It’s official as of Friday Jan. 2: The legendary Smiley’s Saloon in downtown Bolinas will change hands and operate under new ownership. San Francisco attorney Leila Monroe, 35, bought the place, and the ownership transfer’s been a slow-roll over the past month or so.

BoBo locals absolutely love the place, and there was a big musical throw-down last Saturday night to celebrate the 25-year run of the outgoing owner Don Deane.

Word on the street is that Deane transformed Smiley’s from a grim and abject coke-hole to a space wholly dedicated to ramping up the live music—and the gesture was much appreciated in this town of troubadours. So on any given weekend, Thursday included, the joint offers great bands galore, a Sunday night open mic, and by all means, your dog is welcome.

There was a really sweet report on Monroe and the bar in the Marin Independent Journal a few weeks back. The paper noted that Monroe, an environmental lawyer and a surfer, also started a nonprofit organization called Project AMPLIFI, which “stages concerts and events with independent musicians to raise money for worthy grassroots organizations and to heighten awareness of issues facing artists and others of modest means,” according to the Marin paper of record. That’s awesome and explains a lot of the “she’s cool” comments coming from the locals.

I chatted up a Smiley’s regular out on the front deck not long ago, a guy with lots of deep interest and some apparent knowledge of the local history here.

The legend of Smiley’s is that it may be the oldest continuously operating saloon in the state. There are 14 bars in California that have been around for at least a century, the IJ recently reported. But my guy says the history is even deeper, longer and richer than all of that. Smiley’s, he says, may be the oldest continuously operating business of any kind in the state. What?!

The building’s been around since about 1851, and Smiley’s likes to remind you that it served its first drink before Abraham Lincoln was president.

But then they had this thing called Prohibition back in the last century, for a little while anyway. Alcohol exceptions were added to laws written after the constitutional amendment was enacted. Barbers and doctors, for example, could have alcohol on-premises, for sanitizing purposes.

As the story goes, Smiley’s
set up a barbershop in the
front of the saloon when the 18th Amendment took hold.

The Smiley’s regular noted that the bar never closed, it just moved out back and became a speakeasy. Haircuts up front, hoppy ales out back. When Prohibition was repealed, the barbershop closed and the drinking action moved back to front and center.

And that’s the story, dear readers, of why nobody in the hippie utopia of Bolinas has gotten a haircut in 100 years.

The big news in the North Bay this year, if you had to pick one story? Tough call.

Natural phenomenon ruled the above-the-fold headline landscape, or whatever remains of it, and you have to start with the Aug. 25 South Napa Earthquake. That thing shook a 6.1 on the Richter, made national headlines, and the New Yorker even sent a writer to Napa for a predictably boring report about how awful it was. Losing all that wine, that is.

Meanwhile, the Napa jail got hit pretty bad, numerous businesses got hammered, and all told, about $1 billion in damages was assessed. People in Napa are just now getting on the good foot with Small Business Administration loans and other stand-up efforts, even if they haven’t yet re-upped their New Yorker subscriptions. (A Bohemian sub is where it’s at.)

Verdict on the quake: not the big one, but kind of a big one. Stay vigilant. Check your batteries and make sure you got plenty of Lagunitas at the ready, just in case.

Meanwhile, it rained quite a bit in December in the North Bay. But it didn’t rain much this year. The rain was therefore newsworthy, as was this bit of news: If it rains too much, too fast, the Army Corps of Engineers has to drain reservoirs in Sonoma and Mendocino counties so dams don’t get over-flooded. They did it in 2012 after big December rains, but nobody figured on two more years of drought. Like the man says: D’oh!

The blessed bud may be California’s number-one cash crop, but Gov. Jerry Brown would rather you hit the frack pipe to save the state’s economy, not to mention his legacy-humping ambitions. Four more years? You got ’em, Guv. How about four more dabs in return?

Cannabis news in the North Bay was dominated by the December Emerald Cup at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. Verdict: it was fun.

Less fun were the idiots who made the local news after they blew themselves up trying to extract THC for wax dabs using the dumb and dangerous butane-extraction method.

Meanwhile, state legislators tried, and failed, to come up with language this year that would encode statewide protocols for medical cannabis dispensaries, in business here since 1996.

That did not happen, and the bill bit the dust in a late-game flurry of Tough on Crime language.That’s what happens when you ask the state’s police chiefs to write a cannabis bill that’s supposed to be underpinned by empathy over enforcement. They suck at it, and they loaded the bill with all sorts of last-second hate for those who’ve been working in the illicit pot economy and would like to come out from the shadows into the medi-marijuana light.

So now all eyes are on 2016’s expected legalization referendum.

The state did make strides in the department of criminal justice this year. Lawmakers passed and Brown signed a law that decriminalized numerous drug-related, nonviolent crimes—and in doing so, carved space for lawmakers interested in scampering across the no-man’s-land that is the war on drugs.

It would be cool if Gov. Brown could lead the charge in 2016, with a blazing bong in hand. Hey, it’s not like prominent California Democrats haven’t already been charging through the streets, loaded down with elixirs and marching to their destiny, with impassioned intent. Care for a couple of Plinys?

So, what else? Marin County continued its long battle over this quaint concept of “affordable housing.” The Marin mandarins meanwhile took a cue from Sonoma County and told people it was OK to live in their cars. Given the recent and steep decline in gasoline prices, it’s fair to say that living in your car is what they’re talking about when they talk about “affordable housing” in hyper-monied Marin. Sort of like the way ketchup can be a vegetable..

The North Bay also made a “contribution” of sorts to the national freak-out over policing. Young Andy Lopez was killed by a Sonoma sheriff’s deputy in late 2013, after he was spotted carrying a gun that turned out to be a toy rifle with its “safety” tip cut off. The officer involved in the shooting wasn’t charged, after DA Jill Ravitch spent most of the year reviewing the incident.

Man, we’d love to get on the phone with Robin Williams and get his take on the year in North Bay news. But Williams is unfortunately part of the not-so-great-news checklist. He took his life on Aug. 1. Williams was a funny man with a headful of worry, and his death jolted harder even than the Napa quake. Now he’s gone, just like that.