From the library

An author and birthday
Author Night — Fascinating Cautionary California History.
Join us at the library on Wednesday evening, Jan. 29, starting at 7 p.m., in the Forum Room for a book talk by the author of a book that may serve as a cautionary tale for us. The book and author are “California Apricots: The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley” by Robin Chapman.  Chapman is a Los Altos native who is a television journalist and the author of four books. She grew up in a subdivided apricot orchard. So by the time she was aware of her surroundings the change from bucolic agriculture to bedroom communities, freeways and the tilt wall buildings housing computer manufacturing startups that characterize today’s Silicon Valley was well underway. She recounts the history of the Santa Clara (now Silicon) Valley by building a narrative around the apricot and its rise and fall as a commercial crop. Like the wine that we know, the apricot was brought to California by the Mission fathers. In the Santa Clara Valley, apricots found an almost terroir. How ‘cot culture grew from humble mission orchards to making the Santa Clara Valley the largest apricot producing region in the world remains only part of the story. That South Bay valley, like much of the North Bay in those early days caused people to rave about it as an earthly paradise.  Just look at two other book titles:  Like Modern Edens:  winegrowing in Santa Clara Valley and Santa Cruz Mountains 1798-1981 / by Charles L. Sullivan; and Wild oats in Eden : Sonoma County in the 19th century by Harvey Hansen.  To find the rest of the story and we lost that Eden to the computer industry of Hewlett Packard and Apple and Google, come listen to Ms Chapman.  
Library Birthday. Here is a heads-up for a library event on Saturday, Feb. 22 from 4 to 6 p.m., that is totally free and open to the public. Yes, that’s the real date of George Washington’s birthday, but we are going to celebrating the 25th birthday of the Healdsburg Regional Library at the corner of Piper and Center streets. It was a quarter century ago that the library moved from the corner of Fitch and Matheson to 139 Piper St. That moved capped about a decade of searching and civic debate over where we should put our new library. To celebrate the Piper and Center location, and libraries in general, we are having a family-friendly celebration at the library with food, soft drinks, cake, reminisces and celebrations of the children’s library, the wine library and good old regular books/dvds/cds/ebooks/audiobooks library. The Friends of the Healdsburg Library are arranging catering. Charity Anderson, our dynamite children’s librarian and Jon Haupt, our suave and knowledgeable wine librarian will have short demos of what they do so well. And I am putting out the call for any people with Healdsburg Library memories to get in touch. Bo Simons 707-433-3772 x5, [email protected]  There will be more as our plans progress.
Bo Simons is the Branch Manager of the Healdsburg Regional Library.