Smith: Two giraffe skeletons part of Nick Anast’s legacy

The sizable legacy of Nick Anast, who jubilantly taught life sciences at SRJC until his death in March in a kayaking accident, is about to grow another 17 feet.

One lasting reminder of Anast’s zeal for life is the towering skeleton of an adult male giraffe, once named Fresno and adored at the Safari West preserve, that towers within the lobby of the library at the JC’s Petaluma campus.

When Fresno died in 2009, Anast directed the painstaking process of reducing the giraffe to its bones and then reassembling those bones into a standing skeleton.

Earlier this month, Fresno’s remains were visited, studied and photographed by a man on a mission, an Oakland Zoo docent named Paul Ferreira. He’s leading a zoo project to create a giraffe skeleton of PVC pipe.

Keen to find an actual skeleton he could use as a model, Ferreira was delighted to learn of the one Anast and his students re-articulated and placed at the JC library. The docent soon will begin cutting and connecting lengths of PVC into a facsimile of the framework of dear Fresno.

Once it’s completed, perhaps as soon as this fall, the Oakland Zoo will allow children to disassemble and reassemble it and will feature it in school tours and, of course, on World Giraffe Day - June 21.

What a giraffe-like kick Nick Anast would have gotten out of all this.

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CHARITABLE NOT: Thanks to Philip Tymon for pointing out the scam that may have been behind the discovery by a Santa Rosa couple that someone hacked their credit card to make a $500 donation to the Alzheimer’s Association.

The victims wondered if the fraudulent charge might be the work of a modern Robin Hood.

Most unlikely, Tymon said. He described what I now realize is a fairly well-chronicled scam in which a crook uses a stolen credit card number to make a sizable contribution to a charity.

Then the swindler contacts the charity with a story similar to this: “Oops, my elderly and confused aunt made a donation to you in the amount of $500, but actually she meant to donate $50.

“Please refund the $450. Because my aunt keeps doing this sort of thing, we’ve canceled that credit card so please refund it to this other credit card or send us a check for $450.”

Scoundrels!

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ALL ABOUT THE BASS: Lifelong musician Sandy Lane kicks himself for being so rushed to get to a rehearsal late in June that he didn’t make sure the tailgate to his pickup was properly latched.

Lane was driving on hilly Fountaingrove Parkway when a driver pulled up alongside, beeping and waving.

The gate on Lane’s truck had dropped open, and his string bass had slid out of the truck bed. He turned back as soon as he could but found no trace of the 6-foot-tall blonde bass that he’d played and loved for decades.

If perhaps you’ve been wondering about the violin on steroids that’s appeared in your life, Lane would be thrilled for you to dial 542-2643 and tell him about it.

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LOST TO THE VLTAVA: The musical and passionate Mark Wardlaw winces as he recalls the mostly magical journey he and his wife just took to the Czech Republic.

The veteran Santa Rosa High teacher and Santa Rosa Symphony clarinet player recounts the kayaking he and Diane did on the Vltava River “through the absolutely beautiful little town of Cesky Krumlov.”

“This is one of our favorite such towns in Europe,” Mark says.

As he and Diane paddled through the last of four sets of rapids, their boat turned sideways and Mark was tossed into the whitewater. Smacked against rocks, he emerged quite bruised.

But this hurt most: Minutes after helpful strangers assisted him back into the kayak, he noticed the wedding ring he’d worn for 38 years was gone.

He felt slightly better when he and Diane agreed it was “somewhat fitting that we left a part of ourselves in a place we absolutely love.”

Perhaps you know how I savor stories about long-lost treasures being found and returned, so stay tuned.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.