Oral histories: Four native Petalumans share stories

Watching for enemy aircraft from the roof of the Hotel Petaluma

Ever notice the 12-by-12-foot cubicle projecting from the top of the Hotel Petaluma? John Pedroni, then 17, could see it on the way to work at his father’s delicatessen on Western Avenue.

“It was part of an elevator shaft,” says Pedroni. “There was a little extra space in there, and it had glass all around it.”

Pedroni heard the shocking news that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor from a boyhood friend he’d gone to visit down the block.

“He came to the door and said, ‘Gosh, did you hear what just happened?’”

His friend’s family had heard it on the news, and the first reaction was disbelief: “There must be a mistake.”

Reality soon sank in all over Petaluma, and the reaction was panicky.

“They didn’t know what the story was going to be, they didn’t know if the Japanese might be attacking the West Coast, San Francisco, maybe Seattle.”

Maybe Petaluma? Certainly there was a need to monitor the skies.

The little room atop the Hotel Petaluma was called into service as a spotting station. The Air Command — Pedroni is not sure whether it was run from Hamilton Field or San Francisco — asked for volunteer spotters. Their job was to report any aircraft they saw and the direction of flight.

“Right then and there, everyone volunteered,” says Pedroni, “day and night, in two-hour shifts.” Lots of retired people took turns, as well as an employee of Pedroni’s Delicatessen.

Pedroni says the operation — and the anxiety — only lasted a month or two.

“I imagine after they found out the Japanese were not going to attack the West Coast, they disbanded.”

The attack marked a sea change for Petalumans, though.

“Petaluma was kind of a little sleepy town,” he recalls. “And then a few months after the war started, all these shipyards and Hamilton Field, it was all war.”

Within six months, most of the boys in Pedroni’s high school class had enlisted. Pedroni went on to serve in combat in Germany.

People came from everywhere to work in the shipyards. They needed housing and had money to spend. Overnight, sleepy Petaluma had become a boomtown.

— Bonnie Allen

Lily Fishman Krulevitch arrived in Penngrove in 1920 with her Russian Jewish parents, drawn by a close-knit community of Jewish chicken ranchers. She was 3 months old.

Krulevitch remembers the hard work of the poultry business, cleaning eggs every day after school, the economic uncertainty that had them on the brink of financial disaster during the Depression.

But life was also full of joy. There were parades, the circus, movies at the California Theater and later, dances at the Russian River and Boyes Hot Springs. The Jewish community sponsored literary groups, poetry readings and discussion groups.

The only strife was between the Socialists, who were passionately committed to workers’ rights, and the Zionists, whose dream was to one day carry their newfound farming skills to Israel. It was the source of lively and contentious discussions.

How this remarkable community came to be in and around Petaluma is a fascinating story in its own right, but there was a dark side to it.

“Growing up in Penngrove was not easy, because there was a lot of anti-Semitism,” Krulevitch recalls. “We had people in Penngrove who were Nazis.” (Petaluma, she emphasizes, did not display such prejudice, and many of her girlfriends were gentiles.)

Events came to a head in August of 1935.

“I remember the tar and feathering,” she says. Sol Nitzberg, whose son George was her friend, was dragged from his home by a group of vigilantes. Krulevitch was 15 years old, and George was 13. “George witnessed the whole thing,” says Krulevitch.

It was Sol Nitzberg’s labor organizing and his Communist Party membership that got him in trouble with local farmers and bankers. He was taken to Santa Rosa with several other organizers, threatened (“Hang the Jew!”) and then tarred and feathered and turned loose with a warning to leave Sonoma County.

Among the vigilantes were Santa Rosa’s mayor and a city councilman, community leaders, bankers and even newsmen. Although there was a trial later, no one was ever convicted for the offense.

Krulevitch volunteers at the Petaluma Historical Society and Museum, where you can go to watch “A Home on the Range,” the excellent video history of the Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma, featuring interviews with Krulevitch and other family members of the Jewish chicken ranchers.

— Bonnie Allen

It was 1942, and a parent’s worst nightmare: An air-raid alert during school hours.

Teachers, who had no doubt prepared for this possibility, gathered up the children and herded them to the hills above Webster Street, where they were told to lie low during what could be a Japanese attack.

But Ulric “Dick” Dunbar, then in high school, remembers the day as a welcome reprieve from classroom tedium. The kids were soon running and shouting in a celebration of their sudden freedom in the woods.

When the brief emergency was over, he confesses, not many kids made it back to class.

“You know how kids are,” he says, laughing. “We scattered!”

It was a happy memory in the midst of a tense time — and for Dunbar, a time of change. His father died unexpectedly the next year, and the following year he enlisted in the Merchant Marine, supplying military personnel in the Pacific.

“I celebrated my 18th birthday on Guam,” he recalls. In 1945, he witnessed the horrendous Battle of Okinawa.

A native Petaluman, Dunbar was born in the family home at Post and Stanley streets. He traces some of his ancestors to their arrival in Sonoma County by wagon train in 1860.

After the war, Dunbar returned to Petaluma and picked up a temporary job at the Petaluma Post Office during the Christmas season in 1947.

He was so well-liked that he found his way into a permanent job and for 23 years delivered mail to every address in Petaluma. Over four decades he rose to become Petaluma’s postmaster, retiring in 1986.

You can see his handiwork every time you pick up your mail. It was Dunbar who, as a postal superintendent in the 1980s, took on the task of assigning an extra four digits to postal codes in Petaluma and all over the Bay Area.

— Bonnie Allen

The beautiful young actress Loretta Young won her only Academy Award for her role as Katie in the 1947 film “The Farmer’s Daughter” with Joseph Cotten and Ethel Barrymore.

My mom was Swedish and fascinated by young Swedish celebrities like Young, ice skater Sonja Heaney and swimmer Esther Williams. So it is not surprising that she was obsessed by the possibility of actually seeing her. Two or three times a week during the filming, my mom, dad, baby brother and I would travel from Penngrove out to the Scott Ranch on Adobe Road and sit on the running board of the 1935 four-door Ford on the side of the road for hours, hoping to get a glimpse of Loretta Young.

When I watched this vintage movie recently, I was able to see again the barn to the left of the house with a mural on the side. The barn stood there for years, along with the farmhouse and the lush hillside and the knoll on top of the hill where Joseph Cotten stepped gingerly through the flock of leghorn chickens to propose marriage to the young woman who won a congressional seat campaigning on an immigrant rights platform. Back then the immigrants were from Europe and the Orient, not Mexico.

She had the strength of character to run against an incumbent, survive the scandal attempted by the villain sign painter who hoodwinked her out of her money and attempted to get her to shame herself and her family in a scene filmed at the Pioneer Motel and swimming pool on Old Redwood Highway at Fern Avenue. That is just north of the Green Mill Inn. Marvel Bordessa remembers her father talking about how pretty and nice Loretta was when he drove her out to the Pioneer Motel in his cab.

In the vintage film category, this film to this day carries one of the highest ratings. Interestingly, when it was filmed, the working title was “Katie Goes to Congress,” but by the time it got to the box office it was renamed “The Farmer’s Daughter.” It was a sign of the times.

— JoAnn Ritko Pozzi