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The mysterious roots of a homegrown language
From Liz Pfeffer | 12:50
Boontling is a dialect spoken in the tiny town of Boonville, Calif. While every word of the homegrown language tells a story, how and why it emerged remains a mystery.
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A few hours north of San Francisco is the town of Boonville, nestled in the quaint Anderson Valley of Mendocino County. Like Silicon Valley, this place is known for its innovations in communication – but in a completely different way.
Boonville has its own homegrown language called Boontling and only a handful of people still speak it. Among them is Wes Smoot, 81, the unofficial king of Boonville.
Smoot and his cohorts meet at the Redwood Drive-In on the central drag practically every day at 4 p.m. Smoot says it’s one of the last places that feels like the town he grew up in. Outside, Smoot says, wine and tourism have turned the friendly, close-knit community into a place full of strangers.
For Smoot, Boontling is a connection to the past. It’s said to have emerged in the late 1800s and every word has a meaning related to a person or event in Boonville. For example, to work hard is ottin’, after a man named Otto who was the hardest worker in town.
But more often than not, Boontling is used to describe salacious words unfit for print. Former Chico State University professor Charles C. Adams published a dictionary of them in his book “Boontling: An American Lingo.”Today, Boonville residents refer to Adams’ publication as “the big book.”
The little book is a pamphlet Smoot prints and distributes around town with a more child-friendly glossary. It has the definitions and origins of words like zeese (coffee) and blue-tail (rattlesnake).
“In order to speak the language and understand the people you gotta know something about the history of the valley,” Smoot says.
That history has cycled from an isolated farming town, to a logging boomtown, to a winemaker’s paradise. But when Smoot returned after several years away from Boonville as a young man serving in the Korean War, and then traveling around the state for Caltrans, he already felt like his childhood home had changed.
Boontling has been documenting those changes word-by-word. Though there’s no recorded history of where the language itself came from.
Smoot’s favorite version of Boontling’s origin is about a young San Francisco woman who became pregnant out of wedlock and was sent up north by her high society parents to have the baby.
“There’s a number of stories, it’s very interesting,” says Robert Nimmons, a volunteer for the Anderson Valley Historical Society. “We’ve heard several stories that the adults developed it so they could talk but the kids didn’t know what they were saying.”
Regardless, there are just a few fluent Boontling speakers left. And even though Smoot and his pals are sure Boonville’s homegrown language will eventually die off, they’re still contributing to the lexicon.
“Another fella and I came up with a new word now, when the salmon go up the stream and spawn,” Smoot says. “Well when you get our age we're downstreamers, we're getting to go back down stream. We're downstreamers now.”
If these walls could rock: Sausalito's musical mecca
From KALW | Part of the Crosscurrents series | 09:41
The Bay Area is known for inspiring all kinds of great music, especially in the 60s and 70s when groups like Creedence Clearwater and the Grateful Dead called it home. In little Sausalito there was a destination that drew recording artists from all over the world.
The Record Plant, later known as just The Plant, was the premier resort studio. It offered artists an unparalleled hotel-like experience under a cloak of absolute privacy. Sly Stone and Rick James basically lived there. It had a revolving door of superstars and the parties never stopped — until 2008 when The Plant shut down.
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- If these walls could rock: Sausalito's musical mecca
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- KALW
The Bay Area is known for inspiring all kinds of great music, especially in the 60s and 70s when groups like Creedence Clearwater and the Grateful Dead called it home. In little Sausalito there was a destination that drew recording artists from all over the world.
The Record Plant, later known as just The Plant, was the premier resort studio. It offered artists an unparalleled hotel-like experience under a cloak of absolute privacy. Sly Stone and Rick James basically lived there. It had a revolving door of superstars and the parties never stopped — until 2008 when The Plant shut down.
How a baby polar bear made it into my living room
From KALW | Part of the Crosscurrents series | 07:36
For every famous name in animal science — Jane Goodall, Ivan Pavlov, Charles Darwin — there are easily 100 scientists you’ve never heard of, including Gail Hedberg, a retiring senior veterinary technician at San Francisco Zoo.
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- How a baby polar bear made it into my living room
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- KALW
For every famous name in animal science — Jane Goodall, Ivan Pavlov, Charles Darwin — there are easily 100 scientists you’ve never heard of, including Gail Hedberg, a retiring senior veterinary technician at San Francisco Zoo.
Addressing chronic homelessness with permanent supportive housing
From Liz Pfeffer | 09:00
Veterans Commons looks like a regular condo building, but its 75 residents are senior veterans who all struggled with chronic homelessness.
California has the largest concentration of homeless veterans in the nation, and in San Francisco, it’s likely that more than 700 homeless vets will sleep on the street or in shelters this Veterans Day.
According to Bevan Dufty, director of San Francisco’s Housing, Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement (HOPE) program, housing homeless veterans is a high priority for the city. And the number of homeless veterans has decreased since last year, thanks in part to the opening of a permanent supportive housing facility called Veterans Commons.
Veterans Commons looks like a regular condo building, but its 75 residents are senior veterans who all struggled with chronic homelessness. The definition of chronically homeless is an individual with a disabling condition who has been homeless for a year or more, or has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the last three years.
For Jesse Breedwolf, chronic homelessness has been reality for more like 50 years. He’s 74, and says that he’s finally found peace in his old age. And the way Veterans Commons was built, he should be able to live there for the rest of his life. It was designed with handicapped accessible features like elevators and roll-in showers.
“It's beautiful for me,” Breedwolf says. “I can just step out of bed and go right in my bathroom, I enjoy that.”
“Long-term homelessness really impacts a person's health and well-being, so veterans those that are chronically homeless may be 65 chronologically years old but are in their eighties in health profile,” says Leon Winston, housing director and chief operating officer of Swords to Plowshares, the veteran service organization behind Veterans Commons.
It cost more than $29 million to get the building, on the outskirts of the Mission district, ready for veterans. It was owned by the city and had served various purposes over the years, from a juvenile hall to a temporary homeless shelter.
Today, Swords to Plowshares, Veterans Affairs and the San Francisco Department of Public Health offer on-site support services.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an organization that analyzes homelessness policies, chronically homeless people overuse services like emergency shelters, emergency rooms, hospitals, and police departments. Permanent supportive housing reduces the burden on those systems, and by extension saves taxpayers thousands of dollars a year.
“There have been studies that show the cost of keeping chronically homeless people homeless is actually more expensive than housing them,” Winston says.
Veterans Commons is the first permanent supportive housing building of its kind in San Francisco, and these groups hope to replicate the model many times over.