Interviewee: Norman Samuel Manzer

Interviewers: Larsen Moura, Jeremiah Vasquez

April 4, 2025

LM: I am pleased to welcome Norman Samuel Manzer whom I am interviewing on behalf of the St. Helena Historical Society’s Oral History Program.

We are conducting this interview at two o’clock, on April 4th, 2025, at the St. Helena High School Library. Welcome Norm, can you begin by telling us how and when did your family first come to America?

Norman Manzer: I don’t have an exact date. My younger sister did some genealogical research and probably very early 1800s. The only record that she was able to find, not of where we came from in the German areas of Europe, but settled in New York and were working on building the Erie Canal.

The details of that, for how long and what portion, I don't have that information. But we do know that that’s where the footprint came on in America.

From there, it seemed that the family migrated to Nebraska out in the farming country.

They call it the Midwest, but [it’s] the middle of America. I have a photo here of my grandfather when he was about sixteen years old.1 So this would be probably about 1915, holding four mules with their lead ropes there on the farm in Nebraska. I treasure this. It's not in an album. It sits in a frame where people can see it when they come to visit so I can reflect upon that ancestry. That grandfather was with me until I was almost forty years old, and so very dear memories of him.

Some of my earliest childhood memories… my mom and dad were raised in Venice, California, in Southern California. Went to high school together, got married out of high school. I was born about a year later. Unfortunately, my mom divorced my dad.

And in those days, the mom got the baby and she wanted to start anew.

She moved up to Northern California to Mill Valley. My dad remarried. I have a brother and a sister by my dad and the wonderful woman he married, my stepmother [Rosemary]. My mom remarried, and I have a younger brother by her as well. Early childhood memories. Highway 101 was two lanes from Southern California to Northern California, and I remember, couple times a year,

My mom would load the two of us up, make an all-day drive from Mill Valley down to Ventura We would see both sets of grandparents and spend several days. Mom would see old friends and that sort of thing.

But the drive along Highway 101, especially in the Santa Barbara area, just north there, we would stop and have a picnic lunch along the way. The Southern Pacific Railroad ran right next to it. So in the course of being stopped, a train or more would go by. I remember the eucalyptus trees so prevalent there and the strong odor from them.

Just fond memories of that childhood and growing up in Marin County in Mill Valley

So here at four and five years old, kids that age had the run of the town. There was no fear. It was a small town. Smaller than the small town it is now. But we knew the policemen, they knew us. We knew the firemen. We knew the people that ran the soda fountain and the hardware store. I still can remember the names of the families that had those places. And we lived, you know, maybe a quarter of a mile up Mount Tamalpais, but we kids would wander down into town. It was footloose and fancy-free, you know, in those days.

Out of Mill Valley, we moved to Santa Rosa for a year and then to Glen Ellen and Kenwood for two years. That was my first start in being a country boy. We were on thirteen acres right where Bennett Valley Road hits Warm Springs Road.

My folks bought me a horse back then, twenty-five-year-old broken-down horse. But he was rideable and he was safe, and you know, we had a wonderful time. I couldn't swim, but we had a swimming hole in the Warm Springs Creek that was big enough that the horse could swim in it.

If ever fell off, I probably would have drowned, but I'm holding on for dear life. No saddle of course, riding bareback.

So, fond memories of that. So I was there for two years, fifth and sixth grade, and then we moved down to Novato. Novato was a small agricultural town just becoming a bedroom community for San Francisco. Some developers were coming in and buying out these dairy farms and building these 1,200 square foot houses on slabs. And the joke of the people who'd lived in Novato all their life was, “These developers think someone's going to buy that home and drive to San Francisco.” Well, they did. And even today, people in Ukiah drive to San Francisco to work.

The ‘50s, I would say, were a great time probably to grow up anywhere in America

After the Korean War, which I think ended in ‘52, it was peaceful. Yes, we heard about the Cold War in our relationship with the Soviet Union. But other than having an Air Force base at Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato, there really wasn't any sort of upset, you might say, relative to it.

The community had a very rich population of Italians, Swiss Italians, and Portuguese.

There were the dairy business and the poultry business. But many of the kids I went to school with were living in these farm families.

If the parents weren't speaking with an accent, the grandparents in the household were.

So they were usually one generation away from having immigrated from Switzerland or Italy or the Azores out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which is a territory of Portugal. So it was a great experience. So much so, I enjoyed the cultures, but I would tell people the rest of my life, “I was Italian in my last life.” And when years went by and my wife and I got married, we moved to Calistoga.

Napa County was very much like Novato was. Italians, Swiss Italians, not so many Portuguese, not very much dairy farming. The youth groups were the typical Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, DeMolay, Rainbow Girls, but 4-H was the big youth organization. In fact, we had four 4-H clubs in our small town. So many of my friends and my family lived on the outskirts of town.

We had two acres ourselves, neighbors had an acre, or three, or five.

So many of them had a milk cow. We all had flocks of chickens. We had cages of rabbits. At thirteen years old, I was raising rabbits for a 4-H project and you didn't sell them alive. You had to hit them over the head and string them up and gut them and all those kinds of things that today I wouldn't imagine doing. But it was second nature to be doing it back in those days. And I don't know if you kids have ever seen an old aluminum roasting pan where the Thanksgiving turkey would have been baked years ago. But I'd take one of those with ice and put these [rabbit] carcasses all ready to put in the oven, and go down the road to some of these new tract homes that were being built and sell my rabbits to these people that had moved into town. So that was a part of my growing up.

I did have a milk cow for ninety days.

My first continuing job was working in the summer and weekends on a large poultry farm. I think they had 30,000 laying hens, something like that. So a buddy and I worked out there. But the owner had a milk cow for his family, and they had a hired man. The cow had just calved, and the hired man quit, and the owner didn't want to be milking this cow. So I thought, well, my buddy has a cow at his house. I've seen that. I've learned how to milk it. So I bought it with the calf. I raised [it as a] veal calf. All it did was drink its mother's milk, and after he had his fill morning and night, then I would milk the cow for our

own milk and sell some to a local family there as well. But after three months, veal calf was to the point of slaughtering. It sounds horrible now, but that was, again, part of the process. So I sold the calf, and I sold the cow. In those ninety days, you know, if I'd have gotten sick, I'd have been the one to be out there with the flu milking the cow. And I figured at seventeen years old I didn't want to be tied down for all of that. But anyway, growing up in [Novato] was a great life.

Before I move on to some college talk, as great as life was, my family life was not that great. All my buddies, their dad was home by 5:30 in the evening, by six o'clock, dinner was on the table. Some moms worked, but most of them were just stay-at-home moms. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, but most every afternoon, four, five afternoons a week, the social life of my mom and stepfather was a bar. Whether it was when I was a little boy in Mill Valley, or whether it was there in Novato growing up. So much so that I had memorized the phone number of the bar, because if they weren't home by six, I would call and ask if they were coming home for dinner. And usually it was, “No, you and your little brother take the taxi down here.” [We] had one taxi in the town for a dollar and we would go down, and there was a Chinese restaurant next door. So I'd take my school books, and I'd sit there in the booth at the bar that evening and do my homework. And so that was a part of my life that could have been better. And yet, I have lived the most wonderful life overall. If you go back and change something along the way, you could be rerouted in another direction that wouldn't turn out as well as it has for me. So, in spite of that regret, I'm very happy and very fortunate to have lived the life I have.

Going to college, the first year right out of high school… I got good grades. I was, like a B- average in high school. I was very active in all kinds of [youth] clubs that we had [like] 4-H. Those of us that had horses, there was a horseman's club in Novato. We were in parades, and my mom built up a drill team of about fifteen, twenty kids that we would do these intricate maneuvers out in the big arena and so on. So, that was all a part of it. But, when I was in high school, I was interested in the student government. So my senior year, I was the student body president. I enjoyed that very much. So, at your age, seventeen years old, senior year, I came home one day. And like I said, things were calm. Eisenhower was our president. I told my mom while she was fixing dinner that evening, “I think I'd like to be president of the United States someday.” And you boys, I mean, Larsen, you're the only son in your family, so I have a feeling that your mom shows a lot of pride in you, you're very special. And you're the only son in your household [Referring to Jeremiah]. Your sisters probably cry foul that the two of you might get a little bit more attention than they do. But, as supportive as mothers are of their sons, my mother replied to me, “You'll never make it.”

So, I felt like a popped balloon lying on the linoleum floor of the kitchen there when she popped my bubble about someday being president of the United States. And so, I asked her, “Why do you say that?” She said, “Because you're too honest.” You know, my mom only went to high school. I didn't say anything like that to her, but my mind was spinning, “Mom, what do you know, you only went to high school.” But, as time went on, and I learned more, and realized, you know, what politics are all about, there aren't many truthful people in politics. As much as I regretted my mom bursting my bubble, it laid a foundation for me never to get involved in politics. Now, I go to city council meetings and board of supervisors meetings, and I speak up, I write letters to the editor. It's not like I'm not involved, but, even with encouragement: “Norm, you ought to run for city council.” “Norm, you ought to run for supervisor.” So, never tempted, never wanted to expose myself to that sort of thing, and my family at the same time. There was a time in recent years when we had Trump and Hillary Clinton running against each other [for president]. I thought to myself at seventy-eight years old, “Gee, maybe this is the time for me to

throw my hat in the ring.” Of course, that was a joke, you know, you don't just embark on something like that. But, anyway, that's that.

So, before I get to college memories, I was telling you about this unhappiness at home. I stayed home my first year out of high school, and went to a junior college, and carpooled down there ten miles with three other buddies. Marin Junior College was just like high school, except you sat there and smoked and drank coffee, of which I didn't do either. I didn't have my heart in these classes. I got my only F while there in chemistry. I'm a biological science guy, not a physics or chemistry guy, and so I failed that. So I didn't go back to school when the fall of ‘62 started. I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge, as they say.

It was a fifteen, twenty minute drive from my house to the Embarcadero in San Francisco. You know it now with Pier 39 and [the] Exploratorium, or whatever they have down there, and the touristy side of it. No. In those years, it was jammed with rail cars on sidings down there. Low-bed trucks that had immense pieces of machinery that were being loaded on steamships, not container ships. We didn't even know what container ships were. But I went down there, and I went to a steamship company. I knocked on the door, and they said, “Oh, we hire through the union hall, you'll have to go there.” So I went to the union hall. They turned me away. They said, “We're not taking any more sailors, we have too many already, but you'd have to have a seaman’s document from the Coast Guard anyway.” I went over there, started filling out the application, and they said, “What shipping company’s hiring you?” I said, “I don't have a shipping company.” “Oh, well, we can't give you your seaman’s document unless you have some commitment.” So, I don't know if you remember, there was a movie out twenty some years ago before you were born. I can't remember the name of it, but it's like a dog chasing its tail. [Catch-22].

But anyway, I went home dejected. I'd spent the whole day down there trying to break into this hierarchy of getting on [a steamship]. And I stopped by a friend's home, and his mom said, “Well, you know, a girl two years behind you at Novato High, Wendy Hardcastle. Her dad's some big shot with a [steamship company] and they just live around the corner here. You could go over and knock on the door.” It was about six o'clock. I did, and they were having dinner. The dad came, and he whipped out his business card, and he said, “I don't talk business at home, but the next time you're in San Francisco, stop and see me.” So at eight o'clock the next morning. I was at his office door on the Embarcadero, and he invited me in. He had his secretary type up a letter to the secretary-treasurer, the lead guy at the union, introducing me: “Please extend all courtesies to Norm Manzer on my behalf.” So they did, and then I went over to the Coast Guard, and I got my Seaman's document. Mind you, I'm not in the Coast Guard. This is Merchant Seaman, front2 and back of my ID card.3 And this was my discharge certificate sixty days later.4 So seven days after I went down to try and ship out, I was shipping out under the Golden Gate on this freighter, the S.S. America Bear5, and we were heading for Yokohama, which is the port for Tokyo, thirteen days. But we hit a storm at the Golden Gate Bridge. And did you ever see Victory at Sea movies, you boys?

LM: No, I did not.

2 See Photo 2 and at the bottom of the document.

3 See Photo 3 and at the bottom of the document.

4 See Photo 4 and at the bottom of the document.

5 See Photo 5 and at the bottom of the document.

NM: Well, these ships from World War II, mainly military ships, are plowing into these fifty-foot waves with these waves coming up over and showering the ship, and we did that for seventeen of the eighteen days. Instead of thirteen days, it was the eighteenth day we pulled into Yokohama, and it was scary. That ship, you know, there's no holding a steady course. You don't have a tree out there that you're aiming for. There is nothing on the horizon. You have to follow the compass, and it doesn't hold true because the waves are knocking you [one] way or the other. So you're swinging to port. You're swinging to starboard from left to right, trying to average whatever the bearing is that you are taking to get to your destination. So anyway, the trip over was like that. The trip back was like sailing on a mirror. The term is FAC, Flat Ass Calm. You could probably look over the side of the ship and see your reflection down there. And so I coined a little phrase: “You learn something from everything you do in life, if only you learn you never want to do it again.” So I never set [sail] again, but you can see I saved this memorabilia and had it framed, and it's a treasure for me [referencing photos 2-6]. It's a treasure to look back on that.

So, I get back from there, and I wanted to go to [college at] Davis or Cal Poly. I wanted to major, not major in production ag, but something to do with agriculture. And so I called down, and I spoke to the assistant dean of agriculture. He said, “Norm, we have a new major here called Ag Business Management, and it's designed for people like you who aren't in production ag but are going into banking, appraisal, insurance, selling seeds, handling auction yards for livestock, you know, anything that serves production agriculture. So you'd be a natural. Why don't you fill out our application?” So I did, and they didn't accept me [because of] my F in chemistry. They said, “You could have gotten in right out of high school, but you performed so poorly at the JC that we won't accept you.” So I wrote to this dean, and I asked is there someone I could come and talk to, to see how I can rectify this. We made an appointment, and I went down there. When [I] walked into his office, he had my letter lying there on his desk. The first thing he said was, “I want to begin by asking you who wrote this letter you sent to me.” And I said, “I did.” He said, “Who helped you write this letter that you sent to me?” I said, “No one. I wrote it myself.” He said, “Well, even before you arrived here, I said to myself, ‘If this boy wrote this letter, I'm going to admit him on probation.’” Probation means that in the first quarter, if you maintain a 3.0 average, a [B] average or better, you're in. So I ended up with a 4.0 average then, and I was in.

Cal Poly was a dream. It had 7,500 students. Cal Berkeley, I think, had 14,000. Cal Poly today, I think, has 21,000 students. But I was in Shangri-La. I mean, here was this university, or college then, campus on the edge of town, not surrounded by, you know… had all these fields with the livestock and so on.

I had to work my way through college. They had some old Navy barracks from World War II. So this would have been ‘62 when I went down there, and those barracks would have been there for almost twenty years. They called it the “Cardboard Jungle” because rooms for every two guys had a one-quarter-inch plywood wall. And the two-by-fours that were on the wall were exposed on one side. So you just had this one sheet of plywood that separated you from the two guys in the next room that you could hear talking. They were freshman dorms, and normally you worked your way up to these real nice dorms at the top of the hill. But it was only $90 a quarter, dollar a day, to stay down there. And if you stayed all ninety days, you got $30 back, so a third of your rent. I stayed in the Cardboard Jungle for all four years. I immediately applied for a job as student ticket sales manager. This job was pretty much better than [a] halftime [job]. There wasn't an admission ticket sold for a sports event, football, basketball. There wasn't a Western dance. There wasn't a performance by Peter, Paul, and Mary. These are old, you know, rock stars. The tickets had to be printed. The cashiers had to be hired. The ticket takers had to be

[hired]. A [cash] reconciliation had to be made after every event. You put the money together for the school treasurer and that sort of thing. And I got the job. $50 a week, $225 a month. So that's how I paid my way through college and living down in the inexpensive dorms. I had an office of my own, so I didn't have to put up with all the rancor of noise down in the dorm when I'm trying to do my homework. It was a great thing.

LM: Yeah.

NM: Moving on to another question. Did I enlist in the military? Well, in those days, we had the draft, the Vietnam War was on. And if you kept your grades up, you got a college deferment. But as soon as you graduated, usually within thirty days, you got your draft notice that said Uncle Sam's going to take you. And usually that would be the Army or the Marine Corps. So I planned ahead. There was a Coast Guard recruiting station and a reserve station just off the campus of Cal Poly. I started going over there and chatting with the young guy that was on duty. They had a very unusual billet, a very unusual enlistment that didn't come up very often. Six months active duty, and you were a civilian again, [followed by] six years [as a] weekend warrior. One weekend a month, you show up there in uniform, perform, practice your duties, and [then] two weeks in the summer. I was able to land one of those coveted enlistments. So within six months, I was finished with my boot camp and going to sea on this large [Coast Guard] cutter for three and a half months. When I was about to be discharged, we were coming back from a trip from the Hawaiian Islands, mail sack came aboard. In the mail sack was a telegram for me from Cal Poly asking me if I would come back and teach at Cal Poly for ninety days. A new professor they'd hired had been delayed, and would I teach his three classes: one freshman, two sophomore classes. And so there I went, right back amongst kids that I had gone to school with six months before.

From there, I took a job with Pacific Telephone Company for two years in the Bay Area… I should have paid them for what I learned from them about customer service. I managed one of their business offices first in the East Bay and then in San Francisco. But after two years of living in that area and being a country boy, I had the opportunity to hire on as the manager of the Napa County Fair in Calistoga. I'd been dating my wife Linda for about eight months, so we got married, moved to Calistoga, and that was our entrée to the Napa Valley. I did that for several years. A member of my Rotary Club was the district manager for Napa, Lake, and Mendocino Counties for State Farm Insurance.

LM: Mhm.

NM: His job was to hire agents to open up an agency and develop a business. [For] existing agents, he was there to help them if they were having any problems. He recruited me to come down from Calistoga to St. Helena and open an agency. We opened it with one client, my wife Linda and me, and two policies, our one auto and our homeowner's policy. As time went on, I had two wonderful women colleagues, one with me twenty-seven years, the other fourteen years. And by the time I retired, we had 1,400 families insured within Napa County. It was the ideal career for me. I'm the kind of person who never met a stranger… All the customer service I learned from the phone company I was able to put into play in taking good care of our clients, as were my colleagues. That was wonderful.

NM: So…

LM: Mhm.

NM: …our son Paul was born in 1971. And I had mentioned to you in my little written statement about Paul Galleron. Just south of town [St. Helena], you boys have probably seen the Galleron Lane road down there, south of Whitehall Lane railroad grade crossing. Of the seven board members on the Napa County Fair, Paul Galleron from St. Helena was one of them. He had some teenage kids at the time, and my wife and I were in our mid-twenties. And he and his wife took an instant liking to my wife [Linda] and me. So it was command performance, every Friday night we were to eat dinner at their house south of town. Paul was a real people person. He wasn't as chatty as I am, but when he found a family or a person who was in need, he made it his job to see what he could do to make things better for the family. It was a family that had six children and a couple of dogs, they were being evicted from a farmhouse south of town. He made it his job to go around and find a house that could accommodate a family of eight and two dogs. It's that sort of thing [why] we named our son [after Paul]. His name was Paul Louis Galleron, and we named our son Paul Louis Manzer. We always said to our son, “I'm sure you'll be successful in life, but if you end up being half the man of your Uncle Paul, you'll have it made.” Just a wonderful, wonderful human being.

LM: Mhm.

NM: When Paul Galleron died, he died young, about fifty-four, from mesothelioma. As a boy, right out of high school, he went to Mare Island. And they put these young guys down in the submarines pulling all this asbestos off the boilers. And so they called it the time bomb disease. So here it was thirty years later, he develops this mesothelioma. Normally you die within six months to a year. And with his strengths of being a farmer and trying to take good care of himself, he lived for six years after that. So, a wonderful part of St. Helena's history that I appreciate being able to reflect back on.

I remember back in days of frost control, before we ended up having wind machines, we had what we called orchard heaters. Maybe you've seen [them]. They called them orchard heaters, they were really “smudge pots” that burned diesel oil and raised a few degrees out in the vineyards there. But they'd even burn tires out there. I remember Paul telling me, “You want to come down some morning about 3 a.m. when we're out there lighting these tires and things?” And, you know, here were these glowing, red spots around the [Napa] Valley. I remember coming down by the old Christian Brothers Winery where CIA is and seeing these fires out there at the time. It was quite an experience to be invited for that.

You wanted to know something about being manager of the fair in Calistoga.

LM: Mhm.

NM: The fair was five days a year. Of course, it just doesn't happen without a lot of planning. I was the manager. I had a full-time secretary. We had a full-time maintenance man to keep things going. And, of course, the fairgrounds operates year-round. All those buildings that are there and the recreational vehicle facility out there where people are driving through and hook up there [to stay overnight]. There was a lot of activity besides just planning for the next fair and putting the fair on. It was a year-round job. And usually any function that was going to be held, if Rotary was having a dinner for 250-300 people, they'd rent one of our buildings, have a caterer come in and put that on. We held wedding receptions there. And unlike a lot of fairgrounds, the previous fair manager had developed an eight-hole golf course, something that I don't know that any other

fairgrounds in California had. It never made any money, barely broke even, but it was an added feature to the fairgrounds that was all a part of our control and operation.

LM: Mhm. When did you come to St. Helena from Calistoga?

NM: Linda and I moved in 1968 to Calistoga, and in 1973 we moved down here for me to open the agency for State Farm. And, you know, it's a matter of ringing doorbells. You couldn't do it in the city limits, but…

LM: Mhm.

NM: …the County has no rule against that. So you're out ringing doorbells and wanting people to talk to you. Even though you're in the Valley for five years, you're a newcomer to St. Helena, so, you know, these old-timers, they have a jaundiced eye for some stranger knocking on their door. I remember one of the most memorable door knockings was down off Sulphur Springs. The next little road that doesn't go through anymore is Lewelling Lane. The Lewelling Farm goes clear back into the mid-1800s, and so these were descendants in that family that were grape growers there. So, I knocked on the front door, and the door got swung open real fast. Before I could say a word, the woman says, “You're either a preacher or an insurance agent. They're the only ones that come to the front door.” And I said, “Well, you got me on that. I'm an insurance agent.” And with that, she opens this screen door and says, “Well, then come on in here. Let's meet you.” They became one of my first clients, country people, you know. Being raised a country boy, there was an affinity there in my relationship with, you know, country people. And the [St. Helena] city people were country folk here at that time as well.

LM: Mhm.

NM: So…

LM: So it was an easy transition.

NM: Easy transition. Exactly.

LM: Nice.

NM: Supposedly in two years, you're supposed to be able to be standing on your own two feet to be making enough [insurance] commissions to pay the bills and that sort of thing. And I wasn't. I remember at one of the Friday night dinners with Paul and Alberta Galleron, he asked me how things were going. I said, “Well, they're going well, but I'm not on target.” I said, “I'm going to go to the bank tomorrow and borrow $1,000.” That was a lot of money then.

LM: Yeah.

NM: And he said, “No you're not. You're not going to borrow any money from a bank. I have $1,000 or more in my savings account, and they're paying me 2% interest, and that's what I'm going to charge you. Draw up a piece of paper that says we're going to have a loan. You can pay it back to me a year later. Will that work?” I said, “Paul, that would be wonderful.” So we did. A year later came, and it was time for me to start paying back. So, again, at a Friday night dinner, I said, “Paul, you know, it's time for me to start paying you back. I'm not in a position right now to start paying you back.” And he said, “Well, if you're not in a position to pay me back, then you

need another $1,000. Draw up another one of those pieces of paper. We'll just put both loans out another year, and I'll get my 2%, and so on.” Six months later I was in a position to start paying him back, and within a year I was able to pay them off. Those are the kinds of friendships that you don't anticipate, but you know, [we] have some wonderful memories and things.

LM: So he really helped you out. He got [you] started.

NM: He and his wife were both just a delight. We just did so many things together, you know, he was “Mr. Kindness.” When he died, there was an obituary about him. But our longtime [St. Helena Star] editor, Starr Baldwin, in his editorial, had a large paragraph talking about Paul Galleron and what a loss it is to our community, in addition to the obituary that was in the paper.

LM: Mhm.

NM: So I went to his funeral at the small Catholic church on Niebaum Lane. The church probably holds, I don't know, 150 people. There was not only the local priest there, there was the former priest that was now in Napa, and one of the brothers from the monastery down in Oakville. I remember the priest saying that one of the women in the church said she wanted to take up a collection to build a statue of Paul Galleron out in front because she said, “We had our own St. Paul in this church.” She was on target, on target.

LM: Would you say a lot of the members of St. Helena that you talked with were similar to Paul in their kind gestures?

NM: I feel kindness prevails even in the worst of times. There are always those that are kind. Linda and I went to a funeral here about twenty years ago, of the [parent] of some people our ages. We were like sixty years old at the time. The wife had died first, and the man died ninety years old. He'd been a teacher here at St. Helena High School, Mr. Tenbroeck. There were only about twenty people at the funeral, besides his son and daughter, our friends, and Linda and me. About fifteen, sixteen women, older women our ages were there. They were all his former students. Our priest, Father Mac, in the course of the service said, “Perhaps there are some of you that would like to get up and reflect upon your experience with Tony Tenbroeck.” This woman stood up and said, “Mr. Tenbroeck was my teacher, whatever that subject was. She mentioned this and that and another thing. She sat down, but when her butt hit the pew, she bounced back up again. She says, “Oh, I forgot the most important thing. He was a very kind man.”

Another half a dozen of these other women got up and spoke. And they all said, when they finished their recollection, “I want to reflect what Mary said when she spoke. He was a very kind man.” I thought to myself, you know, when somebody dies, there's usually an obituary, and it tells about what they did in their life, what their career was and what their extracurricular activities were. But I thought to myself, you know, maybe he was mayor of the town. Maybe he was this or that. But I thought to myself at the time, “You know, what more would anybody want to have said about them than they were a kind person?”

And so Paul Galleron was that kind of person. I'd like to think that before I attended Tony Tenbroeck’s funeral, I had that concept. But it made me say to myself, “However kind I've been, I want to be even kinder.” I think there [are] a lot of people out there that do that.

I don't think I have it in my car, but when we held my wife's celebration of life a year ago… if you boys have ever been to a funeral at a Catholic church, there's usually a little card

bigger than a business card, and it either has a picture of St. Francis or Jesus on one side, and on the back side maybe it will have the prayer of St. Francis and then the person's name who died and when they were born and that sort of thing, and they pass them out [at the end of a Catholic funeral].

So in our Episcopal church, we don't usually have that handout, but I created a handout that is about one-third of this [a page], of cardstock. It has quotes of kindness. It was a keepsake, a memory of “Auntie Linda”, which is how many people referred to my wife, for them to take home.

LM: Mhm.

NM: I've collected, I have a file folder of several pages of kindness quotes. So I think you'd find those interesting to share with your friends and your family.

LM: What would you say is a major change while you've stayed in St. Helena?

NM: Well, agriculturally it's changed a great deal. I think you probably think it's been grapes forever, because when Charles Krug opened the first winery up valley here, he not only planted grapes for his winery, but there's a hidden grove of olive trees on the other side, up above, the Morlet Winery. This family from Guatemala bought that hillside up there had no idea that the forest included this, they say, 1,000 olive trees. I find that hard [to believe,] even maybe 500 would be a lot of them.

LM: Mhm.

NM: But now they're farming these olive trees. The Valley was primarily prunes, Sonoma County was the same. Every spring, this valley was the most beautiful white with all these prune trees blossoming. In fact, the bus tours out of San Francisco would come up, and usually the Rutherford Grange or over in Alexander Valley, the farm wives would have a fundraiser of serving lunch to these [tourists]. So all those prunes were removed, walnut trees were removed, the Lambert Chicken Farm, a big operation, dairy here and there, even pastures where beef cattle were being raised. So as you know, we're virtually a monoculture here of grapes, and the talk has always been “We have to have something else to fall back on.” Tourism has been a big adjunct, you know, with hotels and restaurants and that sort of thing. But here we're facing the truth of the matter, and that is with the decline of people drinking wine and buying more expensive wine, we're seeing a decline of visitors to the Valley and a decline in the sale of our special product that we grow here and that we make. So we're on the verge of seeing some other changes from the ones I saw going back fifty years ago here in the Valley.

LM: Yeah.

NM: So...

LM: Yeah, when do you think St. Helena and just the Napa Valley in general switched to a more tourist attraction kind of town?

NM: Well, you know, when we moved here, we thought that the Valley was already well known, and it was. I mean, it had a reputation, but if you look at the corner of Charter Oak and Main Street, the railroad tracks, that beautiful stone building there…

LM: Mhm.

NM: I think it was called the Sherry House. [Across from Gott’s Roadside is Merryvale Winery.] I believe that this stone building [the Sherry House] preceded that [Merryvale] going back probably into the late 1800s. The roof was falling apart and so on. So it's only been about the last twenty-five, thirty years that it was enhanced into that beautiful building interior, exterior that it was. But like I say, we thought back fifty years ago that the Valley was well known. Freemark Abbey, for example, before it became Freemark Abbey Winery was just an empty building. The windows weren't broken out or anything. They were boarded up. But every time I'd drive by there, I'd say to myself “My God, what a jewel here to think that, it's not being used.” But in time, the evolution of more tourism and restaurants and wineries and that sort of thing started developing. It took time. And then it almost was like a wild roller coaster there for how many more facilities went in. The Ag Preserve, fortunately, restricted those tourist elements, except for the winery part, to the cities. So, you know, unless it was Yountville or St. Helena, Calistoga, or Napa, unless the property had already been subdivided and already in some commercial venture, such as down in Oakville or Rutherford, the Ag Preserve prevailed and additional tourism couldn't develop in the Ag Preserve.

LM: Mhm. So those older buildings, were there much more of them?

NM: Yes. Yes, in fact, where Rutherford Grill is was the Rutherford Mercantile. You could go in and probably buy horseshoes for your horse. And over on the other side, you could get a loaf of bread and probably the post office occupied twenty square feet over on the side. You know, it was like an old little village sort of thing that was all torn down, I think probably in the early 1970s, you know, something right after we moved here. And so all sorts of changes were evident at that time.

My wife and I have always enjoyed trains, riding trains when we travel and that sort of thing. And the track coming up from Napa to Calistoga back when we moved here went all the way to Calistoga was called a “spur”. It didn't go anywhere, it dead-ended up in Calistoga. And so the train would come up two, maximum three times a week, a little switch engine, bringing a box car or two.

LM: Mhm.

NM: And I remember Taylor's Refresher. Usually the engine would stop there and go over and have a hamburger with the engine still running. But when the Southern Pacific abandoned the line, probably in about 1970, to Calistoga, that track was torn out. They sold [sections] off to adjacent parcel owners [on] some part of it. Calistoga retained the right of way to lay a water pipeline. So as you cross over Deer Park Road, opposite Krug, the old steam train would run up there. So that's how Calistoga gets added water coming in from North Bay Aqueduct, all buried under the old right of way up there.

LM: Okay. On a better note, would you say you had a major compliment to St. Helena, like something you contributed, being the most significant?

NM: Well, you know, I would say that maybe people look at businessmen as, you know, out for their own benefit. In other words, you're not in business to lose money.

LM: Mhm.

NM: But it was a natural fit for me to be able to have this opportunity to open the State Farm Agency. And State Farm agents are a rather [or] used to be, a rather unique breed. I would hope that it has continued. But most people that have not had a State Farm agent don't know what it's like to have this Good Neighbor agent. That's the motto of State Farm.

LM: Mhm.

NM: Unless you had an old school agent, and hopefully some new school agents, that looked out for their clients like I did, and my two colleagues [did], I would say that we lent a real positive note to the community. But I was very active in [community] things. My office for the first ten years was on Main Street in a couple of little offices. But for the last twenty-five years, [it] was in the Lewelling warehouse building where there's now a dog grooming studio, but we occupied the front portion of that one section for my two colleagues and myself. Across the way was a vacant lot [that was turned into a park] called Lewis Station. There's no park [now and] there's no sign there. But an older lady living in that house that's still there, Rosalie Lewis, gifted a portion of that parcel. Some of it the Southern Pacific owned. Another woman and I came together to spearhead converting that pile of concrete and weeds into the very nice park that was built there back in about 1975. The city did a poor job of maintaining it. In fact, they've torn down everything now except for the pavers and the bathroom and a couple of tables. So hopefully, something will come back.

Linda and I have always been involved in service activities in the community. I started out in Calistoga Rotary. I've been a member for fifty-six years now in Rotary, and twelve of those were my first twelve years in St. Helena. I returned back to Calistoga [Rotary] after twelve years here. Community service has been a big part of our lives, so much so that Linda and I ended up commuting to Russia over a twenty-four-year period. We made thirty-eight trips trying to improve the lives of orphans, primarily teenage orphans. Nothing to do with adoptions. Two children were adopted by families that went over and worked with us, but that was not anything we promoted. It was that they met this boy and this girl and proceeded on their own to adopt them. Anyway, it was a big part of our lives. We took groups from St. Helena through our Grace Episcopal Church, after Rotary went over there with a group of twenty-one to introduce fluoride to these children. Dental care in the Soviet Union and in Russia was just horrible.

LM: Mhm.

NM: And so those are the kinds of things that Linda and I did and were pleased to do. It's been a great life for the two of us. And being involved in our community as we are is very satisfying and rewarding as well.

LM: [It] sounds amazing, to be able to provide and help for all those people, just like how Paul provided for you when you first came.

NM: Exactly.

LM: Mhm.

NM: He was a great model. Just as Tony Tenbroeck was spoken so highly of at his funeral. [He] had a servant's heart, had a servant's heart for other people. I took Spanish for four years in high school. It was not conversational, it was just all writing and reading. [background noise] And as

our Hispanic population, primarily [background noise] Mexican population grew, [they became our clients]. [background noise] We got somebody else talking here.

LM: Mhm. [background noise]

NM: One of my colleagues [Rosie Forni], [background noise] the one with me the longest time, was raised in a Spanish-speaking household. So as I would listen to her talk to our clients, my Spanish from high school came back to me so that I could converse quite well in Spanish. So again, this relationship building was really a gift to Linda and me in that we have many Mexican families that are extended families of us as well.

LM: Mhm.

NM: It's been a wonderful part of our living here.

LM: Well, that's amazing. Well, that about wraps up the time we have.

NM: Well, we exhausted the four hours, did we?

LM: Yes, we did.

NM: Okay.

 

NM: Quite the story.

CS: We're out.

RG: Yeah, we're out of time.