Posts by p15
Walking the Graveyard with Willie Saroyan
The last time I saw my grandfather, Aram Arax, he was badgering an old black lady in the courtyard of their nursing home in east Fresno, his chest rattling with pneumonia and his mind stuck on one last poem he was still composing, an epic of early Fresno and his good friend William Saroyan, who…
Read MoreMy Little Brother the Football Coach
My Little Brother the Football Coach Once before, I tried to write about high school football. It was my younger brother Donny’s first season coaching at Kerman High, and as I followed his Lions east and west across the valley, I found myself strangely drawn to the lights rising in the distance out of vineyards…
Read MoreMy Father’s Murder: An Epilogue
One day not long ago, I drove into a valley deep in the mountains of Oregon , a swath of green pastures edged by wild blackberries and split by a creek that filled up a nearby lake. It seemed a pleasant enough place in the world, a place I might even visit again to fish…
Read MoreThe Place
A boy growing up in the Great Central Valley didn’t hold much in the way of bragging rights. I don’t remember anyone ever calling our flatland ‘‘the Great’’ when I was a kid or thinking that we were part of some vast, shared landscape. No fine books in praise of the valley existed back then,…
Read MorePay to Play
The Makings of a Fresno Unified Scandal
Read MorePrivate Emails Show How “Pay to Play” Deals in Fresno Unified Began
As federal authorities continue to build a timeline in the lease-leaseback corruption case involving Fresno Unified, they are able to access thousands of district emails to trace the real-time actions of the main public and private players.
Read MoreMeet Michael Hanson’s Fixer
How a Culture of Secrecy Came to Rule Fresno Unified and Cloak Wrongdoing
Read MoreThe Dreamt Land
Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, that is straining to keep up with California’s relentless growth.
Read MoreStewart Resnick: The Reluctant Farmer
From Valley Boulevard , it was a short drive to downtown Los Angeles . I circled past the skyscrapers and looked for the big beam of light that used to shine down on the Times Mirror building. Another seventy-five of my old colleagues, prize winners who had made the paper one of the world’s best, had been…
Read MoreLegend of Zankou
In a mansion in the hills above Glendale, a man named Mardiros Iskenderian rose from bed one recent morning and put on a white silk suit he hadn’t worn in twenty years. He stuffed a 9-millimeter handgun into his waistband and a .38-caliber revolver into his coat pocket and walked step by small step down the stairs. His…
Read More