Sebastopol’s oldest resident: The secret of life is...

How’s this for a coincidence: Sebastopol’s oldest native son appears also to be the happiest man in town.

Fred Bollinger’s smile is as constant to his face as his nose. The conditions for his every-morning walk, pursued with an expectant gait, are on his mind as he arises and prepares himself a rancher’s breakfast of oatmeal, a fried egg, bacon and a slice of toast with jam but no butter.

“I usually walk for one hour,” he said from a living room chair with a window view of his thriving backyard garden. “I can walk for an hour without stopping.”

Maybe a prick of conscience caused him to add, “Sometimes now I look for a bench.”

There are other men in Sebastopol who walk farther, but there is none who has walked Appletown longer.

Bollinger was born at a house on Pleasant Hill Road on Oct. 12, 1916. World War I had dragged on for two years and would last another two. Sebastopol had a brand new Carnegie Library. The population of Sonoma County approached 50,000.

Bollinger was a tot, the youngest of four children, when his parents, David King Bollinger and Ruth Ann “Annie” (Gregson) Bollinger, moved onto a ranch south of town on what became Bollinger Lane, off Elphick Road.

“It was a real ranch,” he recalls. “We had cows and chickens and ducks and pigs.” Lots of apple trees, too.

Young Fred Bollinger walked the mile or so to Pleasant Hill School. It made for a big day at the school in 1923 when renowned horticulturist Luther Burbank, then 74, came to visit from his experiment farm over at Gold Ridge.

Bollinger’s first year at Analy High School, 1931, he got a kick out of riding a Petaluma and Santa Rosa Railroad car to class.

“It quit in 1932,” he said, still disappointed.

He was 18 when he graduated from Analy with the Class of 1935. Four years later his sister, Louise, traveled back home from Alaska with her husband, a fisherman, to take in the World’s Fair in San Francisco.

She invited brother Fred along. At some point in her visit, she told him, “You have to come to Alaska and learn to be a fisherman.”

So he did. In January of 1940, Bollinger trekked to Craig, Alaska, and became a commercial fisherman. But by year’s end he yearned for California, so he packed up and told his sister and brother-in-law he’d return to Sebastopol and think about whether he wanted to continue fishing.

He decided he didn’t, and he resumed helping his parents produce and sell apples, eggs and milk. Not far into 1941, the U.S. government advised that it had other plans for him.

At 24, while the country was still at peace but girded for war, Bollinger was drafted into the army.

“I served for four years, seven months, two days and five hours,” he said with his trademark smile. His older brother, Clarence, was inducted, too.

Fred Bollinger trained as a radioman and was sent to Europe. He arrived by ship at Normandy on Bastille Day of 1944, five weeks after the launch of the D-Day invasion.

His assignment as a radio technician put Sgt. Bollinger in a command car generally located behind the tanks and troops at the spear point of the push toward Germany.

“That’s the best thing that happened to me,” he said. “All the fighting was ahead of me.”

But all through the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of Europe, he saw plenty of war. He shakes his head at what he beheld upon arriving at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.

“There were bodies. Stacks and stacks of bodies,” he said. He remembers the digging of great trenches as mass graves.

With the end of war in 1945, Bollinger was sent on the long journey back to the States, finding himself at Camp Beale, near Marysville. He spotted a roster and for no particular reason scanned the names.

This one popped out: Clarence Bollinger. “That’s my brother,” he said to a fellow at the desk in the Camp Beale office. The guy replied, “Why don’t you go see him? He’s only three blocks from here.”

The brothers from Sebastopol hadn’t seen each other for about three years. Clarence had tales to tell from the Pacific, Fred from Europe.

They were discharged there at Beale. Fred Bollinger has no trouble recalling the date: Oct. 12, 1945. His 29th birthday.

As he and his brother walked up to the ranch after four years of war, their mother appeared from the house and lifted the hem of her apron to dab her tears.

Fred Bollinger worked the ranch, and, after his parents passed on, what became his share of it for the next 36 years. He became a beloved volunteer at the Luther Burbank Experiment Farm, catching many troublesome gophers and moles and dutifully freezing them for use as food at local wildlife rescue enters.

All these years, he’s been active in the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Native Sons of the Golden West.

Bollinger never married, though he’s long enjoyed traveling and spending time with former Analy schoolmate Laurie Horn, who’s 98. One of Bollinger’s nieces, Ruth Syfert of Windsor, suggested during a visit to the home in Sebastopol that he’s occupied since he left the ranch in 1981 that maybe he’s doing so well at almost 100 because he never had to deal with a wife and kids.

“It’s not too late,” he quipped.

Naturally, folks in Sebastopol fairly often ask the town’s happiest man the secret to gleeful longevity.

“I tell them the same thing my doctor says: It’s your attitude.”