By PAUL PAYNE
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Members of a Petaluma quartet get paid to play Mexican and southwestern dance music at festivals, gallery openings and restaurants across Sonoma County.

But the four accomplished musicians in Los Gu’achis, an instrumental group, get the most satisfaction from free performances they put on every week at two Petaluma senior centers.

Members of Los Gu’achis, from the left, Chris Samson, Barbara Arhon and Steve Della Maggiora get seniors at the Petaluma People Services Center moving to their southwestern sound on Monday, May 6, 2013. (Conner Jay/The Press Democrat)

Seeing elderly people cast aside walkers and start dancing as the music moves them or wave their arms while seated in wheelchairs brings a profound sense of joy, fiddle player Barbara Arhon said.

She and her band play from 11 a.m. to noon Wednesdays at the Petaluma People Services Center on Howard Street and noon to 1 p.m. Fridays at the Petaluma Senior Cafe on Novak Street in Lucchesi Park.

“It’s pretty amazing,” said Arhon, a Petaluma music teacher. “We all have a good time.”

Pat Vachini, activities director at the Howard Street facility, said her 20 or so seniors look forward to the weekly sessions. Even those with memory problems seem to recall the tunes.

“My seniors just love them,” Vachini said. “They are magic. You look around the room and every single one of them is tapping their feet.”

Craig Mason, who runs the lunch program at Novak Street, said band members engage his seniors with charming personalities and a party atmosphere.

“It’s not every day you have a group of musicians who can motivate seniors in their 80s and 90s to get up and dance,” Mason said. “They are an enlivening group.”

Arhon and guitarist Chris Samson, a retired newspaperman, formed the group about five years ago. Artist Steve Della Maggiora joins them on accordion and guitar, and registered nurse Tracy Bigelow Grifman plays stand-up bass fiddle.

The band gets its name from a trading post in southeastern Arizona on what was then the Papago Indian Reservation, where a unique type of music was discovered by ethnomusicologists in the 1920s. It was preserved on wax cylinders.

The tribe, now called the Tohono O’odham, developed a distinct sound that originally was influenced by Spanish missionaries. but also drew on songs from Germans and Swedes headed west during the Gold Rush.

Some of the music resembles polkas or mazurkas. There are no lyrics.

Arhon learned about the style at an annual music camp she attends in Port Townsend, Wash., called American Fiddle Tunes. Each year, the camp introduces a new genre, but she was so inspired by the southwestern music that she decided to form a band around it.

“We just love our music so much,” Arhon said. “We think it’s important to share it.”

Arhon already had been volunteering her musical talents at the Howard Street facility when the band agreed to do weekly performances there.

The free shows fill a gap left when a previous musical program was cut because of funding. The performances have been going on about a year now.

Samson, former managing editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier and singer-songwriter in his own right, took a trip to Tohono O’odham Nation earlier this year.

He got to see some places mentioned in the songs and spoke to locals about their music.

The experience helped him re-create the music for seniors back home in Petaluma.

“They seem to really enjoy the music,” Samson said. “Those who are able to get up and dance.”

(You can reach Staff Writer Paul Payne at 568-5312 or paul.payne@pressdemocrat.com.)

By JEREMY HAY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Barry Watkins hadn’t been driven to volunteer. An architect, single and unattached, he went to work, lived his life.

But in late 2010, he was diagnosed with cancer; a gastrointestinal stromal tumor in his rectum.

Today, cancer-free, the Santa Rosa resident volunteers year-round. “I’ve gotten so much from people, I’ve tried to give back,” he said.

STEPS INTO ROLE: Barry Watkins, 54, is the treasurer of the Ostomy Association of Sonoma County, and also serves as the group’s supply sergeant. (CRISTA JEREMIASON / The Press Democrat)

But, first, back to 2010.

After four months of chemotherapy, Watkins, 54, underwent surgery shortly before Christmas. Going into it, he knew it would leave him with a permanent colostomy bag to drain his body waste.

“My sister said, ‘Why would you do something that will handicap you forever?’ ” Watkins recalled.

“It’s not a handicap. It’s something you live with and manage,” he said recently. In most cases, “It’s not something that cripples and restricts you.”

Three weeks after his surgery, Watkins walked into a meeting of the Ostomy Association of Sonoma County. The group, which meets monthly at the Red Cross office on Aero Drive in Santa Rosa, supports and advocates for ostomates, people with ostomies — surgical openings in the body created so that waste can leave the body.

“The goal is to find people who have ostomies, answer their questions or fears, and make them feel comfortable with it,” he said.

There is a great need for that, said Dmitry Gurtovoy, a wound ostomy continence nurse at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.

“New ostomates feel that everyone will know,’ said Gurtovoy, who works in the hospital’s outpatient ostomy clinic.

When a board member said the association needed younger leaders who could be relied on, Watkins said, “I’m both of those things,” and signed up to be the treasurer.

He handles the group’s finances and its annual membership drive and oversees the sponsorship of a child with an ostomy to send to summer camp.

Eight months ago, he volunteered to be the association’s supply sergeant, keeping a roomful of supplies at his home to dispense to any ostomate who needs them, from locals to tourists.

A woman whose insurer wouldn’t pay for the number of pouches she needed walked away from Watkins’ house with bags of them. A young man waiting to get on Medicaid and unable to pay for the supplies he needed left with a box full.

Watkins knows how valuable such support is, whether or not one needs it immediately or just needs the peace of mind. Before a recent trip to Las Vegas, he located an association providing the same supply service he does.

“It just made me more comfortable,” he said.

“The biggest thing that he has to offer is to essentially give an example,” Gurtovoy said. “To essentially show the patient that, ‘Hey, we can live a very productive, fulfilling life. I’m evidence of that.’ “

And today, the man who once did not volunteer said doing so “has given me families; new circles of friends who see me in a different light. It helps fill me out as a person.”

(You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com.)

By MARTIN ESPINOZA
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

A little more than three years after her husband, Chris Rohrer, died of lung cancer, Kathleen McIntyre realized she was ready to become a hospice volunteer.

After the grieving was over, after she came to terms with the loss, the Sonoma resident knew she had something to give back. Hospice care had made such a big difference in her husband’s final days.

HELPING OTHERS: Kathleen McIntyre of Sonoma serves as a patient-care volunteer for Hospice by the Bay. (SCOTT MANCHESTER / The Press Democrat)

“I wanted to take my experience and give people the same kind of help or relief that I got from hospice,” she said.

McIntyre, 69, is a patient-care volunteer for Hospice by the Bay, the second-oldest hospice in the country. Founded in 1975, the organization has been serving Sonoma County for 21 years.

As a patient-care volunteer, McIntyre goes to patients’ homes or care facilities. She and other volunteers offer companionship for the patient and many times relief for their main caregivers.

“You go visit like a friend,” she said. “Some of your patients can’t talk, but you’re compassionate, you’re there. You recognize that they’re still present, even when they don’t speak. I really believe there’s still an awareness.”

McIntyre was born in Kansas. A job transfer brought her to California in 1969, and she moved to Sonoma — “a nice place to land” — in 1981.

She currently works part time in the ad department at the Sonoma-Index Tribune, where she’s worked for three decades.

In 2005, her husband was diagnosed with lung cancer. Rohrer did not smoke, but his parents did. His cancer progressed and he ended up requiring constant oxygen.

After several rounds of chemotherapy, she said, “all they had to offer at that point was morphine and oxygen.”

McIntyre said that her friends and family “really stepped up” and provided a complete schedule of people that could be with him.

But after a while, it became clear he needed hospice for such things as ordering medications, making hospital-bed arrangements and other practical things.

“There are so many emotional and personal decisions — they just stepped up. It was like adding to my family,” she said.

McIntyre said she realized that hospice is “part of the village that we all need.”

Just two months after starting hospice care, McIntyre’s husband died. Seven years later, death has become a intimate part of McIntyre’s life.

Kris Montgomery, a spokeswoman for Hospice by the Bay, said many of the organization’s volunteers have cared for a loved one who received hospice care.

“They realize the value of having that kind of compassionate support in the home,” Montgomery said.

McIntyre currently has six patients that she visits, three of them with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Her visits can range from 15 minutes to three hours.

“I’ve met some incredible people, some funny people,” she said. “The last things that go are hearing, music appreciation and humor.”

People often say to her that they could never do what she does. It isn’t easy, but it is part of life.

“Some I feel really attached to, and others I just feel relieved that they’re at peace,” she said.

(You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com.)

By SEAN SCULLY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Rancher Silvio “Buzz” Bozzini said he likes to show modern kids the traditional ways of the cowboy in order to pay back the men who taught him as a youth.

Growing up in San Francisco in the 1940s, “you could get in just as much trouble then as you can now,” he said.

PASSING IT ON: Rancher Buzz Bozzini demonstrates his roping technique during last month’s Ag Days at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. (ALVIN JORNADA / The Press Democrat)

But his uncle and grandfather would take him riding and roping at the rodeo grounds that used to operate in the city’s McLaren Park. That sparked a lifelong love of ranching that kept him out of trouble and eventually led him to life on his Sebastopol horse and cattle farm today.

“I call it the cowboy gene,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re born in San Francisco or Texas or Montana; if you’ve got the cowboy gene, it’s there.”

Today, Bozzini volunteers at numerous agriculture-related events, including the annual Ag Days for Sonoma County school kids, where he demonstrates roping for wide-eyed elementary school students.

“I want to be a cowboy,” cried 6-year-old Jamari Gentry, a first-grader at Hidden Valley Satellite School in Santa Rosa, after Bozzini showed him the basics of looping a lasso around a dummy calf at Ag Days in late March.

That kind of talk is music to Bozzini’s ears.

Ranching, farming, and riding “just brings out the best in them, keeps them out of trouble,” he said.

Bozzini, 71, has done volunteer programs at schools and for various events, including the Sonoma County Fair, over the past three decades. He also offers discounted riding and roping lessons to area youth interested in competing on the rodeo circuit.

“Buzz is the real deal, a cowboy who shares his passion for the Old West with city kids who are more closely connected to computers than cows and bucking broncos,” said Tim Tesconi, community relations coordinator for the Sonoma County Farm Bureau.

Tesconi said Bozzini is so eager to share his craft that he is always the first exhibitor to sign up for the annual Ag Days.

Bozzini serves as president of the Sebastopol Wranglers, a 60-year-old nonprofit equestrian club that participates in a variety charitable and sporting events, and vice president of the California State Horsemen’s Association, Region 1.

Bozzini and his wife, Cookie, have owned the Doubletree Ranch and Saddle Shop for more than four decades. For most of that time, his wife offered riding lessons while Bozzini worked as a technician at Pacific Bell and tended the farm on weekends.

The couple made a point of escorting the mostly city-bred riders to horse shows and other events to keep them in touch with rural ways.

He retired about two decades ago and since then he has concentrated on living, and demonstrating, the life of a cowboy.

He does private exhibitions as well. Last week, he did a birthday roping performance for a 63-year-old rodeo rider disabled by a stroke and living in a Napa County nursing home. When the staff tried to pay him, he turned down the money.

“If I charged you,” he told them, “they wouldn’t let me into cowboy heaven.”

(You can reach Staff Writer Sean Scully at 521-5313 or sean.scully@pressdemocrat.com.)

By DEREK MOORE
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

June Albor arrived in New York just as Superstorm Sandy was blowing out.

Albor, an American Red Cross disaster volunteer, was handed a sheet of paper listing the addresses of shelters.

READY TO HELP: June Albor works at Petaluma People Services Center when she’s not responding to disasters as a Red Cross volunteer. (SCOTT MANCHESTER / The Press Democrat)

Go, they said. Help.

“We found people who had gone a day without food or water. Nothing,” she said.

“We had to fix that. We couldn’t walk away.”

Albor, 56, was inspired to volunteer with the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina in 2008.

The Santa Rosa native had the heart for the job. She works for the Petaluma People Services Center helping people transition from welfare to work.

But emotions can be a difficult thing to manage in the face of tragedy.

Albor described responding in the aftermath of house fires and talking to people whose lives have been reduced to what they can carry in a garbage bag.

“You’re talking to someone who literally, for the moment, has lost everything,” she said.

Such was the case last year in New York, but on a massive scale unlike anything Albor had ever seen.

She scrambled to find food, water, blankets — the most basic things that victims of the hurricane needed for survival. She and other Red Cross volunteers fed 3,000 people in a single day.

“You become a darn good gofer,” she said.

She remembers one girl in particular who was staying in a shelter on Long Island. It was snowing outside and the girl was freezing cold.

Albor helped find a coat for the girl, who thanked the volunteers by singing a lovely song in Spanish at the top of her lungs.

Back home, Albor is required to be on call one week of every month to respond to emergencies.

The work entails everything from finding food and shelter for clients, to helping them fill out forms and referring them to other agencies for additional services.

New volunteers attend an orientation meeting and an overview of the disaster services program. The degree to which a person becomes involved depends on their skills and willingness to undergo additional training in disaster response and preparedness.

The training is provided by the American Red Cross of Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties.

Red Cross volunteers also help by teaching CPR and first aid, providing services to members of the military and their families and with fundraisers.

For more information, visit www.redcross.org/SonomaCounty and click on “volunteer.”

You can reach Staff Writer Derek Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @deadlinederek.

By KEVIN McCALLUM
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

When many Santa Rosans gather to celebrate Earth Day, the sustainability-focused events and activities they’ll enjoy will be possible largely because of the efforts of people like Teja Gilmour.

She’s part of an army of green volunteers who have stepped forward to help make sure the 4th annual event in Old Courthouse Square again will be a success.

MODEL FOR KIDS: Teja Gilmour of Santa Rosa, with her kids Dashall Faria, 5, left, and Rowan Faria, 8, center. At Santa Rosa’s Earth Day festival April 27 in Old Courthouse Square, Gilmour and other members of the Santa Rosa Mother’s Club will help staff eco-activity stations for children. (CRISTA JEREMIASON / The Press Democrat)

The event will be held April 27, although Earth Day officially is April 22.

Gilmour, a member of the Santa Rosa Mother’s Club, and about 10 fellow club members have agreed to staff the festival’s various eco-art activities for children.

It’s something the 47-year-old mother of two helped with last year when she and others showed children how to make natural play dough and pine-cone bird feeders.

“My daughter loved coming and doing it with me last year,” said Gilmour, whose daughter, Rowan, is 8 and son, Dashall, is 5. “We want to show our kids how fun it is to not only volunteer in general, but also to help other kids make these neat creations.”

Expanding the club’s role in the Earth Day activities makes sense because the club has tried to increase the awareness of its members and their children about caring for the environment. They’ve stopped using disposable plastic cutlery at their picnics and board meetings, for example. They also participate in outings such as cleaning up trash in local creeks, she said.

“It just fit in with our kind of new mantra that we had as a club,” Gilmour said.

As part of the Santa Rosa Mother’s Club community outreach committee, Gilmour works to make sure the club is more than just moms meeting up for play dates in the park. She has helped organize food and book drives, donations to groups such as homeless services provider The Living Room, and even a roll-a-thon to raise money for Kids Street Learning Center.

“It’s not just a social club,” Gilmour said. “We’re trying to find ways to make our neighborhoods and our community better, and model that to our kids and instill in them that it’s important to give back.”

Santa Rosa is looking for additional volunteers to help out with Earth Day activities. At least 10 people are needed to help set up and take down the festival, which takes place from noon to 4 p.m. in Old Courthouse Square. All volunteers receive a free T-shirt. To sign up, contact Elise Howard at ehoward@srcity.org.

For those interested in helping clean up Juilliard Park and the Prince Memorial Greenway between 8 and 11 a.m., contact Tyler Rockey at trockey@srcity.org.

Volunteers also can register at www.surveymonkey.com/s/SREarthDay, or at the city’s website, www.srcity.org/earthday.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @citybeater.

By MARY CALLAHAN
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Michelle Keip came to the creeks through the children in her pre-Aikido class, known as Samurai Sprouts. She wanted public service to be part of her students’ development in the art of defending life, and she found her inspiration in the plants and animals of the watershed practically outside the dojo door.

Volunteer Michelle Keip picks up trash in Spirit Creek in Santa Rosa as part of a creek cleanup earlier this month. (SCOTT MANCHESTER / The Press Democrat)

Over seven years of leading regular cleanup days on two local creeks through the city of Santa Rosa’s Creek Stewardship program, Keip says, she’s discovered that safeguarding neighborhood waterways is enriching and rewarding for people of all ages.

“Creek stewardship is like remembering that the water, the rocks, the air, the plants, the animals are our brothers and sisters,” Keip, 60, said recently. “Everything is sacred. And we can encourage each other and remember that together.”

Protecting the health of riparian areas is also a way to serve in community, building alliances and friendships among generations, she said.

Even young children can participate, with the proper safety orientation, she said. And it only takes one outing for folks to realize how much can be accomplished in a short time, Keip said. The city will even supply gloves, trash pickers and garbage bags to groups who want them.

“When people see how doable it is, they want to get going on their own,” Keip said.

Keip started by adopting a reach of Piner Creek near Coffey Lane and Piner Road, a short distance from the Movement Oasis studio that houses Well Springs Aikido, the school she and her husband run.

She also leads cleanups on Spirit Creek west of Stony Point Road near the Center for Spiritual Living, whose members are among her recruits.

“Michelle has done a lot and puts a lot of time into it, and is enthusiastic and real heartfelt about what she does,” said Alistair Bleifuss, a city environmental specialist who runs the program.

She currently organizes five events a year, though more than 100 others involved with the stewardship program offer help in a variety of different ways — from leading cleanup efforts, to reporting problem areas, to serving as the city’s eyes and ears in some other way, Bleifuss said.

“Just getting all the little stuff, like candy wrappers and bottle caps, cigarette butts, and all the things that can be mistaken for food by wildlife” is important, Bleifuss said.

With nearly 90 miles of creek running through the city, “we’re really reliant on people who let us know when they see a problem, because we’re not out there seeing the creeks everyday like people who are using them.”

Keip, a public health nurse by training, emphasizes education and reflection in her cleanup events. She usually starts with an orientation to the creek and safety instructions by environmental educator Stephanie Lennox before volunteers get down to work collecting trash.

Workers find everything from car batteries and open paint cans to discarded toys and the usual array of garbage.

“The creeks, historically, have kind of been like the landfill area,” Keip said. People used to look the other way and throw it over their backs into the creeks, and, unfortunately, that attitude, we still find it in our creeks in the kind of trash we find.”

But when many hands are at work collecting such refuse, it goes quickly, and is usually done in an about an hour, Keip said. After that, it’s time to talk and play and share food — pizza provided by nearby Round Table Pizza, when the work is focused on Spirit Creek.

Typical outings bring in 30 or more people, though she’s had as many as 80 turn out for Martin Luther King Day of Service events on Spirit Creek.

Keip said she’s particularly touched to see how readily children embrace the role of protecting wildlife along the creeks, with young kids sometimes showing still younger ones the ropes.

A woman came to her after a March 17 cleanup on Spirit Creek and described how her daughter “insisted that we come to this,” even though she’d never been to a creek cleanup before.

Another girl, about age 5, brought her mother and grandmother. “That cross-generational piece is so precious to me,” she said.

Keip’s next scheduled effort is from 1 to 4 p.m. April 21 on Piner Creek.

Anyone interested in participating can contact Keip at (707) 544-2673 or info@movementoasis.com.

More information on the creek stewardship program is available atci.santa-rosa.ca.us/departments/utilities/stormwatercreeks/steward.

(You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.)

The No. 1 website local teenagers use for research is YouTube.

That was a key, if surprising, finding when volunteers Suzy and Mike Marzalek, along with Chop’s Teen Club, surveyed 200 middle and high school students.

VISION REALIZED: Suzy and Mike Marzalek, center, show off their jobsmadereal.com website at Chop’s Teen Club week with the help of Chop’s staffers Caroline Gonzalez, left, and Melissa Stewart. (CONNER JAY / The Press Democrat)

The discovery helped inspire the couple to create www.jobsmadereal.com, a website designed to teach young people about careers in a medium they prefer — video.

The Marzaleks partnered with Chop’s to execute the vision.

“It has a whole YouTube look and feel, because teens told Chops how they like to learn, and the whole website was built with that in mind,” Suzy Marzalek said.

Short videos give young viewers a glimpse into the life of a graphic designer, a ship pilot, a mint farmer and even a cowboy. They’ve peppered the site with details about salaries, job outlook and personality traits that are suited to each job, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“We learned that teens, and some of the people at the college level, they don’t really know enough about what people really do to take advantage of mentoring or job shadowing,” Suzy Marzalek said. “This is one way to give them insight into what people really do.”

Mike Marzalek spent many hours scouring YouTube for career videos, and then set up links to relevant clips.

“Suzy and I did some initial development but the real meat of the website was developed in conjunction with Chop’s,” Mike Marzalek said. “The whole community has been really heavily involved.”

The Marzaleks have been just as heavily involved with the rest of the community. They were recently named 2013 Philanthropists of the Year by United Way of Wine Country.

“They are truly what the community is all about,” said Mike Kallhoff, president and CEO of United Way of Wine Country. “This is one of the easiest awards we’ve ever given out, because they do so much. These are people that you see all across town. They’re doing everything.”

The couple began volunteering 15 years ago, when Suzy was flying around the world for work, and realized she wanted to be more connected to the community, Suzy Marzalek said. Both are very concerned about access to education, health care and food.

“It does go back to my father, who asked himself every morning when he got up what he could do to make the world better that day,” Suzy Marzalek said.

She sits on numerous boards, including those of Redwood Empire Food Bank, Santa Rosa Community Health Centers, Roseland University Prep, Community Action Partnership, Sutter Medical Center and Planned Parenthood Shasta Pacific.

Although he modestly declined to elaborate, Mike Marzalek has been volunteering his engineering talents to improve cochlear implant devices, which are designed help those who are very hard of hearing.

“He’s been writing software, and using himself as a guinea pig to see if he can make it better,” Suzy Marzalek said.

Both are longtime volunteers and donors with United Way and support Santa Rosa Junior College and Scholarship Sonoma County.

“Doing some of this together … it’s just so amazing to share this,” Suzy Marzalek said. “Oh my goodness, to have these shared values around giving back to the community, it just doesn’t get any better than that.”

(You can reach Staff Writer Cathy Bussewitz at 521-5276 or cathy.bussewitz@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @cbussewitz.)

Ask Ron Hass what his favorite book is and he can’t just name one, he starts naming a long list.

“I just believe in reading,” he said.

The Santa Rosa man credits his aunt with sparking the love of a well-crafted tale that has given him a lifetime of pleasure. It was natural that once he retired, he sought ways to share that feeling.

Volunteer Ron Hass sorts books in a storage unit of the Free Bookmobile of Sonoma County on Thursday, March 7, 2013. (Scott Manchester / The Press Democrat)

Hass, 67, volunteers with the Free Bookmobile of Sonoma County, picking up donations from around the county and spending several hours a month sorting and cataloging them at the nonprofit’s Occidental headquarters.

The bookmobile, founded in 2009 by Glen Weaver as a weekend public service project with his family, has grown into a bustling book giveaway program that has distributed more than 70,000 free books to anyone who wants one — or three, the per-person limit.

Many customers are children, others senior citizens. Most are lower-income, but anyone is welcome to use the service, Weaver said.

“When you see them come off the Bookmobile with smiles, it’s just great,” Hass said of young readers.

Weaver, the only employee of the growing program, called Hass’ dedication invaluable.

Hass picks up donations several times a month from throughout the county. He arrives in Occidental and sorts them into racks of bankers’ boxes organized by category inside a large storage container.

The custom-designed, waterproof container has a capacity of about 12,000 books.

A “database guy” in his working life, Hass is helping fine-tune the sorting system. He examines incoming books and classifies them into one of 35 groups, including those for “immediate placement” into the bookmobile — books in high demand.

“How to Go to College Almost for Free” made the cut, as did a hardback Patricia Cornwell mystery.

“Anything current or newer, things people are talking about, like politics,” Hass said. “There’s a category for every human experience. That’s part of the fun of it.”

Excess books or multiples of the same title are given to other nonprofits.

“Having somebody like Ron is incredibly helpful because he doesn’t only know books, he makes sure that the best stuff comes forward,” Weaver said.

Since young readers are a primary target, picture books, “early reader books” and young adult fiction are always in demand. The mobile also stocks Spanish-language books for all ages.

“A lot of bookmobile users are disenfranchised,” Weaver said. “They aren’t near a library or don’t have access to books.”

Hass said delving into a stack of new donations is an adventure – one he is eager to share with other admirers of the written word.

“Every box is a new discovery,” he said. “I get a tremendous amount of pleasure from it.”

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

Additional volunteer opportunities for the bookmobile are donation delivery drivers, neighborhood event promoters and on-site help during events.

http://freebookmobile.org

(You can reach Staff Writer Lori A. Carter at 762-7297 or lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com.)

By MELODY KARPINSKI
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Have you ever been pegged as a groupie? Erin Sheffield has.

“I’ve been accused of being a Luther Burbank groupie,” said Sheffield, the chairwoman of the Luther Burbank Experiment Farm committee. “The more I found out about the man, the more I was interested.”

The Sebastopol farm, better known as Gold Ridge, was where Burbank developed thousands of new hybrid plants.

Erin Sheffield, shown Wednesday at the Luther Burbank Experiment Farm in Sebastopol, is chairman of the committee that runs the farm. She also serves as liaison between the farm and the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens in Santa Rosa. (KENT PORTER / The Press Democrat)

Sheffield, 73, began volunteering with the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens in Santa Rosa in the spring of 2009. A Sebastopol resident, she discovered Gold Ridge later that year and began volunteering at the farm in the fall.

“I saw there were very few volunteers here (at Gold Ridge), and nobody was doing what I saw needed to be done,” Sheffield said. “It took me until my 70s to find my perfect job, but I found it.”

She now serves as the liaison between the two Burbank locations, just one of the many hats she wears at the farm.

“I’d always loved gardening, and I have my B.A. from Cal Poly-Pomona in horticulture and landscape architecture,” Sheffield said. “My only regret is I don’t garden at the farm.”

Despite finding little time to garden, Sheffield trains new volunteers, plans events, gives community lectures about the farm and provides public-relations assistance.

“Erin transformed the way the farm was organized almost single-handedly,” said Steve Fowler, the former curator of Gold Ridge.

“She brought us into the 21st century,” he said.

A New York transplant, Sheffield moved to California in the late 1960s. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree, she was inspired to take a video production class at Moorpark College in Ventura County.

A call for interns at the local TV station led her to become involved in the producing world, a skill she put to use at Gold Ridge when she produced two short informational videos about the farm.

“Burbank had a particular brand of genius,” Sheffield said. “He was pals with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison — because genius recognizes itself.”

Fowler noted that Sheffield was the first to bring a laptop to the farm. “She introduced a lot of innovations to us and brought a lot of new energy,” Fowler said. “She’s helped us set priorities and fundraising goals.”

Sheffield’s newest project is grant writing, and she recently gave a presentation at the Sonoma County Landmarks Commission seeking funding for the farm.

For Sheffield, her work at the farm allows her to use her variety of skills to pursue her passion.

“Working at the farm allows me to bring together so much of my education and work experience,” she said. “This place is such a precious gem.”

You can reach Staff Writer Melody Karpinski at 521-5205 or melody.karpinski@pressdemocrat.com.