A 2021 remembrance: The lives that left an enduring imprint on Sonoma County, North Bay
The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.
— Irving Berlin, 1927
The words are apt for many or all of the people of Sonoma County and the North Bay whose songs of life played out this past year.
Composer Berlin’s heartening lyrics ring as especially appropriate to at least four of the most accomplished local residents who died since Jan. 1: Don Green, whose love of singing sparked him to initiate the creation of the world-class Green Music Center; pianist and passionate Santa Rosa Symphony champion Norma Brown; former Sonoma State University performing arts director Jeff Langley; and pianist and ultimate hostess Lucille Gonnella, of Occidental’s landmark Union Hotel.
While these four and all of our other recently departed neighbors were with us, their voices and spirits added to the unique anthem of this place. Today, surely, their imprints on our collective melody endure.
Here are memories of some of the local people who in 2021 left the choir.
Don Green
Who knew that in addition to all else that he did, Don Green could sing?
The British-born telephone communications innovator had long perceived himself engineered only to savor the vocal music of others.
Green recounted in his 2016 memoir, “Defining Moments,” that on a Sunday in the 1960s he was singing hymns from a San Francisco church pew ― his wife, Maureen, might have said he was “bellowing hymns.”
How surprising, Don Green wrote, “when the woman in front of me half-turned and said, ‘You have a nice voice. You should join the choir.’”
He did. Maureen did, too.
Nearly 30 years later, Don Green soared as chief visionary of Sonoma County’s booming Telecom Valley. He and Maureen sang in the Bach Choir led by Bob Worth, then choral music director at Sonoma State University. The trio spoke of how badly SSU needed a performance hall designed for vocal music.
Don Green profited handsomely from the 1996 sale of public shares of his Advanced Fibre Communications, Inc. So he and his wife donated to SSU $10 million for what became the stunning $145 million Green Music Center.
At its 2012 grand opening, wowed by acclaimed pianist Lang Lang, Don Green told the crowd, “As the beer commercial puts it, it doesn’t get any better than this.”
He died in June at 90. Maureen Green died in the fall of 2020, also at 90.
Norma Brown
For decades starting in 1958, Norma Brown’s husband, Corrick, stood with baton in hand before the Santa Rosa Symphony and fine-tuned the music flowing from what he helped to lift up as one of the finest regional orchestras in the nation.
Behind the scenes, Norma Brown did pretty much everything else.
She managed the orchestra’s music library, lured in celebrated soloists and then made all the arrangements for their visits, set up the tape recorder at every rehearsal, you name it.
“She knew everybody in the orchestra, and not just to say hello,” Shirley Chilcott, a former Santa Rosa Symphony cellist, said earlier this year. “I can’t imagine anyone else being married to Corrick. She was the perfect wife for him because she did everything. All he had to do was the music.”
Of course, Norma Brown did music, too. Splendidly.
Discovering as a child that she loved the piano, she accompanied her church choir in Santa Cruz. She entered Stanford University at 16 and passed on Harvard to earn a graduate degree in musicology from Columbia.
She and Corrick Brown married in 1956. In 1958, both gave over their lives to the Santa Rosa Symphony and its charitable Symphony League.
Norma Brown died in May at 89.
Said Alan Silow, the orchestra’s president and CEO, “Without her, the Santa Rosa Symphony would not be what it is today.”
Jim Harberson
Through his remarkable, 25-year run as a local elected official in Sonoma County, Jim Harberson achieved much.
The down to earth, North Carolina-reared gentleman and Vietnam veteran was clear about the accomplishment of which he was most proud: his leadership role in assuring the perpetual preservation of great, unspoiled expanses of Sonoma County land.
As a county supervisor, the former Petaluma City Council member was key to the creation in 1990 of the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District.
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