Point Reyes Light -- October 10, 1996

Marine now a clerk
Marine private Jesse L. Sullivan, grandson of Thomasina Wilson of Lagunitas, has completed a Personnel Clerk Course at Instructional Management School, Marine Corps Service Support Schools in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
During the seven-week course, Sullivan received instruction on the preparation and maintenance of officer and enlisted service records.
Sullivan also learned to prepare all personnel documents, including identification cards, promotion certificates, individual evaluation reports, and leave authorizations.
The 1995 graduate of Drake High joined the Marine Corps in January.

Measure A endorsed
West Marin Chamber of Commerce last Thursday voted overwhelmingly to endorse Measure A on the Nov. 5 ballot. The quarter-cent-sales-tax measure would provide money for Marin Agricultural Land Trust to preserve ag lands from development and would help improve city parks in Marin County.
Among the two dozen chamber members who voted, only Inverness restaurateur Vladimir Nevl opposed the endorsement.

Rowing star
The granddaughter of Bob and Dorothy Gallagher of Point Reyes Station, Nicole Rogers of Tiburon, placed fifth in rowing at the World Games in Scotland this past summer.
Rogers, a senior at Redwood High, was selected for a US junior women's crew following a selection camp at Dartmouth.
Once in Scotland, Rogers and crewmate Brittany Kasol in a two-person shell placed second to a German crew in the first heat. In their second heat, they beat a British crew to finish fifth overall.

Bolinas activist Ciel Thalinger dies at age 85
Artist and activist Ciel Frampton Thalinger, a longtime resident of Bolinas, died in Mill Valley Sept. 18. She was 85.
"How beautiful are we human beings when, in the name of brotherhood, we use our minds to know our hearts," Mrs. Thalinger said in 1950. A book of her aphorisms is soon to be published by son Ernest Thalinger of El Sobrante.
"She was concerned with the dignity and sanctity of life," her son said this week. Her beliefs combined the teachings of Jesus, Freud and Marx, he said, and she believed that world peace was possible and that all people could be clothed and fed.
"Ciel wanted the world to be a better place, and did what she could to make it that way," said friend Mary Lindheim of Bolinas.

Helped start consumer group Mrs. Thalinger helped found Consumers' Union (now publishers of Consumer Reports) in the late 1930s. She also helped start the Young Women's Interracial Club of Ossining, New York in 1947, and Women's Strike for Peace in 1960, a forerunner for the nuclear disarmament group SANE, her son said.
While in Cuba in 1961, Mrs. Thalinger was mistaken for a foreign dignitary and hugged by Fidel Castro.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, Mrs. Thalinger began writing poetry as a young girl. At the age of 16 she volunteered for two years as a Sunday School teacher in Valley Park, Missouri, "a small, impoverished, Dust Bowl mining town," according to her son. "She didn't teach religion; she hoped to bring some love and teach them of the world."
Worked at Hull House Mrs. Thalinger studied art and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1931. She later met and married sculptor Frederic Jean Thalinger, who created "The Defenders," now part of the Smithsonian collection. She volunteered at the Chicago Hull House, where her husband taught sculpture in 1941.
That year, the couple created a sculpture known as the "Sun Mobile", a symbol of earth and sun relationships, which was shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art and whose fans included Albert Einstein.
Later, in Ossining, the couple taught art classes for six years. After her husband died in 1965, Mrs. Thalinger moved to Bolinas. Friends said her insight, spirit, and courage helped her survive breast cancer and other physical trauma.
Lincoln Brigade Social-protest music was important to her, including that of Paul Robeson and later, John Baez. She also championed Robeson's right to speak (the black singer/actor was blacklisted in the McCarthy era), and help him in raising money to bring home the anti-Franco Lincoln Brigade from Spain in 1939.
"To me she represents the idealistic tradition of those American people trying to work for justice and equality based on dignity and respect for every human being," said friend Ilka Hartmann of San Francisco.
Among Mrs. Thalinger's sayings: "We who love are mirrored in the hearts of those we just kissed good-by, or perhaps with those we shall soon kiss hello."
And: "Hello, tomorrow! and all the people that come within your care, I love you!"
Family and friends have planned a memorial service at St. Aidan's Church in Bolinas for 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 12.

County planning
County supervisors last week approved an updated Tomales Community Plan.
The new plan contains minor changes to the boundary between the community planning area and surrounding agricultural-preserve land; a parcel of land north of downtown and east of Highway 1 was taken out of the community plan area.
In addition, the plan calls for rezoning all land within Tomales that is now zoned C-R-A (Commercial, Residential, Agricultural) to C-RSP (Coastal-Residential, Single-family, Planned).
County planning commissioners on Monday, Oct. 21, will hear an appeal of a zoning administrator's decision to legalize an existing sattelite-television facility behind the Red Barn in Point Reyes Station.

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