Chris Smith: An art show, found tombstone and USPS cookies

Long, long before Edmund Dechant became a bankruptcy lawyer, he was a kid expected to sit with his grandmother in church.

“I didn’t have to pay attention as long as I kept quiet,” said Ed, now 78 and largely retired from nearly a half century of practicing law in Sonoma County.

As a boy on a pew, he was allowed to entertain himself by silently doodling. He emulated his mother, Ruth Godfrey Branscomb, whose art includes a sculpture of Nicholas Green of Bodega Bay, whose shooting death in Italy at age 7 in 1994 sparked a revolution in the donating of vital organs.

Drawing in church sparked a lifetime of creative exploration by Ed Dechant. He’d decompress after a day or week of lawyering by sketching, painting with oils or water colors or acrylics, and experimenting with bronze and glass.

“Everything I would think of, I tried,” he said.

Now he’s hosting his first show. It runs through March 2 in the senior wing of the Finley Community center.

Ed will be there for the opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday.

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DEATH CAME to 66-year-old Andrew J. Sanford as he was in transit.

The Press Democrat of Sept. 22, 1909 reported that Sanford expired two days earlier at the Northwestern Pacific depot “as he was taking a train for San Francisco.” He was buried at what we now call the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery.

When and why someone plucked up and carted off his headstone is not generally known. This we do know:

Brian Maxwell stood along Matanzas Creek near Hoen Avenue not long back and spotted something out in mid-channel. Closer examination by Maxwell and neighbor John Dennison, a godsend to the volunteers who maintain the Rural Cemetery, revealed it to be Andrew Sanford’s tombstone.

It’s heavy, maybe 150 pounds, and the creek bank right there is steep. So extricating the stone was no small feat for city workers Drew Ramsey, Jose Madina Flores and Lorenzo Paran.

Once the ground at the historic cemetery dries a bit, the stone cut to mark the grave of a fellow who collapsed downtown while awaiting a train almost 108 years ago will be secured back where it belongs.

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LAUGH ON, DOROTHY: A happy crowd gathered in Santa Rosa days ago to cheer the 100th birthday of Dorothy Fewer, a live-wire of a native Californian who lived most of her life on the Peninsula but ventured north often for reunions of the Healdsburg branch of the Passalacqua family.

Dorothy is today a bright star at Santa Rosa’s Brush Creek Senior Living. The retired medical transcriptionist, crossword puzzle queen and loyal fan of the Giants and 49ers likes to advise younger people, “You’ve gotta tickle yourself and make yourself laugh.”

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THE BEST DAY of the week to visit the post office?

For most USPS branches, that’d be tough to discern. But the word is that for users of the postal counter inside the Wells Fargo Bank at Oakmont, there’s no day better than Monday.

That’s because Postmistress Dolly Gibson more often than not bakes cookies on Sunday.

“I baked honey-walnut cookies while I watched the two football games yesterday,” she told me Monday afternoon. At that moment, there were still some left in the post office jar.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.