In March 2021, the Los Angeles film industry was just beginning to roar back to life after a prolonged COVID-induced slump, but Michael Addis, a freelance filmmaker, was still deep in the hole. For more than a year he’d been racking up IOUs to his landlord and the tab stood at $43,792.

So Addis turned to an emergency state program designed to help people like him pay down rental debt accumulated during the pandemic.

Later, in the summer of 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom himself had touted the program, Housing Is Key, as the largest of its kind in the nation. “We’re laser-focused on getting this assistance out the door as quickly as possible,” he said at the time.

Addis heard back 20 months after he applied.

On June 5, 2023 — his 61st birthday — he received an email, which he shared with CalMatters, notifying him that a payment had been approved in full.

But by then it was too late. Addis had already downsized, moving out of his apartment a few blocks from the Marina Del Rey harbor to a smaller spot in the San Fernando Valley. He had also borrowed money from members of his family to pay his old landlord back, hoping that he’d be able to write off the new debt with the relief funds from the state. But once the company that owns his apartment complex, Equity Residential, received a check from the state, they sent it back, citing program guidelines that deemed Addis no longer eligible for assistance.

“It’s just painful to think that the money that was allocated to solve my problem was sent back and I’m still in debt and now I have to downsize again,” he said, explaining that he’s about to move to Simi Valley, even further from his teenage son, who lives with Addis’ ex-wife. “I’m not in any way leaning on the state but I had a bad year — a bad couple years — and there was a program to help. And they helped me in the worst possible way.”

Addis’ long wait for California’s emergency rental relief program isn’t unusual. Though the application window closed in March 2022, more than 70,000 households still have applications pending on the eve of 2024.

California lawmakers created Housing Is Key with billions of dollars in federal relief money, initially guaranteeing everyone who applied in time and was approved would get paid. The ultimate goal of the program was to stem a flood of evictions, as state and local emergency eviction bans came to an end.

For many Californians, it’s been a vital lifeline. The program has sent more than $4.7 billion to nearly 370,000 lower-income households, according to data from the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development.

But a sizable, unlucky minority of applicants — tenants and landlords alike — have had to wait…and wait and wait.

“Tens of thousands of people are at risk of being evicted or made homeless, not because they were ineligible, but because the state ran out of money.”
— Anya Svanoe, spokesperson, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment

In the meantime, many have borrowed money from friends and relatives, pleaded and haggled with impatient creditors, missed monthly payments and turned to online support groups for tips on how to sidestep the program’s red tape.

Still others have been evicted, though the state doesn’t maintain records on how many.

Tenant rights advocates and anti-poverty groups accuse the state of perpetuating a cruel bait-and-switch on some of the state’s neediest. The state’s housing department blames some of those same advocates for the delay, pointing to a lawsuit that slowed down the application review process.

For those still waiting, the hold-up has taken on a new degree of urgency. Housing Is Key might soon be out of cash. Though California’s Housing and Community Development department, which oversees the program, recently “identified additional funding,” it’s unclear whether that will be enough to pay out every last valid claim.

How much is left?

The state’s housing department declined to estimate when the program will run out of money or how many people are likely to get help before that happens. That figure depends on two unknowns: How many of the as-yet unprocessed applications will ultimately be approved and, of those, how much rental debt each applicant is owed.

“Given this inherent uncertainty, we remain focused on assisting as many eligible households as possible with the funding we have available,” said Pablo Espinoza, the department’s deputy communications director.

But the available figures offer a few hints.

As of early November, there were at least 33,658 initial applications still pending, according to data published by the housing department. Another 39,401 applicants were initially denied, but awaiting an appeal review. That’s a total of 73,059 applications.

Though CalMatters reported in early October that the department projected the program would soon be out of money, program administrators were able to dig up some more. According to Espinoza, because the program is in its “final wind-down” phase, money initially set aside to pay administrative overhead or leftover from locally-run programs is now available to help renters. That’s left a new projected balance of roughly $171 million.

But that’s “not nearly enough,” said Anya Svanoe, a spokesperson for Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, one of a handful of organizations that sued the department last year over its administration of the rent relief program. “Tens of thousands of people are at risk of being evicted or made homeless, not because they were ineligible, but because the state ran out of money.”

Svanoe points to the average pay out, published on the program’s online data dashboard: $12,018.

Assuming that same average payment, the program’s current funding would only be able to cover a little more than 14,000 people. That would leave the remaining 58,830 applicants, or 80% of the total pool, out of luck.

Such a high denial rate wouldn’t be consistent with the history of the program. Housing Is Key administrators only denied 29% of completed applications through mid-2022, according to data provided by the department and shared with a coalition of legal aid groups as part of a court settlement reached earlier this year.

The denial rate seems to be ticking up as the program draws to a close. In early October, a mere 17% of the remaining applicants had been denied. A month later, the figure was up to 38%.

That high denial rate could reflect the fact that applications that have been pending this long are disproportionately complicated and more likely to be rejected.

Asked in October about the possibility that many qualified applicants would not ultimately receive help due to a lack of funds, Espinoza said the program funding was “not infinite” and was never intended to serve all eligible applicants, though he acknowledged that the department and other Newsom administration officials had falsely said otherwise in the past.

That realization has started to dawn on some long-waiting applicants. Cassandra Smith, a graphic designer and single mother who lives in Westmorland south of the Salton Sea, said she applied in February 2021.

“I’m trying to find a way to freelance or do whatever I can do to get the money to just pay it myself because I really don’t think they’re going to have enough money to pay people,” she said. “I can’t sit and depend on it and wait because it’s been two years.”

Unintended consequences?

Anti-poverty organizations have been pressuring the state to speed up the approval process.

“These people have been literally waiting for years for a program that is supposed to be an emergency rental program,” said Madeline Howard, a staff attorney at the Western Center on Law & Poverty.

The Western Center and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment were two of the groups that sued the housing department in June 2022 over what they called an “opaque” application review process that harmed lower income renters and people of color.

A month later, a superior court judge in Alameda County ordered the department to stop denying applications until the court had time to give the program’s review process a once-over. That pause lasted until January 2023, at which point the department was once again allowed to start sending out denials, so long as it explained why each request for assistance was being rejected.

The state ultimately settled the case, agreeing to audit its past denials and to make the application process more user-friendly.

The housing department now lays some of the blame for the sluggish administration of the program on that court ruling, which prevented it from issuing full or partial denials.

By early 2023, the program had “approved just about all of the applications we could identify as approvable” and “ had let go most of the program staff,” Espinoza said. Getting the program up and running after the legal hold was lifted added more time. An amended contract from March 2023 between the state and the Mississippi-based accounting firm Horne LLP that administers the program tacked an additional year to the agreement.

Jackie Zaneri, an attorney with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, dismissed the suggestion that the lawsuit is to blame for the program’s tardiness. Nothing in the legal order halting denials prevented the program from processing applications internally and paying out partial awards.

“They chose not to do that,” she said.

The worst kind of help

For renters who do ultimately get help so long after they applied, it may come too late.

Angela Okimoto, a 66-year-old former caregiver in Covina, has been waiting on her application since August 2021. In the meantime, she said she was evicted from the garage she was renting. Now she said she has no permanent home.

The rental debt listed in her application, which she shared with CalMatters, adds up to $15,270. But even if she wins her appeal, that check would go to her former landlord. That might improve her credit history, but it wouldn’t secure her a new place to live.

“These people have been literally waiting for years for a program that is supposed to be an emergency rental program,”
— Madeline Howard, staff attorney, Western Center on Law & Poverty

Okimoto said she checks the online portal and calls the hotline nearly every day anyway.

“All they tell me is, ‘Yeah, they’re working on it…just be patient.’” she said. “I say, ‘I’m as patient as can be. It’s been two years. You can’t get any more patient than that.’”

Landlords are also among those waiting.

Cindy, who lives near Yuba City north of Sacramento and who asked that her surname not be published so as not to jeopardize her pending payment, said she bought her three-bedroom home in early 2020 and took on two tenants to help her with the mortgage. In late 2021, one of her tenants was unable to pay his rent, so she encouraged him to apply to Housing Is Key.

Without his payments, she said she used credit cards to pay her mortgage. “That money is going to come so I’ll just use this to pay this bill,” she said she told herself.

Her payment for $13,600 wasn’t approved for nearly two years. She said she’s still waiting on the check in the mail.

Had she known at the outset how long the approval process would take, “I would have probably made different arrangements — I don’t know, maybe borrowed money from my parents,” she said. “When I moved in, I had great credit,” she said. As in the case with Addis, the Simi Valley renter, Housing Is Key has a policy of not reimbursing so-called shadow debt, loans taken out to pay down rental debt. Cindy now says she has $20,000 in credit card debt.

Last month, she said she unexpectedly lost her job of eight years.

Turning to strangers for help

Leslie Pollock, a private chef in Santa Monica, wonders how she’ll ever be able to move out of her apartment.

Living in a rent-controlled unit in Santa Monica, Pollock said she initially applied for help while recuperating from cancer treatment after the pandemic shuttered her business. Even so, she considers herself one of the lucky ones. She’s working again, cancer-free and only owes three-and-a-half month’s rent. No one has threatened her with eviction yet.

But she still feels stuck. Her landlord is reluctant to do upkeep with the debt outstanding, she said, and she worries about being able to rent anywhere else with so much red ink on her record. Most frustrating of all, she said her application was approved a year ago, but the check was sent to the wrong address. She said she regularly calls the hotline to try to explain the situation, but can never get someone with decision-making power on the phone.

“I say, ‘Can I email?’ and they say ‘No, we don’t have capacity to get email,’” Pollock recalled. “They would just say ‘We can’t tell you anything,’ ‘We can’t tell you when that was approved,’ ‘We can’t tell you when that check was cut,’ ‘We can’t tell you…’”

Many of the applicants fed up with the program’s hotline or web portal have wound up in a Facebook group created by Bella Allen.

The owner of a property management company in Long Beach, Allen set up the private group in 2021 to help a friend who was trying to navigate the new state program.

Two years later the Facebook group’s membership has swelled to more than 3,000. Posts include triumphant screenshots of approval letters and despondent post-denial missives. There are requests for help translating the program’s bureaucratese, as well as rants about the state’s housing department or, more frequently, about Horne, the company hired by the state to administer the program. There’s an occasional meme and no shortage of theories that verge on conspiratorial.

As the months have dragged on, the tenor of the posts have grown more desperate and irate. Allen said she has reached out to lawmakers, lawyers, journalists and legal aid groups, all to no avail. She said she spends hours after work and late into the night moderating the group and fielding questions as best she can. But she acknowledged that she isn’t an expert and has no inside knowledge of how the program works.

“I don’t know what to tell these people,” she said. “And I’m gutted.”

###

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

California’s $53 million investment in teaching its youngest and lowest-performing students to read has shown dramatic — and relatively fast — results, researchers at Stanford have found.

In a study released Sunday night, researchers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education found that the percent of third-graders in the program who met or nearly met the state reading standards rose 6 percentage points, compared to students at similar schools.

“This study shows we can eradicate illiteracy at warp speed,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney behind the lawsuit that spurred the state’s Early Literacy Support Block Grant program. “I wasn’t surprised at the results. But I was impressed with the speed, especially during a pandemic.”

The program came about in 2020 as part of a settlement of a lawsuit filed by Morrison Foerster and Public Counsel, a nonprofit public interest firm based in Los Angeles. Far too many students in California, especially those who are Black, Latino and low-income, were not learning to read, with disastrous results, the lawsuit said. Students who can’t read well by fourth grade are significantly more likely to drop out of school and engage in risky behavior as adolescents, research has shown.

The lawsuit settlement called for California to spend $50 million on literacy programs at the state’s 75 worst-performing elementary schools. At most of these schools, fewer than 10% of students – in some cases, less than 3% – met the state’s reading standard prior to the pandemic, compared to about half of students statewide. Most of the money went toward training teachers, hiring classroom aides and purchasing books. But districts had some leeway to tailor funding to their own unique needs.

Most districts adopted phonics-based curricula inspired by the so-called “science of reading,” an approach to literacy focused on language comprehension and phonics, or matching sounds to letters. Until recently, most schools in California used a “balanced literacy” approach, which includes phonics but also encourages students to recognize whole words by sight.

“Reading wars” over various approaches to teaching literacy have raged for years, but this study is among the first to show distinct before-and-after results, comparing similar schools over time, boosting the idea that the science of reading is a more effective technique.

“The takeaway is that targeted, well-designed science of reading interventions can make a big difference,” said Sarah Novicoff, a doctoral student who worked on the study. “It demonstrated that efforts like this are worth pursuing.”

Becky Sullivan, English language arts director at the Sacramento County Office of Education and coordinator of the block grant for all the targeted schools, said she knew within months that the program was working, based on initial testing that showed 95% of students were making progress.

“I’m really proud of all the schools and teachers who put in the hard work. It shows,” Sullivan said. “We’ve impacted the lives of 15,000 students, from the north end of the state to the south.”

‘Literacy is a moral imperative’

Joshua Elementary in Lancaster, in northern Los Angeles County, was among the schools singled out in the grant. Five years ago, Joshua was one of the lowest-performing schools in the state, if not the country, with fewer than 3% of third graders meeting or exceeding the state’s Smarter Balanced reading standards. Using grant funds, the district tossed out part of its previous literacy curriculum and adopted a new one focused on the science of reading. Teachers were trained, children got new reading materials, and tests were given regularly.

Last year, the number of third-graders meeting the standard nearly doubled, and district officials expect the numbers to keep climbing.

“Our data is still low, but we are seeing vast improvements,” said Krista Thomsen, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction and assessment. “What we are seeing now is teacher buy-in, because they’re seeing success teaching kids how to read. … The entire staff understands that literacy is a moral imperative.”

“Students were running up to me saying, ‘Mr. Humphrey, want to hear me read?’ The glimmer in their eyes, the smiles on their faces. I thought, that’s why we’re doing this.”
— Robert Humphrey, former principal at Bel Air Elementary in Bay Point

Bel Air Elementary in Bay Point, in Contra Costa County, used its grant money — $1 million over three years — to hire reading specialists to work with students in small groups. The school also brought in a new phonics-based curriculum, closely tracked student progress and trained teachers.

The results were almost instant, said Robert Humphrey, Bel Air principal at the time.

“Students were running up to me saying, ‘Mr. Humphrey, want to hear me read?’ The glimmer in their eyes, the smiles on their faces. I thought, that’s why we’re doing this,” Humphrey said. “It’s been an absolutely amazing turnaround.”

He also noticed a decline in behavior problems and an overall improvement in morale, among teachers as well as students. “Walking around campus, you could feel the difference,” he said.

He is worried, however, about what happens when the grant money runs out next year. He’s looking at ways to continue funding the reading specialists.

More grant money is available through the California Department of Education’s new Literacy Coaches and Reading Specialists program, which will bring $500 million to about 800 schools statewide. The program, authorized by Assembly bill 181, was started in 2022 and is available to any elementary school that has an enrollment that’s more than 95% low-income, English learner or foster youth.

Still, that leaves thousands of schools without funding to train teachers and buy materials to implement the science of reading. Rosenbaum said that the results from the Stanford study are too promising to let the initiative fade away for lack of funding.

“It should be expanded throughout the country, at every school,” he said. “And if it’s not, we’ll just file more lawsuits.”

###

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

The old joke goes, “Please tell your father to call me back, Jim Clew. That’s C as in crocodile, L as in leopard, E as in elephant…” “Sorry, E as in what?”

Meanwhile, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in case you’re young and innocent) has its own 26-word phonetic alphabet, one that’s engraved into every pilot’s brain, even if, like me, you haven’t flown in 30 years. From Alfa-Bravo-Charlie to Xray-Yankee-Zulu, the NATO system is unambiguous and easily-memorized, used by pilots and dispatchers and airline ticket agents the world over. Developed over several decades, iteration after iteration, the NATO phonetic alphabet was finalized in 1956 and universally adopted by virtually all groups needing to communicate precisely by radio or telephone. It’s particularly useful for airline pilots and air traffic controllers, for whom accurate communication can mean life or death. (I learned to fly in a PA-28 Cherokee whose code letters “Tango-Romeo-Bravo” sounded — and sound — so cool when pronounced in a plummy Oxford accent.)

Even though it’s been generally adopted, not everything is totally uniform (or Uniform, that being the NATO signifier for “U”). For instance, in this country you’ll often see “Alpha” and “Juliet” written instead of the official NATO “Alfa” and “Juliett.” Wisely, the creators of the NATO alphabet recognized that “ph” isn’t universally spoken as “f”; and that native French speakers, for instance, drop the “t” in Juliet when speaking, hence the double “t.”

I grew up on the Morse Code — or at least learned it when my brain was sufficiently flexible (in the Boy Scouts) to be able to still remember it pretty well, although I’m now much slower than decades ago. In the mid-1830s, artist Samuel Morse figured out a way to send numbers over a telegraph line, the idea being that operators would use a codebook to translate letters to numbers and vice-versa. Within a few years, mechanical engineer Alfred Vail came up with an early version of what is now the International Morse Code, skipping the numbers and going straight to letters.

Vail based his code of dots and dashes on the frequency of letters, so that “e” (the most common letter in English) is represented by a single dot; “a” by dot-dash; s by three dots; and “o” (surely an outlier?) by three dashes. Hence SOS = dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit. Vail and Morse were the first two operators on Morse’s experimental telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore in 1844; sadly, they subsequently had a falling out over patent rights.

(When I say I learned Morse Code, I was strictly a klunky amateur. Today the Boy Scouts of America award a “Morse interpreter’s strip” for sending and receiving at a rate in excess of five words per minute, a painfully slow method of communication. Typically, operators during WW2 would send and receive at 70-100 words per minute.)

Another code, still used (very) occasionally for ships at sea, is the International Code of Signals, adopted for worldwide use in 1901. You can see an example of this in Old Town on the F Street pier, greeting everyone and anyone to our fair city. I’ll leave it to you to figure out exactly what these 15 flags say.

###

The City of Eureka held a Community Health Town Hall this morning to discuss some of the issues surrounding substance use disorder in our community and explore strategies to help struggling individuals find supportive care without stigma.

“This is a really important topic because I think there’s so many misconceptions and so many myths about addiction and substance use,” Eureka Mayor Kim Bergel said at the beginning of today’s town hall. “It’s a tough one sometimes to talk about. I just want to remind folks that substance use – this is one of the myths – is not a moral issue. … Substance use does not discriminate. It doesn’t care if you live on a hill with a lot of money or if you live on the street – substance use doesn’t care.”

One of the panelists, Dr. David Villasenor, a psychiatrist with the Eureka Veterans Administration, said the solution to addiction is “super simple,” but stopping the abuse is where it gets complicated.

Villasenor

“The pathway to that solution is very difficult and can be very convoluted and confusing, but there is always hope in addiction,” he said. “I’d like to say that some people in recovery are some of the wisest people I know. They have a profound understanding that the onus of control is theirs, that they have to make the decision … and other people who don’t have that challenge really never face their demons and have to make that personal change in such a profound way.”

However, individuals struggling with substance use disorder have co-occurring mental health conditions that can make treatment more difficult and even lead to further abuse, said Wes Harrison, executive director of Crossroads Recovery in Eureka.

“Each exacerbates the other,” he said. “Mental health – if left untreated – will feed into substance use behavior and then that substance use behavior will exacerbate the mental health and will very quickly and rapidly decline an individual’s quality of life, which will often lead to more substance use, criminality, homelessness and even death.”

In recent years, the local and national addiction crisis has been driven largely by the proliferation of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Jacob Rosen, program director of the Crisis Alternative Response of Eureka (CARE) team, asked the panel how fentanyl has changed their approach to substance use disorder.

Harrison

“I haven’t seen a heroin positivity case in two years … which tells me one very important factor: fentanyl is the drug of choice,” Harrison said. “We had gotten really good at understanding opiate withdrawal and treating heroin use … and we thought all of that knowledge would really prepare us somewhat for fentanyl. … What we didn’t know was just how difficult the detox portion of fentanyl was going to be.”

Providers didn’t know how long fentanyl would stay in a user’s system, Harrison said. 

“We were used to opiates getting out of a person’s system within three to five days, which meant you could detox in that period of time,” he continued. “What we’re seeing now is fentanyl staying in people’s systems for up to two weeks after their last use. Their detox is lasting 10 days.”

Rio Dell Chief of Police Greg Allan said he couldn’t remember the last time he encountered heroin. “Fentanyl is the big one right now and it’s hard to combat it.”

One of the issues with fentanyl – and even more so with Xylazine, a powerful non-opioid sedative that is sometimes mixed with fentanyl – is its resistance to naloxone, also known by its brand name Narcan, an opioid antagonist medication used to reverse an opioid overdose.

“[Fentanyl] is a high-potency synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than heroin, and all of our treatments are calibrated to heroin,” said Villasenor. “We have this drug that’s only been around a couple of years and we still don’t have a good protocol.”

Vesta Wunner, a behavioral health clinician with the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services, said it often takes more than one canister of naloxone to save someone from overdosing on fentanyl and encouraged people – everyone – to carry several doses at any given time.

Wunner

“This is going to save your life in an overdose emergency,” Wunner said, holding a box with the “NARCAN” label. “You may need four or five of these. If you have an opioid or synthetic opioid addiction, medically assisted treatment has a variety of drugs that can help somebody maintain sobriety over time, but that’s not Narcan. That’s methadone and suboxone, and those – just like somebody who has diabetes – a medication that can stabilize a person while they’re getting other kinds of treatment and support.”

Throughout the discussion, the panel emphasized that substance use disorder must be treated like a disease “because it behaves like a disease.”

“That’s why we say it and repeat it over and over again,” Harrison said. “This moral failing issue – sure, it feels that way because then we get something to blame – but the way substance use disorder works is … it is a brain disorder. It follows the disease model because it behaves exactly like a disease.”

Chief Allan emphasized the importance of humanizing people who struggle with substance use disorder.

“You know, looking down on somebody, thinking that you’re better than them or they’re less than you – I always tell people that one decision in your life could have put you in that same position,” he said. “Think about where you came from, the people around you and those that are suffering in your family and put yourself in that position. Humanizing is a great way to understand what somebody else is going through.

The panel spoke at length about several other issues surrounding substance use disorder and took questions from attendees. Press “play” on the video above if you’d like to watch the full video.

### 

If you’re struggling with substance abuse disorder, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) national helpline at 1-800-662-4357.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe is engaged in exciting work to help promote a greener, more resilient power grid. And they are being recognized for their good work! Linnea Jackson, the general manager of the Hoopa Valley Public Utilities District, is the California Energy Commission’s 2023 “Tribal Champion” award winner and inductee into the Clean Energy Hall of Fame.

Linnea joins the show to talk about the challenges of providing power, water and waste services for a rural district and opportunities to help better the Hoopa Valley through new investments in renewable energy.

If you want to celebrate with Linnea, you can join the ceremony in person or by Zoom. 

Sixty years ago, the 1960-61 sports scene at Eureka High School had gotten off to a slow start. The football team had finished with a 2-5-1 record that included two losses to arch rival Arcata by a combined total of 6-76.

Basketball season was about to commence, but times were different then. There was no McKinleyville High School. There was a Big 4 conference consisting of Arcata, Del Norte, Eureka, and Fortuna, and a Little 4 conference made up of Ferndale, Hoopa, St. Bernards, and South Fork. Conference play would consist of playing everyone in their own conference twice and the teams in the other conference once. This was the first year with this new format. In years past, each team played all the other schools twice. On the court there was a jump ball at the start of each quarter, there was no shot clock, and no three point shot.

In addition to the rules and scheduling changes, each school fielded a “lightweight” and “heavyweight” squad. There were no varsity and junior varsity squads based on age. A point system was assigned to an individual based on age, height, and weight, and if their total was under a certain amount, they could be a lightweight even if they were a senior.

With basketball season starting, Eureka was the pre-season favorite. We had finished second the last two years behind Fortuna. Our record against them in that two-year span was 1-3 but we had broken their twenty-five game win streak with our sole victory over them. We always had problems with Arcata and our record for the previous two years against them was 1-7. We had dominated everyone else in the Big 4 and Little 4. We were probably favored because of my presence at center at 6‘8” and having led the league in scoring and been a unanimous All-League selection the previous year.

However, there was more to it than me. This year there was a team chemistry that had been lacking in the 1959-60 season and the other players were pretty good in their own right. One of the pictures shows and lists the team members. I want to mention the other starters, all juniors. Our point guard was Bill Goodwin, an excellent ball handler and a deadly shooter, especially at free throws. The other guard was Larry Sample, probably the best athlete on the team, a good shooter and ball handler who would occasionally do the most unexpected things, usually for the better.

The forwards were Randy Teach and Tom McGuire, who were steady rebounders, defenders, and scorers. A sixth person, Mike Walsh, had transfered over from St. Bernards and as he got familiar with our system, he was like an extra starter.

In addition to the team members was our coach Mark Melendy. Mark was a star quarterback at Eureka as well as Humboldt State. In between the two, he was a belly gunner on a B-17 bomber in WWII. His philosophy was demonstrated when I first made the team as a sophomore and he gathered us for our first team meeting. He told us we were there to have fun. As I was digesting that he followed up with, “If any of you think losing is fun, you can leave right now!” The season started remarkably with wins over Willits, 61-33; and Ashland, 59-38; and then we headed off to Weed. Weed was a perennial powerhouse in their area and would give us a good test. As the air is thinner in Weed at 5,000 feet, the altitude posed a problem for those of us used to living at sea level.

Our Friday night game with them was nip and tuck and at the end of the regulation game, we were tied and went into overtime. We were told a few hours after the game that at that point the official scorer, a Weed supporter, had made an error and that Weed had actually won by one point, but since it was their error we went to overtime and prevailed 56-52.

In the Saturday night game I picked up an early foul and it wasn’t too long until I picked up a second foul. I averaged about one foul a game and it became apparent that they were running plays designed to get me to foul out of the game, which I did with about two minutes left in the fourth quarter. At that time Weed had a slight lead and held on to win 51-56.

We went back to the coast to prepare for the preseason Big 4 tourney. We played Fortuna on Friday at Arcata, and host Arcata would play Del Norte the same evening, and the losers and winners would play each other on Saturday. Our game against Fortuna started as usual. During warm ups, their center, Don Jacobsen, and I would chat at mid court. We had played each other so many times we were friends. He always grouched that as the second tallest player in the league at 6‘4”, he hated our match-ups often called the “Battle of the Titans” as he wasn’t close enough to my height. For the first time, we had a fairly easy win. The next night we played Arcata. It was a difficult game with the Arcata defense playing defense loosely on my teammates in order to sag into the key and help defend against me. This ploy did not work in the third quarter because with the extra room my teammates took and made all ten shots. The Arcata jinx was buried as we went on to win, 58-39.

We played one more pre-season game against Arcata. It was a pre-lim to a Harlem Clowns game. It was a very hard fought game that we won by only two points. At this point I was averaging just under twenty-two points per game and just over two fouls.

The first week-end of league play saw victories over Arcata and Ferndale. This led to two things of note: On the following Monday the physics class was celebrating because our instructor had told us that if I scored fifty points over the weekend, he would cancel the test on Monday. I had 15 and 35 thus the test was canceled. But it also caused another issue to surface.

At that time Eureka had two newspapers, The Humboldt Times, distributed in the morning, and the Humboldt Standard, distributed in the late afternoon. They had two different sports editors. The Times had Al Tostado, a part time St. Bernards coach and ardent supporter of St. Bernards. The Standard had Don Terbush, who was the uncle and father figure to his two nephews who were my neighbors.

Mr. Tostado wrote an inflammatory article indicating that my teammates were under instructions to feed me the ball in the fourth quarter. He compared that to a Del Norte player who was such a gentleman that after scoring 26 points, he asked to be taken out of the game. The article is in my scrapbook with my mother’s hand-written notes on it pointing out I only played one minute in the 4th quarter and other disclaimers. We had a team meeting where I proclaimed I liked scoring points and we kept playing our game.

Coach Melendy usually took the first string out if we had a 20 point lead. If that occurred in the first half we would start the second half and if we started to pull further ahead he would pull us again. The only time that he did not follow this script was against Hoopa. On the way to the game he pulled me aside and said that Hoopa was playing in a new gym and people were coming from up and down the valley to see me play. He told me to give them a show. At half time I had 20 points and in the third quarter another 20, including a half court shot at the buzzer. He then took me out.

In league play, there were two games of note. The first was against South Fork. I learned some background information on this game when I gave rides home from Stanford on different breaks to Jack Monschke, a starting guard for South Fork. I will use the information that I gained a year after we played to set the stage.

Leading up to our game, I was averaging close to 30 points a game and 0.8 fouls. The South Fork team was averaging about 28 points per game. The South Fork coach wasn’t happy with those stats and decided that I was not to score a lot of points, and instituted a game plan that consisted of two large people following me all over the court when they were on defense and when they were on offense they would not try to score but just stall to use as much time as possible in order to keep the ball out of our hands. Remember, at that time, unlike now, there was no shot clock that mandated you shoot the ball and at least hit the rim within thirty-five seconds of gaining possession of the ball.

When we won the opening tip, I went to my corner of the court and even though I did not have the ball there were two fellows pinning me in the corner with their arms raised to deny me the ball. The other three were in a zone against my remaining four teammates. This took us by surprise, to say the least, and we did not score initially. When South Fork came down, they went into their stall. At the end of the first quarter they were ahead 4-1. More of the same occurred in the second quarter but we ended up ahead 6-5 at the half.

Coach Melendy wasn’t pleased at the half, not with us, but with the other coach and said, “OK, if they want to play that way let’s go out there, get the opening tip, score a basket and we will stall the second half.” What I learned later was South Fork had intended to play a regular second half. The second half started, we got the opening tip but rather than take the ball down and work it in for a close shot like the coach instructed, Sample dribbled down and threw up a fifteen foot jump shot and made it. We held them and went into our stall.

They did not contest our stall, and for a few minutes Goodwin was actually sitting on the ball while the defenders stayed away from him. By the end of the third quarter, we were up 17-9. In the fourth quarter they closed the gap and we were ahead by one with a minute or so to go and Goodwin and Sample were dribbling out the clock when Goodwin was fouled. He calmly sank two free throws putting us up three, and South Fork was allowed to dribble the length of the court and make a lay-in to end the game in our favor, 20-19. They achieved their goal of keeping it close and holding me in check as I only had 4 points and no fouls.

The other game of interest was against Del Norte at their gym. The first half was a hard fought contest that ended up with us ahead 30-28. Coach Melendy, called the third quarter “the best basketball” he had seen. It wasn’t so much of a team effort, but Larry Sample just took over and made unbelievable shots. The most memorable incident had to be explained to me during the quarter break.

Del Norte had stolen the ball, and as they were taking it to their end, they lost it to us, and because of that I was ahead of the rest of the team getting back on offense. As I got to the free throw line, I turned and saw all my team mates still on the other end of the court but I didn’t see the ball. Then I heard a bam/swish noise as the ball hit the backboard and went through the net. The ref held up two fingers for a basket and though I didn’t know what had happened, I trotted down to defense.

What had happened was that Sample had the ball and glanced up at the clock as he neared half court and saw that there were only two seconds left, so he let go with his half court shot that he made. When the buzzer didn’t go off he realized that there had been 1:02 left on the clock. That shot put us up 16 points and the Del Norte coach, Maciel, wandered over to our bench and asked Melendy what the heck was going on? We won by 23.

Our last game was against Fortuna, which we won to end up 10-0 in league play and 16-1 over all. We had planned to make our standard trip to Yreka for a post-season tournament, as Eureka had done for the last eight years or so. At this point Don Terbush came forth and told Coach Melendy that he knew some people in the Bay Area, and he thought he could get us an invite to the prestigious Tournament of Champions.

At this time there was no North Coast Sectional tournament or state championships. The Tournament of Champions was held at Harmon Gymnasium, the home court of the U.C. Berkeley Bears and consisted of the champions from seven central California leagues and one at-large team. It was recognized as the northern California championship tourney. Coach asked us if we wanted to go, and we certainly did. Mr. Terbush worked his magic and we were offered the at-large bid. We accepted and then sat on the information so that Mr. Terbush could break the story in the Standard. Mr. Tostado got wind of what was going on, but could only print rumors as no one would confirm the story. Yreka was mad that Eureka was backing out and we were never invited to their tournament again.

The tournament line-up was set with other teams being: McClymonds (Oakland), Livermore, Monterey, Redwoods (Marin), Sacred Heart (San Francisco), Vallejo and Richmond. As we were the number eight-seeded team we had the honor of playing the number one seed, the Richmond Oilers, who were 24-0 and known for their full court press where they defend you closely all over the court rather than just down on their defensive end.

We had two weeks to prepare for our game We had practiced against the press before and usually it did not bother us. To better ourselves, Melendy asked his brother-in-law, Ernie Cunningham if he would reassemble his St. Bernards squad and press us. I recall them using extra people to harass us even more than normal.

We didn’t know what to expect as we set off on what was then a two-day trip to the Bay Area. We were told that most Bay Area people thought we may not play in shoes, and another pre-season story about Richmond surfaced: “If they can keep their center out of jail, they will do well!”

Harmon Gymnasium was different than we were used to. It seated 8,000 and the seats were at a very steep angle. The McClymonds team was playing before us and they rolled out a cart with a bunch of head phones and a microphone so the coach could talk to them over the very noisy cheering section. It was, to say the least, different.

The account of the game, which we won 48-42, is aptly described in Don Terbush’s article from the Humboldt Standard, which follows.

Loggers Beat ACAL Champs 48-42, Play Vallejo High Tonight by Don Terbush Standard Sport Editor

BERKELEY—Eureka, in its greatest showing of the year, provided California cage prepdom with its most stunning upset as the underdog Loggers rose to undreamed of heights in securing a 48-42 Tournament of champions win over the previously invincible Richmond Oilers Thursday night.

Nearly 6500 onlookers converted Harmon Gymnasium in sheer pandemonium, as the Oilers’ 24-game skein snapped.

The Loggers, led by the brilliant, ball-hawking play of Bill Goodwin took a 5-4 lead with 3:50 remaining in the first quarter and pulled steadily away to record what must rank as the upset of 1961 in high school cage circles.

…Goodwin, a 5-11 junior guard, enjoyed his finest 32 minutes of high school basketball. He pulled in nine of Eureka’s 32 rebounds, tallied an equal number of points, including five-for-five at the free throw line, set up countless scoring plays with precision passing and ball-handling, and thwarted Richmond’s full-court press on numerous pressure-packed occasions.

A majority of teammate Larry Sample’s 13 points came as a result of Goodwin’s feed passes. Center John Murray, one of the TofC’s most publicized players, topped rebounding with 11 and contributed 12 points. Most of the 6-8 senior’s brightest moments came in the second half. …Eureka jumped ahead with 3:50 remaining, and then two layins by Goodwin and Sample added up to a 10-5 first quarter lead. During the first period the Oilers went six minutes without scoring a point.

We then proceeded to lose our next two games, but we had left our mark as our win over Richmond was called the biggest upset in tournament history. After the championship game that McClymonds won both Goodwin and I were named to the ten-man all tourney team. Along with McClymonds we were the only teams with two people selected. Other post season honors saw me selected to the All Northern California first team. In our own league I was a unanimous first team selection plus Goodwin and Sample were placed on the second team. Teach and McGuire were honorable mention.

Some fifty years later our team was selected as the second team to be inducted into the Eureka High School Hall of Fame. In 2011, that honor was also bestowed upon me as an individual player. As part of my “Poster,” I selected a picture of me being guarded by Don Jacobsen of Fortuna so that he could tell his friends he was in the Eureka High Hall of Fame.

After graduation, two of our team, Albonico and Norton, were killed within three months in separate auto accidents. Four of us attended Stanford as undergraduates; myself, Goodwin, Walsh, and Oswald. Another, Teach, received a Ph.D from Stanford. Hibler would go on to earn a Ph.D from Oregon State University.

###

The story above was originally printed in the Spring 2021 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.

Mary Dawn Cunningham left us on November 23, 2023 in the early morning hours. She was widowed on September 24, 2008,after the death of her husband, Ernest Cunningham. She is survived by her daughter Katy Cunningham and her son William Cunningham.

Mary Dawn was born in Alameda on June 7, 1927 to Mary and Mark Melendy. Soon after they came to Humboldt County and lived in Freshwater until they moved into their house in Eureka, on M Street.

Mary Dawn attended Lafayette Elementary School, then Eureka Junior High, Eureka Senior High, where she excelled as a student. After graduating high school, she attended Humboldt State College majoring in education. After graduation she taught 1st grade at Freshwater Elementary for three years.

Friends introduced Mary Dawn to Ernest Cunningham, and a romance began, ending in marriage on December 27, 1949.

They purchased a home in Eureka in 1951, living in that home for the rest of her life. Mary Dawn and Ernest started a family and had two children: Katy Eileen Cunningham and William Ernest Cunningham.

Mary was tremendous homemaker. As well as being a participating mother in her children’s education, she was also active in PTA, Beta Sigma Phi Sorority and the local 4-H Chapter. she was also very knowledgeable regarding local Humboldt County history and wrote number of articles about various local historical events.

She loved to travel and enjoyed the family trips in their small RV, touring around the country.She and Ernie also enjoyed a partnership with another couple, and owned a local laundromat together. After selling the laundromat, Mary and Ernie went traveling in Europe, discovering more information on their family heritages.

Mary Dawn lived comfortably through the rest of her life in the house they purchased in 1951.

Mary Dawn Cunningham passed away gracefully at home at the age of 96, with her children. There will be a graveside service on December 21, 2023 at 11 a.m. at the Oceanview Cemetery. Family and friends are cordially invited to attend.

###