Last week we drove across the country, stopping for no more than one night at a time in motels from Louisville to Cheyenne. Upon arriving in Sacramento, we spent one night here (luckily I have "home bases" here and in Emeryville), then headed to the Bay Area first thing Monday morning so I could get back to work. The rest of the week we spent essentially living out of the car, sleeping in the home of my boss one night, and the rest of the week in the under-construction home of my company's president. (Big thanks to both of them!)

And the fun isn't quite over yet. We don't move into our new place on Treasure Island until Wednesday morning. Tonight and tomorrow we'll be crashing at the apartment of our friend Josh, who's also our future housemate. Conveniently, he gets kicked out Tuesday night -- the day before we move into the new place.

We'll likely be checking into Motel 6 Tuesday night, but come Wednesday morning, it will come as a huge relief to check in -- permanently -- to our own home.

-Gabe

P.S. If you have the opportunity to do so, see Tom Petty at Arco Arena Monday night! Jen and I saw his show at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View Friday night and it was a truly awesome concert.

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An era in California journalism ended recently in the hallways of 925 L Street, but few people saw it: the departure of the last of the "Unipressers."

Clark McKinley, a fixture in the Capitol Press Corps for three decades, gathered up his belongings and closed the Sacramento bureau of United Press International. "You won," he told a long-time rival from the Associated Press as he toted boxes across the lobby. It was a poignant moment -- for both of them.

For McKinley was UPI's final full-time reporter in Sacramento, the classy remnant of a global news service that was known for speed and humor and camaraderie. In recent years, UPI limped along amid a welter of financial woes and a shrinking clientele, but at its zenith UPI was the kind of news agency that print reporters loved to work for -- fast, fun and ferocious.

Its state Capitol bureau was once California's centerpiece of daily political coverage, and its talented alumni are sprinkled throughout the Press Corps and beyond. Some are "flacks" for politicians, some are reporters at other news outfits, including the nation's top newspapers, at least one is a cop and some, like McKinley, have headed to the Internet. But most remember their days at UPI with fondness.

McKinley, a fit bicyclist of 60 who looks 40 and acts 30, was UPI's consummate deskman, who often got to the wire before AP with stories gleaned from the blizzard of press releases that poured into his bureau. One reporter, with grudging respect and exasperation, dubbed McKinley the "vacuum cleaner" for his ability to produce stories from every scrap of paper and spot good copy in a politician's canned hyperbole. AP reporters often had to chase UPI's stories, and McKinley was the reason why.

Being the underdog probably helped, too. The staff of the defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, facing the daunting prospect of competing against the Los Angeles Times -- which they dubbed "the whale" -- had the same sort of spirit, a peculiar mixture of envy and contempt that seemed to energize the newsroom. UPI viewed AP the same way, as a big, floating blimp ready to be punctured.

McKinley had the needle.

It's arguable whether competition makes for good newspapering, whether the scramble for scoops leads to quality journalism. Does the fact that one wire service has a 15-second beat on another really, in the end, matter at all? But one thing is certain: Competition makes for fun. How else do you come up with such cheery homilies as "Get it first, but first get a drink" or, "When news breaks, we fix it" or, "If it's news, it's news to us?"

But that era, suffused with romance, is over.

So McKinley carried his boxes across the lobby and out the door of 925 L, still known as the "Ellis building" after the mediocre restaurant that once occupied its basement.

He didn't look back. But he was smiling.

If 360 million board feet is the historical harvest from the affected National Forests and the QLG Plan allows a harvest of 286 mbf, then the plan allows a harvest that is 79 percent of the historical harvest, not one-third as you stated [in last week's Capitol Action, http://www.capenq.com/newsletter/archives/1999/aug99/0307.html].

The problem is that the historical harvest that people refer to is an artificially high harvest that was allowed for a few years by the Reagan Administration; it is not a harvest level that existed in the early 80s or the 70s. Lots of scientific analyses have documented that harvest rates of the late 80s were not a sustainable harvest -- the forest was being cut faster than it was growing. The health of the economies of the rural timber communities is most assured if the harvest rate is sustainable over the long term. Most timber communities don't want to recognize this and just want to get back to the good old days of the late 80s, ignoring reality because most of us won't be around when the day of reckoning arrives.

On the issue of thinning to reduce fire threats -- the California Department of Forestry has no record of there ever being a forest fire of any significance in California old-growth redwood forest. As you know, old growth is forest that has never been logged and therefore some would say "overgrown."

Local forests managed by local interests? As you recognized, these are clearly not local forests, they are national forests full of public resources and managing them for the benefit of local economic interests is clearly not appropriate. This concept would never fly in reference to Lake Tahoe, Northern California water or any number of other critical geographical resources. I am sure you are not suggesting turning over Tahoe to the local gambling and hotel industries to manage the basin for the short-term interests of the local economy.

Vern Goehring

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