Guy Kay

Interviewer: Skip Lane
Date of interview: 11/21/?

Skip Lane: This is Skip Lane speaking. I am pleased to welcome today Guy Kay, who I am interviewing on behalf of the St. Helena Historical Society’s Oral History Program. We are conducting this interview at 1:30 on November 21st at Guy Kay’s home in St. Helena. Welcome Guy. Can you begin by telling us where you were born and when you first came to the St. Helena area?

Guy Kay: I was born in Jamaica Long Island, actually part of New York City. And we came here in 1972. I took a job at Beringer Vineyards for the Nestle Company. They had owned [INDECIFERABLE] of vineyards on April Fool’s Day.

Skip Lane: What are some of your earliest memories of St. Helena?

Guy Kay: The first, my first memory is the fact that there were no traffic lights and the second memory comes from a small transaction at Steves Hardware. I needed two padlocks for the winery. So, I went down to the hardware store. I had been here two days, nobody knew me and I told the clerk I needed two padlocks and he said, took me over to a display and I picked out two padlocks and he handed them to me. He took out his pad and he said cash or charge and I said, it’s charge. And he said, well and I said Beringer Brothers. He started to write Beringer and I thought this is too easy, so I said to him, no it’s Christian Brothers. And he struck out Beringer and he started writing Christian Brothers and I said it’s really Beringer. And he was quite indignant. He said, do you know where you work? So, it was a world of presumed honesty.

Skip Lane: It was, certainly was. I moved here that same year. So, after you had been here a while and working for Beringer, I know you got involved in politics to some extent. What are your memories from those years?

Guy Kay: Well John Sciutto, who ran Main Street Electric and worked for us at the winery occasionally, came in my office and asked me if I would like to be on the Recreation Commission. So, I said well what do you do? He said, you pass out balls and children play. So, I said, I can do that. So, I, I got hooked into that very quickly. And then it became pretty obvious to me that the real decision making was being done at the Planning Commission. So, Lowell Smith was then Mayor and my next-door neighbor so I went to Lowell and said, you know I really should be on that Planning Commission. He said, you’ve got it. And I was on that for a year and I decided that where the really important decisions were made at the City Council. So, I ran for office. And what I was very lucky because David Whiting, who could be considered St. David as far as, as a lot of people thought at the time, who ran the local plant nursery, endorsed me and he was already on the Council. And so, I, it was a walk-in for me and I thought, boy this political stuff is really easy.

So, I was on there for four years and I made a few mistakes, okay. One of them was that I voted against the selling of fireworks in St. Helena. It’s my opinion, was my opinion then, it’s my opinion now that fireworks should be handled in this area where things are so flammable in July and August and so forth that they should be handled by professionals. We just shouldn’t be selling them. So, they came in every, my recollection is people came in every year for a permit and I voted against it every year. So, I lost a few votes there. Then I did something else that wasn’t very smart. We have Crane Avenue has two pieces, north and South and they don’t connect. And it didn’t seem to me to be a very safe thing to have two streets with the same name that didn’t connect because emergency vehicles might get confused, people driving the vehicles might get confused and so forth. So instead of doing any lobbying about it, I just brought it up in public and of course I got a lot of resistance for that. I heard we just had a print stationary printed among other things. So, after four years I stood for reelection and lost that election by one vote to Greg Hunter.

Skip Lane: I remember that.

Guy Kay: And then Mel Varrelman was successful and was elected for Board of Supervisors. So, it was a half-term to be filled and I stood for election for that and was voted in. Then that put me six years on the Council and I decided that was enough. My job at Beringer was really growing because the winery was being very successful and so I backed off for a while. Then Mel asked me if I would be on the planning commission for the county. So, I went on the planning commission for the county and was there for six years. I can come back to what we accomplished there. Then at the end of six years I told Mel that’s enough. I’ve got to get off and he appointed Tony Holzhauer so I was out of that for a couple of years, out of politics for a couple of years.

And then I was made a public member of Local Agency Formation Commission, which is I don’t think I have to explain to you but it’s a pretty important body and makes very long-range decisions. I was only there for twelve years. And then I stepped down, well I didn’t step down. I was there and Brad Weginconnect called me up and asked me if my ears were burning and I said, why should they be burning? He said well, you know we’re going to have on the ballot the Napa County Regional Park in open space district formation and we need five people to be directors and we want you to run for the third, what’s called the third ward. So, I spoke with my wife about it and she consented. We probably go back and talk about some of my lack of success in politics. And so, I ran for that unopposed, got a two-year term and then stood for four years, the next four years and had an opponent but won that election. So, I was six years on the Park and Open Stage District Forum before I finally backed down.

Skip Lane: So, that’s a lot of politics and a lot of years. What, what are your memories of those? What were the most significant failures or achievements during that time?

Guy Kay: Well let’s talk about the St. Helena City Council for just a minute. We had, we had two things that we accomplished which I’m quite proud of and they haven’t gotten very much publicity and that’s fine. The first one was that we finalized what was then the New Water Treatment Plant. It’s now one that’s under some pressure because it’s 30 odd years old I guess, but at the time it was as very important thing for the community. People were complaining that their water wasn’t clean. Some people even claimed pollywogs were coming out of the tap. I think that was probably an exaggeration. But any rate we did accomplish that. The other one was, we got a letter from the division of Safety of Dams and that’s close to the right name in Sacramento telling us we had to empty the dam. And the reason for it was there was seepage coming out of the base of the damn.

Skip Lane: This was the dam up on Crystal Springs?

Guy Kay: That’s right. Crystal Springs Dam. So, Tony Holtzhour and I went over to Sacramento with fire in our eyes and our arguments were roundly and rightly rebuffed, okay. The people started talking about dam failures where the bottom of the dam gradually erodes away because of the seepage and it accelerates exponentially so eventually when there is failure, it’s catastrophic failure. So, we were able to negotiate with that safety crew a solution that we lower the dam as it would normally come down during a summertime and then put seismometers into the dam to measure all the, I’m not an engineer I’m a botanist so you’re going to have to pardon me on some of this.

Skip Lane: That’s all right.

Guy Kay: Okay but we measured whatever we had to measure to determine where the weak points were. Then we injected concrete into the face of the dam basically and made it a very sound dam at this point, at least from my last knowledge. There was almost no seepage from the bottom of the dam. And it is safe. Those are the two things that I think were.

Skip Lane: Significant.

Guy Kay: Significant, yeah.

Skip Lane: What about after City Council on your around the county planning commission?

Guy Kay: I need to kind of frame this and the reality of what was going on at the time. The Ag Preserve was relatively new maybe ten years old or so, and it was, had been very successful except there were entrepreneurial people coming in and saying, well we’ll just put in a little shopping mall and we’ll call it a winery. So, there was a lot of pressure to break the intent of the Ag Preserve by working at working against technicalities that have not been properly put into place in the original ordinances. So, we did the winery definition ordinance and it’s interesting because I was an executive at a winery. So as soon as it came and showed up on our agenda, I recused myself. I got involved in negotiations between vendors and growers on what the language actually should be, okay.

Then two of my colleagues on the planning commission were told they had to recuse themselves too. So, all of a sudden, we were down to drawing straws to see who would serve with the two that could serve so we would have a quorum. So, I got the short straw. So, I served on that and I think we accomplished what we needed to accomplish. We had to establish a framework that would protect the agricultural land but could be, would pass muster with our court system, and I think we accomplished that because it was tried, tested in court a couple of times and it has stood the pressure. But the pressure is still out there. There are people who still think that we should be more permissive on the Ag lands than we are. I could go into what I think that would be in the future, but we’ll talk about the past for a while first.

Skip Lane: Okay. Do you think today that, I think the Ag Preserve came into being in 1968 is that?

Guy Kay: That’s right.

Skip Lane: Is it from what you say I gather you think it’s a successful endeavor?

Guy Kay: Yeah, I think it’s successful. I know what I’m going to say now is, is somewhat I thought about years ago but certainly not with the same intensity that I have about it now. But we’ve got, I was born, my wife and I were born in 1930. We were two of three billion people on the planet. We just heard in the last few months, seven billion on the planet. And if we’re lucky enough, my wife and I are lucky enough to live to be 95, when we move off the planet, there will be eight billion people. Now that’s people can quibble about the numbers, but you can’t quibble about the orders of magnitude. Those growth factors are there. They are real and the core stressed ecosystems and a lot of sort of thing, so this could lead you into a lot of areas when you start talking about land use, but one of the critical ones is that as long as the world is going to have this incredibly large population, we have to have to agricultural in that.

Protecting agricultural land is one of the premier responsibilities of this generation. It is as simple as that. So, and my opinion is that we have to tighten up our view of what is agricultural land is and make it more expansive and include more land not less. And that is in my ideal world without regard, to what is present classification is just because it isn’t classified as agricultural land today does not mean it does not have value as agricultural land. So, it’s not a fight that I’m going to be involved in because that’s going to happen over the next ten or fifteen years, but it’s what I project will come out of what we did in the ‘80s.

Skip Lane: Of course, Ag Preserve in Napa County is all about grapes. I assume what you’re talking about is food crops as well when you’re talking about preserving agricultural land?

Guy Kay: Yes, I this would make me the most popular man in a lot of the agricultural groups in the county, but I see grapes as perhaps a place-marker because they make the agricultural activities viable today financially. And so, they hold the land open for agricultural but it may very well be that fifty years from now, a hundred years from now the agricultural land will be shifted out of grapes and into some crop which produces for lack of a better term, more nourishment per acre.

Skip Lane: Yeah, well.

Guy Kay: I’m going to rub of my crystal ball, I don’t know for sure.

Skip Lane: Yeah. Yep. Besides the politics that you were involved in while you’ve been in St. Helena, what are some of the people or institutions that have had the most influence on you or that are most memorable?

Guy Kay: Well, I was able to join the Napa Valley Vintners in 1972 when there were very few members, maybe 25 or so. And we ate lunch once a month at the Old Lodi Farm Center. That building is gone. And it was, it was really sort of a slap you on the back good fellow kind of a club, but it quickly evolved into something bigger and I think started to view some of the responsibilities that the Ag community had to the larger community.

So, in about ’79 I was elected to be President of the Vintners.  At that time and I was, I was elected and served for two years in that, and during that time we accomplished two things. The first one was we agreed to put on the wine auction and we organized it. And it wasn’t a slam-dunk because there are a lot of people in the group that thought, we’re going to throw a party and nobody is going to come, okay. That turned out fortunately not to be true. So that’s and because I was so involved in the early part of the wine auction, I did serve on two update task forces for the auction to talk about improving the organization and determine how we could take this largess as it was being given to us and ensure that it could, would come down every year with significant amounts of money. So, we put it, we established reserves and so forth. But all of this took a lot of effort. We had to assess what the needs were in Napa County and the groups still does that today and I’m doing what my grandfather would have called “the heavy looking on.” I’m not involved with that anymore.

So that’s one thing. The other thing was that we got, we applied for and got the Napa Valley viticultural area okay. And that, I mean it has proven. It was not easy because we were the very first applicants and so the Federal Government didn’t know how they wanted to do it and there was a lot of confusion. And there was also a lot of internal argument about what was included in the Napa Valley. My opinion was if a drop of water hit the slope and it ran into the Napa River that part of that land was in Napa Valley and if it didn’t flow into the Napa River it wasn’t. Well there were some people who disputed that and so my definition didn’t win, okay.

Skip Lane: What was the final definition?

Guy Kay: Well the final definition includes some of the back valleys that drain into the central valley.

Skip Lane: Oh okay.

Guy Kay: But what that was of course was, it made it possible for all these other sub appliation to be put in position. So, I think served as a major contribution.

Skip Lane: Ground-breaking.

Guy Kay: Yeah.

Skip Lane: Come a long way since then hasn’t it?

Guy Kay: It certainly has.

Skip Lane: What, who are some of the most interesting characters that you’ve met since your time here?

Guy Kay: Well interestingly from, you said you wanted to interview me like this, I sort of sat down and scratched down a few notes for myself about who the people were that influenced me. The first gentleman I would mention was Roy Raven Senior. And Roy had been retained by the Nestle Company to assist in keeping the Beringer Vineyards going during, and before I arrived, he had been pushed out in some, I don’t know all the details even today but he had been pushed out very unfairly. And he had every reason to be imbittered because after all he was part of the, he was the glue that held Beringer Vineyards together before it was sold. So, he went off. He had gone off and started putting in a vineyard and a new winery, vineyard first on Zinfandel lane and when he heard that there was a new manager come in to run the show at Beringer he showed up in my office. And I, he had been rather badly burned in an accident while they were getting rid of walnut trees, but he showed up in my office and he basically said I know where everything is buried in this winery and if you ever get a problem you call me. And he meant it. And we became very good friends and we sat next to each other at the Vintner meetings quite frequently and I made the mistake of telling him what my nickname was as a boy. He never addressed by anything but that name after that.

Skip Lane: And that name was?

Guy Kay: Well it’s Yug and Yug is Guy spelled backwards. So certainly, Roy is high on the list. Louis Martini, extraordinary helpful to me. After all you know I came in from a freeze-dried coffee factory after having worked in chocolate and condensed milk for Nestle. So, the only thing I knew about the wine industry was what I had read here and there in magazine articles and that sort of stuff. And Louis Martini was there to give advice and it was always good advice. And when the first year I was here we were, we crushed our fruit down at Buchli Station Road what is now Bouchaine Winery. And we had a press. We were using a press and the press broke down and it turned out that the thrust bearing in the press was what had failed. And Martini used the same press but they had prepared themselves for a breakdown of this bearing because it happened frequently. So, they had one in stock. We were a week or a week and a half away from getting a new bearing and Louis called me up and he said I understand you need a bearing. He said I’ve got one. Simple as that.

Skip Lane: Those were the days huh?

Guy Kay: Those were the days, yeah. So, let’s see, those are the people who are I think would be on the very top of the list for me. Joe Heitz was a very helpful fellow. Some of the simple, when I was with ordinary people who were, who are memorable to me are two people who lived at the winery when I came. Tommy Hilario who was the houseboy for the maiden sisters that originally owned the business after their fathers had died. And part of the deal was that when the winery was sold to Beringer, to Nestle that Tommy could live on the property and he had, he had an apartment in what is what we call ‘the White House’ in those days. It’s now called the Hudson House. And we weren’t, well we weren’t very hotsy-totsy. My office for a while was on the unheated porch of that building okay and Tommy’s, Tommy’s habit was to listen to a soap opera and I would be sitting in my office and about 2:30 in the afternoon this soap opera would come on and it didn’t matter who I had in the office or what we were working on we had this background of a soap opera.

So, and he, well we, were entertaining a wine writer from San Francisco and we were having an outdoor tasting and it started to rain. So, we moved it into the porch and Tommy came out of his apartment and he began telling this wine writer that he was a very accomplished chef and he could make all the great cuisines of the world. And on top of that he was very, very wealthy because he had been, he’s worked with the Beringer’s for years and blah-blah, right. And the wine writer thought that was a lot more interesting than writing about our wine. So, we did that and then, we had tried to find Tommy’s relatives in the Philippines and never had been able to do it.

We even put the long arm of the Nestle Company which is an international company, to the task and they couldn’t do it. But that article sure found a lot of relatives. They came out, they came out of the woodwork and one group of people came up frequently to see him and befriended him, and because he was a wealthy man as far as they knew, okay. And it finally got to the point where they called me up. By that time, I had built a new winery and they called me up and said you better get over here to the old side because somebody is loading Tommy and stuff into his car, in their car. They are going to take him away. So, my secretary called the police department and it was a circular drive in those days and I drove in one side and the police car drove in on the other side. So, they couldn’t leave. And there was Tommy sitting in the backseat next to his television set, and a whole bunch of clothes and stuff and they were really going to take him away. Well we got that stopped but then they started some legal procedure and so it ended up in front of Judge Kongsgaard and all these legal arguments were going on back and forth. But finally, the judge said he wanted to talk to Tommy. So, Tommy is on the witness stand and the judge asked him questions like, what do you do every day? And he said well I go out to the garden and I cut some flowers and I take them up to the girls in the office. And do you like to do that? Oh yes, I like to do that. So, we went through some of that and he said what about your finances? Oh, he said, Johnny always takes care of that. This is John Delvanio who just took care of all of his financial stuff. So, went through about twenty minutes of that and the judge said something like, if this court would allow this man to be taken away, out of its jurisdiction into some other area with people unknown to this court, the court would need a conservator. So that’s that one, okay. Emanuel Aguilar lived on the property and he lived in a small building behind the “White House” now the Hudson House and he had been Otto Beringer’s right hand man and he was our gardener for around the White House grounds and he had a gold tooth in front of his teeth with a diamond in it, which he was very proud. He flashed that on every opportunity. And Tommy, and there was a persimmon tree between Tommy and Emanuel’s places and every fall there was a war about who owned the persimmons. And it couldn’t be the owner of the land. It was either one of these two men. So, I got involved in arbitrating these disputes and that sort of thing. But and so it was a privilege to come to the community at that time when these people were still alive and be able to deal with them.

Tommy used to come to our house on Christmas and Thanksgiving and that sort of stuff because he had no other place to go. So, let me think about a couple of other people. On the political side, Al Halburger [ph] who was the County Administrator was very influential with me. He, for reasons I don’t understand to this day, he sought me out very early on and Beringer would host the 4H Club. I don’t know if you know what that is, but.

Skip Lane: Sure.

Guy Kay: There were four men who ran the county, Al Halburger who was the County Administrator, Hamilton who did the engineering, Hickey who did the planning, and Hackett who did the legal okay. And so those 4H and they were called the 4H club. And Al Halburger would bring the 4H Club up to Beringer and they would bring a sack lunch and Beringer would provide the wine and they would sit and have an informal conversation with whatever they wanted to have. And it sort of cemented a relationship between me and Al.  Al was very adamant about the importance of reaching out to the south county, not only the agricultural up county like St. Helena, Calistoga, but the whole county. And his reasoning, which is absolutely valid till this day, is simply that the preponderance of the population is in the south county. So that’s where the political leverage is and if those people decide that agricultural isn’t going to be around, it won’t be around. So, we have to do stuff that includes, that’s inclusive for them and makes them feel that they have some ownership and sharing of the well-being that comes out of the agriculture.

Skip Lane: Successful I would say?

Guy Kay: Yeah very successful. Gosh, I’ve mentioned David Whiting who is just beyond belief for me. We had across the street from us Sam Haus. Sam was in his ‘80s when we came here and died at 95 or 6. He had moved to the big city of St. Helena from Pope Valley. He had retired from the Haus Winery over there in Pope Valley and he was a bachelor and he became; he became sort of our responsibility. We sort of took over a lot of what would have been, if he had children, his children’s responsibilities. So, we kind of looked after him about this and that. But he, his memory reached back into the mining era and the mercury mining and he told a story to me one time that he said, well he called me over and said you went to college. So, tell me what those are. And he opened the trunk of his car and he had some rocks there. So, I said, well they are rocks. And he said well I know they are rocks but what kind of rocks are they? And I said I have no idea. And he said, well they are furnace rocks. Then he said to me, those poor devils, they could only eat scrambled eggs. And I said to him, I don’t understand Sam. So with a little probing what came out was that the wine owners up in the hills between here and Pope Valley would smelt their ore in very leaky furnaces and the men working around it would become poisoned by the mercury vapors And they suffered from not only being addled like the mad hatter in Alice of Wonderland but they also lost their teeth through this process. And his mother would see these men coming down the main road in Pope Valley and invite them in for a breakfast of scrambled eggs because they couldn’t chew anything else.

Skip Lane: Oh, my goodness.

Guy Kay: So that was a story. But I’m sure it was a pretty accurate portrayal of at least one aspect of what happened here.

Skip Lane: That is a story you don’t hear very much.

Guy Kay: No, you wouldn’t hear it very much. Nope.

Skip Lane: So, you’ve been here about 40 years now. What has changed for the worse and what has changed for the better in our town?

Guy Kay: Right. Well I want to preface this by saying that because I’ve spent so much time in public office, I realize that it is a very difficult job, okay. And you aren’t going to please them all and I don’t care what it is. My view of it is that if you’re going to make a miracle in public office, it’s got to be a perfect miracle. You can’t, you can’t get it 95% right because the 5% is what you’re going to hear about. And so, with that said okay, I want it to be clear that I don’t hold any animosity about this stuff. But I see it as a risk, when we came to this community there were very few if any restaurants. Not very many places to stay overnight so forth, that’s all changed and to some extent that’s for the better because it certainly diversifies our economy.

But on the other side of it, we need to be very careful that because of my vent on saving agricultural land for the long-term, we need to be very careful that we don’t overweight the hospitality industry to the point where it becomes the dog that is wagging the tail of agriculture, okay. And I’m beginning to feel that. We had what was called the Destination Council which has been very successful. It now has become, it now is Visit Napa Valley, I think. But they have been very successful. They’ve gotten publicity from all over the world but in the last ten or fifteen years, fifteen years we’ve built a lot of hotel rooms in Napa County. We built and there are a lot of restaurants that have been started so forth. And they are beginning to have the leverage of their success, which means that they could very well overweight the desire to keep the agricultural base and I wouldn’t want that to happen. And I don’t think it’s inevitable. But I think we’re back to in a sense another view of what we went through with the Winery Definition Ordnance where it will be terribly and bitter arguments and people who won’t talk to each other for the rest of their lives and all that sort of stuff.

Skip Lane: Some people would say that [indiscernible] has gone away that they are talking about in terms of restaurants and hotels.

Guy Kay: Yes.

Skip Lane: Don’t you think also that a lot of the restaurateurs and hoteliers realize that the reason people come here is the vineyards and the agriculture and therefore we better be a little careful about impinging on that?

Guy Kay: Well I do think many of them are very sensitive to that. But I am always concerned that wealth is a magnet for more wealth. And we can gradually draw in people who have no feeling for this viewpoint and that’s my concern.

Skip Lane: There are a lot in St. Helena these days, there’s a lot of second homeowners and vacation homeowners and it’s a different town than it was in 1972.

Guy Kay: Yes, it really is. And well I don’t, when I ran for office, okay, I was brand new in this community. I was here six years and I was on the City Council and people stopped me on the street and said, how did you get on the City Council? And my response was, they don’t need anybody in the graveyard in your family. You just need to take out the papers and go door to door and get some signatures and so forth, right. So, there is some validity to having the strength of the original culture represented.

That said, there is a wonderful book by Joan Didion, I think. It’s called “Where I was From”. It’s about her growing up in California and it talks about how people who have had several generations think that they somehow have a veto power. That they are allowed more discretion in their land use and so forth than newcomers. I think that is very dangerous too. That said, it would be very hard for me to argue that people like Roy Raymond didn’t implant, imprint on the community their values and the values that have been developed before them.

Skip Lane: I meant to guide this discussion and all. Are there any stories or other tales to tell about your time here that you’d like to share?

Guy Kay: Well I’m very proud of, there are two things, okay. The first thing that has to be said is I didn’t do it in a vacuum. I have a wife who has been very, very supportive. For example, we were off on vacation up near Lake Tahoe and I was on the Council and it was a vote coming up and I couldn’t, I can’t to this day tell you what the vote was anymore but I left the family and drove down picked up my packet the night before at the City Hall. I spent that day getting up to speed on what was in the packet and going to that meeting. Then sleeping one more night here and then going back up with my family. Well, she put up with that kind of stuff. And she also has made a mark in the community. She has done some, she was a lifeboat of the Napa Valley Symphony for a couple of years when she was president and in an economic downturn and really made it stick and made it go. So, I think credit needs to go to my wife. And I like to think of we did it, not I did it.

This won’t mean much to some people but it means a great deal to me, that going out of Calistoga there was the Old Hill Mine Road. Which I hiked for years and I was trespassing because it was officially supposed to be, officially closed by the Board of Supervisors. When I retired in 1992, I was up on the trail a lot of times and I was loosely made a group under the auspices of this Sierra Club to look for ways to officially open that trail to the public. So, I put a sign-up box at the bottom of the hill and asked people to sign it. So, we got data that indicated how many people were using it and who they were, so, and their addresses so we could get a little base of support and so forth. That group established the Palisades Trail through a lot of talk and a lot of effort. The Palisades Trail hooks up with the Old Hill Mine Trail from easily called the Road up at the pass, the Holms Place. And we got that trail put in before the Old Hill Mine Trail was officially opened to the public but it provided a lever to talk about how important it was to get the Old Hill Mine Trail opened.

So, finally and that was one of the projects I was interested in when I got on the Regional Park and Open Space District 4, was to see that happen. So, it’s happened, okay. And Bill Grummer, Joe Calliso and I either singularly or together up in the Palisades for about a year or year and a half looking for routes for trails and so forth. It was when my legs were a little bit younger than they are now, I tell you. But I’m very, I’m very pleased that has come in. I am very proud of it for a couple of reasons. The first one is that’s an amenity that will be available in the future, probably forever. At least in the reasonable future. And it gives access now to all the new acquisitions that are up along and above the Palisades, the Dove Ranch and Wild Lake Ranch. And those accesses are extremely important so that there is a continuity to be able to use them inter-connectedly. And so, I think it’s all worked out. It was, it only took us about twenty-five years.

Skip Lane: As long as you got it done. Before we conclude, is there anything else you’d like?

Guy Kay: Let me look at my.

Skip Lane: Talk about.

Guy Kay: Let me look at my notes.

Skip Lane: I know you’ve got a list there.

Guy Kay: You know I neglected to mention Jack Davies who was very helpful to me personally, but also along with his wife, really had the best interest of long-term agricultural preservation at the forefront of that. And then, no, I think we covered it.

Skip Lane: Okay. Well some great stories and I would like to thank you very much for taking the time to do this today and we’ll get it transcribed at some point and get it back to you so you can check it out and see if there is anything you regret saying. And we’ll change it if there is.

Guy Kay: Well I think one thing I have to say, I’m now 83, and if there is anything on my mind that I think ought to be said, I’m at the age where I sort of say it. I don’t think I’m going to run for political office again, so.

Skip Lane: You can afford to.

Guy Kay: I can just say it.

Skip Lane: Good for you.

Guy Kay: Yeah.

Skip Lane: Well thanks again and.

Guy Kay: You’re welcome.