Sonoma Stories: For 21 days, everyone in Santa Rosa looked up at Wanda Ruegamer

As Wanda Ruegamer braces to turn 89, the grandmother, senior center pool shark and former wilds-of-Mendocino tomboy is doing fine. No, great.

But in 1951, she was on top of the world.

From a teeny, tiny but fairly comfortable room erected atop a flagpole, Ruegamer peered through binoculars down onto curious onlookers, who used binoculars to gaze up at her. Her arms ached from waving to them.

There was a cot up there in her 6-by-6-foot cubicle, as well as a sink with hot and cold running water, a flush toilet, a radio, a heater and fan, a coffeepot, picture windows with Venetian blinds and a telephone that, thanks to The Press Democrat publishing the number, rarely stopped ringing.

Ruegamer used a basket on a rope to hoist up three hearty delicatessen meals a day, plus all sorts of treats and gifts from well-wishers.

“Somebody brought me a white rat,” she recalled. She politely dodged having to share the pole house with the rodent.

All of this happened in September 1951 at Santa Rosa’s then-new Montgomery Village shopping center. Having the 22-year-old, photogenic and mirthful Wanda Ruegamer live 40 feet off the ground was a straight-up, unabashed publicity stunt by Hugh Codding, postwar Santa Rosa’s brash, bold, bigger-than-life developer of homes and retail meccas.

Not even three months earlier, the ex-Navy Seabee made headlines and newsreels by having a small army of carpenters build a house at Franquette Avenue and Montgomery Drive in three hours and nine minutes.

When Codding advertised for a pole-sitter, Ruegamer was a young homemaker eager for something to do. She had been happily married for 15 months to Russell Ruegamer, who was working his way up the Northwestern Pacific Railroad and riding the rails between Willits and Tiburon.

“He didn’t want me to work,” said Ruegamer, who’s wiry and quick-witted and no doubt still capable of ascending 40 feet of ladder rope.

Russ Ruegamer “would go to work and he’d be gone for two or three days,” she said. When he at last had some time at home, he wanted her there with him, so he persuaded her not to go to work.

Not being employed was foreign to Wanda Ruegamer. As a child, her father was out of the picture, and so as soon as she was able, she found jobs to help her mother, Myrtle Carson, pay the bills.

Born Wanda Brown in Geyserville, she lived until age 11 on her grandparents’ ranch in the remote Mendocino County town of Covelo. She said, “I was always a daredevil; I was raised with eight boy cousins.”

She spent her teen years in Willits, and for a time worked at a dime store during the day, then at a hamburger stand.

She remembers being 21 and sitting in the sun with a friend in Willits when railroad worker Russ Ruegamer happened by.

“We struck up a conversation,” she said. “End of story.”

They married in 1950 and briefly lived in Eureka before settling in Santa Rosa.

Ruegamer read in August 1951 that Hugh Codding was looking for a pole-sitter to draw attention to the new shopping center he had named for Billy Montgomery, who had died a decade earlier in the attack on Pearl Harbor. She asked Russ if he thought she should apply for Codding’s stunt.

“He said it was up to me,” she told The Press Democrat that year.

So she applied.

Ruegamer doesn’t recall how many other people applied to live on top of the flagpole Codding installed near the Farmers Lane shopping center’s Redwood Empire Farmers Market. Regardless, Codding gave her the job, for which she’d be paid $15 a day - more than the railroad was paying Russ. It was open-ended how long she’d stay up on the pole.

Reporters with KSRO and The Press Democrat were present when Ruegamer climbed up to her roost that Saturday afternoon on Sept. 1, 1951. “It was a big deal at the time,” she said.

She loved the elevated view, which took in the new and expanding Montgomery Village neighborhood and shopping center and the under-construction St. Eugene’s Cathedral.

Ruegamer began a diary, and she wrote dispatches for the former Montgomery Village News.

“I would like to try for the record (for pole-sitting),” she wrote, “but I guess time will tell. What am I saying? I don’t even know what the record is.”

She added, “I spend a lot of time watching the people and enjoying the beauty of the Sonoma hills.”

“The hills appear from here to be a high wall guarding the city. Some day I’d like to have a home on one of those hills.”

Where do you suppose she lives today? On a hill in the Skyhawk subdivision in Rincon Valley, in a house she shares with her son, Marc Ruegamer, daughter-in-law Jana Ruegamer and grandson Ryan, 22.

While in the house on the pole, Ruegamer spoke by phone to KSRO every morning, and she responded to fan mail she received from as far as Butte, Montana.

There was no room in the cubicle for a chair, so she’d write while sitting on the cot or toilet.

Ruegamer also spent a fair amount of time eating. Into her basket on a rope went three squares a day from Wes Eisenhood’s Village Delicatessen and Gourmet House. In addition, she regularly received milkshakes from Gene’s Fountain and cakes from Scotty Taylor’s Village Pantry.

“I gained six pounds,” she said.

A boy once placed in her basket a whole watermelon. She got her exercise that day hoisting it up.

Despite a fan, it got so hot in the shack one Saturday that Ruegamer thought she’d die. She broke the no-visitors rule, allowing Ned Caulfield to come up and remove a window for ventilation.

On her worst day, a swarm of yellow jackets invaded the house. She wrote, “I killed 19 of them without being stung.”

Ruegamer was up there 21 days when it came to seem that the stunt had gone on long enough. “The newness kind of wore off,” she said.

Besides, she added, “My husband was getting a little perturbed with the whole thing.”

Hugh Codding told her in a phone call she should come down and work for him in the Montgomery Village office. She eagerly accepted the job offer, descended from the pole and prepared to become a Codding payroll clerk.

“It was the best job I ever had. I can’t say enough nice things about Hugh Codding or his son,” Ruegamer said, referring to David Codding, the current owner of Montgomery Village.

She hadn’t worked in the shopping center office very long when the birth of her son, Marc, caused her to resign and become a stay-at-home mom. She also tended to the black cocker spaniel puppy that a Healdsburg boy named Eddie Latson gave her while she was still on high. She named the dog Flagpole.

These days, fellow Santa Rosa Senior Center billiards players sometimes rib Ruegamer about her pole-sitting fame.

Widowed since her husband died in 1997, she enjoys occasionally looking over her collection of news clippings from her moment of fame.

The 70th anniversary isn’t all that far away. Ruegamer muses about celebrating it by living for a few weeks atop the Coddingtown sign, but only if the Coddings agree to slow its rotation.