At the cusp of 94, Henry Trione, by any measure one of the Redwood Empire's leading men of all time, just finished his latest big project.
It's a book, an autobiography titled, "Footprints of the Baker Boy." Trione confesses some trepidation about having written it and printed hardback copies for sale.
A modest and deflecting man despite his prominence, success, wealth and influence, Trione wrestled with whether the self-publishing of memoirs might be presumptuous or vain. Ultimately he wrote the book — in longhand! — for the same reasons he has done most everything else in his long and impactful life:
To take on a challenge, have some fun, engage further with the community he treasures and helped to build, give credit where it's due and, perhaps, generate a few bucks.
Trione won't benefit personally from sales of the $29.95 book. "I don't want anything," he said at his longtime home in the wooded hills above Oakmont.
Every cent in proceeds will go to the Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital Foundation, one of innumerable service organizations and endeavors graced for decades by his generosity.
Trione's book was edited by longtime friend and fellow former Humboldt County kid Gaye LeBaron, the Santa Rosa history author and Press Democrat columnist. It illuminates and shares personal stories from some of the son of Italian immigrants' well-known pursuits:
; How he came to provide lumber and also mortgage loans for Sonoma County's post World War II construction boom.
; How the sale of his Sonoma Mortgage Corp. to a much larger company made him, until he was displaced by Warren Buffett and Walter Annenberg, the largest stockholder of Wells Fargo Bank.
; How the Empire College business and law schools grew from his 1961 bargain-basement purchase of the abandoned, cupola and clock-capped home of the Bank of Italy and Bank of America on what is now Old Courthouse Square.
; Why he to sought to preserve more than 5,000 acres of hilly wilderness on Santa Rosa's eastern flank that was proposed for a huge housing development, and in the process became the father of Annadel State Park and a co-founder of the California State Parks Foundation.
; How he considered that the large, bankrupt Christian Life Center complex north of Santa Rosa might make a suitable home for Empire College, but instead signed onto the vision by others to transform it into the community cultural asset that is now the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts.
; How his love of horses and the sport of polo led to the creation of the Wine Country Polo Club, which doubles as Oakmont's no-leash dog park. And how his polo-playing days ended abruptly, almost tragically, when his neck was broken in a fall on ride in Mendocino County shortly before his 70th birthday in 1990.
He recalls that after months of recovery, his doctor told him, "I wouldn't fall of a horse again if I were you, Henry.
"That was the end of my riding career."
Trione's book also reveals much about his childhood in Fortuna and many of the less public aspects and fascinations of his life.
He writes with great reverence about his parents, Vittorio and Catarina Trione. He said Vittorio was industrious and did well in his native northern Italy, but came to America in part because of the old Roman laws that excluded him from sharing in the family business.
The couple settled in Fortuna and created a bustling bakery, where the 12-year-old was assigned his first job — to show up before school to open and close the oven doors for the bread baker.
"In hindsight," Trione wrote, "I suspect this 'important job' was a diversion, preventing possible mischief ... "
He recounts adventures from his college days at the University of San Francisco — only briefly — and then at tiny Humboldt State College, then Cal Berkeley, where he studied business.
"My final examination, in Labor Economics," he wrote, "was on December 8, 1941" — the day the U.S. declared war on Japan.
Trione shares his delight at being granted a commission in the Navy Supply Corps. Things were going pretty well for the new officer until, in San Diego, he started dating a young woman whose father happened to be his immediate superior.
In a flash, Trione found himself in the frigid Aleutian Islands. He was thawing at the Naval Air Station in Alameda when he stopped short at the sight of a WAVE named Madelyne Keyes, whom he estimated was half an inch taller than he.
"One day," he wrote, "I summoned my courage and said, 'If I were taller, I'd ask you for a date.'
"She didn't hesitate. 'Don't let stop you,' she said. I didn't." They would be married for 56 years and have two sons, Victor and Mark.
Anyone interested in business is likely to find instruction and inspiration of Trione's accounts of the entrepreneurial journey that began when he decided after the war not to make a career of the Navy.
In a story that parallels and personalizes the rise of post-war Sonoma County, he traces his evolution from a salesman of adding machines and then Gallo wines to a mortgage lender, timber man, co-owner of Summit Savings and Loan, downtown Santa Rosa urban-renewal developer, Empire College founder, grape grower, Geyser Peak vintner and investor in myriad other enterprises.
A man clearly delighted by where his curiosity and good fortune have taken him, Trione wrote with whimsy about coming to own a piece of the Oakland Raiders and about his intrigue with truffle farming. It would be a crime to divulge here the upshot of his pursuit of the ideal truffle-sniffing dog.
The baker's son offers proof that not all of his business deals worked out profitably, but allows the "The Luck of the Triones" did seem to be at work when he bought the Tule Goose Club, out between Colusa and Gridley, and the deal laid a golden egg.
The book by the former Humboldt County baker boy has been bound and will arrive by the end of the week in the gift shops at Memorial Hospital and the Sonoma County Museum, at Corrick's and at Copperfield's Books in Montgomery Village.
Trione seasons the story of his life liberally with recollections and acknowledgment of other of the major figures of post-war Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. Among them Hugh Codding, Ralph Stone, Jim and Billie Keegan, Dorothe Hutchinson, Charles DeMeo, Ken Blackman, John McDonald, Ken Brown, Roy and Sherie Hurd, Alan Milner, Gene and Dan Benedetti, Lucille Kelly and Evert and Ruth Person.
He shares in his book that when Madelyne died in 2002 "it was as if a shroud had been cast over my life from which I felt I would never be free." Pages near the end glow with his gratitude to be loving and loved by his wife since 2006, Eileen.
(Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.)
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