Sam Chapman on the path

By Craig Smith

^ On the Path 18” x 24” oil on canvas by Sam Chapman

Every structure tells a story. Every piece of land saved from the bulldozer has a tale. Every law was made by somebody. If we don’t know their stories, how do we understand the landscape in which we live? Sam Chapman, the youngest person ever elected supervisor in Napa County at the age of 27 in 1974, is writing a memoir about growing up here and his life in law, journalism, government, politics, and art.

Last yearI described the Dream Bowl, a refuge for war workers. Sam’s mother was a clerk/typist at Mare Island. She kept an extensive scrapbook with highlights from her job at the shipyard during her first year of work in 1941. One of her clips from December 15, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, reports that the Navy Yard was instituting a seven-day week, 24 hour/day work schedule.

His father worked out of Shop 64, laying tile in ships’ heads and galleys. When tile work was lacking, he would sometimes be “loaned out” to the laborers’ gang, that did whatever manual labor was required. To get to work, he would either take the Mare Island jitney–a long car that sat six or eight people – or Sam’s mother would take him to the ferry across the channel and pick him up at the ferry stop at the end of the day. “I remember going with her for the pick-up. He was on his knees much of the time while laying tile, and the job was often hot and dirty.”

The family initially lived in wartime housing in Vallejo but Sam vividly remembers “driving to Napa to visit my aunt Gloria and cousin David who lived in a small white house with yellow trim on a large lot with walnut trees, cherry trees and a garden on Redwood Road, which then had the feeling of a rural, country road.” Once, they drove north for dinner and dancing at the Nappanee, at the corner of Jefferson and Trancas.

His parents, “having grown up in poverty, loved new houses.” The house they bought in 1956 was at 3508 Baxter in Bel-Aire. This first unit was offered at $11,000 with a slab (concrete foundation/tile floor) or at $11,500 for a wood foundation/floor. Baxter at that time dead-ended a few houses down the block at Diablo. Beyond, in that northerly direction, were fields that separated Bel-Aire from Crescent Park. Behind the houses directly across the street was Bel-Aire shopping center, consisting of a P&X grocery store, Levinson’s Owl Rexall drug store, later a cleaners and variety store, and the first pizza parlor in Napa, Alfredo’s.

Like so many Napans back before every meadow was covered with construction, “I used to play behind the stores in the cardboard boxes stacked there and in the surrounding fields and creeks near our house. We routinely found obsidian arrow heads in the creeks.” Napa had more public pools then than now: Oak Lake Park, Vichy and Mt. George.  Many full afternoons were spent at Mt. George or Oak Lake Park, filled with shade trees and picnic benches. There, Sam learned to swim.

His early jobs sketch a history of Napa through work. First, picking prunes in 1960, a time when Napa County farmers derived twice as much revenue from beef cattle as from wine grapes, and prunes still edged wine grapes in total value – “It was hot, dirty, sticky work. Picking prunes involved shaking the tree and being on hands and knees to pick the fruit off the ground and put it in a box. We were paid by the box, ranging from about 25 to 40 cents, depending on the orchard. At the end of the day we were covered in dirt and sticky prune juice. “

His next job was as a dishwasher. “Fisher’s Fine Foods on Franklin Street in downtown Napa was a local, independent restaurant run by the droll, middle-aged Richard and spunky, dyed red-head Rose Fisher…on my first day, Rose marched me over to the local office of the Culinary Workers, Bartenders & Hotel Employees union and introduced me to Stella and Ernie Collicutt. I joined the union, received my union card and was a proud union worker.” Later, he “learned to move at the fastest pace I had ever moved to keep up”…After clean up, the staff would all sit at the counter, “and some of us, me in particular, would have a choice of any left-over pie.”

Sam’s Sunday school teacher at First Presbyterian Church was Ross Game, also the editor of The Napa Register and a regular at Fisher’s. As Sam was busing dishes, “Ross Game said ‘How’d you like to come to work with me at The Register?’ That was one of five moments in my life when a new world opened for me, my life changed course, and I headed onto a new path.”

The Register, in 1965, was “a great example of a small-town newspaper” in an era that no one imagined would ever end. It was located at First and Coombs Streets in the heart of downtown Napa, in a building erected in 1905. Chapman describes the newsroom: “Reporters and editors had desks scattered throughout, with the City Editor at the head of a U at one end with copy editor on one side and wire editor on the other. Behind them was a small, long, glass-walled room where the wire machines ran perpetually, spitting out paper copy. Behind the wire room was the “backshop.” Behind the backshop was the press room. When the editors finished with a story, they put it in a basket to be picked up or carried it directly through a swinging door where “linotype operators clipped the story in front of them and, using a keyboard, transcribed the lines on the paper before them with the use of molten lead into lines of hard metal type.”

The Register was an afternoon paper. The deadline was 11 a.m. to get the final copy to the backshop. The paper rolled off the presses around two pm in the afternoon, bundled and picked up by carriers to be home-delivered and placed in news boxes on streets around the town which Sam remembers as “An exciting and almost magical daily process.”

Play and work: these experiences defined Napa pre tourism: open spaces to explore; jobs picking prunes or working in independent small businesses, and the pleasures of a thriving community newspaper. A good preparation, perhaps a necessary one, for Sam’s renegade campaign for supervisor, which will be told in his much-anticipated memoir.