Sonoma Stories: Molsberry Market helps to feed its neighborhood’s recovery north of Santa Rosa

What’s a neighborhood supermarket without its neighborhood?

The past 13 months have taught the family that operates the landmark Molsberry Market that, absent a hugely heartwarming display of loyalty and caring from its customers, employees and suppliers, it would be a business with big trouble in store.

“The worst is behind us,” said grateful co-owner Brian Molsberry.

The worst encompassed witnessing the death and wholesale destruction the Tubbs fire dealt to the Larkfield, Mark West Springs and Wikiup neighborhoods just northeast of Santa Rosa.

For a time in the midst of the historic disaster, the Molsberrys believed their market on Old Redwood Highway had burned. The worst of the experience included having shellshocked, hollowed shoppers drift in and tell what had happened to them.

“This became a meeting place for the people who lost their homes,” said Molsberry, who’s 56 and a grandson of late market founders Milt and Tress Molsberry.

He, his sibling partners and employees heard from fire survivors that a trip to the market “was the only normalcy in my life.”

Flames incinerated homes just on the other side of the fence behind the market, and they ate at the fence. The store and the shopping center it anchors might well have been lost had neighbor, firefighter and former Molsberry Market bagger Sid Andreis not pulled a fire hose from his Honda and saturated the market and neighboring businesses.

Early on in the week that Molsberry Market was closed, fire crews gathered in the parking lot at the shopping center on Old Redwood Highway just north of Mark West Springs Road.

The Molsberrys, who at one time had operated two other markets in Sonoma County, invited firefighters to go in and take whatever they wanted. Joe Molsberry will never forget seeing them walk past food and beverages and gather up wet wipes, talcum powder and other personal hygiene and comfort items.

One firefighter told him, “People keep bringing us cakes, but this is what we really need right now.”

Before the Molsberrys reopened the market after the Tubbs fire raged through Fountaingrove and Larkfield-Wikiup-Mark West Springs and on to and beyond Coffey Park, they had to get rid of a massive amount of perishable and briefly thawed frozen foods.

“We dumped a quarter million dollars of product,” Joe Molsberry said.

He and his three sibling partners and their managers tried to give food away, but amid all that was going on then no organizations were able to take it. The Molsberrys did find a taker for much of the produce: the operators of the then-isolated Safari West wildlife preserve on Porter Creek Road took it for their animals.

The market reopened the third week of October 2017, amid enormous sorrow and uncertainty. The fire had killed 12 people in the Larkfield-Wikiup-Mark West Springs area and incinerated more than 700 homes.

“I’d see these customers hugging each other and crying,” Brian Molsberry said.

He and brother Joe Molsberry, 53, said they and the eight relatives and 55 employees they work with all stopped whatever they were doing to be present with their mourning and stunned customers and to hear their stories.

With so many neighbors displaced, grocery sales inevitably plummeted. But the Molsberrys didn’t have to lay off any employees because a couple of veterans staffers took medical leaves and were not replaced, and the business endured reduced profits.

“We didn’t want to cut people,” Joe Molsberry said.

With sales down, suppliers of perishables helped out, not requiring the market to order a minimum amount of foods that had to be tossed out if they weren’t quickly sold.

Some Molsberry customers who moved to other areas of the city or the county made a point of coming back to shop. And there were new customers who mentioned they wanted to support the market through a most difficult time.

Joe and Brian Molsberry said business dropped by about 20 percent, then began to inch back up.

Workers involved in the vast post-fire cleanup effort began showing up in the store for hot breakfasts and lunches. And these days, members of construction crews involved in rebuilding the area’s homes stream in for meals.

With the neighborhoods just starting to come back, its grocery store still isn’t seeing a solid return of shoppers who come in and buy a week’s worth of food. But Joe Molsberry said the recovery is happening, and the store’s relationship with its community has deepened.

He said that prior to the fire there were many customers he recognized and enjoyed speaking to but didn’t really know. Now he knows their names and what they experienced in October 2017.

“And we know where they live,” said his brother, Brian.

Joe Molsberry said there’s now a wholly different sense in the market.

“We were always a friendly store; we were always known for that,” he said. “But we’re like a family now.”

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.