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Feature11: Greg Cahill
From covering Marin's rock elite to being condescended to by Noam Chomsky, staff reporter/music columnist Greg Cahill has done it all...

Hot tubs and peacock feathers—those emblems of Cyra McFadden's Marin satire The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County (first serialized in the Pacific Sun in 1976 and later turned into a popular book and film) came to symbolize the hedonistic pursuits of the local denizens. During my five-year tenure as staff reporter at the Sun, the seminal alternative newsweekly sought to paint a different portrait of the county. We saw the community as a dynamic and diverse place, home to people who were grappling with rapid growth and development—traffic and mass transportation, affordable housing, homelessness, immigration, water shortages—not as sexy as the media's image of hordes of spoiled yuppies frolicking on a gilded playground, but a real world that provided this then-fledgling journalist with an endless string of fresh challenges.

Along with my stalwart colleague Joy Zimmerman, I enjoyed almost free reign to search out stories that could humanize the big issues in the county. We sought to present not only the most important news, but also the mood of the county.

So I wrote about the challenges of living in then crime-ridden high-density, multi-cultural Canal community; explored the impact of poverty and development on Marin City; and scoured homeless communities that thrived in hillside camps and makeshift shanties behind the Highway 101 sound wall.

I butted heads with bureaucrats and politicians and, in covering that shanty town, literally crawled through human excrement to get the story.

And what compelling tales. I wrote about West Marin ranchers fending off packs of hungry coyotes; the enthusiasm of preeminent Marin bicyclist Jackie Phalen; Internet innovator Howard Rheingold and the early online community known as the WELL; the scathing anti-Gulf War sentiments of MIT professor and media critic Noam Chomsky (who presaged his answers to my questions by saying, "As any 10 year old knows..."); the environmental writings of rocker, activist and author Bob Weir; the efforts to gather banned LSD research into a viable medical archive; and a then little-known Bolinas lettuce farmer named Warren Weber, now the dean of Bay Area's thriving organic growers movement; among others.

Not that there wasn't a flakey factor to some of the coverage: there were interviews with local victims of alien abduction; a psychic healer who claimed to possess a cure for AIDS; and alleged kidnapper Peter Chernoff, who had abducted his child, he said, in order to spare the tot from being ritualistically murdered by a vast Satanic conspiracy that ranged from Marin judges to President Clinton.

It was an exciting time and place, and I shared it all with a creative staff that cared about their work and offered lots of moral support.

Publisher Steve McNamara and editor Linda Xiques gave me the latitude to explore my profession in a unique community populated, for the most part, by hard-working, honest, intelligent and forward-thinking people, some of whom were just scraping by—while others had their sights set squarely on the future.

No hot tubs. No peacock feathers.

—Greg Cahill

Greg Cahill prefers life in Petaluma with his wife Sheryl and sons Austin and Miles to hot tubs and peacock feathers. The couple own the Station House Café in Pt. Reyes Station. Cahill writes a weekly music column for the Sun.

Posted by Bain Cheshire, a resident of the Kentfield neighborhood, on Sep 24, 2009 at 11:34 pm

Greg did you attend Oakland Hihgschool and marry Sherly Lucia? I was a friend of Tom March's and Ron Meagher's What are you doing now besides playing?