Off Beat: Another Sutter County emigrant makes good

A few weeks ago, this column noted the former police chief at UC Berkeley grew up in Sutter County.

So it's only fair to go from a cop to a judge.

How about David Herrick? At 64, Herrick just retired from the bench in Lake County.

And, yes, he, too, comes from Sutter County, according to a recent story in the Lake County News.

"Herrick grew up the oldest of three children in the Sacramento Valley town of Tudor, about 12 miles south of Yuba City in Sutter County," the paper reported. "His grandparents had come west looking for a new life, leaving the Midwest during the depths of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl."

His "grandfather established a family farm in California of close to 300 acres. There, his parents, grandparents and uncles all made their homes and farmed a wide variety of crops and raised livestock. The family also would own a farm equipment dealership."

Herrick graduated from Yuba City High School in 1966 and left the area.

After obtaining a law degree, Herrick ran for Colusa County district attorney in the mid-1980s.

He lost. But in the mid-1990s, he ran for judge in Lake County and won.

More glove factories

You never know what you might find in a government press release unless you read the whole, darn thing.

Earlier this month, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics pumped out its monthly "Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment Summary." It's everything you ever wanted to know about jobless trends in metropolitan areas.

Yuba-Sutter is one of those metro areas. It's called the Yuba City Metropolitan Statistical Area.

And so buried a few paragraphs down in the release, where most reporters don't bother to read, was this gem about Yuba-Sutter: "The largest over-the-year percentage decrease in employment was reported in Yuba City, Calif. (-4.5 percent), followed by Las Cruces, NM (-3.5 percent), and Dalton, Ga., and Lawton, Okla. (-3.2 percent each)."

Of course, the percentage figure was probably not as bad as the real number of job losses elsewhere.

"The largest over-the-year decrease in employment occurred in Albuquerque, NM (-3,900), followed by Brownsville-Harlingen, Texas (-3,200), and Colorado Springs, Colo.(-2,700)," the release said. But Yuba-Sutter, you're number one, at least in one rarely noticed category.