Smith: Double booking for Al Maggini leads to flight from the fairway

Imagine you’re 99 ? years old and you’re anticipating a big day on Thursday.

Got an image of what the day might be like? A great-great-grandchild’s birthday party? Maybe a trip to a park? Tea with a friend downtown?

Whatever you envision, compare it to what’s really happening Thursday for Al Maggini.

The dapper, bow-tied WWII bomber navigator, Sonoma County civic dynamo and retired stockbroker will have a bag packed before he sets out for Rohnert Park’s Doubletree Hotel and the midday James B. and Billie Keegan Leadership Series luncheon, hosted by the Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital Foundation.

Al, who’ll turn 100 in September but looks and acts decades younger, is a former recipient of the foundation’s Keegan award for community leadership. He’ll applaud the Keegans’ son, Jim, and the other family members who’ll be honored for all they do for this place.

And Al will be listening for a helicopter.

He’ll dash from the banquet hall when a chopper lands at 1 p.m. on the Foxtail Golf Course’s first fairway, out between the hotel and Highway 101. The whirlybird will come because Thursday’s also the opening day of an annual golf tournament in rural Yolo County, and the men eager to play in it can’t imagine it happening without Al Maggini.

He’d told his lunch-and-golf friends in the Fountaingrove Business Club he would have to pass on this year’s tourney at the Yocha Dehe Golf Club, northeast of Lake Berryessa, because he absolutely cannot miss the Keegan luncheon.

What to do? Mike Burch, founder of the Fountaingrove Business Club, and other pals of the club’s one 99-year-old member booked a copter out of the Sonoma County Airport.

Briefed on the extraordinary nature of the man needing the flight, officials of both the Sonoma and Yolo county golf courses agreed to allow the copter to land on the links.

The flight should take 35 minutes. (Driving time, more than two hours.) Once the chopper sets down on the 18th fairway at Yocha Dehe, Al should take about four steps to a cart bearing his clubs.

He’ll golf the rest of the day Thursday and all day Friday.

Given all this, when Al turns 100 this fall he’d better expect from his Fountaingrove Business Club pals only a cheap card and some grief over the birdie he landed at two golf courses 95 miles apart on the same busy day.

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