'Farmer Vic' Pozzi gets colorful final send-off (w/video)

‘Farmer Vic” on Monday took one last ride through the countryside of his beloved Sonoma County.

A long, red procession of fire trucks, the classic beauty at the front bearing the casket of Victor Archangelo Pozzi, followed a leisurely route from the staging area at the Wells Fargo Center north of Santa Rosa to the funeral at Windsor’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church.

It passed slowly by Pozzi’s pride and joy, the dairy ranch on Shiloh Road that the lifelong bachelor worked pretty much by himself since 1963. He reluctantly let go of the milk cows in 1987, then took boyish delight in repopulating the ranch with the emus, Brahman cattle, sheep, geese, chickens and ducks he treated and introduced to smitten visitors as his family.

Often on his birthday, July 4, Pozzi would paint an American flag on one or another of his gentle critters. An old-school people person, he relished allowing passers-by to feed salvaged bread to the menagerie, and it made his day to shake the hand of any fellow unaware of the fun he had watching new victims try to work free of his grip of steel.

Through most of his 83 years, Pozzi was a champion of both agriculture and the fire services in the county. Barbara Thomas, a cousin, told the large crowd in the church that if he were there, “he would be ecstatic, full of smiles and saying, ‘Oh, man! Oh, man!’”

Thomas shared that for weeks prior to his death at a nursing home Oct. 4, Pozzi was frustrated that a stroke had disabled him, and as hard as he tried to walk and speak and use both of his arms, he could not.

“Through it all, Vic was a gentleman,” Thomas said. “A gentle man well taught by his parents.”

Pozzi was a 1950 graduate of Sonoma Valley High School who learned firefighting as a volunteer with the valley’s Schell-Vista Fire Department.

After moving to rural Shiloh Road 50 years ago, he co-founded the volunteer company that became the Windsor Fire Protection District, answering calls until colleagues persuaded him, when he turned 75, that he had served on the trucks long enough.

More than 70 firefighters from throughout the North Bay dressed in their best Monday to honor Pozzi at the funeral. As it concluded, the Firefighter’s Prayer was read and a firefighter rang a brass bell three times, then three more, then three more, signaling an end to a call and a return to quarters.

It was time for farmer - and firefighter - Vic to go home.

You can reach Chris Smith at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.