Interviewee: Chris Hartley

Interviewers: : Matthew Larrabee, Vaughn Thongtawath

Interview Date: April 5, 2025

Matthew Larrabee: This is Matthew Larrabee and Vaughn Thongtawath. I am pleased to welcome Chief Hartley who I am interviewing on behalf of the Saint Helena Historical Society oral history program. We are conducting this interview around 10:30 at Saint Helena Police Department. Welcome Chris Hartley can you begin by telling us where you were born and when you first came to the Saint Helena area?

Chris Hartley: I was born in 1960 in Napa, and I’ve been coming to Saint Helena my whole life. We used to farm walnuts and prunes, so every time we had to go to Sunsweet in Calistoga, we’d stop by Saint Helena as well. Then we used to come here to the olive oil and cheese factory.

ML: So can you start off with the history of your family, do you remember your great grandparents and what do you know about them?

CH: All but one of my great grandparents were dead by the time I was born or that I can remember. My great grandmother on my mother’s side lived in Rodeo and I think she passed when I was like four or five years old and some stories about her is her father, which would be my great grandfather, migrated here as a stowaway on a ship from Ireland, and then on my father’s side my great grandfather John Hartley is the one that invented the Hartley Walnuts in Napa on Big Ranch road, there is actually a monument to him in the middle of downtown Napa.

ML: What was their name again?

CH: That would be [John Hartley].

ML: [John Hartley], okay. So for your grandparents, do you remember them, what did they say and can you describe their lives?

CH: Yeah I remember them, all my grandparents very well. Both grandmothers were born in Napa, their mothers ironically both came from Oklahoma off Indian reservations. They were hard workers, laborers, my grandmother on my dad’s side worked at Napa Box company when it was in business and at the tannery making leather gloves. My grandfather, her husband, Frank, he was a farmer on Big Ranch Road, Big Ranch Road was named after my great grandfather’s ranch the one that invented the Hartley Walnut, but he worked the ranch his entire life, he also worked part time with Kaiser Steel until it went out of business and my grandfather on my mom’s side, his name was Les Barnes, and he owned Reliable Insulation Company in Napa and also had the ranch where Moore Creek Park is now, did the Labriandas ranch, René de Labriandas was his brother in law.

ML: So for your father and mother’s side, what is the name of your father?

CH: My dad was Gilbert, my mom was Marjorie.

ML: And when and where were they born?

CH: I wrote the dates down here. My dad was born in September of ‘36 at the Saint Helena Hospital and my mom was born in 1940 at Vallejo General.

ML: What were some of their life experiences you can tell us about?

CH:. My dad was an outdoorsman, rancher, and a college grad, he worked as a nuclear physicist at the UC Berkeley lab, and my mom was a high school teacher in Sonoma County. Best life experiences, my parents divorced when I was 12 but I stayed close to them throughout their lives, my mom is still alive and she lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Best memories of my dad -- that’s who taught me how to hunt and fish and got me into loving the outdoors. My mom, shortly after they divorced, she moved with my sister and I to Mexico to Veracruz, where I lived and went to school there for about a year and half before we came back. My mom was there as a student as well. She ended up later on in her career taking over as a foreign language director for Sonoma County School District.

ML: So coming back to the Hartley Walnuts, how did it first start and who helped out the company besides your great grandfather?

CH: Well it came to start on Big Ranch Road, at the time they were growing Frankfurts and Eureka walnuts and my great grandfather was interested in developing a walnut that was sweet to taste, as most walnuts are bitter, and he grafted a Eureka with a Frankfurt tree and grew that seedling which produced a sweeter walnut that had a flat top almost shaped like a heart and now you can find Hartley walnuts all around the world.

ML: Are there any notable company workers?

CH: Yes, for both the prunes and the walnuts we had to have pickers and caretakers, we did most of the plowing and stuff and disking every year, but as far as the picking and running we had foreman, his name was Poncho he was from Mexico, and the annual laborers from Mexico would come over and assist with the picking of the walnuts and the dehydration of the prunes every year.

ML: Where were you born?

CH: I was born in Napa, California, Queen of the Valley.

ML: Do you have any siblings and what are their names?

CH: I have one sister and her name is Lesliann, she lives in Napa and she's a real estate broker.

ML: What was your childhood like growing up?

CH: It was fantastic growing up. I have very few bad memories, I have a whole lot of good memories. We lived half the time at the ranch and then my parents had a house in town as well which was close to the Napa River so I was always outdoors whether it was hunting, fishing, motorcycle riding. I was very active in sports in baseball and soccer, I learned how to play soccer in Mexico so when I came back here I was pretty good compared to the rest of the white kids.

ML: How was your experience with schooling because you also mentioned going to Mexico, how was it different from there compared to the US?

CH: For me, because we’ll start when before I went to Mexico. Elementary school for me, when I was in kindergarten I had to repeat kindergarten twice. I had eye surgery in the middle of my first year so I missed half the year and had to go through it again. I was in a private school at Saint John’s Catholic School for the first three years. Once my parents divorced, that was the end of the private schools and I went into the public school system where I met fantastic friends that I’m still friends with today.

We moved to Mexico the first part of my junior high year

It was difficult because my mom wanted to immerse us into the culture and the language so I was known as the guero of the apartment complex which was actually in the poor neighborhood of Veracruz, they called it a patio. At first it was difficult, I certainly understand racism and prejudcism but I learned how to fight really well, not by choice. School there was difficult at first but by the end of the first year I began to excel. Again with sports and I started making good friends some of which I’m still friends with today. But the differences in their schools were very regimented, more regimented than our schools are today.

ML: Can you explain further than that, like what do you mean by regimented?

CH: Regimented, you had a schedule, you stuck to the schedule. We had a uniform, every year during their Independence Day parade the students would march in the parade in their classes representing their schools and it wasn’t something you could elect not to do, it was part of school. When you were in class you paid attention, they didn’t put up with anybody out of the line, it was very similar to when I was in Catholic school, even though it was private school. But the education that I received while I was there was equal to if not better than the education that I got in the public school system here.

ML: Were there any notable teachers or any adults that really helped get through the learning curve over there in Mexico?

CH: Sister Audry was a big help to me, she saw that people would tease me or try and bully me and I’d get in trouble for fighting, she really helped tear down those barriers and as soon as I started walking away from issues instead of retaliating, I gained more respect and made more friends, I was more approachable.

ML: So as a child or an adolescent, what did you want to be when you grew up?

CH: I wanted to be a game warden.

ML: And why is that?

CH: Because I love the outdoors and I wanted to protect the environment, protect the animals, plus I’d know where all the good hunting and fishing spots were.

ML: We have read that you had served as a Marine, did you have a job prior to being a Marine?

CH: I did, when I was nine I had a paper route. I was a paperboy for the Napa Register. After that I think I was like twelve and I started working as a laborer for my grandfather’s insulation company and every weekend was spent out at the ranch, working the orchards, or working cattle at my mom’s father’s ranch.

ML: How was it like being a paperboy during your childhood?

CH: It was an eye opener, it was a very good first job, delivering papers was easy, we did it on our bicycles and we had like a six block radius in our own neighborhood where we deliver papers.

The hard part was once a month you had to go door to door to collect the monthly fees

That was a little bit difficult and the other part that was difficult, here you are ten years old with all this cash in your pocket and you tend to go to the store and buy candy, and then your parents had to make up the difference when the register asked for what you recovered.

ML: And how did you get into the job?

CH: There were applications in the paper for paper boys and I had a friend that had the route next door so when the route that I was on became vacant, he let me know and I applied and got the job.

ML: And your other job was?

CH: Working at my grandfather's company and that was a really laborious job. They’d take old newspapers and I mean we’re talking truckloads if old newspapers and magazines and boxes and we run then through a big shredder, that would grind them up, we’d run them through dry chemical which looks similar to salt through the machine as it came out you had to bag it in fifty pound bags, sealed bags, stacked bags, and it was as soon as you got one bag put away the second one was full, so when there was only three of us that worked in the manufacturing part and it was a lot of work, I hated it.

ML: Was there anywhere specifically that you worked that you remember, like any notable spots or places?

CH: No, not really because right at the end of highschool I went into the Marine Corps and then worked 20 years there.

ML: What had motivated you to become a Marine?

CH: My dad was a former Army Green Beret, which they now call Rangers

His only brother, my uncle Richard, was a Navy Seabee and as most people know Seabees later on became known as Seals, he was in underwater demolitions, they always bragged about their service time. I was not in a good place in my life, my parents had been divorced, I’d just come back from Mexico, didn’t have the best of grades in high school was skipping school a lot, was hanging out with the wrong people and I'm like you know what I need to do something with my life and I went in the Marine Corps and I chose the Marine Corps so that I could up my dad and my uncle.

ML: So how is the process of becoming a Marine?

CH: Met with the recruiter, and I actually met with them twice. I tried to go in when I was seventeen and my mom refused to sign so as soon as I turned 18 I reviewed, they do a background check, and then everybody that passes the background check they load you up on a bus on a Saturday morning at like three o’clock in the morning and ship you to Oakland where you go through what they call an AFIS station, armed forces, examination, you have to take a written test and then you had to go through a physical fitness test. I wish I would have known about the written test prior and I would probably have tried a little harder, I didn’t do so great on that which determined my occupation when after boot camp.

ML: So when and where did you serve and what were your duties?

CH: I initially went in as an amphibious assault vehicle crewman

It is like a floating tank, it works on land and sea. It's a tracted vehicle like a tank, they’re huge there’s little models of them over there in my shadow box. That’s where I started, I went in 1979, 1980 I was sent to Beirut as part of a marine security guard team and so I served in Beirut during the Beirut bombing.

I came back from that and because I was ground combat every six months I deployed somewhere else. I’d come home for six months and leave for six months, come home for six months, leave for six months, and when we left we go on ship on what they called West PAC or we’d be deployed to Okinawa for a full year. Well I was lucky enough to do just the West PACs which they considered tip of the spear. You're floating out in the South Pacific or in the Persian Gulf and should anything flare up in any of those areas, whether it's Southeast Asia or Asia, you were the first ones to go in. So make a long story short I served in Beirut, Grenada, Desert Shield, and Desert Storm. In between there I had a period where I was an instructor, I went through the ranks of Private all the way to Gunnery Sergeant, so I had an NC non-commissioned officers when you make Corporal.

I was a Corporal then a Sergeant, as a Sergeant is when I deployed to Grenada, Desert Shield, and Desert Storm.

I was at that time I was what they called a Platoon Sergeant so I had thirty two people underneath me along with thirteen amphibious vehicles. When we got back from Desert Shield, Desert Storm I was chosen to go to Special Ops and went through, did the basic reconnaissance training, became a Recon Marine. They sent me to Coronado where I spent four years as an amphibious raid recon and Seal instructor. When I came back from that and went back to the amphibious tractor battalion.

They received a mission from JTF 6, which is joint task force with the army for counternarcotics, surveillance, detection and you work with the Coast Guard and the DEA to intercept narcotics. I got six months to hand pick and train my own team. We got to grow our hair out, grow beards and whatnot so that we blend in. They flew us, our equipment, all of our guns, bullets, and band aids were shipped to Corpus Christi, Texas. We all flew to Corpus Christi and we did counter narcotic missions in South Padre island for four months. At the time we had the largest narcotic seizure in JTF 6 history. I'm sure they’ve broken that record since but it was a pretty big deal. When I came back from that they promoted me to Gunnery Sergeant, which I was a Company Gunny, which now I have 180 to 200 Marines underneath me that I’m in charge of.

I was the Company Gunny

They sent me to the schoolhouse, the assault amphibian school battalion for all the new guys coming into service that were in that occupational field. From there I got moved up to Company First Sergeant which is the highest enlisted rank inside of the Marine Corps Company. And they waved another stripe around me but I’d promised my kids and my wife that I wouldn't deploy anymore, so I retired.

ML: So during your time of your service, were you injured ever in the line of duty, and if so what were the circumstances of your injuries?

CH: I fractured my back in a helicopter crash during that narcotics operation in South Padre Island. Never shot, no major injuries.

ML: So what had brought you back to Napa Valley after your service?

I really wanted to come home.

CH: It was my home, a lot of people when they retire they stick close to you know bases and stuff especially retirees for all the benefits and services. I had decided before I retired to become a police officer and it’s something I really wanted to do. I thought it would be an easy transition going from the Marine Corps to becoming a police officer so about two years before I retired I put myself through the part time police academy down in San Diego, which I graduated from.

I’d applied, I had friends still home here in California

My wife’s from here, I’m from here, which is the whole reason we came back to be close to family and finish raising my kids with family. But anyway I’ve had friends with Napa PD. They told me that I didn’t want to go there because there was a lot of politics going on, a lot of infighting within the agency so I saw that St. Helena PD was hiring and I was home on leave.

I drove up to St. Helena and filled out an application

They tested me, they gave me a conditional job offer all within a week. Police backgrounds are very thorough, I did well enough testing with the city of St. Helena that the chief at the time Bert Johanson, he decided to do my background himself and he actually flew down to San Diego to do that.

ML: What do you remember about growing up in Napa Valley specifically, like during this time?

CH: It’s a lot different now but during that time there was still plenty of things for kids to do. I mean we had a skating rink, actually two skating rinks at one time, bowling alleys, you know Boy Scouts were very active. I was very active in 4-H. You know and everybody knew everybody so I mean there was a time out behind Memorial Stadium at about midnight and I was in high school and we were back there drinking beers and got caught and we all got rides home and all of our parents knew the police officer, so that’s kind of one of the reasons I ended up in St. Helena too was that small community closeness.

ML: What was your involvement in 4-H?

CH: I started raising rabbits and worked my way up to raising a steer. But it was actually, who got me started in it. Now my dad’s best friend was Eddie Lauritsen and his wife Donna, she grew up here her maiden name was Balany. She grew up here in St. Helena and she was like my second mom and she was always the 4-H leader and that’s what got me started. They were big into lambs and sheep and I didn’t want to do a lamb or a sheep and I always wanted to do a steer but they said no lets give this a try and see if you can stick with it and I got stuck raising a stupid rabbit.

ML: So during your first decades of being in the St. Helena area and Napa Valley area, you described it as quiet, could you describe it and go into detail about it?

CH: Yeah, like I said everybody knew everybody. There was always lemonade stands up by kids out. We didn’t have the gang problems, we didn’t have the drug problems. The biggest drug problem we had was the occasional high school kids that would smoke pot but they didn’t have any of the hard stuff. Alcohol I’m sure was still a big deal but you really didn’t see it, that was an adult issue.

Friends from childhood--some of them will be lifetime friends

I have a buddy of mine that I went through kindergarten with that is flying out here, he flew out here last month but he’s coming out this month too, he lives in Minnesota, but he grew up in Napa as well and you know we used to be able to walk everywhere or ride your bike from one side of town to the other side of town. It’s just not the same. I mean all the old-timers like when I worked for my grandpa, he had his own seat at Buttercream Bakery, you know every morning that was his seat and he sat at the same place, had the same breakfast every morning, but everybody knew everybody.

ML: You also mentioned a memorable aspect of the olive oil and cheese industry, could you go into depth about this?

CH: The Particelli family was friends with my mom’s side of the family, the Labriandas. So on weekends we would come up here and I went to school with Annette, which is Ray’s wife. She went to St. John’s as well in Napa. Anyways we’d come up here, my mom was into the fancy natural cheeses and the olive oils and this is where we came and we picnic right out there in front of the olive oil factory.

ML: When did you meet your wife Shelly and how?

CH: I met Shelly through my sister, she was a friend of my sister’s and she actually lived four doors down from us after my parents divorced and we were living over by Redwood Junior High School with my mom and my sister had brought her home a few times and I actually was attracted to her sister because her sister was my age and Shelly was three years younger, but as we got a little older things changed. I started dating Shelly about a year before I went into service and then a year after I was in the service we got married.

ML: You had mentioned Bert Johansen and what was his impact on your life?

CH: Bert Johansen had a huge impact on my life

For one, he taught me how to take the leadership that I’d learned and transition it into the civilian world and it’s a big difference between the military and civilian world which I didn’t quite understand. I can remember you know, he showed me a sense of loyalty and leadership just by him taking on my background himself and flying all the way to San Diego to interview the neighbors and my bosses and instead of sending one of the sergeants to do it. So he kind of took me under his wing as soon as my wife and I moved back here and I started the work. He and his wife took us out to dinner just to try and make us feel at home. I remember, you know, some of the language changes.

There was one of our public works employees had walked into the bathroom at Lyman Park to clean bathrooms and there was a drug deal going on, and the drug dealer hit him in the face and then threatened to, you know, do a lot more harm if he told anyone. And anyways, he came and told Bert Johansen about it and we all knew who the drug dealer was and he happened to be laying out in the park, on a blanket and Bert called myself and another officer into his office and said, I’m not going to give you his name but said our suspect is out there in the park, I want you to go tune him up.

So we went out there and Bert’s window looked right into the park and he was watching us, so his idea to tune him up and my idea from being in the military I’m tuning somebody up were completely different. He thought, what he expected us to do was go over there and get him up and chew him out and you know scare him. Well my definition of putting the boots to somebody was completely different and by the time we got done, Bert had run out into the park to stop us. So that had a major impact and it was a big eye opener on the differences between being in the military and being in the civilian world.

ML: So you also mentioned Dave Curtain, how did he make an impact on your life?

Dave Curtain had served in the military as well. He’d been a city manager in Lincoln before he became a police officer here and he really taught me about the politics of the job, how the association works, you know he was a humongous man. He knew this town by the back of his hand, which I've really respected, but I can remember twice getting into, starting into a foot pursuit and Dave grabbing me by the collar and says “why are you running?” and he put me in his patrol car and he knew exactly where everybody was going to go.

He knew where everybody left. So we just drive to the house and they were either there or we waited for him to show up. So Dave was just a really good hearted man. I remember when kids would get in trouble in school, you’d walk into the police department and there’d be like what looked like a book report and it would be a thousand times, I will not speed, I will not speed, I will not you know and it kind of enlightened you into there’s other ways to get your point across without putting a kid through the juvenile justice system.

Not everybody deserves a ticket, especially first-time offenders you know, or whether he did it with, you know, finding a bunch of high school football players in the back parking lot drinking beer after a game. You know instead of running them all through the legal system he’d sit there and call every parent and have them come get their kids and see what their kids doing. So he really helped mentor and did a lot of things that I really respected.

ML: So would you say those two helped you become inspired to become a police officer?

CH: I was inspired to become a police officer before I came here, but they really taught me what being a police officer was all about and I wouldn't be a chief of police without having those two as mentors during my career. Bert told me, he’s the one that said that you know you need to get a college degree and you know for years I fought going back to school and said you know I did twenty years in Marine Corps, I didn't have time to go to school so what’s the difference between a four year degree and a twenty year career in the Marine Corps?

You know I've been to every leadership school, the best ones in the world

Anyways after a while, later in my career, I mean I was a sergeant in under four years which was almost a record but I was a sergeant for thirteen or fourteen years before I got promoted again but I started seeing the writing on the wall of why people become chiefs or want to move up, and it’s not for glory or it’s not for personal reasons. You see how prior administrations treated their officers. You saw how prior administrations were afraid to make decisions for the department. They’d make decisions for city council or you know for some other political goal instead of taking care of what’s in front of them and I moved up because I wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen again. We had like four chiefs in a row that really screwed this place up and I wanted to make sure I was in a position where I thought I could make a difference.

ML: What would you describe as your most memorable experience as a police officer?

CH: My most memorable experience was working side by side with my son on a crazy person call and it was a lady that was off her meds and threatened to kill her mom. And we show up on the scene and knock on the door, nobody answers. We look in the window andwe can see a naked lady chasing her mom around the dining room table. Make a long story short, we make entry through the back door.

The lady runs and barricades herself in a closet that’s just full of stuff and loads it all behind the door so we can’t get in. We finally get through that door and there’s another door on the back end of the closet. She’d gone through that and climbed up in the attic. So we piled all this stuff as we got through, blocking the doors for getting out so James is in the dining room with the mother who has dementia really bad and he radios me that he has a foot fell through the ceiling.

So the lady her foot had come through the ceiling. So I’m piling all this stuff out, in the meantime, Justin’s there too and he climbed up into the attic and he’s making his way across the attic to her and I make my way out of the closet, get to where James is at and a second foot falls through the floor, and you’ve seen James he’s a lot taller than I am. He’s got one ankle in his hand while our other one comes through and I said one, two, three, I jumped up, grabbed the ankle and we yanked and she came falling down right on top of both of us with absolutely nothing on and anyway it was very, very comical. So that was probably my most memorable moment working here. It was funny, I’ve got some not funny ones that are memorable but they’re not something I want to put out there.

ML: How has St Helena changed since you became a police officer?

CH: The housing market has completely flipped this town.

When I started working here, you know, for like the first ten years, it reminded me of growing up in Napa. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody’s kids, there wasn’t a big Napa influence or a big Calistoga or Santa Rosa influence like there is now. The traffic, traffic’s always been there cause you got a state highway that runs through town, but it wasn’t as near as big it was mostly agricultural traffic, you know the trucks hauling the grapes through town. Occasionally having the spillages. We always had lots of DUIs but we never had the gangs and the drugs like we did then, and the traffic now. A lot of the old timers that had that real tight family and neighbor niche is gone.

The housing market, it was doing very good and a lot of the old time families saw a large profit, sold out and moved. Well the people that moved in tend to buy a lot of vacation homes so you lose that sense of community, that has had a very negative influence on our city. We’ll get calls of people with loud music or their TVs too loud. The days of walking next door, knocking on your neighbor’s door don’t exist, they want the police to fix everything. They don’t even want to know their neighbors. It’s sad but it’s just part of life, part of change.

ML: Well despite that, what would you say is your favorite part of St Helena?

CH: The community. The ones that are here are still very community oriented. They have the harvest table, which happens once every two weeks now where a lot of the community members, especially a lot of the seniors, all get together and have dinner together and dinner’s provided for them over at the church. I’ve gone to several of those.

I like the fact that I can pick up the phone if there’s an issue at one of the schools and I personally know who I’m talking to on the other end of the phone. We have a very family oriented police department where we’re like brothers and sisters here and that translates when they’re dealing with people in the street as well. As far as being respectful and it’s a bleed over you know and again the negatives in town are outside influences, it’s not the core of the community and the core of the community here is phenomenal.

ML: What notable contributions that you’ve made to the people of St Helena?

00:44:41 CH: I’ve participated with a lot of the nonprofits and have helped the nonprofits provide for the community. I’m a Rotary member of Kiwanis. I donate to the high school, I donate a lot to the Rianda house for the seniors, I go to the Rianda gents meetings.

The biggest thing I have given to the community, I think, is transparency

Being part of the community, most citizens have my direct cell phone number. I created the juvenile diversion program where instead of putting juveniles straight into the criminal justice system. Between them and the parents they can opt to do the diversion program where they are given resources for counseling, given resources for parenting. We’ve helped a lot of community members out through that alone. I did the walk and talk with the chief, lately we’ve had over the past couple years there’s been a lot of angst in the community about city politics and how the city has spent their money and, you know, that the city doesn't speak to the community.

So I did the walk and talk with the chief

I do it every summer where one day out of the week, usually Wednesdays, I meet at the corner of Pope and Main Street and whoever wants to come walk with me shows up and we go for a walk and they can ask me anything they want. A lot of investigative stuff. I just did on our weekly, gave a peek because people really don’t know what we, you know, our big cases don’t hit the newspaper because anything under investigation they’re not going to put on the newspaper. But we had six or seven huge cases within the last twelve months that people are totally unaware of that I put out there on Thursday. There’s a lot that our agency does at my direction to help the community stay safe.

ML: Do you remember somebody saying something to you that had a big impact on how you lived your life, and who said it, and what did they say?

CH: Going with the one that just comes to mind that I tell my kids all the time is you can count your true friends on one hand. There’s so much truth to that. And my dad is the one who used to say that and then my grandpa used to always say you always see the darkest things when you don’t have a gun.

ML: What would you say is your greatest achievement in life so far?

CH: My family, hands down. I have three wonderful kids and eight grandkids, and a lot of issues that many people of our generation face with drugs and alcohol and you know, not giving back to society and just taking taking. I’ve been blessed and I’ve had none of those issues with any of my kids or my grandkids.

ML: That concludes our interview.