Smith: Yet another miserable night to sleep outdoors

The low temperature on Friday night, I see, is forecast to be in the mid-30s.

You won’t hear me complain about how unpleasant it’ll be to sleep outside on concrete, as I’m well aware that such misery is a fact of life to many teens, young adults and others.

On Friday, I’ll be one of more than 100 volunteers of One Cold Night. It’s hosted by Social Advocates for Youth to make more real the plight of hundreds of homeless youth in Sonoma County, and to raise money to help them rise up from the streets.

You’ll recognize the names of some of my fellow “sleepers:” Susan Gorin, Shirlee Zane, Eric Koenigshofer, Brad Baker, Lisa Wittke Schaffner, Jenny Tamayo.

If you’d like to see all the participants and perhaps make a donation on behalf of one or more of us, go to give.saysc.org/site/TR.

At 6:30 p.m. Friday at the SAY Finley Dream Center on Summerfield Road in Santa Rosa, there’s a candlelight vigil to kick off One Cold Night. SAY invites you to come and asks that you bring along, for someone young and homeless, a $10 gift card to Target, Big 5 or Safeway.

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PEARL HARBOR DAY also is Friday.

An observance that morning in the club room at the back of Santa Rosa’s Veterans Memorial Building will honor all casualties and survivors of the 1941 attack on U.S. forces in Hawaii that changed the world.

Guest speaker at the 9 a.m. gathering will be Lt. Cmdr. Douglas Apperson of the Coast Guard training center west of Petaluma.

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ON FIDDLER’S GREEN: If you’ll go to Saturday morning’s dedication of the new markers placed on graves of military veterans buried at the county cemetery off McDonald Avenue, note the correct starting time.

It is at 10 a.m.

To get to the indigent field, now called the Fiddler’s Green, walk through the main gate of the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery near the Town & Country Shopping Center and follow the fence line at your right.

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VILLAGE BAKERY was a popular attraction for decades at Montgomery Village, thus the bakery’s name.

The Village Bakery located today in The Barlow in Sebastopol and in Santa Rosa’s Town & Country center are not the same business that began in Montgomery Village. But even so, there’s excitement that the village that Hugh Codding built is about to have, once again a Village Bakery.

Pat Lumm, owner of the bakeries in Sebastopol and the Town & County Center, Pat Lum intends by mid-February to open a new Village Bakery cafe where Michelle Marie’s Patisserie used to be.

Lum said the bakery at Town & Country will close and be replaced by a sales kiosk inside the neighboring Pacific Market.

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A PRESIDENT’S HAND: Arron Healy didn’t grow up in Sonoma County but loved to visit his grandparents here, especially in the summertime.

It was a treat for Arron, now a TV cameraman in Salt Lake City, to tool around the county airport with his grandfather. Howard Healy was an ex-Navy pilot who back then was the airport’s operations manager.

In the summer of 1993, Arron was 13 and he and his granddad were on the tarmac, guiding in private jets that carried guests of the Bohemian Grove encampment near Monte Rio. Arron remembers a Secret Service agent stepping from one jet, followed by a dignified, smiling man.

“Welcome to Sonoma County, Mr. President,” Howard Healy said to him. Then he said, “This is my grandson, Arron.”

At 38, Arron appreciates more than ever having shaken the hand, firmly, of the late President George H.W. Bush.

Contact Chris Smith at ?707 521-5211.