Vandals in the early hours Sunday pushed over 11 portable toilets that had been set up in the parking lot of West Marin School for a lunch stop on the Waves to Wine Bike Tour. The tour, which passed through Point Reyes Station Saturday, was a fundraiser for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Each of the toilet stalls holds 30 gallons of sewage and chemicals.

West Marin School Principal Anne Harris (right) and firefighter Joe Morena on Sunday worked out cleanup plans with Jennifer Snow of Marin County Environmental Health Services and crew from the portable-toilet company. The group decided against hosing off the sloped parking lot because that would send contaminated water into the school’s storm drain and potentially into Papermill Creek. Instead, the group decided to wet vacuum the area and disinfect it with bleach.

Caltrans repaved Point Reyes Station’s three-block-long main street, Highway 1, Wednesday and Thursday nights. Wednesday night the southbound lane was paved; Thursday night it was the northbound lane.

Each night, a state highway crew ground off a three-inch-deep layer of the main street and then filled the trench with asphalt.

Point Reyes Station resident Tony Ragona, owner of Windsong Cottage bed-and-breakfast inn, encountered the paving project Thursday evening while picking up his mail and was good enough to contribute these dramatic photos. Seen here at right is the Bank of Petaluma.

Road crews wear highly reflective vests to make sure nighttime drivers see them.

Preparing to lay down new pavement at the north end of the main street.

My houseguest’s tiny Bichon Havanese mix becomes acquainted with one of my resident raccoons. The raccoon could see the elderly dog better than the dog could see her, but neither could smell the other through the glass pane of my dining-room window, so both soon lost interest in each other.

A former neighbor, who through no fault of her own had to abruptly move out of a home on Tomasini Canyon Road, is staying at my cabin for a few weeks as she prepares to move into a new home in Santa Rosa. My houseguest, Linda Petersen, previously lived in Puerto Rico 21 years where she acquired a now-14-year-old Bichon Havanese mix, which is also staying in my cabin.

Havanese, which are related to Pekinese, were originally bred in Havana, Cuba, and this particular pup weighs less than five pounds. Sebastian is almost deaf and almost blind but still has a keen sense of smell. That’s not necessarily a good combination, for whenever the dog gets lost, it follows its nose, as long as its nose is pointing downhill.

My houseguest Linda Petersen with Sebastian the dog at the mouth of the Russian River. Ten years ago, Linda’s daughter Saskia found Sebastian hunting for garbage in the streets of a densely packed suburb of San Juan.

Linda is a horsewoman, and a day or two after she moved in, she went for a ride in the Point Reyes National Seashore and left Sebastian in my care. No problem. The old dog sleeps most of the time. After working at my computer for a while, however, I thought it best to check up on Sebastian and discovered to my dismay that he had slipped out my kitchen door and was nowhere to be seen.

I searched around my house and a neighbor’s. No Sebastian. I then drove over to Tomasini Canyon Road to see if the dog had returned to his old home. Still no Sebastian. By now I was worried that the blind-and-deaf old dog would wander onto Highway 1 where it might be too small for a motorist to see it, so I drove up and down the highway, but still no Sebastian.

As I drove back up Campolindo Road to search my hill further, I surprised an unusually large red fox that skedaddled onto neighbor Jess Santana’s property. A short ways further up the road, I spotted another neighbor, Carol Waxman, and asked her if she had seen a small dog wandering around.

As it turned out, Carol had seen Sebastian only two or three minutes earlier and took me to the place. “He ran off the road right here,” she said, pointing to the spot where I had just seen the fox disappear. That was alarming because Sebastian is far smaller than a jackrabbit and is no match for a fox.

Frantically, I crawled under nearby barbed-wire fences and through thickets of willows to look for the dog while Carol took over my search along Highway 1. The more time went by, the more I worried about the fox getting a hold of Sebastian.

And then suddenly there he was, at the edge of Jess’s driveway heading toward the home of another neighbor, George Grimm. The dog was clearly lost and seemed as happy to see me as I was to see him. As for the fox, it was probably pleased just to have me out of its thicket.

By now Sebastian has had several uneventful encounters with the wildlife on my hill although it’s not clear how much he was aware any of them.

Two blacktail fawns watch Sebastian trot past them down my driveway too blind to see them. (Photo by Linda Petersen)

Using flash photography last Friday night, I managed to get neighbors Jay Haas and Didi Thompson’s Charlie cat climbing into a field of horses, which is better than getting a Charlie horse climbing into a field of cats.

Cats, the musical, was loosely based on a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot titled Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Opening in 1982, Cats played for 20 years, becoming the world’s longest-running musical, and it now cries out for a sequel. Eliot died in 1965, however, so I’ve decided to submit my own collection of doggerel à la Eliot titled Old Cat’s Book of Practical Possums.

If any of my British readers happen to know composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, please tell the baron he can make millions more with a sequel called Possums, which will be loosely based on my transforming poetry, assuming, of course, I get my 10 percent.

The Naming of Possums

The naming of possums is a difficult calling.
It isn’t a matter of mere caterwauling.
For possums have no names for each other.
They know by the scent who’s mate and who’s mother.

Moriarty: The Mystery Possum

Moriarty’s the mystery possum; he has a pink-skinned snout.
You’ll never know when he’ll show up or when he’s not about.
He baffles the raccoons and brings the foxes to despair,
For when they do their nightly search, their prey’s no longer there.

He knows when there’s a cricket near or a moth is unattended,
Or when the cat food’s been left out or the fence is poorly mended.
For coons and foxes on the hunt, Siamese or cocker-spaniel fare
Was going to be their evening meal, but it’s no longer there.

Moriarty, Moriarty. There’s no one like Moriarty.
Whatever crime’s discovered, he’s not the guilty party.
You’ll find dinner on his mottled coat or in his fingers pink,
And when you think that you have found some paw prints in your sink,
They’re never his paw prints; you know he couldn’t get inside.
Perhaps he can; perhaps he can’t; perhaps he’s never tried.

Intruder? Prowler? Nighttime stalker? Moriarty’s on the go.
Let his brethren play the possum; that’s not his style of show.
A marsupial mystery to us all, some say he’s like a rat.
Moriarty cares not what they say. He’s watching for the cat.

Gus: The Theatrical Possum

When he is scared, the possum Gus bares his fangs and growls,
But Gus is not a one to fight and secretly fears scowls.
So when you see opossum Gus looking mighty tough,
I’d just say, “Hi,” and walk on by. It’s only huff and puff.

The Ad-dressing of Possums

As you’ve learned about possums, they’re not all the same.
When sending one home, will you now know its name?
His tail may be scaly, his fur in a mat,
But this you must know: a possum’s no rat.

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KWMR and Love Field in Point Reyes presented a “Far West Fest” Saturday, Aug. 18, as a fundraiser for the community radio station (90.5 FM in Point Reyes Station and 89.3 in Bolinas). Throughout the fair, which ran from 11:30 a..m. to 7 p.m. at the privately owned baseball field, acoustic music and amplified music alternated on two stages. Here the crowd dances to the band Sambad.

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Approximately 750 paying adults plus dozens of children and volunteers enjoyed sunny weather, with many families picnicking in Love Field’s outfield.

Vendors’ booths offered jams and jellies, artwork, a variety of prepared foods, newspaper subscriptions, face painting, t-shirts, children’s books, and information on numerous organizations.

Carlos Porrata of Inverness and his granddaughter play in the shade of the face-painting booth. The retired state park ranger’s colorful braclet shows he has paid admission while the stamp on his hand shows he’s old enough to buy beer.

The Far West Fest included a “Kids’ Zone” filled with outdoor toys, such as this.

The audience dances to the band Camper Van Beethoven during the fundraiser for KWMR. The station, incidentally, can be heard streaming at KWMR.org online.

West Marin Citizen editor Jim Kravets (left) and reporter Jeremy Sharp sold subscriptions to the new weekly newspaper. Other staff also took turns manning the booth.

A laid-back celebration. Despite bright sun in Point Reyes Station, a light breeze off Tomales Bay kept festival goers comfortable. Here an acoustic band tunes up in the background.

Two ravens have begun defending my pasture, often sitting atop pine trees and croaking out loud “cr-r-ruck” warnings. Whenever I wander down my driveway, they circle low overhead, creating quite a din. The easiest way to distinguish ravens from crows, by the way, is by their tails. Raven tails are tapered like the bottom of a man’s tie while the ends of crow tails are squared off. In this photo, a downward flap of the wings leaves a ghost image above them.

A blacktail fawn nibbles on a blackberry vine outside my kitchen window.

Whether one finds entertainment in music, wildlife, or the cosmos, Marin County can be a pretty good place to live. The wildlife alone is more entertaining than television, and enjoying it merely requires keeping your eyes and ears open. In West Marin where light pollution is minimal, the cosmos is on display every night that isn’t foggy. And as for Marin’s music scene, the venues may be small, but the performers are typically top notch.

Moonrise at the Station House Café. The arms of light extending to the right and left are part of a small cloud in front of the moon. In the foreground, a woman in the shadows reads a map by the light of the café sign as a car drives by.

Meanwhile inside the Station House, Si Perkoff on piano, Daniel Fabricant on standup bass, and Dale Polissar on clarinet perform a dazzling set of melodic jazz.

Last Friday a friend and I attended an impressive performance of Hawaiian slack-key-guitar music at the Dance Palace, and on Saturday another friend and I went to the venerable No Name Bar in Sausalito to listen to jazz. The No Name is virtually the last establishment around here surviving from the Beat Era, and the music we called “modern jazz” in the 1950s and 60s can still be heard in the bar every Friday and Saturday night.

Shortly after we found a table, three couples showed up and took a pair of tables next to us. One nut-brown-complected woman in the group was speaking French, and before long she stood up and began dancing all by herself. Now it’s not unusual for a couple or two to dance in the narrow straits between the No Name’s bandstand and bar, but in my years of going to the place, I had never before seen a dancer quite like this one.

The woman must have been a French stripper, for she started doing bumps and grinds in front of the band, giggling all the while. Her dance routine included flirting with men at the bar and periodically raising her a leg over her head as if she were flashing. (In fact, she was wearing long pants.) At other times, she passionately kissed her rakishly coifed husband, and in general kept both men and women in the bar wondering what she would do next.

When the band at her request played a bossa nova number, she and a tall blonde from her group started to dance only to have a somewhat tipsy guy, who’d been on a stool at the bar, cut in and start dancing with her. The blonde then convinced a more-than-hefty black woman from another table to dance with her. Rhythmically swaying to the beat, the third woman’s grace was as impressive as her size. The French woman meanwhile danced holding the tipsy man’s hands on her butt or alternately holding her own arms around his neck; her husband just laughed.

When the three couples finally left the bar, the waitress quipped: “Show’s over.” My friend and I chuckled, but the tipsy guy on his stool at the bar looked forlorn.

The rest of the world may going to hell in a handbasket, I thought to myself, but here in Marin County, folks are still finding ways to have fun.

More entertainment: With a droplet of water still on its chin, a roof rat prepares to climb down a lattice after taking a drink from the birdbath on my deck. In the late 1340s, roof rats’ fleas spread bubonic plague throughout Europe, but the main danger from the timid, little roof rats now in West Marin is to dishwashers. Please see Posting No. 13 for that story.

There was a time in these parts when “W.M.” stood for “West Marin,” but in 1998, Waste Management appropriated the initials for its new, shiny containers which hold our home and yard debris. It now appears that this coast will soon be able to reclaim the abbreviation. These containers are at the foot of Balboa Avenue overlooking White House Pool.

Waste Management of Houston, the conglomerate that for most of July stopped picking up garbage in Oakland and other East Bay cities, may soon stop picking up garbage in West Marin. Here, however, another garbage company is waiting in the wings to take over the conglomerate’s role, so no interruption of service is likely.

In short, what’s in the works is not a big change in garbage but a change in Big Garbage. Waste Management has begun preparations to sell its West Marin franchise to James Ratto. A native of Italy, Ratto has been in the garbage business 51 years and has owned or been a significant investor in about three dozen garbage companies around California. He locally runs The Ratto Group of garbage-pickup operations in Sonoma County and is an owner of Fairfax Garbage Disposal and Novato Disposal Service. Waste Management owns garbage companies throughout the United States and Canada, as well as Marin County’s only dump, Redwood Sanitary Landfill in Novato.

Waste Management also holds separate franchises from Bolinas Public Utility District and Stinson Beach Water District to pick up garbage in those towns. For more than a month, the boards of both districts have been aware Waste Management wants to sell Ratto the franchises for their towns too. Indeed BPUD’s board was preparing to discuss the pending “sale of assets” this Wednesday night, district manager Jennifer Blackman told me earlier in the day.

Jeff Rawles, deputy director of the Marin County Department of Public Works, on Wednesday told me DPW is still waiting for a letter of intent from the corporation before drafting a Board of Supervisors resolution to change the franchise for garbage pickup in West Marin and other unincorporated areas. Referring to Waste Management staff, Rawles noted, “I talked with them. We’ve said, “Where’s your letter?” The county is still waiting for it, Rawles added, but “we’e proceeding under the expectation they’re going to sell.”

Rawles noted that The Ratto Group (through competitive bidding) previously “took over most of Waste Management’s business in Sonoma County.”

Meanwhile, non-union garbagemen this past week began carting off some of the mountains of trash that have been steadily rising along streets in Oakland and other East Bay cities since July 2. On that date Waste Management locked out nearly 500 drivers who belong to the Teamsters Union. The Teamsters’ Alameda County contract with the conglomerate ran out June 30, and thus far negotiators for the two sides have been unable to agree on a new contract. Still at issue are pay, pensions, benefits, and worker discipline.

Waste Management said it locked out its drivers as a preemptive move lest they strike, but the logic of that gambit escapes me, for the effect is the same either way. The union, in turn, has said its members would rather be driving, but as management’s lockout continued, the Teamsters last Friday began picketing Waste Management’s garbage operations in Sonora and Stockton plus its recycling facility in Walnut Creek. With recycling drivers now staying home in Walnut Creek, Tom Ridder, Waste Management’s district manager here, spent Wednesday driving a truck in that city and was not immediately available for comment on the pending sale.

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With lettering almost as large as “Inverness Park” on the county roadsign, the Waste Management logo on its debris containers helps frame the gateway to town. The ubiquitous containers have created a leitmotif for West Marin’s scenic roadways.

In 1990, the County of Marin gave Shoreline Disposal a 25-year franchise to pick up garbage in West Marin, but Waste Management bought Shoreline in 1998 and took over the franchise. County government then ordered an audit of Shoreline’s books and eventually concluded the company had overcharged West Marin residents by as much as $479,000 in 1997, 1998, and 1999. Waste Management in 1999 negotiated a $244,000 settlement, but the money was not returned to the residents. The county held onto it, with most of the money earmarked for educating residents here about proper disposal of waste. That’s a lot of education. Or waste.

The West Marin franchise provides for the garbage hauler’s pickup rates to be reviewed every four years, and this year is that year, Rawles said. The county determines whether the hauler’s recorded costs and revenue are accurate, and if they are, the county allows a 10 percent profit, the DPW deputy director said. He predicted a change in rates and said it is unlikely they will be lowered. In Bolinas, the hauler is annually given a rate increase equivalent to 85 percent of the rise in the federal Consumer Price Index, Blackman said. Garbage rates in Bolinas, however, cannot go up by more than 8 percent a year unless BPUD’s board agrees there is an extraordinary need, she added.

And then there is the question of how all this affects the West Marin Sanitary Landfill, the Martinelli family’s dump in Point Reyes Station that closed in 1998. In 1996, Ratto argued there should be a transfer station at the dump so that a few large trucks occasionally, rather than several smaller trucks frequently, would transport coastal garbage over the hill. Waste Management would not be selling its West Marin franchise if it were very profitable, and driving up its costs has been the need for garbage trucks from the coast to regularly travel all the way to Redwood Sanitary Landfill north of Novato for unloading.

The Martinelli family would still like to have a transfer station at their Tomasini Canyon site. No doubt they could use income from it towards sealing and monitoring the landfill. However, Ratto, 67, is a tough bargainer and sometimes-controversial businessman, and he and the Martinellis several years ago had a falling out. It is, therefore, anyone’s guess as to whether the garbage-company owner would ever resurrect the transfer-station proposal.

A blacktail doe and her two fawns in my field.

Fawns at play bound across my field.

Now that Independence Day is over, let’s take a moment to reflect on what it was really all about. Footraces in Inverness? Parades in Woodacre and Bolinas? A tug of war between Bolinas and Stinson Beach? Illegal fireworks on Stinson Beach? I myself spent much of the holiday enjoying nature.

The odd thing about the Fourth of July is what it doesn’t represent. For example, did the 13 colonies begin their fight for independence from the British crown on July 4, 1776? No, the “shot heard ’round the world,” at the opening battle of the Revolutionary War, had already been fired on April 19, 1775, in Concord, Massachusetts. Paul Revere had made his famous ride the previous night. On April 23, 1775, King George III had declared the colonies to be in open rebellion. The colonists had seized Fort Ticonderoga from the British on May 11, 1775, and on June 16, 1775, had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In short, the American Revolution had been underway for a year when on June 7, 1776, representatives of the 13 colonies, meeting in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress, began debating whether to declare independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. On July 2, all the colonies except New York (which abstained) voted to approve a draft of the Declaration of Independence.

On July 4, 1776, members of the Continental Congress (with New York as usual abstaining) voted to approve a final draft of the Declaration of Independence, but only John Hancock, president of the Congress, signed it before it was sent to a printer.

The document we know as the Declaration of Independence was signed by all members of the Continental Congress, including New York, on Aug. 2, 1776, and backdated to July 4. Perhaps one reason we don’t celebrate Independence Day on Aug. 2 is that those who signed the document on Aug. 2 did so in secret to avoid British reprisals. I personally would have thought that keeping the public in the dark negated the purpose of a “Declaration of Independence.”

In any case, all this was so convoluted that future President John Adams mistakenly wrote his wife after the first vote: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.”

Likewise in the dark and fighting for survival: this dauntless vine of ivy has worked its way through a narrow gap in the wall into my basement, where it is now growing up through a cabinet in my workshop. Because there are no windows in the workshop, the vine gets light only when the basement door is briefly open, as it is here, or when the sun is in a position where there may occasionally be a crack of dim light around the door. The photo demonstrates the valiant persistence of ivy, but it also reveals why many homeowners don’t want it growing on the outside walls.

Was it a ship’s flare or a meteor? It appeared at almost exactly 11 p.m. Monday while I was standing in my living room talking with Nina Howard of Inverness. Suddenly a bright-white light came into view out my window, traveling west to east in the moonlit sky.

“Turn around quick!” I said to Nina, who did and was able to see the end of the light’s long arc as it disappeared behind Inverness Ridge roughly three miles south of my cabin. The light appeared to have been high above the ridge with a long trajectory.

I called the Sheriff’s Office and reported that two of us had just witnessed what appeared to be either a ship’s flare or a meteor. About 10 minutes after I hung up, I got a call from the Coast Guard in Bodega Bay. An officer asked several questions and then requested I stick around the cabin for a followup call.

After a few more minutes went by, I received a call from a woman who identified herself as a member of the Coast Guard in San Francisco. She was clearly well versed in making sense out of what civilians report. Given that the light was visible longer than a typical shooting star, she felt there was a reasonable chance it was a ship’s flare.

She told me to make a fist and hold my arm straight out with my little finger even with the top of Inverness Ridge. How many knuckles above the ridge was the light when I first saw it? “Four or more,” I told her. If I were looking at a clock in the same direction, at what number did the light enter my field of vision? “Eleven,” I said. What is the elevation of my house? “Roughly 200 feet.” Inverness Ridge, on the other hand, is 1,407 feet at its highest point.)

After a few more questions, she said I’d provided enough information that she could organize a search, adding that the Coast Guard appreciated my reporting what I’d seen.

Tuesday morning I checked with the Sheriff’s Office and the Coast Guard, but neither reported finding any boat in distress, so I called the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. Bing Quok, the assistant director, said there was a “possibility” that what I saw was an “early meteor” in an annual meteor shower known as the June Bootids.

The Bootids are normally seen from June 26 until July 2 and will peak this Wednesday night, June 27, an hour and a half before sunset. The typical shower lasts for several hours, appearing to radiate out from the constellation Bootes (hence the name), which is near the end of the handle of the Big Dipper. Bootes will be directly overhead at the peak of the shower.

This map of the constellations comes from the website of Spaceweather PHONE, an unusual enterprise that for $4.95 a month will give you a phone call every time meteor showers, Northern Lights, space-station flybys, planets in alignment etc. can be seen from where you live.

The June Bootids are debris from the comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke, which is named after Jean Louis Pons, a French astronomer who in 1819 first recorded a sighting, and a German astronomer named Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke, who rediscovered the comet in 1858.

The comet normally produces a weak meteor shower, and nothing at all was seen in 1880, 1904, and 1957. However, in 1916, 1921, 1927, and 1998, it produced dramatic showers. In 1998, some 100 meteors an hour streamed from the comet for seven hours straight.

By meteor standards, the Bootids travel slowly, only 40,000 miles per hour (11 miles per second). The light I saw was visible through my window for two to three seconds; if it was indeed a Bootid, I first saw the meteor about three seconds after it entered the earth’s atmosphere, the edge of which is 62 miles above us.

Astronomers, by the way, believe that although meteors primarily come from asteroids (AKA minor planets), they also from comets, the moon, and Mars. Any solid body coming from outer space is called a meteoroid, if it’s at least as large as a speck of dust but is smaller that an asteroid. If we can see it, we call it a meteor, and when a meteor makes it to earth at least partially intact, we call it a meteorite. The meteorites that come from Mars and the moon (more than 20 of each have been found) probably were thrown into outer space when an asteroid slammed into those heavenly bodies.

Although a huge amount of meteoroids (a total of more than 100 tons) supposedly enter our atmosphere daily, most are well under an inch in diameter. And most are traveling so fast (up to 45 miles per second) that they slow down and burn up as a result of atmospheric friction.

On rare occasions, however, a giant hunk of space debris is too heavy to be slowed by air friction although it may ultimately disintegrate, such as the meteor that 49,000 years ago came down near present-day Winslow, Arizona, blasting out this huge crater almost three quarters of a mile in diameter. (USGS photo)

In 1908, a meteoroid believed to have been a 200-foot-wide bundle of stones slammed down on a remote region of Siberia north of Mongolia. Although it disintegrated before hitting the ground, its airburst leveled trees in a 30-mile-wide area and was heard all the way to London.

Scientists have, in fact, calculated how much damage can be expected from different sized meteors. A meteor less than 165 feet in diameter will usually burn up in the upper atmosphere; stone meteors 245 feet in diameter have the impact of the Siberian meteor while iron meteors that big create craters the size of Winslow, Arizona’s, but meteors this size come along only once in a thousand years. Every 5,000 years on average, a meteor 525 feet in diameter devastates an area the size New York City while every 63,000 or so years, meteors roughly 3,000 feet in diameter show up and lay waste to areas the size of Virginia. And every 250,000 years a mile-wide meteor strikes the earth and wipes out an area the size of California or France. An asteroid capable of killing off the dinosaurs drops in every 100 million years.

Fortunately, the Bootids won’t do anything like that; nonetheless, it’s probably worth watching the sky as soon as it gets dark the next few nights, even if the light Nina and I saw Monday was actually a ship’s flare. However, Café Reyes owner Robert Harvel told me Tuesday night he had seen a similar light race across the sky about 10 p.m. Monday, making me now suspect that both lights were part of the same meteor shower.

Inverness resident Andrew M. Schultz died on Monday, June 18, at the age of 58 from complications related to small-cell lung cancer.

His death will inevitably be described by those who knew him as The Death of a Salesman, and Andrew would be the first to agree, as evidenced by his personalized license plates, AD SPACE.

Andrew’s specialty was selling newspaper classified advertising to automobile dealerships, which he did almost continually for more than 30 years.

Born in Manhattan, New York, on July 27, 1948, to Fran and Leon Schultz, he attended public schools in the Bronx, Plainview, and Long Island, as well as Hofstra University on Long Island for two years.

For two years he studied to become a chef only to switch courses and attend two more years of classes at the New York Institute of Photography.

Andrew moved to California in 1971. “I had been wanting to get out of New York. I felt trapped,” he explained in an interview last winter. I felt nothing was happening for me there.”

He arrived in Marin hoping to work as a photographer. Given his choice, he said during the interview, “I would have been a magazine photographer doing cover shots for magazines such as Glamour, Time, and US News and World Report, mainstream magazines.”

Many may have sent or received the composite postcard from Inverness with photos of downtown, a friendly pelican and the famous beached boatwreck. All those photos were taken by Andrew Schultz.

Another of Andrew’s favorite photo assignments has been the annual Disaster Council pancake breakfast at the Point Reyes Station firehouse. Andrew said he enjoyed capturing on film the pillars of the community stuffing their faces with pancakes.

In 1972, he recounted, “I went to work for The Funfinder as a photographer but quickly became a salesman. In those days, The Funfinder was an entertainment periodical the size of TV Guide, boasting a circulation of 20,000 in San Francisco and Marin counties.

When The Marin Independent Journal bought The Funfinder in 1975, Andrew went to work for The Independent Journal. “The most fun I’ve ever had was selling automotive classified when I moved from The Funfinder to The IJ,” he recalled. “It was one of the most interesting changes I made in my work life. It clicked, and I just loved it.

“With the majority of the people that I meet, I discovered that there are three stages. First, they don’t like me at all. Then it’s, ‘Let’s give this guy some time.’ Then, I really win them over. You always know when you’ve broken through to the customer.”

Andrew said he genuinely liked his customers. “About six times, dealers offered me jobs, but I didn’t want to sell cars. Whenever a dealership offered me a job selling their product, I knew I had them right where I wanted them… that they trusted me and we had built a strong professional relationship. Contrary to what most people think, business relationships are really personal relationships.”

Andrew worked at The Independent Journal until 1987, when he moved to Monterey County and began selling automotive classified adds for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “Nine months after I got there, I won salesman of the year,” he recalled with pride. I left Santa Cruz a month before the Loma Prieta earthquake. I had been living in Soquel, two to three miles away from the epicenter in Aptos.”

After moving back to Marin County, Andrew sold advertising at The Point Reyes Light for a year, at the Petaluma office of a free “pennysaver” owned by newspaper chain publisher Dean Lesher, at The Petaluma Argus Courier, The Cotati Times, The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, and Auto Trader in Petaluma.

Indeed, Andrew sold advertising space wherever he could find it, whether it was on cash register tapes or the community-access channel of Horizon Cable. In 1999 after public-utility deregulation, he even tried to sell electricity and was hopeful of signing up most of California’s schools. However, the company he was working for collapsed.

Many West Marin residents knew Andrew as an advertising salesman and operator of Horizon Cable’s community channel, Channel 47. As such, Andrew donated a good portion of his time to helping the local nonprofits with their fundraising.

West Marin had enjoyed good television reception until 1973 when Bay Area channels stopped transmitting from Mount San Bruno and began using the newly constructed Sutro Tower. TV signals to this stretch of coast were then blocked by Mount Tamalpais. Among those unhappy with the resulting poor reception was Andrew. The poor reception also prompted John Robbins, formerly of Inverness, to build the West Marin Cable system, starting in 1983; he sold it to Horizon Cable in 1991.

Robbins, who had employed Andrew part time, recalled in an interview last January, “The first time I met him, I was at the White House Pool building the cable system. He stops his car right on the corner of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Balboa Avenue and wants to know when he’ll get hooked up.”

When Robbins was building the Stinson Beach part of the cable system, he hired Andrew to line up customers. “I let him go there and knock on doors.”

Even after the cable system was built and sold to Horizon, Andrew continued in his spare time to sell advertising for its community-access channel, which was then Channel 11 and 13 and is now Channel 47. Only recently did he finally relinquish that responsibility to Horizon owner Susan Daniels.

“He’s a wonderful, pushy, in-your-face salesman, and he aims to leave you feeling good about the conversation,” Robbins said. “You always knew when Andrew was coming. His voice was a big as he was [6-foot, 3-inches and more than 250 pounds].”

“Sometimes I’m insensitive in realizing that I’m a very big guy,” Andrew acknowledged. “I’ve been told at times I’m disruptive… I’m definitely noticed. I’m good at parties, but I don’t care to go to them very often. I come home at night and the mask comes off.”

©Art Rogers/Point Reyes

Rather than socializing, “Andrew’s life revolved around his computer and movies,” Robbins noted. “At times, I am nearly a hermit,” Andrew confirmed.

“Yet I feel as if I have lots of good friends. I have loved many in my life. I have a hard time understanding jealous people. They don’t seem to realize that you can’t take love from others. Love is only given.”

Surviving Andrew are his brothers Billy, Nathan, and Barry Schultz. His father Leon Schultz died in 1990 and his mother Fran in 2000.

Andrew is also survived by his former partner, Daniel Medina. Andrew also leaves a long list of people he has loved and who have loved him, commenting several weeks ago, “They will all know who they are…”

At his request, Andrew will be cremated. Adobe Creek Funeral Home in Petaluma is handling arrangements. A memorial service will be held on Limantour Beach at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 23. Before he died, Andrew asked that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to Hospice by the Bay and West Marin Senior Services “please.”

Editor’s note: At Andrew Schultz’s request, several of us combined efforts to write this piece before he died.