Dick Woodson

Isabella Montenegro: This is Isabella Montenegro,

Aria Ries-Juncker: And Aria Ries Juncker,

IM: And we are pleased to welcome Dick Woodson, who we are interviewing on behalf of the Saint Helena Historical Society’s Oral History program. We are conducting the interview at 5:14 PM on April 23, 2026, at 2004 Humboldt Street, Yountville, California.

Dick Woodson: Two-zero-zero-four

IM: My apologies. Welcome, Mr. Woodson. Can you begin telling us where you were born, along with how you came to the Napa Valley?

DW: I was born in Dallas, Texas [7/3/1935], where my father was a bank examiner for the United States Treasury Department and then we moved to a small town, Hampstead, Texas. [where] he was a banker, and then when he moved to Conroe, Texas.So I grew up and finished high school in Conroe and then went to college at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, for a year and a half. I was studying aeronautical engineering at the time, but I changed to business, doing economics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Then when I finished there, I had several jobs, as we will get to later, but one of the jobs was to be hired by United Airlines, and I had the choice of eight different places to live all over the United States. I chose San Francisco, so that’s how I happened to come here when I was a pilot for United [Airlines].

IM: That’s amazing. Are you able to give us a summary about your immediate family when you were a child?

DW: Well, my father was a banker; my mother, a housewife; my sister, two years older [than me]; and myself, and that’s the family. We didn’t have any family when we lived in Dallas or Hempstead, but when we were in Conroe, that was where my grandfather and grandmother lived with their son and daughter, and their family’s. So, that’s what my family was like when I was going to high school.

IM: Do you care to expand on your home life and what it was like?

DW: Gosh, you know, it was just a pretty nice home life. My father worked, and my mother was a housewife, but when World War II came along. A lot of the women went into the workforce, and my mother was one of them. She worked in various jobs, like banks, the doctor’s office, and for a petroleum company’s office.

IM: What are some of your earliest memories from your childhood, or your most significant?

DW: I lived in Hempstead. I remember we had a tree that I really liked, and it had a nice swing on it and I really hated to leave that house. At that time, I was quite young, probably less than five, not going to school yet. You know, the streets weren’t paved in those days, and when it rained we got out and made mud pies in the streets. My mother had a guest over for a bridge game where we would present them with mud pies when they got back to their car. They didn’t expect that they would find mud pies in their car and then I would go around after the ladies had left and take the last little sips out of their teacups because it was so sweet. I remember we were playing with neighbor kids in the street and riding bicycles.

IM: You grew up in Texas and around the 1940s, correct?

DW: Yes.

IM: Culturally, what was that like?

DW: When we first moved to Conroe, it must have been, 1940. We lived in a town, which was largely white and colored people, but it was the main part of the town where the white people lived and there were two different areas where the colored people lived and how it was right on the edge of the white and the colored. I enjoyed the colored people, and particularly, they had their church nearby, and they would be singing in the night and we would go down there and sit in our cars and listen to them sing. I remember another guy came along, and he pushed a cart with hot tamales, and we were always happy to see that hot tamales cart come to town. The town was near an oilfield and began to have a lot of income from the oil. So they began to pave the streets. I remember the streets being paved and how nice that was. Next to my house was an empty lot, and we had a fair amount of rain that summer and whenever it had rained, thousands of crawdads, some people call them crayfish, would dig holes in the ground. They made these little mountains on the top, and when they kicked out their dirt it would make little towers that were six or eight inches tall. I would take a piece of string and put a piece of bacon on the end of it, drop it down in that hole, and the crawfish would catch hold of it. I’d pull him out and play with them.

IM: Moving on, how did growing up during that specific time period help shape your worldview and identity?

DW: When I was six, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and everyone came together as a nation. We all had a great feeling of wanting to help each other. All the young men were volunteering to go into the Army, Navy, whatever. There wasn’t any Air Force at that time. That was part of the Navy they had there. I remember my father showing me how to take a rifle, load it and hide behind the couch so if the Germans were to come in, we would protect the family that way. From time to time, we’d have air raids where at night everyone would have to turn off all their lights and close their windows, and then the air raid wardens would walk the streets and look for little glimpses of light that might be escaping from some of the windows because we didn’t want to have the enemy airplanes to be able to find the city. It was very much dominated by the fact that we were fighting a war. The way it affected the children was that there were some things that were in short supply, such as gasoline, sugar, and meat. Gasoline was rationed, and you could have just a few gallons. At the time, for your meat, you had to have a little stamp in order to get that or to get sugar. We saved our money and bought little stamps at about like twenty-five cents each. When we’d get enough, like what amounted to eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents, we could trade that book of stamps in for a war bond. In school, it was fun; we had a lot of art and music, singing, choral clubs, and excellent teachers.

IM: Continuing on the topic of school, what was your schooling like up until college? DW:What was it like?

IM: Yeah, what was your schooling like until college?

DW: It was just like everybody’s schooling, you went to school in the morning around eight o’clock and probably got out around four. When we were younger, we had our schooling in one room with the same teacher and then when we got out of grammar school and into High School, we would go to different grades with different teachers for different subjects. We had a lot of time for sports as well.

IM: What was your favorite subject?

DW: I don’t know that I particularly loved any of them. I have the subjects; we get our work; that was it.

IM: What did you major in and how did this help you in the numerous career fields that you partook in?

DW: When I went to college, I started aeronautics for a year and a half. In the summers, I would have various jobs, working at grocery stores and airports. When I changed schools, we went to Dallas, I really enjoyed economics a lot more than engineering. I didn’t quite think I would enjoy sitting at a desk in a big room with 100 other people and drawing boards, so that would have been the aeronautical side of it. I thought I would like to study economics, or perhaps going into banking or some other financial field.

IM: You’ve had several careers through your lifetime, what was your personal favorite and why?

DW: As long as I could remember, I was interested in airplanes, and the thing I wanted most was to be a fighter pilot and fly off of aircraft carriers because I felt like it took great amount of skill to be able to take off and land on them [aircraft carriers] and go off on a flight and come back to them in the middle of the ocean. So I did the Navy pilots [program]. When I graduated, I considered going into the Marines as a pilot. I was too thin, so I couldn’t pass. About that time, I joined the Texas Air National Guard because I really liked the fact that if you joined the guard, you got to fly the kind of airplanes that they flew or work on the kind of airplanes that their particular units had, and I didn’t want to be involved with cargo airplanes for commerce. I wanted to be involved with the fighters. So my Air Guard unit was a fighter group, from time to time, I would almost go through flight training to become a pilot with them because I was initially an aircraft mechanic. But, I had trouble with my weight again. So I never really got to go into the military flight school and become a military fighter pilot, so I spent about nine years in the reserves. Part of that time was in the Texas Air Guard. After this, I was hired by the U.S. Treasury Department to be a bank examiner. When they found out I was in the Guard, they didn’t want me to have any military commitments, for example, if I had to be in town on a particular weekend but I’d be off in another part of the state. I was requested to withdraw my application. I probably shouldn’t have, but I did, then I didn’t know what to do. [After,] I was talking to my mother, and she always enjoyed drawing house plans and figuring out ways to decorate and all, and from time to time, she would have a house built. So I asked her why she didn’t go into the business of being a home building contractor. She said that my stepfather would never let her do that. In trying to talk her into how good an idea it was, I decided I would look into it myself. I had a cousin that was building houses in another part of the state. One afternoon when I was visiting him, there were some people pouring cement for a sidewalk around the house. I didn’t have anything to do, so I just went out there and started mixing cement just for the fun of it. Before I knew it, I was helping him build houses. I helped him build a couple of houses by the time my mother decided that she wanted to build a house. I said, “Well, if you’re going to build a house, I’d like to build it for you.” So I built that house for her, then I built another house and sold it. The building industry had an off period so I thought, “well, I will go to work for the Federal Reserve bank examiners.” So I talked to them. They agreed to hire me and I told them, one of the previous people that I had interviewed with the Treasury Department, that I was going to go to work with the Veds, and he said, “Well, we’ve changed our policy now, and we will allow you to be in the reserves and still work for us. Why don’t you come to work for us?” So I did. I went to work for the U.S. Treasury Department. That’s how I got there. I did that for about five years, but all of my life, I was really in love with flying. I decided that I would see if I could get on with an airline, and I was not initially successful at that, but I became a flight instructor, I got a lot of good flying experience that way. Then I became a corporate pilot and got some experience with larger multi-engine airplanes. Then, for fun, I was flying aerobatics, and I went to an aerobatic op competition. One of the guys that saw me flying there asked me to come over and visit with him. That was in Chicago, and at the time, I would have flights to different parts of the country, and so sometimes, I would fly through Chicago, and one time, when I was in Chicago, there was a tremendous snowstorm, and I wasn’t going to be able to fly for a couple of days with the company, and he said, “Why don’t you talk to United Airlines?” I was so happy with my flying job with a corporate company that he really had to kind of convince me to go there. But I did go, and they said, “You’re going to have an interview with a certain man.” So I got there, and I said, “I have an interview set up for Mr. So-and-So,” and they said, “You have to fill out these papers before the interview.” There were a lot of papers. It was complex and they wanted me to describe all the different kinds of flying I’ve done, and I didn’t want to do that. I wasn’t excited about flying for United Airlines. I took the papers and handed them back to them, and I said, “No, I don’t think I want to do this.” I walked through the door, and as I was grabbing for the doorknob, I thought, “My friend set up this interview, and it’s gonna look bad for him if I don’t show up.” So I went back and got the papers and filled them out, without much enthusiasm. I went in [to the interview] and they said, “We want to give you a test.” I went in there and I took the test, and they said, “You did very well, and we’d like for you to come back in about a week or so for the physical part.” I did that, and when they got the results for my mental test and the physical test, the man said, “I have the ability this year, myself, without any further interviews to decide on two people to admit to the company for flying,” I was one of those two. [After,] when I walked into the big hangar. There was a large airplane sitting there with the tail going up. I looked at the airplane and I thought, “You know, this really would be quite a different field of flying, and I think I would like to do this.” That’s how I got to be a United Airlines pilot.

IM: That’s amazing. Previously, you talked about meeting your wife in collegeDW: No, I did not meet her there.

IM: My apologies. How did you meet your wife?

DW: Well, that was back when I was a bank examiner traveling around, and I was in Houston, there was a big party of young people, I went to it, and she had a boy friend, not a boyfriend, but a boy who was a friend, he asked her to get some of her friends together; he’d gotten some of his friends together, and then I’d go to this party. They were all lawyers. We went to the party, and there were several hundred people there and there was Caroline [his wife] in a group with a whole bunch of these lawyers around her and I moved my way through the lawyers, I asked her to dance with me, that’s the way we met.

IM: Can you tell us about your children and grandchildren if you have any?

DW: I have two children; my son has one child and two stepchildren, and my daughter had five children. Her five children, two of whom were raised by surrogate parents and the other three were adopted. My son had this one child with his second wife, they divorced, he married his third wife, she had two children, and the five of them are very happy. The three children that were adopted by a family have a stepsister and a stepbrother, they are very happy in that family.

IM: How do you describe your experience raising your kids?

DW: Well, I was very happy to have them when they were born. Then, as they grew up and became teenagers, they both became very difficult and it was a difficult time for me, and I was not enjoying those years at all and then finally, they got older; they smoothed out, and now I enjoy them.

IM: What was your life like before coming to the Napa Valley?

DW: What was my life like?

IM: Yes, sir.

DW: I came to the Napa Valley when I took the job at United. Before that, my life was that of a bank examiner, where I traveled all over Texas, parts of Oklahoma, and parts of Louisiana, my life was that of a lot of traveling, a lot of very tiring work, and at the end of the week, I was really tired; I had to drive maybe a couple hundred miles or so and get home just to relax during the weekend, but then I’d have to go out again, Sunday or Monday, so it was a busy life, being a bank examiner.

IM: What was the Napa Valley like when you first moved here? How did you envision it?

DW: When I first took the job with United, I lived in San Mateo. It was a very nice suburban town. I enjoyed it a lot. But I bought an airplane, and I wanted to put it in an airport, and Livermore was maybe 20 miles away, and so I bought a house in Livermore. I really enjoyed having my airplane there. It was a great airport to have my airplane in. It was close by, but I became very allergic to the pollen, and sometimes I would get so allergic that I couldn’t fly for United. I looked for another place to live where it wouldn’t have pollen, I decided on Pebble Beach. I moved to Pebble Beach and enjoyed it very much, and my allergies just went away. After a while, I became interested in wine, I thought I would like to move up to this area, I looked at Sonoma, and Napa, and I thought, “Well, I could learn a lot about winemaking here in Napa,” and it was a beautiful valley with a comfortable lifestyle and wonderful weather, and so I looked around here, and I wanted to live in Saint Helena. I looked up that way, but I had in mind that I wanted a certain kind of house, and I wanted a house to fit my idea of what should be in the Napa Valley and it was a house like this one. But my real estate agent said, “Well, we’ve shown you everything here in Saint Helena, and you didn’t have anything there that you chose. I have something you might like in Yountville.” I said, “Yountville is not a very nice-sounding name. I don’t want to live in a town named Yountville. I don’t want to look at the house.” So we continued to look and look and look. She said, “What about this house in Yountville?” I said, “Well, you know what? I grew up in a town named Conroe, and I don’t like the sound of that sound, and I don’t like the sound of Yountville. No, I don’t want to look at that house.” But finally, for lack of anything else to see, she brought me to Yountville, and Yountville was kind of a backwater town. Not much to commend it, but the house was just what I was looking for and I thought, “Well, maybe this town will get better. It looks to me like maybe it has a chance of getting better than it is now.” So I bought this house, and that’s just what happened. The town just got better and better, and I liked it better all the time. It’s amazing.

IM: Continuing on with that transition and change, how has Napa Valley changed during your time here?

DW: Well, it’s gotten to be more sought-after as a place to live. It’s gotten noticed for excellent food and excellent wines, and a lot of people have wanted to spend their weekends or buy homes here, so it’s gotten a little bit bigger and a little bit nicer and a little bit more upscale than it was.

IM: How do you feel about that?

DW: I like it. It’s good. There’s no other place I would rather live. I used to travel a lot all over the United States, and I’ve been to a lot of different places all over the world. This is where I want to be.

IM: Why is it your favorite?

DW: Because it’s quiet, it’s beautiful, it’s comfortable. Nice people, low crime. It’s beautiful here, I like it.

IM: How does the Napa Valley compare to Texas and the other places you’ve been?

DW: The weather’s much better here. I grew up in Texas. I thought everyone lived in a place like Texas, where the summers were so hot that when you went outside, the humidity made you sweat through your clothes immediately. If you tried to do anything outside, you tired quickly and it could be too wet. Sometimes the storms were such that it would turn like night, even just during the day. It would be dark outside. In the winter, it wasn’t cold enough to get snow, although we often wished we did. The whole time I lived there, it only snowed enough that I could make a snowman once. But winters were cold and damp and uncomfortable. I didn’t like Texas weather, but I thought everyone in the world lived in similar conditions until I began to travel. When I was at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the winters there were cold, but they were dry enough; it didn’t really bother you, and the summers were beautiful there. So I thought, “This is really nice here.” I’d seen a little bit of Connecticut and New York, and I’d found that those areas were very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer with high humidity in both summer and winter. I knew I didn’t like that. Then I had a few flights out to California, and I found the weather here comfortable. I think this is the nicest weather I’ve ever seen.

IM: What was your wife’s perspective on moving?

DW: On moving?

IM: Yes.

DW: She was excited about it.

IM: How so?

DW: Well, her family was somewhat controlling, and Texas had very difficult, harsh weather, so she thought that it would be a much better life out here. She was excited about the chance to move to San Francisco. At that time, San Francisco had a reputation of being a nice town and a nice place to live. What people told me at that time was that “San Francisco was like a lady.” It has changed. It’s not as good as it was, but this place, It got better here in Yountville.

IM: When did you and your wife know that it was time to settle down and have kids?

DW: After we had been married a few years, it was clear that we were well suited for each other. We weren’t going to get a divorce. At that time, I thought it would be a good time to start having children, before I became too old to fully enjoy them as the years passed.

IM: Do you have any notable or favorite memories of that time in your life with your wife and kids?

DW: It was all good, all good.

IM: Do you have any particular ones? ​

DW: Not right now.

IM: Okay. Continuing on, is there anything you would have done differently looking back in your life?

DW: No, I’m pretty well satisfied with it.

IM: Do you have any advice for younger generations?

DW: Yes. ​

IM: Are you willing to tell us some secrets?

DW: I think what Benjamin Franklin said about moderation being a good thing. I think that patience is a good thing and I think that you should learn to forgive.

IM: Is there anyone you would like to mention or thank for getting to this point in your life with all your success?

DW: I was fortunate that after my real father died, my mother found a very good man to be married to, he exhibited those qualities of patience and love. My mother was a very loving person. My sister and I were young. Like a lot of people, we fought a lot and were a problem for our parents. Then, as we grew older and got more settled down and they grew older and got more settled down, as well. Everyone got along beautifully, that’s important to have a good family that encourages you to do what you want to do. If you’re dealing with good people; you and good people should be encouraged to do what you want to do. You have to be careful if you’re dealing with someone that’s not a good person by not allowing them to do everything that they want to do.

IM: Did having a father figure such as your stepdad, inspire you to take any qualities or traits onto your family with your wife?

DW: I’m sure that it helped me to develop attitudes of friendliness and kindness.

IM: Did you carry that throughout your life?

DW: Yes, one of the things that’s always been important to me is honesty, all of my family members were very honest. Going all the way back to my grandfather.

IM: Do you have any specific examples?

DW: No, just the whole way, all the time, whenever they told me something. It was the truth, and whenever they did anything, it was honorable.

IM: Is there anything we didn’t ask you that is important to your story?

DW: Not that I can think of.

IM: Thank you so much for having us.

DW: Thank you. I’m just an ordinary person. That’s it.