This is Kate Magruder with Promise of Paradise,
back to the land oral histories of Mendocino County.
Today we’ll be hearing from Karen Rizzolo of Potter Valley.
Karen came to Potter Valley in 1975 with her future first husband, Don Buickerood.
She was 21.
Like thousands of young folks around the United States,
they’d been poring over issues of Mother Earth News,
looking for a place in the country they could call home.
An article in the magazine about the Class K movement in Mendocino County
caught their attention.
They wanted to live in a place where that kind of creative activism was going on.
They wrote a letter to United Stand and Anon Forest replied,
inviting them to visit Potter Valley.
They’ve been here ever since.
In the decades that followed, Karen’s been involved with the fledgling Ukiah birth collective,
she helped create and run the Potter Valley Health Clinic,
and was one of the hard-working folks who launched
our county’s first Farmers’ Market in the early 1980s.
I asked Karen what she was thinking she was going to do
when she first headed back to the land in Potter Valley.
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