Applegater Spring 2016
•••BIZ bits•••
Welcome to BizBits, a section that highlights businesses new to the area, holding
special events, or offering new products. If you are a business owner, please let us
know when you move into the area or to a different location, hold a special event,
expand your business, or mark a milestone. Email gater@applegater.org.
• • •
CrushPad Creamery. A recent venture of Wooldridge
Creek Winery located on-site and offering homemade
cheeses from both cow and goat milk, “ranging in style
from soft and creamy to hard cheeses that are aged over
one year.” 818 Slagle Creek Road, Grants Pass. Phone:
541-846-6364; www.wcwinery.com.
• • •
The Great Unbaked Raw Chocolate Factory & Unbakery. Opened late
last year at 8880 Williams Highway, Unit B, Grants Pass/Murphy. Hours are 9
am to 4 pm, Monday through Thursday. Website: www.thegreatunbaked.com.
Phone: 541-450-9080. See article by Laird Funk on page 12.
5
LEHI Pump Service, Inc., is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Their story
in their words: It all started in our beautiful town of Applegate in 1976 with Les Hill
(first generation). And because of you, our customers, the business grew. In 1979,
Ron (second generation and Les’s son) joined the family business. Some years we
barely kept it together, working day by day, month by month. But you kept calling.
We greatly appreciate your support over the years, which allowed us to continue
providing water to your homes and fields and adding Dustin (third generation,
Ron’s son, and Les’s grandson) in 2000. Our goal is to continue providing our
outstanding, loyal customers (without
you, there would be no LEHI!) with
knowledgeable, honest, reliable, and
affordable water-well pump service for
many years and generations to come.
We are truly honored and blessed to
have been a part of this great community
and surrounding areas for 40 years!
Thank you from the entire LEHI family.
PS: If your pump is broken and
you need it fixed, that’s what we’ve been
doing since 1976. Call 541-846-6662.
BOOKS & MOVIES
— Books —
The Witches
Stacy Schiff
The Mayflower landed on our eastern shores in 1620.
Harvard College was established in 1636, and by the time
of the 1692 infamous Salem witch trials, villages throughout
Massachusetts Bay Colony were vying for Harvard’s theology-
schooled clergymen. Harvard tuition was paid with wheat,
butter, parsnips; a side of beef covered a year’s tuition. Laws
requiring public grammar schools began in the 1640s, and
ignorance was considered satanic. The ability to read the Bible
was the crucial be-all of Puritan life.
Schiff has stated in interviews that she loves to actually
smell and touch original documents, and we readers are the
lucky beneficiaries of her thorough research. For those who
care, her 495-page book contains 67 pages of very small-print
notes. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Ellis says about
the book: “The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692,
and no one else could tell it with the otherworldly flair of Stacy Schiff.”
Puritan life placed extreme emphasis—and I do mean extreme—upon sin and
the devil, this in a feverish, small-town atmosphere where everyone knew everyone
else’s every foible and failure. Even a bruise was considered a punishment from
God or a “mark of the devil.” People not only gossiped about these things, but also
pointed to them in church and prayer meetings, with accompanying ecclesiastical
demands for punishments, apologies, and fines. Punishments, such as head and hands
locked in the stocks, were severe, public, and humiliating. Though providing a very
rural, small-town milieu, Massachusetts Bay Colony was a highly litigious society;
neighbor sued neighbor for such as an errant pig in a garden. Combine this with the
constant fear of Indian attacks, homes burned to the ground, women and children
kidnapped while men were away serving as guards and fighters in Indian wars (ten
percent of the male colonist population—including my eighth great-grandfather,
Nathaniel Sutliff—was killed in King Phillip’s War of the 1670s), and you get an
environment ripe for witch hunting.
Schiff details much of this overburdening pressure and fear and much of the
grinding hard work by all, including children, when she writes: “When she was not
tending livestock, the garden or a fire, when she was not baking or candle-making,
a Puritan girl was meant to be knitting, spooling, or weaving. A
five-year-old could be relied upon to sew a counterpane or spin flax.”
Bible quotations, interpreted as “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” were widely
known and rigorously applied. The first two teenage girls to twitch and writhe, to
moan and scream accusations were daughters of the Salem Village clergyman, Samuel
Parris. Present in the Parris household was the slave, Tituba, brought by the family
from the West Indies. She brought with her, and thus influenced the children with,
that society’s beliefs in magic and spiritualism.
The first person to be accused of being a witch by the teens had been a relatively
well-off woman, Sarah Good, widowed and reduced to begging in a community
where downward mobility was often considered suspect, a sign of God’s disfavor.
When Good (and her five-year-old daughter) was turned away from neighborhood
doors with less than she considered adequate, she was known to walk away mumbling
and muttering—much to her detriment, as Cotton Mather wrote of murmuring
as “the devil’s music.”
The accusations snowballed in a community full of resentments, jealousies,
and grudges. A culmination occurred in the severe winter of 1692, during which
14 women, five men, and two dogs were hanged (not burned as many believe) for
witchcraft. Schiff details the overzealous and often inept proceedings, held in a bar,
by a couple dozen men considered to be community leaders. Some were unschooled
other than their autodidactic knowledge of their businesses, guard service, church,
and other local activities.
The Witches is an exposé to vex the image many of us have of the kindly Pilgrims
and Indians sitting down to Thanksgiving turkey and pumpkin pie. It also should
give moderns pause about preconceptions and judgements: 1692 Salem Village folk
believed firmly in the imminent Apocalypse, in Satan, in hellfire—and in witches.
They believed in conspiracies by the foreign swarthy men (the Native Americans),
by an overweening government (Britain), and even by rumored unfair plans of
neighboring towns and villages. Beware.
Julia (Helm) Hoskins
julmudgeon@aol.com
Julia Helm Hoskins is the author of She Caves to Conquer, a novel set in the American
Midwest and in southern Turkey.
— Movies —
Chocolat
Binoche) and
her young
Reviewer rating: 5 Apples 1 Apple—Don’t bother daughter.
Genre: Romantic
5 Apples—Don’t miss
When
comedy-drama
Vianne opens
PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned. a magical chocolate shop
Some material may be inappropriate for during the week of Lent,
children under 13.)
it soon becomes clear
Opened: December 2000
that this conservative
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, and rigid town is not a
Johnny Depp, Alfred Molina
good fit for her. While
Director: Lasse Hallström
the townspeople are
understandably drawn to Vianne’s
Chocolat is my go-to movie when I warm personality, her beauty, and her
want the world to melt away and to get rich chocolate creations, she and the
lost in something happy. Needless to say, town’s leader, Comte de Reynaud (Alfred
I’ve probably seen this movie a dozen Molina) are instantly at odds. Right
times, yet I never tire of it.
about now, I have to pause the movie
The movie opens in a small and to fetch a mug of rich, hot chocolate
quaint provincial French town in the late because I know in the next scene that
1950s. A strong wind begins to blow and Vianne is going to pour a mugful
ushers in a mysterious Vianne (Juliette of thick and creamy hot chocolate
for a rebel townsperson
(Judi Dench) and I won’t
be able watch without
drooling.
And just when
I think I can’t drool
any more, in walks a
handsome gypsy man
named Roux (Johnny
Depp). Need I say more?
Again, I hit the pause
button of my television
remote to visit the pantry in search
of leftover Christmas chocolates. I
double-dog dare you to make it through
this film without craving chocolate!
Roux eventually becomes Vianne’s love
interest, but because Roux is quite a
free spirit, it is not without some effort
on Vianne’s part. We are given the idea
that Vianne, with her beauty, charm and
chocolates, typically gets what she wants,
but this town and this
man prove to be a bit
of a challenge for her. Her chocolates
contain some magical powers, some of
which have a very funny effect, while
another manifests in a woman who needs
courage to leave her abusive husband.
There are some touching scenes where
Vianne helps the woman—the film is
not all about love and romance with
Roux. Darn!
Nominated for five Academy
Awards, including Best Picture, this
romantic comedy-drama is lusciously
filmed and beautifully acted by the entire
cast. I give it five out of five apples for
its sweet, mysterious, and adventurous
storytelling. It’s perfect for a cold, cloudy
afternoon by the fire with a warm blanket
and, well, some chocolate.
Mikell Nielsen
mikell@mikelllouise.com
