Laughter, tears at tribute to Henry Trione

Henry David Trione told a crowd of about 1,800 people why his namesake, noted Santa Rosa financier and philanthropist Henry F. Trione, said he ate rooster meat rather than chicken.

While “poor chickens work hard laying eggs every day,” the younger Trione recalled Tuesday at a celebration of his grandfather’s life, roosters are “bossy birds” whose lives in the coop are spent “looking for sex.”

In the same mildly risque vein, Mark Trione said he had explained to his father, whose work shaped Santa Rosa’s postwar growth, the consequences of marrying his second wife, Eileen, in 2006.

You won’t be able to buy life insurance, Mark told his father, the financial wizard, because the policies come with three prohibitions: “skydiving, rock climbing and taking up with a red-haired woman,” drawing a hearty laugh from the crowd.

Eileen Trione, seated with family members in the front row of the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, shed tears during the 2½-hour celebration filled with heartfelt tributes to - and some previously unpublished details of - her late husband’s life.

“You could just feel the love in the audience toward Henry,” his older son, Victor Trione, said during the reception. “You felt he was with us in the audience, smiling.”

Henry Trione, who died Thursday at the age of 94, was the Humboldt County lad who arrived in Santa Rosa in 1947 and made fortunes in home mortgage lending, timber, wine and even owning a piece of the Oakland Raiders football team that later helped him save Annadel State Park from development.

But the Navy veteran of World War II, an avid outdoorsman and equestrian, also loved a good time - roughing it with the guys and charming the ladies.

Victor Trione let on that his mother, the late Madelyne Trione, Henry’s wife for 56 years, said that her husband “had an eye that never got married.”

Denise Trione Hicks said she often visited her grandfather at his home in the Southern California desert, where “he loved having my girlfriends lounging by the pool.”

Hicks also recalled how Henry and Madelyne “mercilessly beat” their grandchildren in family games of gin rummy and dominoes, but also let them occasionally win.

Gaye LeBaron, a Press Democrat columnist and longtime friend who shared Trione’s Humboldt County roots, said Trione “bragged that he once told an Italian joke to Frank Sinatra” and survived. Having the audience squarely in hand, LeBaron revealed the joke about the similarity between an Italian and an alligator.

“They both have short legs, big mouths and make great shoes,” she said.

Dr. John Reed, who was Trione’s physician for decades and considered him a father figure, said the proud son of Italian immigrants “had more than charm. When he spoke, his voice somehow commanded attention without insisting on it.”

Trione, a short, stocky man who bore a mild resemblance to actor Marlon Brando, “loved women,” Reed said. “He was a flirt, but he was always respectful. Women loved him for all the right reasons.”

Mark Trione said his father was a tease “who loved to be teased.” On hunting and camping trips, Mark Trione recalled the men drinking “until all the stars were comets” and the night his brother, Victor, hurled boots at their sleeping father, then awoke in the morning to find an upset dad, a smirking brother with his own boots lined up beneath his bed and Mark’s own boots missing.

Perhaps the raciest family story had to do with Henry woefully embarrassing his sons by dropping them off at junior high school on College Avenue in his enormous, shiny 1961 Cadillac Fleetwood, ignoring the boys’ insistence on getting out a few blocks from the campus.

Victor and Mark got revenge, jumping on Henry as he came home from work that day, knocking him to the kitchen floor where “we completely pantsed him,” Mark Trione said.

There were plenty of more prosaic tributes to the man whose nearly 70-year career left an enduring mark on the landscape, preserving 5,000-acre Annadel State Park and transforming a bankrupt church into the Wells Fargo Center, long the county’s premier entertainment venue, and founding Empire College.

Trione rebuffed all inquiries about the size of his fortune and the scope of his philanthropy, attributing the former to good luck and the latter to one of his favorite aphorisms: “There are no luggage racks on a hearse.”

Victor Trione, a banker-businessman in his father’s mold, offered a rejoinder to his father’s concept of luck. Quoting Thomas Jefferson, he said: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more of it I have.”

His father, with a sparkle in his eye, “taught us how to short-sheet beds” and to “never take ourselves too seriously,” Victor Trione said.

Henry David Trione said his grandfather was a generally law-abiding man who also “never let the rules get in the way,” recalling their venture fishing for catfish with a pole and dog food for bait in a pond on a country club golf course. The caper ended when they were chased off by a groundskeeper, Henry David Trione said.

LeBaron said her old friend had a Midas touch bolstered by his “impeccable timing,” arriving in Santa Rosa in time for the postwar population boom, with cheap land, nearby forests for lumber and not a mortgage company in the town.

Trione opened his first enterprise, Sonoma Mortgage Corp., in a cubbyhole on Mendocino Avenue, offering 4 percent home loans at a time when the going rate was 6 percent. In 1968, he merged the firm into Wells Fargo Bank in exchange for $10.6 million in stock, becoming the San Francisco-based bank’s largest individual stockholder until he was eclipsed by larger investments from Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway and Ambassador Walter Annenberg.

Trione followed the same course investing in a forest products company, Geyser Park Winery and the Raiders, coming out way ahead in each case.

“He got out early and profitably in his ventures, the shrewdest of businessmen,” LeBaron said.

She also recalled asking Trione for a loan to cover just the costs of publishing a local history book she had co-authored. “You should always make a profit,” Trione counseled, she said. Then he loaned her the money without interest, LeBaron said.

The celebration ended with a military ceremony, with a bugler sounding taps and a Navy color guard folding a large flag on the stage.

Victor Trione said it was “a fitting send-off for a remarkable man.”

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.