Jim Lopes, a fixture on Santa Rosa streets, dies at 82

Jim Lopes befriended legions of people through the years he trolled the streets of downtown Santa Rosa and the junior college neighborhood behind a decorated grocery cart laden with trinkets for giving and redeemable cans.

The sweet-tempered vagabond, who might have been presumed homeless though he shared a rental house on Beaver Street, had a thing for ladies. Blondes, especially. Often, it was mutual.

“I know how much he loved me,” said Beverly Schisler, a longtime server at the Sam’s For Play Café on Sebastopol Road. One morning he caught a ride to the diner, walked in, declared “Ta-da!” and pulled off his cap to reveal the name of a fabric store he’d clipped from a newspaper ad and taped to his forehead: Beverly’s.

“He loved me so much, it wasn’t even funny,” said Schisler, who’s now just brokenhearted.

Lopes died Jan. 14 at a Santa Rosa convalescent hospital, at age 82. Another of his not coincidentally blonde friends, Kellie Nyholm, a volunteer at his favorite thrift store, comforted him shortly before he succumbed to cancer.

“I assured him he would see his mom when he got to heaven and there was nothing to fear,” Nyholm said. “He liked that and hoped it was true.

“When I left he said, ‘Thanks for being my friend, honey. I’ll see you in heaven.’?”

Admirers of Lopes tell of learning from him that he was born in Sebastopol but attended school for at least part of his childhood at Santa Rosa’s Lincoln School. He evidently stopped going to school during or after the eighth grade.

Friends say he recounted having worked at a Sebastopol apple cannery and at a bookstore in Oakland. He was up-front that he put his life into a slide by hitting the bottle. He spoke proudly of having been sober for about the past eight years.

By several accounts, Lopes lived with his mother until she died.

“He loved her very much and missed her,” Nyholm said. She said it seemed that he lived on a trust fund created with the proceeds of the sale of his mother’s home.

Nyholm became close to Lopes through the course of his frequent visits to the Angels Attic thrift shop on E Street, a charitable enterprise of First United Methodist Church.

“I was there every Wednesday,” she said. “He made a point of coming in on Wednesdays.”

Lopes would walk in wearing his trusty, beige parka emblazoned on the back with an American flag. Typically he also sported a ball cap onto which he’d adhered the word he’d cut from a supermarket bag: Lucky.

He would always bring Nyholm and the other volunteers a stemless flower that he’d plucked from a front yard along his route, and often little gifts the likes of a piece of fruit or a cookie or a knickknack or friendship note.

He’d ask Nyholm and her colleagues if they had any books or magazines on airplanes and he’d flip through the shirts rack looking for a Hawaiian beauty, or one that was yellow. On occasion he’d hold up a shirt and say, “This is nice.”

Usually Nyholm would respond, “Well, that’s a woman’s shirt.”

Lopes was not beyond accepting money from people on the streets who might reasonably assume he was homeless and without means. But he was also quite generous.

Nyholm recalled that beyond the many little gifts he brought into the thrift store, “After my shift one day, he asked if he could buy me lunch. We went to the Chinese restaurant on Fourth and we had the nicest time.”

As often as he could get a friend to drive him, Lopes went also to Sam’s For Play Café for a meal but mostly to see Beverly Schisler.

He was a gentleman, she said, “a colorful man, full of love and life.

“He loved attention, he loved making me happy and making me smile.”

The one day each year that Schisler was certain that Lopes would appear at Sam’s was December 13, his birthday.

As sorry as the waitress was to lose her friend on Jan. 14, she was pleased he did pass the day before.

“He didn’t want to die on the 13th,” she said. “That was his lucky number.”

Friends will gather to honor and share memories of Lopes at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Sebastopol Road café.