Longtime Santa Rosa Junior College professor John Crevelli dies at 84

John P. Crevelli, a longtime Santa Rosa Junior College history instructor and prolific writer, was also part of Sonoma County’s environmental vanguard who thwarted PG&E’s nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay and fought to preserve public access to the coast.

A lifelong Sonoma County resident who grew up on a Santa Rosa chicken ranch, Crevelli suffered a brain aneurysm and was surrounded by family when he died May 19 at Sa nta Rosa Memorial Hospital. He was 84.

Brook Tauzer of Santa Rosa, a retired vice president of academic affairs at SRJC, described his longtime colleague as “an accomplished human being” who was “held in absolute respect” by his fellow academics. “His friendship was a delight,” Tauzer said.

Tauzer, a history instructor before he became an administrator, said he and a former SRJC president, the late Randolph Newman, hired Crevelli in 1962. When Tauzer became acting president for a year in 1970, Crevelli “was the only person” he considered to temporarily hold his own vice president’s post.

“He served with distinction,” he said, adding that both men returned to their previous jobs.

Crevelli taught U.S. history to thousands of students before he retired in 1990.

Peter Leveque, a retired SRJC biology instructor, knew Crevelli as a faculty member, a parishioner at St. Rose Catholic Church in Santa Rosa and a friend whose family shared vacations with the Leveques.

Crevelli was “a wonderful fellow,” who was a demanding, but fair, teacher, Leveque said.

Both men were members of the Over the Hill and Dale Hiking Club, a group of SRJC instructors and retirees and local environmentalists who took monthly hikes around the county. At their lunch breaks, Crevelli would read chapters of a book he was writing on the history of Sonoma County, Leveque said.

Crevelli was a founding member of the group COAAST, or Californians Organized to Acquire Access to State Tidelines, formed in Leveque’s classroom in 1968. It included the late Bill Kortum, the dean of Sonoma County environmental activists, and the late Chuck Hinkle, a former county supervisor who was recalled, along with Kortum, in 1976 in a move that paved the way for the board’s first environmental majority.

Crevelli, who hiked throughout the county as a youth, confirmed his conservationist sensibilities after a Santa Rosa High School English teacher, Lucy Spaulding, introduced him to the works of naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir in 1946.

Crevelli began collecting quotes from Muir’s books, “which seemed to speak truths that were biblical in nature,” he said in an essay in The Press Democrat in 2010.

“There wasn’t a nook in the Sierra he didn’t know,” his wife, Debra Crevelli, said.

In the essay, he recounted his “first venture into political activism” in the battle that thwarted PG&E’s proposed nuclear plant next to the San Andreas Fault in the early 1960s.

COAAST, formed to fight for public access through a housing development to the Sonoma Coast, went on to push for a statewide ballot measure that created the California Coastal Commission in 1972. “It passed in a landslide, the result of education and a growing awareness of the connections between man and nature,” Crevelli said in his essay.

Crevelli was born Feb. 11, 1931, in Healdsburg to Antonio and Maria Crevelli, both Italian immigrants. Crevelli’s job was to carry the chamber pots to the outhouse every morning. In another essay published in the newspaper in 2012, Crevelli said he had expected to finish high school and become a chicken rancher, like his father. That future appeared to be set when his father died of a heart attack three months after Crevelli graduated from Santa Rosa High in 1948.

Crevelli said that he became the “man of the house” and a chicken rancher, but the ranch, fortunately, was near SRJC and he began taking night classes. After graduating as class valedictorian in 1953, Crevelli earned a bachelor’s degree in history and then earned a teaching credential and master’s with honors in American history at UC Berkeley.

While studying at Berkeley, a mutual friend introduced Crevelli to Debra Cinic of Petaluma, and the pair were immediately smitten with one another.

Crevelli would bring Cinic back home to her family in Petaluma each weekend on his way to Santa Rosa to work on his family’s ranch. They’d return to campus Sunday night.

“We just fell in love,” Debra Crevelli, his wife of nearly 59 years, said. “He was full of energy. He made time for everyone.”

They married in 1956 after graduation and moved to Santa Rosa. He taught at Santa Rosa High School and then joined the SRJC faculty. They moved to Healdsburg in 1987.

“He gave his students the best that he had,” his wife said.

In addition to his wife, Crevelli is survived by his children Renee Crevelli of Vacaville, John Crevelli of El Sobrante, Tony Crevelli of Santa Rosa and Monica Crevelli-Sallee of Windsor.

Family and friends are holding a private burial and service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Healdsburg. A public celebration of Crevelli’s life will be held this summer.