Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

While doing some research at the Searls Historical Library in Nevada City, I ran across this photo of Foothill Flowers, circa 1967. You could almost imagine Ward, Wally and “Beaver” Cleaver coming out the front door, holding a bouquet of flowers for June.

We’re lucky to have such a fine collection of photos of our past.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

In a neighborhood where we can’t even tap into a 3G wireless network with an iPhone, it would be ultra-cool for our family to get a one gigabit fiber optic service.

Nevada City will host a rally, march and party on Sunday to show community-wide support for a proposal dubbed 95959google to land the service here. It will be held at 1 p.m. at Robinson Plaza in the historic district.

“Western Nevada County is the ideal rural beta site,” said Chip Carman of Spiral Internet, which is spearheading the campaign. “We would be a great companion to an urban deployment of Google Fiber.”

There are some compelling historic reasons, as well as existing ones:

•The first long-distance commercial telephone call occurred here during the Gold Rush, in 1878.

•The first telephone network, consisting of five phones, operated here as well.

•In the ’60s Grass Valley Group created the HD broadcast video industry here.

We still are a mecca for HD. We also have many tech savvy, creative and educated residents who can help test the service.

The 95959google initiative also will encompass neighboring Grass Valley, where we have a hospital and community college campus.

This is the kind of grassroots initiative that has helped put Nevada City on the map as a leader in energy conservation. The city has more solar installations per capita than any other California city.

Spiral previously has teamed up with the county Economic Resource Council and Broadband Leadership Council to look for technical and financial solutions to expand broadband access here with an initiative called Nevada County Connected.

HIgh-speed internet access is a cornerstone to economic development in our rural community.

For its part, Google is planning to target a small number of communities, encompassing between 50,000 and 500,000 households.

It faces some hurdles in building a potentially $1 billion network, including providing content as well as infrastructure challenges.

“We know that other companies have been in the business a long time,” a Google spokesman told the Wall Street Journal this week. “We’re not pretending to have all the answers.”

In Cleveland, an initiative is underway that would connect 104 houses, several hospitals and Caste Western Reserve University to a 1-gigabit per second service, according to the Journal. It is expected to go live this month.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

The Vienna Boys Choir, one of the world’s most famous singing groups, wowed a sell-out crowd of 475 people here on Tuesday night.

The acoustics in the Seventh-day Adventist Church — a more intimate setting than a big concert hall — were spectacular for the performance that lasted about 1 1/2 hours.

The choir has been a symbol of Austria for more than 500 years. My wife, son and I were eager to wring out more memories from our recent Austrian vacation by attending the performance. Forty dollars was still cheaper than a plane ticket to Vienna.

The Boys Choir used to sing more 16th-century music, clearing out the bored children at intermission, according to a gentleman sitting next to me, who was a family friend of one of the choir members.

Not nowadays. The choir performed songs from around the world — the United States, South Korea, India and Israel — along with Vienna classics and other Austrian songs. Our son, who was sitting about 10-feet away from some of the choir members, was entranced.

For two songs, the choir walked into the audience, singing the whole time. Another song was a “sing along” — in German. The crowd did well, though.

My favorite was still Strauss’ “An der shönen blauen Donau” (AKA Blue Danube Waltz). I still have the LP. The program is here. Our son said he liked “Oh Happy Day” the best.

The Boys Choir came to Grass Valley en route from Davis’ Mondavi Center to Chico. It was a coup for artistic director Ken Hardin to sign them up.

TCCA, now changing its name to In-Concert Sierra, would like to invite them back, board president Keith Porter told me on the way out.

Well done, In-Concert Sierra.

BTW, I stretched out the evening’s memory by sipping two fingers of Williams’ Pear Brandy while I wrapped up this report. (I picked up a bottle during a run to the supermarket while were were vacationing there last month; Swiss pear brandy is everywhere.)

Since no recordings, photography, video or audio recordings were allowed at Tuesday’s performance, here’s a video of the Boys Choir singing “Blue Danube Waltz” in a much bigger venue:

Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »