This is an essay about people. To me, people and community are the most precious treasures we have. Sure, the trees and water and animals are all essential parts of our lives, and we are most fortunate to have Point Reyes National Seashore in our backyard. The seashore is home to deer and badgers and parking lots and red-tailed hawks and beaches and Instagram spots and bishop pines and concrete restrooms and snowy plovers. And people: warm-hearted, hard-working, good-neighbor people.
The ones I write about here are people I have loved for the past 40 years, even if they don’t know it or if I don’t know them well. Even if they’d rather I not mention them here, I’m going to anyway, because this is a big moment in our neighborhood, and I must honor them.
Let’s take it from A to Z.
Sitting in the kitchen with his wife, Betty, George Nunes admitted that his nickname was Scumpy (or something like that) and that he could be a rascal when he was young. He was the kid in the one-room-school picture making a face, and he died too young. Betty, the strong and friendly woman of integrity, the matriarch of the Point. The next generations have kept the ranch going under her gaze.
The hired men with their families—talk about integrity. Padilla, Romo, Carmona, Vega, Franco, Gonzalez, Isais—too many to name. Most memorable and touching, a third grader, daughter of a dairy employee and friend of my granddaughter, telling me with an endearingly honest smile how much she loved living at the A Ranch and how proud she was to be part of the life in that little community at the edge of the continent.
The next dairy over, Joe and Scotty Mendoza. Joe’s parents settled at B Ranch more than a century ago. Gruff Joe, strong as a horse. Ebullient mother-to-all Scotty, with endless good energy, leading 4-H, Western Weekend queens, preserving local history, cooking her famous beans by the gallon. Yes, integrity. They are gone, and their grandson has been running the dairy while raising the family’s fifth generation in the same place.
The Spalettas: hard workers who have seen more than their share of tragedy. Strength and integrity show in their daughters and son, who is dedicated to providing milk to California since his great-great-grandfather started in Olema in the 1890s. These families came from poverty and hardship in the southern Alps and found a good life here.
From Ireland came Edward and Catherine Gallagher, arriving in a covered wagon to settle on the Black Mountain ranch in the early 1860s. Their children migrated out to the Point as tenant ranchers, then owners, then tenants again.
Have you ever gotten to know Joe Lunny? He is 94 years old, came out as a teenaged city boy and immediately got the ranching bug. You will never meet anyone like him. Loves to joke and laugh, has a story about most everything. The time he started growing his own feed, the dubious neighbors who saw the light and hired him to grow their feed, too. He’s lived in the same house for almost 80 years, where he and the lovely, much-missed Joan raised a whole bunch of kids. Integrity.
Then there’s the Grossi clan of H Ranch, M Ranch and Rogers Ranch. Grandpa Grossi bought the land and put a son or daughter on each one. Alfred with the twinkle in his eye—was it mischievous?—and his brother Domingo, comparatively quiet. Today, on Domingo’s place, we have four generations of strong women in residence, from a dynamic 10-year-old to her great-grandma. They run the ranch. Their home is the only place they’ve ever known. Among my favorite people on earth.
The longest on the Point are the McClures. James and Margaret came over from Ireland 140 years ago, had 10 kids. Jim and John and David continued and created a legacy. John married the local schoolteacher and bought Pierce Point with Dave and their mother. Jim married his neighbor Helen Gallagher—one was Irish Catholic and the other Irish Protestant, which couldn’t have happened in the Old Country. Jim and Helen’s son Ronald came next—rode his pony to school to save rubber during the war—then Ron’s son Bob, and his and Ruth’s girls. A long string of excellent people, the best you could meet. Overflowing with integrity.
The north part of the peninsula was Little Ireland, what with the Gallaghers, Lunnys, McClures and Kehoes. “Big Jim” Kehoe was our local supervisor—he married a schoolteacher, too. Son Skip kept the dairy, and his three sons after him. Throughout those three generations, the fathers were best friends with their McClure peer. How can we have a place with such universally good people? Yet there they are. And there they go.
There’s more. The Evans (of the Grossis), McClelland (of the Mendozas), Lucchesi (of the McDonalds) families, the latter pioneer artichoke farmers before being chased out as Italian enemy aliens during the war. Merv McDonald was the prince of integrity, in my eyes. Taught his neighbors the art of raising beef as they closed their dairies. Knew sheep, knew cattle, knew good grass, spoke his mind.
The people who worked for these business owners often stayed for decades, raised their own families, and sent their kids to local schools. Many came from Jalos in Mexico; their children now run successful businesses around the Bay Area, and their grandchildren are in school. Dozens of Latinos working in our towns and beyond grew up or lived on the Point. Dozens more are preparing to move and find new jobs. Their children—reportedly almost a quarter of the student body—will likely leave our schools, creating a loss in diversity and other unforeseen consequences.
By my calculation, 80 percent of family units who have lived here for 100 years or more will be gone. About two-thirds of people over age 60 who were born here will be gone. Stunning.
All these people will be leaving, emptying the Point of working lives, to be replaced by leisure-seekers in their cars. What the litigators don’t seem to grasp—or care about one whit, I guess—is that this is a deeply ingrained and committed community, and that is something that is good and cannot be replaced. It is a massive blow to our area’s culture. The Coast Miwok people were wrongly and brutally evicted from this land 200 years ago, but two wrongs don’t make a right.
Notice how many times I wrote the word integrity in this column. That’s an attribute getting harder and harder to find these days. It will be a very sad 15 months as we, the neighbors, say our goodbyes and watch the moving vans and cattle trucks rumble down the road. Our community will be broken.
Dewey Livingston is a California historian who wrote detailed history studies of the ranches for the Point Reyes National Seashore from 1988 to 1998, along with other agriculture-based histories around the state. He lives in Inverness.