990 (she died of cancer in 1997). Mr. Sweeney set up an anti-Anderson Web site, www.LiarUnlimited.com. "I regret it," Mr. Anderson said of the article. "It was kind of over the top."
In 1988, he published a fabricated interview, intended as satire, with Douglas H. Bosco, a congressman, in which Mr. Bosco railed against his dope-smoking constituents.
"His biting sarcasm always had enough of a kernel of truth that it stuck," Mr. Bosco, now a lawyer in Santa Rosa, said. "He's a good writer. So even if you were being completely maligned, at least you had the honor of it being done in good style."
Frank Zotter, chief deputy for the Mendocino county counsel, keeps Mr. Anderson's insults pinned to his office bulletin board along with favorite cartoons and family photographs. "He said I bring 'a bland, irritatingly good-German obtuseness' to my work," Mr. Zotter said. "He called me 'a willing conscript of the forces of reaction and oppression.' It's kind of nice to be insulted by someone with such a good command of the English language."
Mr. Anderson leaves behind local landmarks like the Boonville Hotel, once a brawling loggers' hostelry nicknamed "bucket of blood" and now a "yup hut" restaurant where cable television shoots close-ups of pumpkin curry. "We need the dialog," John Schmitt, the chef and proprietor, said of the newspaper. "We all live up dirt roads separated by geography and economics."
Mr. Anderson moved to Eugene, where his wife has a close friend, and started publishing AVA Oregon!, "the Oregon newspaper that tells it like it is." He has taken on a police scandal, the "slurbing out" of the freeways and the community sports complex, "an Albert Speerish goosestepperish fantasy come alive."
As for their new editor, readers in Eugene may want to follow some advice recently dispensed in Charmian Blattner's column in The Advertiser. Musing about life in general, Ms. Blattner wrote, "When something defies description, let it."
Mr. Anderson admitted he "knows beans" about his new turf. Nevertheless, as he recently informed his readers, "Just because I got into town five minutes ago doesn't mean I don't have opinions about the place."
