PREVIOUSLY:

• MUSICAL MEMOIR: Playing with Hubert Sumlin and Sunnyland Slim at Arcata’s Jambalaya Club, 1976
• MUSICAL MEMOIR: The Night Dan Hauser and Wes Chesbro Presented a Couple of Blues Greats With Keys to the City

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Author’s note:  This is the first story of a three-part series.

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When the Sunnyland Slim Band drove into a white-out blizzard on Interstate 80 it was just the beginning of the 2,100 miles of troubles ahead. 

The band left Blytheville, Arkansas the day before on October 28 after playing an all-night show at a juke joint with our leader, legendary Chicago blues pianist/singer, Sunnyland. The group included me on drums, Harry Duncan on harmonica and vocals and Chicago bassist Joe Harper.

We were going to meet up with the famous white blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield for a month of dates in the San Francisco Bay Area starting the first day of November. 

A Chicago native, Bloomfield had played with Sunnyland as a young man. He told Harry that Sunnyland was the first Black Chicago bluesman to invite him onstage to play on a Southside night club stage. He went on to play with the influential Paul Butterfield Blues Band in the mid-1960s, formed the San Francisco-based Electric Flag and recorded Super Session with Al Kooper. 

Bob Dylan recruited him to play on his ground-breaking album Highway 61 Revisited, which included “Like a Rolling Stone.” He considered Bloomfield the best blues guitarist in the country, as did many others. I listened to all those albums over and over while in college.

I was 21. I bought my first drum set two years earlier. I started learning how to play while a full-time student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I dropped out at the end of my junior year to become a professional drummer. That was in May and now I was on the road in October with Sunnyland, the man who gave Muddy Waters his recording career start in Chicago in 1947. He brought Muddy into Aristocrat Records – which later became Chess Records – as a sideman guitarist when he recorded on two of Sunnyland’s songs.

Harry Duncan, left, and Paul DeMark at Riverwood Inn, Phillipsville, California in 1979.

Sunnyland, 65, drove his mid-1960s Oldsmobile station wagon while Harry and I took turns driving a 1964 Ford Fairlane we had bought for $50 a month earlier.

Sunnyland argued with the 22-year-old Harry Duncan that we should take the southern route from Arkansas on Highway 66 to Los Angeles and then drive to San Francisco. Slim worried about possible bad weather. 

Harry won the battle. He visited a Triple A Insurance office in Wisconsin. They gave us a small “flip book” with maps detailing the road from Blytheville to San Francisco. 

We left Arkansas on October 28. The first show with Bloomfield was set for November 1, 1972 in Santa Cruz, California, four and a half days away. We drove through winding two-lane highways in Missouri and into Kansas.

It was too late to head south. We continued through Kansas into Colorado heading north. It was snowing in Denver when we pulled over at a gas station parking lot to sleep in our freezing cars for a few hours. 

“I told you we should take Route 66,” a highly irritated Sunnyland said to Harry.  “You got us driving on these pig trails!”

By the time we were driving west on frozen Interstate 80 through Wyoming, we could only drive about 15-20 mph.  It was almost impossible to see the highway in such a fierce blizzard.  Luckily, growing up in Wisconsin, I had driven in these conditions before. We saw numerous cars and trucks that had slipped off the highway and left abandoned on the side of the road. 

We white-knuckled it. Harry and I taking turns driving our car and Sunnyland driving solo. Bassist Joe Harper didn’t drive, which angered Sunnyland to no end.

 “The man doesn’t even drive,” Sunnyland complained to us in front of Harper. “You can’t be like that. I need 300-mile drivers.”  On the road, he rated sidemen on how far they could drive without needing a rest. 

We had a deadline to meet so we kept driving through the blizzard almost the entire state of Wyoming to the famous Little America Truck Stop on the western edge of the state. It was the biggest truck stop of its kind in the U.S. The Wyoming Highway Patrol blocked drivers from going west at that point because of the treacherous conditions.

Scores of truck drivers and travelers like us had to stay the night. The motel rooms were all taken. Dozens of people, including me, slept on the grimey, well-worn carpet of the lounge area outside Little America’s bathrooms. Using my jacket as a pillow, I managed to get a few hours of sleep. 

I remember thinking, “Can it get any worse than this?” 

The next morning the highway patrol let drivers head west. About 100 miles from Little America, smoke started pouring out of our Ford Fairlane’s engine. Luckily, we found a service station near the highway.  A mechanic said our antifreeze was empty and we’d damaged the radiator.  He assured us it could be fixed in a couple of hours. 

“Harry and Paul, you’re babies on the road,” Sunnyland said with disgust.  “You don’t even put antifreeze in your car.”

The station had a pool table for fun while customers waited. Sunnyland talked his way into playing a game of pool for money with two Wyoming men wearing cowboy hats. Sunnyland could disarm anyone with his friendly manner.

We went through parts of Utah and then down into Nevada. We stopped and ate at a Chinese-American restaurant in Elko. It was the first time I remember stopping at a restaurant to eat. We were beyond exhausted.  

The only time we stopped to rest was at Little America. Harry and I took turns driving while the other one slept.  On the other hand, Sunnyland in his Oldsmobile station wagon, with no help from Harper, drove all 2,100 miles with almost no sleep.  

Sunnyland had no patience for Harper who, in addition to not helping with the driving, was always complaining about feeling sick.

While we waited for our food to arrive, Joe complained about being cold.  Sunnyland sat straight up, looked hard at Joe and said in a menacing, low voice, “Joe, you say one more word, l’ll cut you.”

That shut us all up. Harry and I looked at each other warily as if to say, “Is he serious?” 

From that point we drove to San Rafael. California greeted us with a perfect, sunny first day of November. We arrived at a motel late in the morning and were able to get some rest before our first show with Bloomfield at the Opal Cliffs Inn in Santa Cruz later that night.

The Santa Cruz show started at 9. We arrived in plenty of time to set up our equipment.  The downtown club was packed with a menagerie of California long-haired counterculture people smoking pot, drinking and getting ready to free dance the night away. As a college student in the early 1970s in Madison, I was part of the counterculture there.  But this was California and it felt a lot wilder. 

When I set up my four-piece Ludwig drum kit, sound technicians converged to set microphones up on my drums. We were going to be broadcast live on a local radio station, a first for me.

The band sound-checked without Bloomfield. Finally he stormed through the back door of the club, 10 minutes before show time. He held his  Gibson Les Paul guitar and cord in one hand, no guitar case in sight. We were introduced and hit the stage. He plugged into his Fender amplifier and off we went. 

Bloomfield — wild curly hair, blue jeans and flannel shirt — sometimes played with the fury of a tornado and then sweetly and sadly behind Slim’s slow blues. He was tremendous playing the blues with emotion and skill. It felt like a jolt of electricity playing with him.

Fifteen shows in 30 days. The tour had begun.

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Thanks to Pamela Long for editing and Julian DeMark, photo-scanning. 

How should state-owned demonstration forests be managed? For private timber production or for climate, biodiversity, clean water, and other values?

That’s the question being considered by the California legislature with AB 2494 (Rogers). AB 2494 proposes a virtual reserval of priorities. Currently, state law directs that these public lands be managed for “maximum sustained timber production” while “giving consideration” to other resource management. Under AB 2494, managing for other resources takes top billing while still allowing for commercial timber production where that production is used as a tool to achieve the resource objectives.

EPIC staff Melodie Meyer and Josefina Barrantes join environmental attorney Alex Leumer to discuss.

Want to support? Sign the petition here.

Recently I found an article written by my grandfather, James Ballard, telling about his arrival and experiences in Humboldt County. He wrote this account at the request of the Telegraph World on his retirement from the Western Union telegraph service. At the end he remarks that he feels the story is too personal and would not be of interest to outsiders. He never mailed the article. It is published here for the first time.

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Our family came to California in the fall of 1875, arriving in Alameda in the middle of November, where we joined father, who had preceded us about four years, coming from our farm home in New Brunswick, Canada, a few miles from Fort Fairfield, Maine. After a couple of weeks’ stay in Alameda and San Francisco, we boarded a little coast steamer to Eureka, a thriving sawmill town on Humboldt Bay, in the heart of the redwoods.

My father, having spent most of his life lumbering in the woods of New Brunswick and Maine, naturally was attracted to the woods of northern California. In August of the following year, he was accidentally killed in the woods.

I was then a boy of seventeen, the oldest of six children. This meant no more schooling for me. It was up to me to ‘keep the home fires burning’ and the table supplied. The next four years were spent by me in the big sawmills of Eureka, where the work was from six to six. Three of those years I stood each day with my shoulder within a foot or two of three whirling circular saws placed one above the other to enable them to saw the immense redwood logs into boards and timbers. As it was up to the sawyer, the man at the lever, to pile up as many feet of sawed lumber each day as possible in order to hold his job, that meant the two of us who handled every stick of lumber that came from the saw, did not need to have the word “hustle” defined for us.

Mr. and Mrs. James Ballard on their wedding day in 1884.

In the summer of 1880, depression in the lumber business shut the mills down and I found myself without a job. But a job I must have, so I accepted the first to be offered on a farm twenty miles from Eureka. When this job came to an end, I immediately returned to Eureka and was soon offered a job as night clerk in the principal hotel there, The Vance, owned by one of the pioneer mill men and loggers, John Vance.

There I was brought into contact with the telegraph where heretofore I had been no closer than seeing the telegraph poles and wires along the streets and roads, and therefore thought nothing at all about the process of telegraphing. The telegraph office was a small room partitioned off from the hotel office. The clicking of the sounder attracted my attention at once and I began to listen to it, and to watch the operator as I went about my duties in the hotel office. I soon got the opportunity to inspect the instruments closely and soon understood their character and also borrowed a copy of the Journal of the Telegraph from the operator, in which I found some learner’s instruments advertised and also a copy of the telegraph code.

But these instruments were too costly for my means at that time. I saw that the key alone made sounds like the sounder and so I made a wooden key with nails for contact points. With this I practiced every night after midnight when I was mostly alone in the office. Within a year I was able to read everything that came over the wire when I listened. In the meantime I purchased two of the cheap learner sets and got scraps of zinc from the operator and some fruit jars, to set up a battery at home, putting one upstairs and the other down, and teaching my sister, Sara Ballard, the code. She was soon able to send to me.

I advanced from night clerk to day clerk and finally to manager of the hotel. When the owner leased the hotel I immediately secured a job as a telegraph repairman and worked at a repair station sixty miles from Eureka. I spent two years riding the telegraph trail there. Most of my section was over a mountain trail, necessitating the use of a saddle horse. I remember well my delightful experiences in that beautiful mountain country with its many streams filled with trout in the summer and salmon in the winter and the hills alive with game. In winter in that country it rained, not in drops, but in sheets and columns of water driven by wind that no clothes could keep out. I remember my appearance after a thirty-mile trip over the line in such a storm; fording the rushing streams and making long detours on trails around many fords when they became impassable.

A little touch of romance here. When I became marooned between fords on one of the streams, I was forced to seek shelter at a ranch house and there met the girl (Minnie Hunter) who became my wife the next year. Thus the association with the telegraph service led me to her, otherwise I never would have seen her. What is fate?

I remember my encounter with a mountain lion while riding the trail, and my experience as a tenderfoot, with bucking cattle horses that I had to use in riding the line.

Later I was transferred to Eureka as manager of that office where I served 26 years until failing health compelled me to try a smaller office in an effort to recover. Then came my year-and-a-half at Watsonville, Calif., as a result, and my return to the Eureka office and being compelled to retire to outdoor life. I recovered my health and returned to service as an operator in the main Western Union office in San Francisco.

I retired from the service at the age of seventy in 1928. I now pass the time studying economics and sociology … but mostly I study my favorite author … Emanuel Swedenborg, whose works are on the human soul, spiritual world and its spiritual laws of life … Added to this, I work as an amateur painter in oil, in which I sometimes produce pictures which please my friends to whom I present them. Not being a professional with a reputation, I do not try to sell them.

Now having written all this out it seems to me, making due allowance for bias of the author, that it reads well, in fact is quite a story, although it contains but a small part of my life as a telegrapher. I look back on the service with the greatest of pleasure and would gladly do it over again. In fact my whole telegraph service is surrounded by almost a halo of romance. The passing of that wonderful language in which man first communicated with man instantaneously over a long distance with the dot and dash, fills me with regret. The skilled Morse operator at each end seemed to be in such close touch with the personality of his comrade at the other end, that he learned to know him even better than if face to face. For me that language was a living, breathing soul, while the automatic telegraph is like a sixteen-inch gun; deadly efficient but without a soul…

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James Ballard and his wife, Minnie, lived out their retirement days in Oakland near their daughter, Bess, and their son, Ernest and their six grandchildren.

Carol Ruth Ann Hillman passed to “the other side” March 21, 2026 at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka. Carol was born June 2, 1949 at a small hospital in Lodi. 

Her devoted husband of 26 years Raymond W. Hillman was by her side. She was predeceased by a brother, Harvey of B.C., her parents Emma & Harvey Janszen, and her much loved grandmother.

Survivors are a very caring son, Theodore, and a sweet granddaughter, Jade; sister-in-law Pam Janszen; and her husband, historian, Raymond.

After Carol graduated from Berkeley High School, she found employment with Pacific Telephone Co. as an overseas operator mainly in Monterey. Later she was in retail at Mervyn’s stores Richmond, San Francisco and Eureka. While at the Eureka store she took great pride in wrapping gifts. 

She met Raymond in Eureka as a customer of his guided tour of Ferndale and she was the only one that day. Carol’s interest centered around going to the movies, sometimes weekly if not every two or three weeks with her son, at the local cinemas.

She loved animals, particularly her pet cat Mao and dog Lola. Last August she adopted a kitten named Purrsantan to gift to her son. 

She had an elegant wardrobe that was curated through years of going to local boutiques with her granddaughter, where they would spend quality time shopping together. Carol also wore mismatching earrings to add whimsical charm into life.

She knew the name of any flower she saw and always liked to roast pumpkin seeds after the pumpkins were carved for Halloween. 

She was also a ferroequinologist, always loving trains. She enjoyed a trip on the Coast Starlite from Eureka to Seattle. She will be greatly missed by all who knew and loved her. 

Carol lived in Humboldt County in Eureka for over 25 years. The temperate weather as well as the beaches and redwoods were what made her love the area. Cremains are held by the family.

A celebration of life was held on April 1 at her favorite restaurant, Amigas Burritos, with family and friends.

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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Carol Hillman’s family. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.

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Attention, residents of Eureka’s Highland Park and West Side neighborhoods! Would you enjoy improved access to nearby shopping centers and surrounding neighborhoods? How about upgrades to sidewalks and street lighting? Or safer crosswalks and bike lanes? 

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, you’ll want to attend a little neighborhood walkabout with Eureka’s planning staff next week to learn more about the city’s strategy to improve safety and accessibility in your neighborhoods. Your feedback will help staff prioritize infrastructure improvements as the city moves forward with the second phase of its “Sunset Heights” development near the Eureka Mall.

Need a little refresher? In 2022, the city swapped three publicly owned downtown parking lots for a mostly vacant 4.18-acre site overlooking Highway 101, between Harris and Henderson streets. The affordable housing development will include 88 units (86 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments and two manager’s units) in four buildings, as well as two indoor community centers and two outdoor plazas.

At the end of last year, the city was awarded a $21.7 million grant from the California Strategic Growth Council to help finance the first phase of development, which includes roughly half of the total number of units, along with infrastructure improvements in the surrounding area identified through a community outreach process. (A full list of those infrastructure improvements can be found here.)

The City of Eureka, Humboldt Transit Authority and Ukiah-based project manager Rural Communities Housing Development Corporation are applying for another round of grant funding to cover the second half of the project. But before the city submits its grant application, staff want to hear from the folks living within two miles of Sunset Heights, including much of west, south and central Eureka.

You can share your two cents by participating in an online survey — linked here — or by attending a community walkabout.

“The community walk is a more hands-on opportunity,” city planner Alexandra Gonzalez told the Outpost. “It allows the community to walk the neighborhood together, look at specific locations in real time, and talk through potential improvements, whether that’s crossings, accessibility, lighting, or connectivity to nearby transit stops. Together, these efforts help ensure that any improvements reflect how people actually move through the area day to day, and that the final plans are grounded in community experience.”

“Since Sunset Heights is already well located near transit and everyday destinations, the future improvements, if awarded, will make it even easier and more convenient for residents to walk, bike, or take the bus,” she continued. “These could include filling in key sidewalk gaps, improving bike connections, enhancing crossings on major streets, and adding wayfinding signage.”

If you’d like to join the community walk, meet at Alice Birney Elementary School (South Avenue and Utah Street) at 12 p.m. on Thursday, April 23. The group will make a big loop through the Highland Park neighborhood and discuss different ways to improve connectivity to the Eureka Mall area and Sunset Heights project. (We have it on good authority that snacks will be provided after the walk.)

Asked when the city plans to break ground on the first phase of the project, Gonzalez said a construction date has not been set. “Rural Communities Housing Development Corporation is the developer for this project, and from my understanding the project is almost completely funded but is still in the process of gathering the last bit of funding,” she said.

More information on the city’s website at this link. You can also contact the city’s planning department via email at planning@eurekaca.gov.

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Crisis Alternative Response Eureka — a city team that responds to calls for mental health or substance use intervention — will soon take over response in more areas.

Behavioral health professionals are hopeful a recent agreement will help the county’s team focus on farther flung areas.

CARE signed a service contract with the Behavioral Health Branch of the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in March to cover unincorporated areas of Eureka, including Myrtletown, Cutten and Pine Hill.

Jacob Rosen, CARE’s Managing Mental Health Clinician, said serving the areas will hopefully help support Humboldt County’s Mobile Intervention & Services Team (MIST), which offers mobile crisis response throughout the county.

“When you think about the demand that they have from the state, they need to be able to provide rural crisis response out into, say, Hoopa or Whitethorn,” noted Rosen.

Rosen estimates this means CARE will soon serve an area with an additional 10,000 to 15,000 people, including multiple residential mental health facilities. He said the team is prepared for the increased call volume.

The city-run team launched in 2023. CARE began responding to certain 911 mental health calls without police in 2025, and started working seven days a week in February.

The two teams already have a great relationship, Rosen said, where CARE will handle a call routed to MIST, or vice versa.

Between the experience of MIST, CARE, Eureka Police Department, and Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Rosen hopes they can “bring that experience into one room and really improve the system,” he said.

There are two MIST mobile crisis response teams covering the county, an operation that runs 24/7, 365 days a year.

“Contracting with CARE has allowed our agency to focus on providing mobile crisis response to the rest of the county,” said Behavioral Health Deputy Director Paul Bugnacki, in an email sent by a spokesperson.

The MIST teams have a wide geographic area to cover.

While Bugnacki said there have been days a MIST team is in Shelter Cove in the morning and Hoopa that afternoon, “The good news is, this doesn’t happen very often and not every crisis requires an in-person response,” he said. When multiple calls come in, Bugnacki said the team prioritizes responses, and is very good at managing crises over the phone.

The contract with DHHS also allows CARE to bill Medi-Cal for the service under the Mobile Crisis Benefit through CalAIM.

There’s been quite a few changes in how these teams have been funded, according to a 2024 Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury report, which found programs like CARE and MIST need stable sources of funding to be successful.

“The only thing different about our crisis services is that they are more available now than they have been in the past. As we continue to expand these teams in the county, our communities will have greater access to support before, during and after a crisis occurs,” said Bugnacki.

All mobile crisis teams are deployed through local crisis lines and local 911 dispatch. Individuals can access MIST or CARE by calling the crisis line at 707-445-7715, toll-free at 1-888-849-5728, or 988.

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PREVIOUSLY

• The Latest Chapter in the Decline of the Bayshore Mall: It Will Be Auctioned Off on the Courthouse Steps
• Humboldt County is Interested in Buying the Old Sears Building at the Bayshore Mall. So is Home Depot

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A crowd of close to 30 people gathered on the courthouse steps this morning in hopes of being among the first to learn the fate of the beleaguered and debt-laden Bayshore Mall, but the scheduled foreclosure auction proved anticlimactic.

“Do I have any bidders here?” called out auctioneer Mike Adams, an unassuming man with slicked back white hair and baggy clothes. He’d been hired by a company called Superior Default Services to handle today’s proceedings, and he’d already asked around to see if there were any certified bidders.

There weren’t. One man had shown up with a check made out to himself, but that’s not allowed. Checks needed to be made out to the beneficiary, which, in this case, is a company called Assured Lender Services. 

Adams proceeded to read off a description of the property for sale: eight parcels and part of a ninth located at 3300 and 3450 Broadway Street. This includes the entirety of the Bayshore Mall except for the current Kohl’s location. The old Sears and current Walmart buildings are part of the deal, as is the nearby McDonald’s, most of the mall’s parking lots and some adjacent greenbelt land.

There is $38,945,221.94 in debt attached to these parcels, but the trustee had instructed Adams to open the bidding at $12 million even. If anyone had bid that amount, he was instructed to keep raising the asking price in $250,000 increments until bidding reached or exceeded $16.8 million, after which the highest bidder would have become the new owner.

The Humboldt County government has shown interest in the old Sears building at the north end of the mall, and the Board of Supervisors recently authorized staff to negotiate a deal for that parcel, which the county would convert into a one-stop permitting center. But no one from the county was present this morning. 

Nor were there any representatives from Home Depot. Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery recently revealed to the Outpost that the big box retailer has been searching for a spot in Eureka for more than a year and is specifically interested in that same Sears spot. 

“How much am I offered and by whom?” Adams asked the assembled group. “How much am I offered and by whom? How much am I offered and by whom?” Looking down at his clipboard, he declared, “The property reverted at 10:02.”

With no bids, the parcels reverted back to the current owner, a Delaware corporation called Bay Shore Mall, LP Assured Lender Services, Inc., the beneficiary of the deed of trust. [CORRECTION: Bay Shore Mall, LP, was the trustee held in default.]

We reached out to the county to ask whether staff will pursue a purchase of the Sears building directly with the owner. We’ll update this post if and when we get a reply.

As the crowd milled about and murmured among themselves on the courthouse steps, one woman approached Adams.

“Did the mall get sold?” she asked.

“It reverted,” he said. “It reverted back to the beneficiary.”

Her face was blank.

“Nobody bought it,” Adams clarified.

“So what happens now,” a nearby man asked.

“It’s in their hands,” Adams answered. “I don’t know.”

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CORRECTION, 3 p.m.: This post initially misidentified the party to whom the deed of trust reverted. The Outpost regrets the error.