There’s a bear having quite the adventure in Eureka today, so much so that the Eureka Police Department says it has received “many calls” reporting its exploits. 

Well, unless the bear starts acting up, law enforcement invites you to calm down. From EPD:

COMMUNITY ALERT - There is a bear running around in Eureka and we are getting many calls for service. The area is Broadway to Union and West Harris to Buhne.

PLEASE ONLY CALL if the bear is agressive. If you see it and want to post here where you last saw it that would be helpful.

Thank you.

Grin and bear it, Eureka. 

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Press release from Humboldt Bay Fire:

On June 4th 2025 at approximately 4:06 pm Humboldt Bay Fire units responded to a first-alarm structure fire at the 900 block of B St in Eureka. Firefighters arrived to find visible smoke pushing from the roof ridge of a residence that appeared to be from a solar panel system on fire. Crews quickly went to work and extinguished the fire, successfully containing it to the roof.

The fire’s cause and origin were investigated by Humboldt Bay Fire personnel. The source was determined to be a faulty solar shingle system. The estimated damage to the structure is approximately $5,000.

On June 7 th 2025 at approximately 3:00 am Crews responded to a first alarm fire of a workshop to the rear of a residence in the 1800 block of Henderson St. The building was fully involved upon crews arriving at scene and the fire had potential to spread to adjacent residences, and the vegetation nearby. Crews rapidly deployed hose lines and protected the structures while extinguishing the fire. Estimated loss for property and contents is $15,000.

Smoke Alarms Save Lives. This fire is still under investigation and if you have any information please contact Humboldt Bay Fire Department at 707-441-4000.

During this fire there were multiple other calls for service in the greater Eureka area, including two medical emergencies. We want to thank Samoa Fire Department and E8614 for providing coverage and handling these additional calls. We also want to thank PGE and EPD for their assistance with both of these incidents.

Humboldt Bay Fire would like to remind the community of the importance of maintaining good clearance of any vegetation around structures especially as we move into the wildland fire season.

This week: An all-star roundtable with our favorite law wonks, wherein we try to figure out where the Supreme Court is taking the National Environmental Policy Act — the most important federal law regulating the environmental costs of development.

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Ferndale may be “Hollywood on the Eel” as the locale of the four movies “A Death in Canaan” (1978), “Salem’s Lot” (1979), “Outbreak” (1995), and “The Majestic” (2001), but Ferndale’s real gift to Hollywood was Frank Ferguson who, from 1940 to 1975, was one of the most recognizable faces in movies and television, appearing in over 175 movies and some 400 television programs.

How did it happen that this man destined to share the silver screen with such luminaries as James Stewart, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Rock Hudson, and Doris Day came to be born in Ferndale? The answer dates to 1893, when Thomas “Tom” Ferguson, Frank’s burgh — a farming region, about as close to the North Sea as Ferndale is to the Pacific Ocean. Yet why was Ferndale his destination? With thousands of Fergusons from Scotland in the United States, one could assume that Tom had a Ferguson relative in Humboldt County. But the Ferndale connection was through Tom’s mother. She was a Swain from England and her brother, John Swain, had come to Ferndale before 1875 to visit relatives. He soon married a Ferndale girl, fathered five children, and became the drawing card to bring his nephew, Tom Ferguson, to Ferndale.

Tom entered the business world of Ferndale’s Main Street, and within two years opened a cigar and confectionery store. It survived only one year. Though ambitious, he took a step back to become a clerk at Main Street’s White Front Store. Cyrus Boynton, one of the co-owners, liked Tom and opened his home to him for room and board. Love blossomed at the dinner table between Cyrus’s lovely sister Annie and Tom, and they were married in June 1900. Two years later, daughter Harriet was born, then baby Frank became the gift they received on Christmas Day, 1906.

In 1912, when Tom learned of the death of his father, he wrote and urged his mother Georgina to come to Ferndale and bring his sister Isabella, age thirty-two, and brother John, twenty-seven. The three arrived in Ferndale in early July. Sadly, there was no family reunion between Georgina and her brother, John Swain. Left a widower after the death of his wife during the stillbirth of their fifth child, Swain had fallen victim to alcohol, becoming persona non grata not only to the family, but to all of Ferndale.

Georgina, Isabella, and John, after briefly staying at the Ferguson family home on Van Ness Street, purchased a separate residence on Lincoln Street, near the Golden State creamery at the north end of town. John, or “Scotty” as he was called, would spend most of his life working at that creamery, the most important creamery in Humboldt County — its innovations had influenced the whole dairy industry, including the paper-wrapping of sticks of butter and the development of powdered milk.

The Thomas Ferguson family, Ferndale, circa 1920. Clockwise from top left: Tom Ferguson, children Harriet and Frank Ferguson, and Annie Boynton Ferguson. Photo courtesy Frank Jewett.

Young Frank grew up helping in the Ferguson Dry Goods Company, his father’s Main Street store, which had opened in 1918 in the IOOF Building. Ferndale really moved into the twentieth century during Frank’s early years. The beneficence of another Scotsman, Andrew Carnegie, reached Ferndale with the dedication in 1910 of the new Carnegie Library, which young Frank often visited. He and his parents attended a variety of musical, vaudeville, and motion picture nights at one of Ferndale’s two theaters: the Fern (1909) and the Valerie (1910), which had each been carved out of space within other buildings. (Ferndale’s first standalone theater, the Hart, was built in 1920.) Improved medical treatment arrived when Ferndale’s first hospital moved from Washington Street to Main Street and added up-to-date equipment. For Frank, this proved important, for sometime during his Ferndale grammar school days he suffered injury to his legs when the family Model T leaked gas into the seating area and caught fire.

Frank entered Ferndale High School in 1922 at a time when the school offered both dramatics and football with equal enthusiasm. To Frank’s good fortune the high school had an exceptional English and drama instructor, Thomas G. Allison, “an impeccable gentleman in appearance, and … a stickler in the use of good language and writing.”1 Allison quickly recognized Frank’s exceptional acting and singing talents and began coaching him in oratory and declamation, while giving him roles in dozens of plays. The voice that would become Frank’s “bread and butter” blossomed. His vocal talents were honed to such excellence that in his senior year he entered the annual Shakespeare Festival for high schools at the University of California at Berkeley in March 1926. Declaiming an oration of King Edward from Richard III, Frank won first place for California high schools of less than 500 students. The celebration in Ferndale was townwide: it was the first time a Humboldt County student had won a statewide contest! The university professors who were the judges wrote in their assessment that Frank’s “English was as near perfection as one could desire.”

The Shakespeare award opened the door for Frank to attend UC Berkeley upon his graduation from Ferndale High in 1926. In no time at all, he became an integral part of the university glee club and the Little Theater. In fact, in his second semester at UC, he had to make a decision: either to go to Washington with the glee club to serenade President Calvin Coolidge, or remain for a major role in a production of a Greek tragedy, Euripides’ The Trojan Women. He chose to stay and act. This decision lead to starring roles throughout his college career in both dramas and comedies, as well as singing roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. He also took a great interest in directing and in his junior year the Little Theater initiated “a training school for students interested in drama and practical stagecraft” with Frank as its head.

So it was not surprising that in his senior year he won the prestigious Templeton Crocker scholarship to attend a graduate school for further studies in drama. He chose Cornell University. In 1930, after a post-graduation visit to Ferndale, he took the steamer Virginia from California through the Panama Canal to New York and the Ithaca campus. He spent two years at Cornell, living on a $1,500 annual stipend, and gained his master’s degree in dramatics.

With only an advanced degree in hand, he left Cornell in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, and he did his best to survive in theatrical activities. For several years, he directed plays at the Berkeley Playhouse Association, then took a production of the famed melodrama The Drunkard on a national tour including stops in Texas, New Orleans, and Chicago, where it played all summer. Though he was the director, he also took the lead as the mustachioed villain.

In 1936, he married Ruth Rosa, a San Francisco girl. Still determined to be an actor, he tried his hand in New York the next year and had a bit part in a Federal Theater play, but soon returned to California and a solid job as a director and actor at the Pasadena Playhouse, which was emerging as the state’s prime producer of young actors for nearby Hollywood. From 1937 to 1941, he directed a dozen plays and acted alongside other young actors, some of whom would become full-blown “movie stars,” such as Dana Andrews, Victor Mature and Robert Preston. Then, in 1940, a Warner Brothers scout spotted him. His thirty-five-year Hollywood career was launched.

For the rest of his life, Frank Ferguson would be one of the most utilized character actors on both screen and television. With their vast acting experience prior to coming to Hollywood, the character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Years — the unsung heroes of movies — gave any movie they were in a special quality. Among Ferguson’s close friends from his Pasadena Playhouse days was Edgar Buchanan, another character actor, often seen in westerns. Buchanan also had a Humboldt connection, for he had two sisters here: Kate Buchanan, who served for many years as dean of women at Humboldt State; and Gayle Buchanan Karshner, author, teacher, and historian. Gayle was married to Don Karshner, longtime dean of students at Humboldt State.

Frank witnesses a Babe Ruth miracle

Movie directors saw Frank’s abilities in minor roles, uncredited in many of his earliest movies. In just a few minutes on screen, he could be memorable. On his single scene in the 1948 movie The Babe Ruth Story, one critic wrote:

Ferguson proved himself an above-average actor by successfully pulling off the treacly scene in which Babe (William Bendix) says “Hi, kid” to Ferguson’s crippled son — whereupon the boy suddenly stands up and walks!

Two classic Ferguson roles are Mr. McDougal, the owner of the house of horrors in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, considered the comedy pair’s best movie; and the marshal in Johnny Guitar, the western that starred Joan Crawford and uniquely paired two women, not men, who were out to get each other.

Frank plays straight man to Bud Abbott.

Though Ferguson had the potential to star in films, he preferred character roles because he loved the variety and knew that as a character actor he would probably have work until the day he died. When television series took off in the 1950s and 1960s, he had roles in most of the long-running series, such as Lassie, Peyton Place, Bonanza, Laramie, The Andy Griffith Show, Perry Mason, and on and on.

Ferguson was described by Humboldt journalist and historian Andrew Genzoli as “he of the wrinkled brow, eyes set with a twinkle of humor and wisdom, and a well-groomed mustache.” One Hollywood historian summarized Ferguson as an actor who “was equally effective as a henpecked husband, stern military leader, irascible neighbor, merciless employer, crooked sheriff, and barbershop hanger-on.” Little surprise that such versatility would land him roles in some 170 movies and hundreds of television appearances from 1940 to 1976, sharing the screen with many of the great stars of the day.

Frank gets pushed around by a racist demagogue in Bonanza …

… until the Cartwrights set him straight.

“Contrary to impressions the public may get,” Ferguson told a local interviewer while on a visit to Ferndale, “screen stars are generally not conceited, brash, or self-centered, but more often are earnest, hardworking people, and easy to get to know.” He even had specific comments about some of them: Clark Gable and John Wayne were “marvelous people,” Alan Ladd was “a nice person,” Joan Crawford was “a hard worker, but scared everyone,” and Doris Day was a “very sweet person.”

Ferguson did not fail to return to Humboldt to visit friends and family. Relatives still remember him as the friendliest and most affectionate of persons. His Uncle John’s children especially looked forward to the visits of their “movie star” uncle, who would empty his pockets and pass out “fivers” to his younger cousins. His nephew Frank Jewett (son of Frank’s sister Harriet) recalls a special visit by Ferguson during Easter vacation in 1946. The two of them spent five days fishing on the Eel River at Weymouth Pool (between Fortuna and Scotia) and caught steelhead every day, including one ten-pounder.

Publicity photo.

Ferguson thrived on outdoor activities, including rockhounding and even training bird dogs, but hunting and fishing were his favorite pastimes. In Southern California, skeet shooting and duck hunting were passions pursued with friends in a private club in Lancaster, some fifty miles north of Los Angeles in the Antelope Valley, at a site owned by the famed Doheny family.

In the realm of sport, Frank Ferguson’s partner-in- arms was Robert Fuller, one of television’s best known Western stars as the lead in the Laramie series in the 1960s. Though twenty-seven years younger than Ferguson, Fuller had a deep admiration for the older man, regarded him as “a unique actor in the business,” and looked forward to his being a guest star on Laramie. A bond of friendship developed through the two men’s love of the outdoors. In the 1960s, gun companies such as Winchester would provide “expeditions” to special hunting sites for well-known movie and television actors, as well as other famous individuals. Ferguson and Fuller would accompany the likes of General Jimmy Doolittle, Roy Rogers, Glenn Ford, and Van Heflin on various trips, including antelope hunting in Lander, Wyoming and quail and pheasant hunting near Phoenix, Arizona. “Those were fabulous days for us sportsmen in the 1960s,” recalls Fuller, describing Frank as “an honest sportsman,” not one to ever bend the rules of hunting.

During those years, Frank became a serious collector of shotguns, one who would easily spend twenty or thirty thousand dollars on a gun that he wanted for his collection. Fuller recalls Frank telling him how he had to “lie a little” about the cost of the shotguns when his wife Ruth became annoyed at the accumulation of guns in the house. When she would ask the price, the response went something like, “Just about $250, dear.” According to Ferguson’s nephew, Frank Jewett, the actor told him that “the guns were his retirement plan and he would sell one off every once in a while as needed.” (Jewett inherited what was left of the collection: “Two or three of his ‘users,’ that were top quality guns, but fairly well beat up.”)

Frank and his wife Ruth had a home overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Ruth died in 1967. A year later Frank married Dorothy Ann Baker, but sadly she died seven years later. With no children from either marriage and few roles coming his way after 1975, he spent more time with acting friends. There was one famed Hollywood “watering hole” that Frank frequented: the Cock ’n Bull pub on Sunset Boulevard, a favorite hangout for actors young and old, and where the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Somerset Maugham hovered at the bar in earlier days. Frank Jewett recalls that he once visited the actor, who took him to the pub and “introduced me to every patron in the place!” Robert Fuller also remembers those great days with Ferguson and the other habitués of the Cock ’n Bull.

In 1977, film historian David Del Valle visited the pub, and writes that he caught up with “a trio of character actors getting rather stiff at the corner of the bar. The trio was instantly recognizable from a lifetime of working in TV and films. First there was Frank Ferguson… Next was the Maytag repairman himself, Jesse White.” And soon after, Del Valle recalls, the great actor John Carradine (the itinerant ex-preacher in The Grapes of Wrath) sauntered into the pub and immediately greeted Frank with a favorite nickname and the atmosphere exploded with shared recollections of the good old days of the movies.

A year later, Frank began a slow and painful exit. It would be these friends and especially those from his skeet shooting and duck hunting days out in Lancaster who helped take care of him in his final days before he died of cancer on September 12, 1978.

Perhaps it is no surprise that at Frank’s funeral service his friends would remember him not so much as an actor, but as a friend, one with whom they shared early morning duck blinds in Lancaster. George Nichols, a former agent, recalled that the actor was “not an overly religious man,” but “I will never forget what he said one Sunday morning in a blind. The sun was just coming up over the horizon, and ducks were flying all around us [and] he said, ‘George. We are in Heaven.’” Lastly, Dr. Ted Lynn, a physician friend, spoke to the heart of the man:

God in his wisdom made all kinds of people. But he did bestow on a few of his creatures special qualities of gentleness and kindness and of courage, which in a sense makes them a breed apart…This was Frank Ferguson all the way.

In a true Hollywood ending, his friends spread his ashes over his favorite duck blind at the Lancaster hunting club.

Frank, playing a defense attorney, opens the action in the 1947 RKO noir thriller They Won’t Believe Me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A shorter version of this article was published in “Our Story,” the bimonthly magazine of the Ferndale Museum, 515 Shaw Avenue, Ferndale, CA 95536.

Many people provided information for this article and I would like to extend my thanks to all of them:

• Don Anderson, Ann Roberts, and Mary Ellen Boynton of the Ferndale Museum.
• Floyd Bettiga (whose family lived across the street in Ferndale from the John Fergusons).
• The relatives of Frank Ferguson: Frank Jewett, Velma Ferguson, and Michelle Murphy Ferguson.
• Nina (Mrs. Robert) Brown of the Swain family side. Robert Fuller, actor (Interview by phone: Jan. 11, 2014).
• But special thanks must go to Frank Jewett, the nephew of Frank Ferguson, who not only supplied numerous key pieces of information about Frank, but also many of the photos.

PREVIOUSLY

• SHERIFF’S OFFICE: Today’s Shooting at Bear River Was Witnessed by Several and Captured on Body Cam Footage; Investigation Underway

• (UPDATE: SHERIFF PRESS CONFERENCE) Officer-Involved Shooting Near the Bear River Recreation Center

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Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Update for Officer Involved Shooting on 06/05/2025, near the Bear River Family Entertainment Center in Loleta.

On 06/05/2025 at approximately 1620 hours, 29-year-old Nicholas David Anderson (DOB 05/02/1996) succumbed to the injuries he sustained during the critical incident which occurred earlier that afternoon at about 1531 hours near the Bear River Family Entertainment Center in Loleta.

During this incident, Anderson charged a Deputy Sheriff with a knife in a threating [sic] manner. As a result, one deputy fired his service weapon striking Anderson in the chest. The incident was witnessed by bystanders and captured on body cameras worn by the deputies.

Preliminary information indicates Nicholas Anderson is not a Humboldt County resident and the circumstances surrounding his presence in the Loleta area are currently under investigation. Investigators are continuing to establish a timeline regarding Nicholas Anderson’s whereabouts and actions in the days prior to his involvement in the critical incident. License Plate Recognition (LPR) cameras indicate a vehicle associated with Nicholas Anderson arrived in Humboldt County from the Simi Valley, CA area on June 3, 2025. It appears while in Humboldt County, Nicholas Anderson utilized an alias to receive medical treatment at a local medical facility for a previously existing injury.

Two Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputies involved in the incident have been placed on routine paid leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

More information will be made available once a forensic autopsy is completed, which is anticipated to occur in the coming days.

This case is still under investigation by the multi-agency Humboldt County Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT), led by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office.

Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.

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A few months ago, Luci Ramirez and Thomas Carter, owners of Humboldt Bay Coffee Company and Familia Coffee, flew to Tanzania, where they attended the weeklong African Fine Coffees Association Conference and Exhibition. While there, they spoke with farmers about the crazy weather conditions they’ve been dealing with: torrential rains at abnormal times, unexpected hail and sudden freezes.

They also went to Uganda, where they experienced some of this schizophrenic weather for themselves. 

“It was February, sunny and hot, and then all of a sudden there was a torrential downpour,” Ramirez recalled. “The native people there say this has been happening more and more.” During such downpours, flowers get knocked off the glossy, dark leaves of the coffee plants. Those dropped blooms will never mature into drupes (or “cherries”), each of which holds a pair of the seeds we know as coffee beans. 

Ramirez and Carter buy beans from a farm in Uganda whose owners expected to produce 15 containers of beans for the year, but due to the chaotic weather — which scientists attribute to human-caused climate change — they wound up with only seven, less than half of what they’d anticipated.

“If you’re a farmer in that situation, you have to feed your family by selling your crop, so the cost has to go up,” Ramirez said. 

This climate-induced jolt to the global coffee trade’s supply and demand is not just happening in Africa. Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, is suffering its worst drought in 70 years. That combined with frost and wildfires have damaged as much as one-fifth of arabica coffee producers’ growing areas in the country, Colorado economist Billy Roberts recently told the Associated Press. Extreme weather has also led to poor harvests in Colombia and Vietnam, the latter of which is the world’s second-largest coffee producer. The resulting global coffee shortage has led to the highest wholesale prices in 13 years, according to the International Coffee Organization.

“Everybody in the coffee business is dealing with this; it doesn’t matter how big or small you are,” Ramirez said. “One of the biggest things happening is that the back stock in Brazil is being bought out by huge producers doing commercial coffee. When those [reserves] start to go down, it creates a panic in the market, which makes prices go up [even more].” 

Chris Nichols, owner of Muddy Waters Coffee Company

Chris Nichols, owner of Muddy Waters Coffee Company in McKinleyville, said the price of coffee has increased by 40 percent this year, mostly due to the effects of climate change and drought in Brazil and Vietnam. The coffee he buys doesn’t come from either of those countries, but the global scarcity impacts wholesale costs across the entire market. 

“I’m doing my best to keep our price as low as possible,” Nichols said. But he’s been forced to raise consumer prices by about $1 to $1.25 per pound, and he’s now charging 25 percent more on sales to Costco, which carries Muddy Waters coffee in 30 of its warehouse locations. 

Tariffs

In the midst of these global market pressures, the Trump administration has enacted a 10 percent tariff on nearly all coffee imports, with even steeper rates for some countries — including a 46 percent hike for Vietnam — though there’s currently a 90-day pause on those higher rates.

“We already got a tariff bill,” Ramirez said. “It’s the reality of what we’re dealing with.” The coffee she buys at four dollars per pound now costs $4.40, plus freight, importers’ fees and other costs. Twenty percent of the raw beans’ weight is then lost during the roasting process, making each bean even more expensive. 

“Our base cost was around four dollars [per pound] a year ago; we’re now looking at seven dollars [per pound] because everything’s getting exponentially more expensive,” Ramirez said.

It’s a lot to explain to the customers who balk at the increased cost of a 12-ounce pour-over at Familia, the gourmet coffee cafés Ramirez and Carter own in Arcata and Eureka. The cafés have been suffering more than the wholesale coffee business as coffee drinkers deal with inflation and increased food prices.

“I feel like we’re all just hanging on, trying to figure out what will happen,” Ramirez said in reference to both her own company and other Humboldt County’s coffee roasters.

Chocolate

Meanwhile, another tropical commodity crop is also suffering the effects of global climate change: cacao trees, which grow the cocoa beans used in chocolate production. 

“Sixty to seventy percent of the cocoa in the world is grown in the Ivory Coast and Ghana,” said Adam Dick, co-owner of Eureka-based Dick Taylor Craft Chocolates. “So if you have a climate problem in that very small area of the globe, it throws cocoa in particular into a huge upheaval.”

That’s exactly what’s been happening in recent years, as rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns have led to heat stress and disease, resulting in smaller pods and decreased yields. As with the coffee market, the shortage is causing prices to skyrocket. They quadrupled last year and recently reached a 50-year high. 

“When we first were buying cocoa and getting started, the commodity price was trading at about $2,500 a ton, and we were paying probably close to $6,500 for the [specialty] stuff that we were buying,” Dick said. “Now, the most recent orders from Belize, with the tariff on top of it, of course, it’s gonna be just above $18,000 a ton. … It’s pretty hard to fathom those numbers. Every time I buy cocoa, it’s like the same price as buying a car.”

Asked how the company can absorb such steep cost increases without a similar near-tripling of prices for consumers, Dick said that’s a good question.

“Honestly, this feels like such uncharted territory,” he said. “You’re forced to look at all other areas of the business and [find] ways that you might be able to cut costs.”

Dustin Taylor (left) and Adam Dick, co-owners and founders of Dick Taylor Craft Chocolates.

Dick and his business partner, Dustin Taylor, contacted their bank to arrange longer-term financing for the more expensive bulk purchases. Earlier this year they also raised prices on their line of craft chocolate products, and they’ve worked to reduce labor and packaging costs — for example, by redesigning their cases so each one has less material and is easier to assemble. Boxes that used to take 45 seconds to put together can now be assembled in less than five, which adds up over the course of thousands and thousands of units. Labor is Dick Taylor’s second-most expensive part of the business.

“I don’t want to get rid of employees, but I want to make sure that the employees that I do have are working as efficiently as possible so that we can stretch those hours further and further,” Dick said. And unlike Ramirez, whose cafés are struggling, the espresso and treats counter at Dick Taylor’s relatively new chocolate factory on First Street has helped to offset the increased wholesale costs.

Still, Dick said that the double-whammy of cost hikes and tariffs have slowed the business’s momentum.

“This feels like we’ve had, like, fetters put on our legs,” he said. 

The tariffs in particular don’t make sense to Dick because, as with coffee, there’s not nearly enough domestic supply to replace imports for the industry. (Hawaii and Puerto Rico produce both cacao and coffee, but its production represents a tiny fraction of domestic demand.)

“And so, really, by putting a tariff on cacao you’re just shooting the whole chocolate industry in the foot,” Dick said, “because I couldn’t find an alternate U.S. source that would be viable or price competitive.”

Map of global average surface temperature in 2024 compared to the 1991-2020 average, with places that were warmer than average colored red, and places that were cooler than average colored blue. | NOAA Climate.gov, using NOAA NCEI data.

Long-term outlook

The impacts of human-caused climate change are only expected to worsen, with longer, more intense heat waves along with ​​droughts, wildfires and extreme rainfall. Ramirez said she doesn’t expect wholesale coffee prices to decline anytime soon.

“There’s part of me that wants to believe they’ll go down but I don’t believe they will. I really don’t,” she said. “Another thing to factor in coffee farming: the kids of these farmers are no longer interested in farming because there’s no money in it. It’s a lot of work, and most of them are not getting the satisfaction of knowing where the product goes.”

The average age of coffee farmers in Mexico is 54, and in Africa it’s around 60. 

“I am worried about it, by a lot … ,” Ramirez said. “We’ve always been very committed to making a great cup of coffee in the morning accessible to people. I want them to be able to Frankenstein to the coffee pot and still have a great cup.”

She’s also worried about the retirees on fixed incomes who come in to buy their pound of coffee each week. “I have to figure out how to get them their coffee … but I can’t go out of business, either,” Ramirez said.

Dick said he expects the price of cacao to come back down some, though he doesn’t expect the commodity price to ever return to what it was. In the chocolate industry, farmers are typically “the ones that lose,” getting paid the least out of anyone in the supply chain, he said. But for Dick Taylor’s specialty suppliers, the recent price hikes have actually been beneficial. The suppliers the company purchases from documents payment amounts all the way back to the gate price — the “cash on the barrelhead” paid to farmers. 

“The price that they’re paid … it is astronomical right now, which is wild,” Dick said. But it’s good for the industry. “That incentivizes them to grow more cocoa, which will alleviate the supply shortage.”

Not immediately, though. Cacao trees take about three years to start producing. Still, Dick expects prices to come down, and he’s thankful that they probably won’t go as low as they used to be.

“It’ll still stay, you know, higher than it was, which will be better for the farmers,” he said. “And we’ll just have to figure out, cost-wise, how to make that work.”

Meanwhile, for the next few years at least, global temperatures are expected to remain at or near record highs. 

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

Between May 19th and May 30th, 2025, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office conducted a sex offender registration compliance sweep throughout the County of Humboldt. Representatives from the Arcata Police Department, Rio Dell Police Department, Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office and State Parole assisted during the operation.

During compliance sweeps, law enforcement attempts to contact registered sex offenders in Humboldt County to ensure each offender is following their registration requirements. Pursuant to California Penal Code 290, sex offender registrants are required to register in person with the law enforcement agency that has jurisdiction where they reside. The registrants must also comply with several registration requirements, such as updating their registration annually and informing law enforcement when any changes have been made to their address or registration information. Failure by a sex registrant to keep law enforcement notified of an address change or registration information is a crime and can be punished as a felony or misdemeanor.

As of June 6th, 2025, there are 375 registered sex offenders in Humboldt County. Of the 375 registered sex offenders in Humboldt County, 46 of those offenders are registered as transient. During the compliance sweep, 317 registrants were determined to be in compliance, 23 registrants were suspected of being out of compliance, 28 were unable to be contacted, 2 offenders were currently incarcerated and 4 were discovered to be deceased. Additionally, 7 arrests were made during the operation. Investigators are completing follow up investigations into those found to be out of compliance and anticipate additional arrest warrants to be submitted to the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office. Please keep in mind, those that were unable to be contacted do not necessarily mean they are out of compliance. Often, the compliance sweep takes place on weekdays during work hours, and it is expected that some registrants may not be home during those times.

The annual sweep is a collaborative effort to reduce violent sexual offenses in the county through proactive monitoring of sexual offenders, and strict enforcement of state registration requirements. The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office is a participant in the Region II Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Team, and these enforcement efforts are funded through the SAFE grant.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office would also encourage members of the public to research Megan’s Law, which is a set of state and federal laws that require sex offenders to register with law enforcement and make information about their registration and whereabouts public. The primary purpose is to protect communities, particularly children, from potential harm by sexual offenders. This is achieved by providing the public with access to information about registered sex offenders and allowing law enforcement to notify communities about their presence. Megan’s Law website can be accessed at this link. Anyone with questions or possible concerns about a sex registrant should contact their local law enforcement agency.

For more information regarding the sex offender registration compliance sweep, contact Investigator Jenn Taylor at (707) 268-3642.

Additional Information on Megan’s Law and ways to protect yourself and your family at this link.