The San Francisco Giants may have won the World Series in 2010, but a look back in time, sheds light on the team’s origins, its tenacity and a local ball game that captured the interest of Cruzans
Back in 1887, when local entrepreneur Fred Swanton—the man who would eventually inspire the idea for the Boardwalk and become mayor of Santa Cruz—heard that the Giants were coming to San Francisco, he hurried to the city and paid a call on Walter Appleton, the New York club’s advance man. “The managers of Dolphin Park offered us such liberal inducements to come here,” Appleton advised the Santa Cruz Sentinel, “that we were determined to not disappoint the people.”

It had been a banner year for Santa Cruz baseballists. The local club, led by former major leaguer Scott Hastings, had recently won the Central Coast League championship.  Hastings, who had caught the best pitchers of the time, including Al Spalding, Candy Cummings and the ill-fated Jim Devlin, had passed on his knowledge of curves and drops to a strong-armed local twirler known as Reynolds.

It has been a year since poet, film scholar, teacher, colleague and dear friend Morton Marcus left us, and he is still sorely missed. Author of 12 volumes of poetry, one espionage novel, and the lavish, informative autobiography, “Striking Through the Masks,” Mort contributed hundreds of poems to anthologies and literary journals, and was the longtime co-host of The Poetry Show on KUSP radio. He was a regular contributor to GT and other local papers and a fixture at literary and cultural events around town. A passionate advocate for human rights as poet, teacher, columnist, and union organizer, he was also a celebrated and rigorous English instructor, and film guru to generations of awed Cabrillo College students.

Inside: Tortilla Flats
Main Street Garden & Café
Vino Tabi, Equinox
11 Great Pizzas
Hot Deals 11 for under $11
11 Desserts & more

In 2005, the club Students Against War led hundreds of UC Santa Cruz demonstrators in successfully ousting military recruiters from the school’s spring career fair. Again in April of 2006, four military recruiters fled the campus in a hurry with student protestors shouting “Don’t Come Back! Don’t Come Back!” behind them. Crowds of dissenters have continued to infiltrate UCSC career fairs, toting signs emblazoned with “Hey recruiters, leave them kids alone!” and the like. Their message has been clear: the military is not welcome on our campus.

This sentiment makes UCSC an interesting environment for one, small faction of students. Marine, Navy, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard—there are Slugs who have served in each. Currently there are 100 students attending UCSC on the GI Bill, and, over time, there have been many more.

Founder Rick Walker on what makes the inventive Y2K-X Live Looping Music Festival a global hit. And why it will be his last.

Rick Walker can't sit still. Sporting a black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and sipping his preferred drink of choice, a cosmopolitan, the local drummer tells an endless supply of stories with animated hand gestures and impassioned sound effects. To illustrate his points, he spontaneously acts out air drums, air guitar, air maracas, air sitar, air (insert remote African instrument you’ve likely never heard of before).

When he goes over his 40-year music career, it’s like he’s reliving the excitement of each chapter; there’s the time in college at UC Santa Cruz in the early ’70s when he witnessed a Central African pop band and it made him discard his rock records for world music and, he says, “changed my life;” and then the time decades later when hearing Aphex Twin jolted him further into electronic-infused music and, again, he says, “changed my life.”

Editor’s Note: October offers a feast for the eyes with hundreds of artists opening doors and welcoming crowds. In our Art Issue, we spotlight the head-turning, downright creative works featured all around the county, beginning with Cabrillo Gallery’s new, month-long exhibit dubbed “Visually Invisible.” Beyond that, take note of two Open Studios artists that captured our attention, too. But there are so many others. Get out there. Look around. Embrace the creativity. Onward ...

It was launched in Scotts Valley, went nuclear and is now one of the most successful companies in America. The Netflix story.

At a glance, it doesn’t look like much. It’s red, square and fits neatly between your bills in the mailbox. But for Netflix founder and Santa Cruz resident Reed Hastings, his now-famous red envelope represents something more: A revolution in the way America watches movies.

What began as a small business in Scotts Valley 13 years ago has become the world’s largest subscription service streaming movies and television shows on the Internet and mailing DVDs. According to its website, Netflix members add 2 million movies to their Queues every day. With more than 15 million members as of June 2010, paying $8.99 a month to instantly watch movies online or have them delivered to their homes, the company has rapidly become a force to be reckoned with.

Get growing! Our annual Fall Home & Garden issue tills the creative soil of locals—on the farm, in the garden, in the living room, and beyond.
Inside:
Love Them Apples 
TerraGnoma Time
Madison Interiors
Get Baked: Solar Ovens
Feng Shui It
Taking Gardening to New Heights
You, Your Garden, Your Food
Seven Tips for Your Fall Garden
Greenspacing
Seven Household Tips for Fall

Esalen Institute in Big Sur is a portal of progressive thought, education, healing, and more. A look inside the haven that attracted some of history’s most adventurous thinkers.

Commas, apostrophes and periods.  I couldn’t stop thinking about them. They sat there, a haunting trinity of punctuation, lounging on a wicked conveyor belt in my mind. A conveyor belt that seemed only to be increasing in speed.

Commas, apostrophes and periods.

Long before Umi was a Zen master in the Santa Cruz Mountains, he was a seafaring rock radio pioneer who riled the establishment and ushered in the British Invasion. In this spirited interview, he shares tales of his colorful journey and sheds light on the nature of Zen.
As I approach the end of the long driveway on Empire Grade that leads to Stillpoint Zen Community, Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days” is blaring from the nearest building. With its relentless, menacing bass line and its maniacal, howling pedal steel guitar, it’s a far cry from the soft sound of bells and wind chimes you might expect to hear at a spiritual center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But taken in context, it’s not an unfitting welcome: From 1964 to 1968, Stillpoint’s focal figure, now known to the members of his community as Enlightened Master Umi, served as DJ and program director for Britain’s first offshore pirate radio station, Radio Caroline. During those years, the station’s crew sailed the English Coast, defying the establishment by broadcasting the rock & roll music of the day. In so doing, they played a key role in sparking the British Invasion and bringing color and life force to a staid, button-down society. Their exploits are echoed—albeit in highly sensationalized form—in the film Pirate Radio, currently on the New Releases shelves of video stores.