Restaurant Review – March 2006

Napa Valley Marketplace Magazine Restaurant Review March 2006.

Jonesy’s
By “The Unknown Eater”

Old favorite dresses up… Many visitors to our Valley learned long ago of the convenience and the excellence of Jonesy’s Steak House. Located in the terminal at the Napa airport, Jonesy’s offers a full range of dining plus a cocktail bar, terrific service and very tasty food.Jonesy’s established a reputation as a first class steak house more than 50 years ago. In 2005, Bill Tuthill renovated his place but kept the parts that keep us coming back – the service and the outstanding food. The décor is comfortable and exactly right for relaxing.

Long time visitors who fly into to Napa often comment that Jonesy’s is a time warp kind of place that takes them back to airport restaurants from 50 years ago. When they say this, they get teary eyed and nostalgic. I agree. This is no rush ‘em in, rush ‘em out kind of place. At Jonesy’s it is okay to take your time, try a classic or try something new and to get to know old friends even better.

It is fun to sit by the windows and watch the airplanes take off and arrive just feet from your table. If the timing is right, you may see a real celebrity step down from a gorgeous private jet. Of course, this unique experience is even better with a custom made cocktail or a glass of Napa Valley’s finest. Turn your head and you can see Jonesy’s unique flat grill where steaks are cooked with a flat Sacramento rock on top to hold in the juices and produce that firm outside and juicy tender inside that steak lovers crave.

Maybe the perfect dinner for two is Jonesy’s Service for Two. This is a huge, 24 ounce sirloin done to your taste plus each of you will get a tossed green salad or a bowl of soup and your choice of potatoes or rice pilaf. Jonesy’s great staff is pleased to serve exactly what you want.

Not in the mood for steaks? Relax, Jonesy’s offers Broasted Chicken, tasty seafood, great salads and two specialties that are not to be missed, Jonesy’s homemade Famous Bleu Cheese Dressing and Jonesy’s Special Potatoes. They will delight your taste for, well, something a little different. Years ago, when we first came to Napa, people told us about Jonesy’s Famous Bleu Dressing and those incredible potatoes.

Jonesy’s Special Potatoes are freshly shredded potatoes with cheese and grilled onions. Many times we have gone to Jonesy’s just for the potatoes. Both are available at lunch and at dinner. Tasting these two unique items is a good enough reason to head for Jonesy’s right now.

Readers will appreciate that I am a cheeseburger fanatic. Jonesy’s features simply terrific cheeseburgers. Add perfect fries and a small house salad and I am in business. A business associate and I stopped in for lunch recently. We had the burgers and the small salads. I spooned some of the Jonesy’s Famous Bleu Cheese Dressing on my burger. Fantastic!

Speaking of lunch, if you are anywhere in the south county area, make Jonesy’s your headquarters for a private lunch, business lunch or even a company meeting. Jonesy’s has banquet facilities and they can always find a place for you that affords privacy for your meetings.

At Jonesy’s you can enjoy lunch and dinner, fine cocktails and great local wines. The dining room is open daily (except Mon) 11:30am – 8:00pm; breakfast is served at the counter from 10am. This great steak house, which also features very reasonable prices, is convenient to just about everyone in the county. Parking is close up and abundant at any time of the day. When you visit Jonesy’s, take the time to look around the gift shop and the airport. You will find that Napa County operates a pride-and-joy small airport that shows Napa’s best to visitors.

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History Article – June 2006

Napa Valley Marketplace Magazine History Article June 2006.

Fancy Fair & Community Projects
-Women’s History in our Town
By Lauren Coodley

When hearing that I taught “women’s history,” people have responded with confusion and misunderstanding for many decades. That’s not surprising, because most people don’t study the history of women, nor women’s organizations. Thus they don’t realize that women’s history encompasses the stories, not only of renowned national figures, but the quiet heroism of members of our own towns. Though much scholarship has focused on women’s voluntary contributions to civic life, it is the responsibility of every town to note and to remember these contributions.

One such contribution is charitable work through fund raising events. How would we find out the history of the “fancy fairs” that were held at the Fairgrounds for many years? And if we discovered the women of Community Projects created them, how could we find out how that organization began? How did it run so successfully, and who were the personalities that kept Community Projects thriving since its inception during World War I? So much of local history depends on who wrote for our local papers and what they chose to write about. Did journalists ever investigate the history of Community Projects? And if they did, have the archives been preserved and indexed? These are the kinds of questions we will be pondering as we develop the Napa History Project at the community college library.

In the meantime, if we talk to even one person, the origins of this important history begin to be woven. Maryellen Simmons was one of hundreds of women who belonged to Community Projects (CP). Her experiences in the organization both as a newcomer and as its 1975-76 board president begin to paint a picture of what this organization achieved. She remembers becoming aware of Community Projects, “by following CP in the newspaper. I was impressed by what the organization did—great things were accomplished as a group that one could never accomplish alone.”

Maryellen remembers: “I was working as a checker at Food Fair Market on Silverado Trail around 1963 when Pat (Vernice) Gasser, who was regular customer, approached me about joining. She emphasized that the organization was one of work, with camaraderie, yes, but with all things done through work, not pure socialization.” [Gasser’s mother was a founder of the group whose first project was rolling bandages for the WWI soldiers]

The overall mission of Community Projects was to benefit the people of Napa County. Members were required to log a minimum number of volunteer hours and attend monthly meetings, which Maryellen describes as “all business” with an agenda that included a strict accounting by the Board of Directors for every penny brought in and spent. During her time there, CP purchased a new van for Napa Valley Head Start, replaced Red Cross vehicles and gave countless scholarships to local high school students. She remembers that its first project was the modest one of purchasing a whole set of dishes for the Parks Victory Hospital, which once stood on a tree-lined Jefferson Street. “The women held their first little “bazaar” right there in the hospital with the goal of replacing the bits and pieces of donated dishes patient meals were served on back then.”

Years later Community Projects became the auxiliary support for Queen of the Valley Hospital where CP greeters in their blue monogrammed smocks were a welcome sight to patients and visitors for decades. That affiliation generated the organization’s principle that “no CP volunteer would ever fill a job that should be done by a trained, paid employee.” Many members fulfilled their hour commitments by working at the Thrift Shop. Maryellen describes a typical day there: “Volunteers arrived, bag lunch in hand, and gathered in the back room where donations were stored. They unpacked, sorted, mended, and priced items. In the early years of the store, if clothing arrived soiled or wrinkled, the women themselves would take it home to launder, iron, and return.”

The shop’s annual Spring Opening became a much-anticipated event in the community, and in the 70s the Thrift Store expanded, buying the corner service station next door. CP also took on the task of coordinating all the transportation for the Kaiser Golf Tournament (later Anheuser-Busch). The tournament became a major fund-raiser, but CP’s annual Fancy Faire was its signature event for many years. Preparation and planning for Fancy Faire was an enormous undertaking. Groups of women worked in their homes year-round making craft items and preparing baked goods and other consumables; in addition, the women and their entire families invested hours of sweat labor converting a cold exhibition building into a festive and beautiful place to kick off Napa’s holiday season.

As Maryellen recreates those years in the 60s and 70s, it reminds us that everyone experiences each decade differently. “Some Napans remember the blooming of civil rights and the anti-war movement in their town during these decades; others recall the simplicity of life in a small town encircled by orchards, with drive-in restaurants, a skating rink and two bowling alleys. Napa women joined clubs, made crafts and also worked outside the home in factories or in their own stores.” (excerpt from Napa: the Transformation of an American Town (Arcadia Publishing, 2004).

Within Maryellen’s own family, this period of the late 60s has a different meaning, as described by her son Michael Amen later in the Napa book: “In February 1969, I headed across the City of Napa to attend a concert … it seems more fitting to think of it as a pilgrimage.”
Amen had seen an ad in the Register for a concert for the Grateful Dead at the Dream Bowl. He writes: “My mother tells me that during World War II, couples were looking for some romantic way to spend their time because it could very well be their last time together…when the Dead performed, I was totally captivated… I feel lucky that I got there at that particular nick in time.”

Fancy Faire and the Dream Bowl are gone, to be
remembered as long as the last people to visit them are alive. Community Projects thrived, with new generations of women volunteers. It is housed as it always has been on 7l5 Franklin Street. Women’s history, the stories that women tell, can restore us to the memory of Fancy Faire, the triumph of Community Projects, ventures which knitted our community together in charity and craft. My deepest thanks to Maryellen Simmons for helping us to make sure this story is not forgotten.
__________________________________________

Note: Tony Kilgallen in his Napa: an Architectural Walking Tour (Arcadia Publishing, 200l) tells us, “In l905 G.W. Young announced his plans to build a plunge bath tank.” It was originally a wood frame building with a tank 30 by 90 feet. In l9l2 the pool was floored over by the Catholic Church, and Dominican Sisters taught classes there. In l920, the building was remodeled, and shortly after, Community Projects hung out its sign. For more information on the Napa History project or fall class,
contact sgrohs@napavalley.edu or
lcoodley@napavalley.edu.

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History Article – April 2006

Napa Valley Marketplace Magazine History Article April 2006.

A Tannery in a Town- Afterthoughts
By Lauren Coodley

Last month, I ended my essay this way: “What stories could the men in this photo tell us, and who will pass them on? Will their personal histories be lost or forgotten, left in shoeboxes and family scrapbooks?”

My first answer was from Sharon Arnold: The picture of the Sawyer color wheel includes her father, Chester van Gorder, “the man on the right with the dark hair.” Her mother “doesn’t remember any stories other than it was hard/dirty work and that he didn’t have set hours. He went in at 7:00 and worked until everything was done and many days that was early afternoon so he would fish the Napa River.”

My next correspondent was Peter Manasse, who wrote: “I am the 4th generation and only tanner and Manasse left in this town. Emanuel Manasse was my great-grandfather.” We discussed how it all began in l869, when Sawyers used to cure hides with salt and send them to Chicago for tanning. His great-grandfather Manasse came up to Napa on horse and buggy “and said, look I can tan those things.” He went to work for Sawyer and became a partner almost immediately (much sooner than I indicated in the first article). Emanuel’s first house, built in l886 at 443 Brown Street south of Oak, was known as the Manasse Mansion until five years ago, when it was renamed the Violet Mansion, now a Historic Landmark Number 78000723.

Peter Manasse explained that after his great-grandfather joined the Sawyer Company he rapidly developed new methods for tanning sheepskin and buckskin. The “relative” I mentioned in the first article was actually Emanuel’s son, Henry Manasse, who opened a shoe store downtown and built a family home at 845 Jefferson Street. Emanuel’s other sons were Ed and August. Both began working at Sawyers, but Ed stayed with the company, while August founded a tannery in Berkeley, Manasse Block Tannery. Irving went to work at Sawyer’s, along with his brothers, and later founded his own tannery next door, CalNap, in l945, the year after his father’s death. Ed and his wife had four boys: Gerald, Robert, Phillip, and Irving (Peter’s father). The Edward Manasse House at 495 Coombs Street is also a Registered Historic Landmark 93000271.

Peter Manasse remembers the “whistle blowing every day at seven and one and four,” the chemicals and dissolved hair being tossed into the Napa River, while the fleshings went to a tallow company. He remembers the barges coming up the river bringing diesel fuel for their boiler, and the hides arriving by freight train. He remembers driving a big flatbed truck across the 3rd street Bridge to pick up the hides at the train depot at 4th and Soscol. Sawyer Tannery was such a major employer that “most people did work at the tannery in high school or grammar school.” Napa was so small that, “if I drove my parents’ car too fast downtown, a police officer would call them.”

Originally Sawyer made baseball gloves, which they sold to all major baseball glove manufacturers. After the Japanese got into that business around l955, Sawyers was forced to switch to shoe leather. In l96l Pete Manasse came home from the Navy and worked in the business making shoe leather, until l980 when half the shoes were being imported. Every year after, another l0% were imported, and by l990, l00% of shoes were imported from other countries. Now, he tells me, all tanneries in America are gone.

What destroyed the tanneries was the policy of free trade. Recently, David Sirota wrote: “Free trade is all about allowing corporations to move capital wherever they please, without regard to the labor, human rights, environmental and—yes—security consequences of those moves.” (San Francisco Chronicle, February 24, 2006).

Wanting to learn more about the ways international events affect our local lives, I discovered the following information from a local leather supply shop:
“This area [Napa] contained the necessary elements of good leather crafting: soft water, fur bearing animals, and tanning materials from tree bark… Between 80 and 90% of the leather was tanned in the US. During both World Wars and the Depression, the tanneries prospered due to the constant demand for military and domestic leather products. They remained stable until the late 1970’s when three international events took place: Russia was at war with Afghanistan, the Ayatollah took over Iran (hence an embargo on African hairsheep), and Turkey chose not to export raw sheepskins. These countries supplied the fine raw material used to produce lightweight organ leather. Further, the efforts of the Environmental Protection Act caused many tanneries to close rather than invest in compliance measures.
What a surprise to discover the connection between countries so much in the news today with our own town’s history! My first article on tanneries concluded: “A man could make a living with his hands throughout most of the twentieth century, after unions won wages that allowed working class families to survive without charity.” Wayne Taylor, who probably grew up in one of those families, sent me this description of his childhood near the tannery:

“In the late 30s, I lived on Pine Street and attended Shearer Elementary in the seemingly huge (to a child) brick building. The tannery was only a few blocks away. I recall going to a side door of the building on a warm summer day and getting free leather scraps from a kindly gentleman employee whose machine was close by. A leather scrap combined with rubber strap cut from an old auto inner tube formed the action (parts for a slingshot)! Of course, this all started with a forked piece of wood trimmed from a tree. Now we had a neat toy for free. Remember, a Depression was still on. Several of us neighborhood kids would then compete to see who had the best accuracy in hitting tin cans with our homemade slingshot.

“Another summer memory that occurred near the tannery was watching the older kids pushing hand powered lawn mowers over the weeds on the vacant lot at Coombs and Elm. This preceded lively games of baseball with bats and balls all provided by the participating kids. Up Pine Street, and across from Shearer School was the little market where we could exchange scrounged soft drink bottles for penny candy. Most of us kids did not know there was a Depression on. We just accepted what we had as normal and made the most of it. Your article caused the recall of these pleasant carefree memories for me.”

The words of these three Napans confirm Carol Kammen’s insight that “local history is a process of learning, and is about explaining causes—the how, and the why, of the past.”

Warmest thanks to Wayne Taylor, Peter Manasse (now manager of Tulocay Cemetary) and Sharon Arnold for helping to write this history For more information, see Carol Kammen, On Doing Local History and Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back. The following poem was inspired by what I have learned.

They called it tanning
Then, and it wasn’t a booth
Where white girls would bake
Brown, but a building where
Animal skins were cured,
Not like sick people, but
Preserved, like pickles—
Alchemized, perhaps, into
Something called leather
That became a glove you
Could catch with, or slide
Your fingers inside.

They called it tanning
And it was a craft, a skill,
A living: dangerous, but
No more so than lying
In a booth to become brown,
Like the girls do these days.
You were a tanner, then,
And you worked with your
Hands, alongside other men.
Your leather became shoes that
People wore to work, to
Funerals, shoes that were worn
Until discarded: where are
All those shoes now,
Dropped at Goodwill?

They called it tanning,
After the animals had already
Died, while the river turned
Brown from the chemicals
And from the hair still
On the skins. Yet something
Was made, in that factory,
At least a living, as well
As hand and footwear, and
If the big clock no longer
Rings, and if there are no rhythms
Here and nothing made, just
Time lost, spent, missing—

They called it tanning.

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History Article – March 2006

Napa Valley Marketplace Magazine History Article March 2006.

A Tannery in a Town
By Lauren Coodley

I see it sometimes, and it could be under glass, a little museum of people and implements from another place and time. I’m there, too, but slightly to one side, my natural position, the onlooker, the interloper. The Village and its life was taken from them, and it was given to me. I tried my best to return it.
-New Burlington: The Life and Death of an American Town, John Baskin

Once upon a time, seven wharves were constructed on the Napa waterfront, along with lumberyards and warehouses. Back then; steamers carried both agricultural and industrial products, sometimes transporting entire flocks and herds of livestock to our docks. French Albert Sawyer from New Hampshire was visiting Napa when he noticed that local butchers were discarding sheep pelts with wool still on them. He purchased a pile of pelts and started a wool-pulling business on the banks of the Napa River, aided by Chinese laborers. Soon he was curing hides, pickling them in brine and shipping them back East.

In l870, he and his father founded the Sawyer Tanning Company on South Coombs Street. A year later, French Sawyer invited Emmanuel Manasse, a German immigrant who was running a successful tannery in the Mission District of San Francisco, to move with his wife Amelia to Napa and go to work for him. Manasse joined the company and rapidly developed new methods for tanning sheepskin and buckskin.

In small towns like Napa, in the early part of the twentieth century, there were few telephones and only one operator, Mary Stoddard. When she resigned to take a position with Sawyer, the Napa Daily Journal of June 7, l900 urged citizens to be patient “until the new operator becomes accustomed to the names of the subscribers.” That year, the tannery was buying deerskins for $.38 a pound in the summer, in winter, for $.28. Wet, salted cowhides cost $.09 a pound and horse hides cost $2.00.

By 1909, Sawyer Tannery had developed Napatan Waterproof Leather and Napa Patent Leather. Emanuel Manasse eventually became a co-owner of the business. In l9l7, his relative Henry Manasse opened a shoe store downtown and built a family home at 845 Jefferson Street; it is pictured in Tony Kilgallen’s Napa: an Architectural Walking Tour (Arcadia Publishing, 200l). When the supply demands of World War I caused a shortage of chemicals, Sawyer sent engineers and miners into the hills and found chrome ore from which they made dichromate of soda, the chemical essential to tanning.

By the Twenties, Sawyer was the first tannery west of Chicago to produce patent leather, and in 1927, it developed chromed tan leather, the ideal material for fashioning softball gloves, and later, leather for baseball and welding gloves. In the Twenties and Thirties, South Franklin Street, a couple of blocks from the Tannery, was a neighborhood of working class residents: tanners, paper hangers, stevedores, river men, and their families.

Lin Weber sketches the scene:
“Edna and Rita Guisti grew up in that neighborhood on Levee Street (now Riverside Drive). They went barefoot all summer, wearing ragged cotton dresses with bloomers underneath. They often climbed the big oak of Oak Street, which was by the water. It had a rope swing, on which they swung as high as possible before jumping off into the water… The river was still clear; carp would come to the surface, and children tried to spear them with willow branches to sell to Napa’s remaining Chinese families.

“The big whistle on top of the water tower at the Sawyer Tannery was one of life’s regulators for children like Edna and Rita, and for their parents as well. It blew every day of every year at 6 am, 12 noon and 4 pm.” (Roots of the Present: Napa Valley l900-l950, 20l).

Despite the national economic collapse in the Thirties, Napans were partially sheltered from the bitter effects of the Depression when Julian Weidler opened the Rough Rider Clothing Company in 1936. Rough Rider brought new training and employment opportunities: classes were offered at Napa High to teach girls to operate power sewing machines. Eventually, Rough Rider employed over five hundred local women, all members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Rough Rider Company even extended credit to its retail customers, and many remember being saved from economic disaster by the company’s generosity.

Sawyer Tannery continued to thrive, turning out woolen lining for coats and all kinds of gloves. The photos on the previous page illustrate the atmosphere of the tannery: hard work, sometimes dangerous and always involving exposure to the toxic materials used to tan hides. Even so, a man could make a living with his hands throughout most of the twentieth century, after unions won wages that allowed working class families to survive without charity.

All of that began to change in the decade after these photos were taken, after corporations were allowed by “free trade” to move their operations out of our country. Napa factories shut down one by one. Rough Rider closed its doors in 1976, Kaiser Steel in 1983, and Sawyer Tannery gave final notice to its employees in 1990. With the clanging of the great doors and the leveling of the buildings, with the transition of blue collar workplaces to art galleries and tourist centers, scores of workers were displaced and young high school graduates lost the opportunity to work at manufacturing jobs.

As historian Carol Kammen writes, “Local history is a process of learning, and it is about explaining causes—the how, and the why, of the past… the letters of a prominent family might be held in a local archive while the letters of a laborer in a tannery were not thought about or considered important enough to collect.” (On Doing Local History, Altamira Press, 200l). What stories could the men in these photos tell us, and who will pass them on? Will their personal histories be lost or forgotten, left in shoeboxes and family scrapbooks? Please send your memories of the tannery and other untold parts of Napa history to me at lcoodley@napavalley.edu or c/o History Department, Napa Valley College, Napa, 94558.

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History Article – February 2006

Napa Valley Marketplace Magazine History Article February 2006.

Seeing History
Through Photographs

By Lauren Coodley
Who decides what is of historical importance? History has been expanded in the last several decades to include the stories of “real people.” The recent Faces of America photo contest (sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2000-2002) gave us an opportunity to learn from the family histories of those who were working or studying at Napa’s community college.

Our first photo shows us how California was a destination of adventure and opportunity for some European immigrants: Preschool teacher Maggie Cole described her grandmother, Ruth Berg Longhurst, seen in this photo taken in Oakland around l895, as “the daughter of German Jewish parents, who came to the U.S. in the l870’s. As a single independent woman, my grandmother homesteaded near Susanville, wrote a column of her adventures for the Oakland paper, and became friends with Mark Twain.”

Our second photo shows us how whaling and earthquakes helped to shape one family’s destiny. Electrician Joseph Alexander contributed this image of his family posing at the Palace of Fine Arts, site of the Pan-Pacific Exposition in l9l5. On the right is his grandfather Joseph Alexander (for whom he was named), an electrician whose parents immigrated to Monterey when it was still a site for whaling. Joseph moved to San Francisco from Monterey to help rebuild the City after the l906 earthquake. Alexander wrote that a few years after this photo was taken, “Joseph moved his family to a southern San Joaquin Valley ranch where one of his sons, his grandsons, and his great-grandsons continue in the electrical business.”

Mail room clerk Mary Ann Watson described her father, Fred Behrens, at his store The Hippodrome Sweet Shop, Napa l921: “a favorite place to visit over ice cream. My father was later a spray painter at Mare Island.” Mare Island Naval Shipyard was a major source of employment for Filipinos, Euro-Americans, and eventually African-Americans as well. But in the Thirties, life expectancy was 58 for men and 62 for women, the average salary was $1368 per year, unemployment was 25%, milk cost l4 cents a quart and bread, 9 cents a loaf. Student Christina Granero wrote:

”My maternal grandmother, Edith Cecilia Garrigan Gentry, holding the day’s bounty. This was taken in a Pacific Gas and Electric camp, where my grandparents and family lived during the Depression and my grandfather worked as an electrician on the Oroville Dam. My grandmother had two small children and a husband to feed, note the hunting license stuck in her hat.”

The war years in California were shocking and traumatic for Japanese citizens who were forcibly relocated to bleak camps, yet at the very same time, women of other races found new pride and opportunity as “Rosie the Riveters.” More than a million African Americans left the South during the War, and 85% of the migrants came to California for the employment opportunities. For African-American women, as well as those of other ethnicities, well paid blue collar work brought decent pay and a sense of companionship with fellow workers, which they hoped to maintain when the war ended. Student Ashlee Gary wrote:

“This is my grandmother, Ethel Mae Gary, Magnolia Street, Oakland, l945…She and my grandfather moved to California where they bought a house and raised their six children, where she still lives and still wears that same look of honesty and wisdom. She is our family treasure and holds us together.”

Student Sara Courtney described another part of the World War II story:

My grandfather, Howard Baskin, after a hard day’s work outside government housing, Richmond, l943. Housing was provided to shipyard employees during World War II. Having volunteered for the Navy Seabees, he began work as a shipfitter. When they realized he could draw blueprints, he was exempted from the draft and promoted.

And as suburbs grew, freeways were built to connect them, and a new word called smog was invented. In the Fifties, service station attendants wore uniforms and checked your oil, and driver training was an important rite of passage in high school. Student Kira Bulger wrote: “At left, Donald Hevernor, my grandfather, taught business, accounting, and drivers training for the San Leandro School District. This photo taken in l955, shows him receiving their first dual control instructional vehicle built by Chevrolet. As President of the CTA [local teachers union], he worked with March Fong Eu in the development of driver’s education programs for the state.”This family photo helps us realize that behind -the -wheel drivers training had a history. Widespread deaths from traffic accidents created a need that public officials worked to meet. Now that free driver training has been removed from most public high schools, we realize that originally it was provided for the public good.

In the Fifties, Cesar Chavez began registering Latino voters in San Jose, and when the Rumford Act began to address the housing discrimination suffered by African-Americans. In l948, a coalition of progressive white and African American voters campaigned for pharmacist William Byron Rumford, who was running for state assembly in a district that included much of Berkeley and part of Oakland. Rumford won the election, becoming the first African American from Northern California to serve in the legislature. He eventually authored two of the state’s most important civil rights laws—the Fair Employment Practices Act of l959 and the Rumford Fair Housing Act of l963.
Student Koy Lynn Hardy wrote:
“Karese Young, my mother, Washington Elementary School, Berkeley 1964. This second grade photo of my mother shows one of many darling children experiencing the benefits of the civil rights movement. Karese lived across the street from the Rumford family of the famed Rumford Act that banned racial discrimination in housing in l964.”

And student Rosa Tijero concluded:
“Jose Garcia, my father, alien labor ID card, taken l2/7/55, prior to coming to California to work in the fields of Salinas, where he toiled for 25 years, providing for his family in Mexico. In l969, he marched with Cesar Chavez. He retired from the fields in l985 and lives with his daughter (me) in Napa.”

People of every place in time deserve a history… What they thought; how they felt; what they got angry, fought, and cursed about; what they prayed for; what drove them insane; and finally, how they died and were buried.
- Joseph Amato, Rethinking Home

These photos will be included in a textbook, California: a Multicultural Documentary History (Prentice-Hall, 2006), written by Lauren Coodley. Thanks to Jayme and Tammy Rogers for contacting the contributors to the photo contest and helping to organize the textbook.

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History Article – January 2006

Napa Valley Marketplace Magazine History Article January 2006.

The Flight of Feathers:
Researching Napa Birds

By Lauren Coodley

In studying the history of Napa, I came across a bit of tantalizing information: banker and Boy Scout leader Elmer Bickford wrote a letter to the editor in the l920’s, listing the birds that the Scouts had sighted on one weekend. I wasn’t able to include the list in my book, but it haunted me. Which birds had survived?

When I saw a copy of a new book, “Breeding Birds of Napa County,” an atlas detailing the natural history of the 145 known and 11 possible species that breed in the area, I realized that I could begin to answer that question. I learned that the Napa-Solano Audubon Society (NSAS) had organized 70 volunteers, most of whom surveyed separate 5-kilometer plots between 1989 and 1993. The atlas includes two foldout maps, drawings of each bird, distribution maps, habitat descriptions, and population estimates. Leah Messinger writes, “In the spirit of the first breeding bird atlas, which was developed in Great Britain and Ireland in 1966, this book provides a baseline for future comparative population studies. NSAS expects this atlas will be a useful environmental record as the traditionally mixed-crop agricultural county becomes more and more a monoculture of wine grapes. Already, since the book’s completion, amateur ornithologists have noticed a decline in the numbers of loggerhead shrikes and burrowing owls” (“Ear to the Ground,” January-March 2004).

Elmer Bickford was one of the leading citizens of l9th century Napa, and an outstanding amateur photographer; I have included some of his views of Napa here. Along with his Scouts, he found the following birds: Western Robin, Green-backed Goldfinch, English Sparrow, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, House Finch, Plain Titmouse, Audubon Warbler, Cedar Waxwing, Belted Kingfisher, Valley Quail, Red-shafted Flicker, California Towhee, California Purple Finch, White-crowned Sparrow, Red-breasted Sapsucker, Townsend Solitaire, Rufous Hummingbird, Lute-scent Warbler, Hermit-thrush, Golden-crowned Sparrow, Western Meadow Lark, Rough-winged Swallow, Brewer Blackbird, Song Sparrow, Violet-green Swallow, Slender-build Nuthatch, Nuttal Woodpecker, Spotted Towhee, Downy-willow, Woodpecker, Bullock Oriole, Willow Goldfinch, Nicasio (Bewick) Wren, Western, Warbling Vireo, Western Flycatcher, Killdeer, Black Phoebe, Red-winged Blackbird, Tree Swallow, California Jay, Ring-necked Pheasant, Russet-backed Thrush, Cliff, Swallow, Wren Tit, Western Tanager, Western Gnatcatcher, Barn Swallo, Great Blue Heron, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Long-tailed Chat, Western Wood Pewee, Pileolated Warbler, Pacific Yellow Throat, Lawrence Goldfinch, California Creeper, Arkansas Kingbird, White-tailed Kite, Cooper’s Hawk, Sharp-shinned Hawk, Allen Hummingbird, Shrike, Yellow Warbler, Chipping Sparrow, Cassin Vireo, Lark Sparrow, Western Bluebird, Black-headed Grosbeak, Western Crow, Turkey Vulture, House Wren, Mallard Duck, Little Green Heron, Mourning Dove and Wood Duck.

On the supplementary trip on Sears Point Road, they found an additional 17 species: Horned Lark, Sparrow Hawk, Least Sandpiper, Western Sandpiper, Marbled Godwit, Hudsonian Curlew, Tule Wren, Bonaparte Gull, Western Gull, Herring Gull, Salt Marsh, Yellowthroat Coot, Savannah (Bryant’s) Sparrow, American Egret, Spoonbill Duck, Grebe, Semi-palmated Plover, Mocking-Bird, Lazuli Bunting, Black-crowned Night Heron.

Eighty or so years later, reporters for the Register wrote: “Where tourists now prowl for wines and high priced mustards, there were once herds of tule elk browsing, California condor soaring, and even some grizzly bears roaming…what decimated the population of elk, condors, and bear was the loss of habitat and hunting spurred by the influx of settlers during the l9th century.” (“Millennium Issue,” January 2000).

A thousand years ago, Napa was home to an abundance of wildlife that we now associate with places like Alaska. The article notes that Napa settlers’ early records include mention of the California condor, according to Bill Grummer, Ranger at Bothe State Park. With a wingspan of nearly ten feet; condors could soar on thermal updrafts for hours and reach l500 feet. Alterations to the riparian habitat along the Napa River and to the wetlands that once stretched all the way to Imola Avenue also reduced the prevalence of many bird species in the county. The California Clapper Rail, now listed as endangered and often impossible to find, was once so numerous that residents ate it, said Fred Botti, biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game.

When we read about the loss of open space, when we see the landscape around us changing abruptly, it’s easy to forget the cost we pay in the loss of birds. Napa College student Justine Fournier, who has studied the destruction of the town of Monticello, is keenly aware of the terrible loss of species. She single-handedly cross referenced Bickford’s list with the careful lists created by “Breeding Birds of Napa” authors Murray Berner, Bill Grummer, Robin Leong and Mike Rippey. Here are the birds that Elmer Bickford and his Scouts saw, which have survived today: House Finch, Cedar Waxwing, Belted Kingfisher, California Towhee, Hermit Thrush, Western Meadow Lark, Brewer Blackbird, Song Sparrow, Violet-green Swallow, Nuttal Woodpecker, Spotted Towhee, Bullock Oriole, Wren, Killdeer, Black Phoebe, Red-winged Blackbird, Tree Swallow, Ring-necked Pheasant, Cliff Swallow, Purple Finch, Warbling Vireo, Northern Rough-winged Swallow, Downy Woodpecker, Green Heron, Western Tanager, Barn Swallow, Great Blue Heron, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Western Wood Pewee, Lawrence Goldfinch, White-tailed Kite, Cooper’s Hawk, Sharp-shinned Hawk, Allen Hummingbird, Yellow Warbler, Chipping Sparrow, Cassin Vireo, Lark Sparrow, Western Bluebird, Black-headed Grosbeak, Western Crow, Turkey Vulture, House Wren, Mourning Dove, Wood Duck and Mallard Duck.

Of the birds found on Sears Point Rd., there remain these: Homed Hawk, Western Gull, Savannah (Bryant’s) Sparrow, Grebe, Mocking Bird, Lazuli Bunting, Black-crowned Night Heron.

What happened to the others? In l930, there were only 6,437 people living here; by l950, we were home to l3,000. In the Forties, new houses were built on the streets called Ash, Sycamore, and Spruce, where perhaps those trees once stood in open meadows. In the Fifties and Sixties, new houses were built north of Lincoln, in what had been farms, and on the north side of Trancas, in an area named Bel Aire, and then in Browns’ Valley, were acres of prune orchards and dairy cows. By l970, we had 37,000 people.

The population voted in a 1973 referendum to maintain the size of the city and to keep downtown as the center of the shopping district. Those citizens, Republicans and Democrats, women and men, must have cherished the town they knew, bordered by Trancas on the north end and the open wetlands around the Maxwell Bridge, wetlands that housed many of the bird species we can no longer find. Few strangers ever visited and few locals ever left, a kind of Brigadoon, where the narrow roads in and out of town were rarely traveled by anyone. Perhaps in those days a quarter century ago, the Western Robin, the White Crowned Sapsucker, and the Lute-scent Warbler lingered in our fields, not yet claimed by developers. Certainly the wetlands were home, as they had been for thousands of years, to the Tule Wren, the Western Sandpiper, the Spoonbill Duck, and the Sparrow Hawk. Was it worth losing them for another McDonald’s or an Office Depot that would displace customers from locally owned businesses downtown?

How do we count the price of “progress?” How do we use the traces from the past to help us plan for the future? The letter from a Boy Scout leader, the dedication of the Audubon Society members, and the careful work of a college student have combined to give us some tools. For sharing with me the letter and photographs from his grandfather, I would like to thank Robert Northrop; for her impassioned research, Justine Fournier. Order forms for “Breeding Birds of Napa” are available through napasolanoaudubon.org.

For opportunities to see some of these birds in the wild, including field trips along Huichica Creek (Napa County) and Highway 113 (Solano County), contact field trip chair David Takeuchi at (707) 643-5544. Birds that are endangered right now by habitat destruction include the Olive-sided Flycatcher, Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks, and the Yellow Warbler. Perhaps we can yet save a few more species from the bulldozer and the parking lot, and let us honor those who’ve spent their time on earth advocating for those lovely flying feathers, the birds that still live with us.

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