Davisville Archives
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This journalist helped convict a Davis killer
Joel appears on Davisville today to talk about the resolution of the case, which is, in a sense, the resolution of his book. He discusses the verdict, and why it took a third of a century to identify and convict the killer. He also discusses Parkinson’s, which struck him while he was writing “Justice Waits”—and led him to write a powerful first-person account of his resulting brain surgery, “The heart of the (gray) matter,” for the Sacramento News and Review. |
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Meet Doug Hatton, one of Davis’ Santas
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UC Davis greenhouse expert Garry Pearson reports back from Iraq
He spent his time in Kurdistan, the less-violent northern part of the country, working with Kurds, Shias and Sunnis. Pearson describes both tension and reasons to hope—hotel guards with AK-47s, and a lively democracy. A few years ago he went to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Afghanistan is probably next. “Davis,” he says near the end of the show, “needs to get out and see the rest of the world.” |
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Davis school funding cuts end, but there’s no long-term fix yet
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‘Hobbit,’ year-end films, and great projections in Davis theaters  Davis film critic Derrick Bang returns to Davisville this week to talk about some of the big December movies, including The Hobbit debuting Dec. 14, and Quentin Tarentino’s Django Unchained “southern,” which opens on Christmas.
We also take up related questions about movies, such as the continuing slump in ticket sales. He blames the degraded experience of going out to a movie, including the pre-show commercials and mediocre presentation—but says the three Davis theaters do a consistently good job in sound and projection. Maybe that’s a selling point for a city banking on arts and entertainment as a major draw for downtown.
We also get Bang’s take on the best, and worst, holiday movies through the years. His list of the best is thin on recent titles, compared to his list of the worst. A reason, he says, might be Hollywood’s fear these days of seeming corny or sentimental. |
New Davis theater group opens with a ghost story, 'Woman in Black’  Today’s guests are Brianna Owens (far left) and Steph Hankinson from Common House Productions, a new theater troupe that is producing its first show, "The Woman in Black," in Davis. The play will debut at 8 p.m. on Halloween, in what they describe as a "huge, really creepy" backyard with a campfire pit on Loyola, and run through Nov. 11.
Owens and Hankinson, vets of local theater who met at Sacramento State, are co-directing the play. On Davisville they talk about "The Woman in Black," their plans for Common House, why they created a new theater company, the co-operative structure of their enterprise, why they opened with a strong narrative story where the sound is a defining part of the experience, and what they’d like to do next.
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Tales from the world’s largest temporary corn maze
For example: They end up with a lot of shoes. Some pumpkin hunters amass so much gummy clay on their soles after a trek through the patch, they abandon their footwear next to their cars when they leave. Other facts: The Cooleys (Matt and his brother Mark) thought about adding a mud pit, to go with the hay bales, scarecrows and corn bath; they might move the maze south of Interstate 80, and/or offer two mazes, one harder than the other; and Matt gets calls in the middle of the night about or from people lost in the maze. People ask him if the maze is haunted, and he says no, except if you’re out there alone in the night amid the rustling stalks, and a bird suddenly takes off skyward near you … yeah, it can be scary. |
With a key vote due soon, Mayor Krovoza discusses Davis' water project  Today’s subject, water, could not be more basic. Everyone who uses water in Davis is going to pay more for it, probably significantly more, in the next few years. The reasons why, and how this might all play out, are among the points we cover in today’s discussion with Joe Krovoza, the mayor of Davis and vice chair of the Woodland-Davis Clean Water Agency.
This complex subject goes back years. It involves issues of where Davis gets its water, potential partnerships with Woodland or West Sacramento, conservation, a great deal of analysis by the citizen’s Water Advisory Committee, and more. Tune in for a rundown on how we got here, and what might happen next.
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Talking frauds and scams with Davis attorney Elaine Roberts Musser  Fraud, online and otherwise, exists in Davis as it does anywhere. But the local experience isn’t always the same as it is in other places--for one thing, two years ago our town was visited by the ”Crying Girl.” Low-crime Davis also views itself as a positive, can-do town, which can have a lulling effect.
Today's guest is Elaine Roberts Musser, shown here, a Davis attorney who specializes in consumer protection and law concerning the elderly. She mentions Crying Girl, talks about fraud of different kinds (including consumer and cyber), explains why she doesn’t bank online, discusses why seniors are prone to fraud (some are just lonely and welcome the contact), lists reasonable measures to protect yourself, and more. |
| Davisville Sep 10th, 2012 This is the Sept. 3rd show, repeated. (I haven't deleted it because there might be some links out there to this copy of the show, instead to of the Sept. 3 original.) |
Joel Davis is a hometown Davis journalist whose book “Justice Waits: The UC Davis Sweetheart Murders” played a key role in solving the 1980 Davis kidnapping and murder of “two stellar kids,” UC Davis students John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves. In December 2012, 32 years to the month after the slayings, a Sacramento Superior Court jury convicted Richard Hirschfield of first-degree murder for killing Gonsalves and Riggins, who were both 18.
Today’s year-end program has one guest and two subjects: Tales from a man who portrays Santa Claus in Davis, plus some of his memories of Davis through the years. Both are fit subjects for late December, when the year-end holidays, and the changes that accompany the turn of the year, are front and center. My guest Doug Hatton talks about what he sees as one of the town’s Santas—he has played the character in hundreds of appearances for thousands of local kids—and how Davis has changed since he moved here at 13. His local roots go deeper than that, though. For example, his mom was Miss Davis of 1939.
Twice this year, Garry Pearson has gone to Iraq as part of a program to help Iraqis grow more vegetables. He oversees about 160 research greenhouses at UC Davis, and an ag project recruited him as a technical expert. On today’s Davisville he talks about what he saw. Pearson wanted to “see what’s going on [after the U.S. war] ... It’s my own natural curiosity. I know I have technical skills that can be passed on to different people, if it’s presented in the right way. On the ground my experience was just meeting the people everyday, the day-to-day folks. I got the opportunities to be out and to mix.”
The financial picture for Davis schools looks better than it has in years … and yet that doesn’t mean the recent era of cuts is history. Too much remains undecided, including the impact of the fiscal cliff if Washington can’t resolve the nation's tax-and-spending dispute in the next few weeks; the recovery of the California economy; upward pressure on wages and other costs; and the fact that Measure E and Proposition 30, which put a floor under the school budget this fall, will expire in several years, unless extended. In today’s Davisville we discuss all this with Jeff Hudson, education writer for the Davis Enterprise. Other topics: the post-election mood among educators he talks with, technology at the schools, class sizes, salaries for teachers, and the evolving impact of the No Child Left Behind law on transfers and, yes, on funding. We end with a quick list of three major issues facing Davis schools in 2013.
For my Halloween show, I thought it’d be fun to talk with the people behind Cool Patch Pumpkins at the north edge of Dixon, just southwest of Davis. Guinness World Records says the farm has the world’s largest temporary corn maze (53 acres this year, with a path 2.5 miles long). Cool Patch co-owner Matt Cooley obliged, and told me things about the farm I hadn’t read or heard before.Pages
