Ann Pisenti Beach Burow dies at 110

No one knew Santa Rosa like Ann Pisenti Beach Burow did.

Age 17 when her Italian-Swiss parents moved their family north from the East Bay in 1922, she watched Santa Rosa grow from a population of about 9,000 and transform for the following 93 years.

Burow, almost certainly the oldest resident of Sonoma County, died Saturday. She was 110.

“It was very peaceful,” said one of her two daughters, Gwen Sandstrom of Santa Rosa. To the end, she said, her mother recognized the members of her family, her friends and caregivers, and she smiled when they appeared at her bedside.

“She just loved so many people and everybody loved her,” Sandstrom said.

As a young bride and former city girl, Burow lived on the dairy that her first husband, George Beach, and his brother, Wes, ran on what is now Summerfield Road. Formally educated only through the eighth grade but all her life an avid reader and prolific writer, Burow admitted in a story she wrote in beautiful longhand, “I really didn't know a cow from a milk bucket.”

But she came to love the ranch life and became a pillar of the Bennett Valley Grange, since 1873 the heart and focal point of the agricultural community in southeast Santa Rosa. She served as secretary of the grange for 66 years, amassing a vast and detailed set of historic records.

In the mid-1940s, the “lady of the house” of the Beach Dairy found a paying job because her and George's two daughters, Louella and Gwen, were ready for college. Ann Burow recalled in an interview with historian and Press Democrat columnist Gaye LeBaron in 1998 that County Clerk Walter Nagle asked her to join the staff of the Elections Department.

“It was like manna from heaven,” she said. She worked in the county clerk's office the next 20 years, looking forward always to the excitement of election night.

Long active in Native Daughters of the Golden West, Burow fondly recalled co-chairing the major social event that was the 1952 Admissions Day parade the organization hosted.

“That was a big day, a big day in Santa Rosa,” she said last year in an interview prior to her 110th birthday celebration.

She was widowed by the death of George Beach in 1970. Four years later, she married Ray Burow, a genial haberdasher at Santa Rosa's former Keegan Bros. Clothier. They had 10 years together and spent much of that time traveling.

“I'm a gypsy when it comes to that,” Ann Burow told The Press Democrat last year. Asked if she had a favorite destination, she replied, “Oh, I loved Switzerland.”

Ray Burow died in 1984. Ann Burow continued to live in Bennett Valley until a bit more than four years ago, when she moved into the Vintage Brush Creek care home. She said last October, just before her birthday, that she'd never stopped loving Santa Rosa or feeling grateful for her life.

“The good Lord has been good,” she said. “He's been very good.”

Burow was the eldest of 14 children born to immigrants James and Rose Pisenti. The couple lived in Oakland when she arrived on Oct. 23, 1905, moving later to Pleasanton.

High school wasn't a possibility for young Ann Pisenti because her hardworking parents needed her help with her many brothers and sisters.

Not long after the Pisentis left Pleasanton for Santa Rosa in 1922, their eldest daughter took work packing apples in Sebastopol. Her father would drive her there, and on the way they'd pass the busy cannery on Santa Rosa's Third Street.

Burow recalled in 1998, when LeBaron taped an interview with her and brothers Joe, Bill and Walt Pisenti, that on the drive one day she saw workers at the cannery and said, “You know, Dad, I don't want to be like that. I want to study law.”

Her dream to become an attorney wasn't in the cards, but the newcomer to Sonoma County would live an exceptionally long, full, happy and productive life. She was just 19 when she married George Beach in 1924 and launched a new life as a farm wife.

“He was a heck of a good man,” she said last year.

In the interview with LeBaron 18 years ago she recalled resisting her husband's entreaties that she learn to drive a car. But she dabbled with driving and one day decided to take the car to the mailboxes a ways north on Sonoma Avenue.

“I got up to the mailboxes,” she said, “and I forgot how to reverse.” So she continued forward, taking a very long route back to the dairy and to her husband and everyone else, who would have had a good laugh had she told them about her trouble with backing up.

“They never heard of it, no siree!,” she said. “To my dying day, they'll never know.”

Ann Beach was 20 when the secretary of the Bennett Valley Grange, Sonoma Talbot, resigned before going off to teacher's college. She said some grange members urged her to run for the office.

She resisted, telling them, “I don't know much about farming.” Her husband the dairyman told her she ought to step up as secretary.

“I did, and I was in there for 66 years,” she said in the '98 interview. “I loved every minute.”

Barred from dancing as a child because of her responsibilities at home, she delighted at spending all night at the monthly dances in the oldest continuously operating grange hall in America.

And her husband? “He struggled with it,” she said last year.

The Beaches' first child, Louella, was born in 1926. Gwen arrived the following year.

Their mother told Le Baron in '98 that when she was young and Santa Rosa was, too, she loved to go downtown for shopping trips that could last most of the day.

“It would take you an hour to go one block because you'd meet so many people you knew,” she said.

“At that time, it was a very promising town, really. We knew Santa Rosa would grow, and it really has. We still love it.”

She and dairyman Beach had been married 45 years when he died in the spring of 1970. A shared love of travel brought her together with Ray Burow, and they spent about a decade exploring America, Canada and Europe.

Last Oct. 23 at Vintage Brush Creek, Ann Burow sipped champagne and celebrated her 110th birthday with a large crowd that included both her daughters, her two surviving brothers and dozens of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren and friends.

On that day, she was one of only a handful of fellow Californians and Americans to have attained that age. The oldest known person in the state, Florence Boggs of Carlsbad, was just two years her senior.

For a list of the oldest people in the world, visit the Website of the Gerontology Research Group, visit www.grg.org/SC/WorldSCRankingsList.html.

Gwen Sandstrom said her mother was blessed to live “a very full life” and at the end “just went to sleep.”

Burow is survived also by daughter Luella Heney of Folsom; brothers Al Pisenti of Santa Rosa, and Gene Pisenti of Chico; five grandchildren; 13 great-grandchildren; and 22 great-great-grandchildren.

Visitation and Rosary services will be from 4 to 5 p.m. today at Daniels Chapel of the Roses. A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Thursday at Saint Rose of Lima Catholic Church in downtown Santa Rosa.

Burow's family suggests memorial contributions to Catholic Charities, P.O. Box 4900, Santa Rosa 95402, or to Becoming Independent, 1425 Corporate Center Parkway, Santa Rosa, 95407.