Smith: The election night dust-up between the mayor and the labor leader

If you’ve heard rumors of the election night clash between Mayor Chris Coursey and Jack Buckhorn, head of the North Bay Labor Council, you may think they came to blows. They did not.

“I didn’t threaten him and he didn’t threaten me,” Buckhorn said. Coursey separately said the same.

But the confrontation at Santa Rosa City Council candidate Victoria Fleming’s end-of-campaign party at NY Pie was heated, and unpleasant, and it was over the failure of Measure N.

Coursey championed the $124 million housing bond; the labor council opposed it. Both the mayor and Buckhorn supported Fleming’s campaign, but when early returns showed Measure N was losing, Coursey lit into Buckhorn for his part in denying affordable housing to the next generation of young people.

Buckhorn retorted that Coursey’s lack of leadership brought the unacceptable measure to the ballot. Election consultant Terry Price tried to persuade the pair to save it for another time and place.

“It was a spirited conversation but there was nothing physical about it,” the mayor said.

The union leader said he and Coursey agree sometimes and sometimes don’t, and he understands the mayor’s frustration at the loss of Measure N.

Both men spoke of their dismay at the hubbub and rumors.

“I guess people are really sensitive,” said Buckhorn. “It was a disagreement, no more than that.”

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IT’S A LOW, LOW THING to steal a man’s music.

Though Bill Eakin - “Rhymes with achin’,” he says - worked in the carpet business in Santa Rosa for four decades, what he’s always loved most is laying down a tune.

The 80-year-old’s band, “Country Express,” has performed all over the region since 1974.

Upon retiring from Abbey’s Carpet in 2009, Bill began giving lessons in a rented space in Rincon Valley.

“Not only do I teach guitar I teach anything with a string,” he said.

Last weekend, someone broke into his studio. The thief or thieves carried out, as closely as Bill can figure, 25 instruments from his lifetime collection of guitars, banjos, mandolins, lap steel guitars and the like.

“It’s not going to stop me,” he said. But he surely would like for his instruments to come back. He senses they will.

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KRISTALLNACHT. It’s a glittery, nice-sounding word.

But exactly 80 years ago Friday - on Nov. 9, 1938 - Nazi hostility to Jews turned savage.

Synagogues and Jewish homes, businesses and schools were torched or shattered, at least dozens of Jews were killed and tens of thousands were arrested and shipped to concentration camps.

As horrific as Kristallnacht, the “Night of broken glass,” was, it was just the beginning. The pogroms marked the Reich’s turn to genocide.

On Friday, two eyewitnesses to Kristallnacht, Santa Rosa’s Susanne and Alfred Batzdorff, will reflect on attacks on Jewish people - then and now.

Both 96, the Batzdorffs will be featured among the speakers at an observance at Congregation Beth Ami on Mayette Avenue. A service welcoming the Sabbath will start at 7:30 p.m. and the Kristallnacht observance at 8.

The congregation welcomes us to come and take part.

You can contact columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.