LeBaron: Remembering when Montgomery Village could have become its own city

Every community, every town and city, has history markers — dates to be written large in their story.

For Santa Rosa, those would be:

• The day in 1854 that the youngest son of the Carrillo family filed a plat map for a town with a plaza in the center.

• The last day of 1870 when the first train arrived, whistle blowing to create a shipping point for the surrounding farms.

• An annexation vote in 1955 that very nearly doubled the population of the 100-year-old city.

When we talk about that annexation vote, we are talking, as are many friends and neighbors, about Montgomery Village, the upscale shopping center that anchors the city’s southeast area, which is apparently about to be sold out of the family that created it.

And what that really means is that we are talking — again — about the late Hugh Codding.

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LOVE HIM or hate him, whether we consider him the best or the worst thing that could have happened, we must credit him with historical significance that affected — even governed — the way Santa Rosa “grew up” over the past 75 years.

So, as we ponder the long-term effects of the anticipated conclusion of this landmark sale, we should revisit how it all came about in those glory years of the 1950s.

He had come out the Seabees at the end of WWII, and gone back to building — a house at time, using the sale of one to finance the next, as he had done as a kid before the war.

For journalists, he was a joy — because he loved to tell his story to anyone who would listen. With a bow to his credibility, we observe that, with some changes of emphasis, those oft-told tales remained the same through more than half a century. So, the best way to learn the Village story is to let the man who did it tell you how and why.

Codding left a substantial record of his conversations on the matter —including a 1973 Q&A interview for a very good and far too short-lived magazine called Golden Gate North and a video recorded in 1995 in which he was invited to tell his life story — and does.

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IN 1995, Hugh sat down for that video interview looking back over his life and, among other later “adventures,” talked about the Village’s history. (Warning: Hugh’s accounts were always rambling, at best, so transcription is tricky. Clarification may turn up in parenthesis.).

His story begins in 1947, on a ladder at the construction site of Town & Country Village, the former Parsons family prune orchard on the eastern edge of the area’s first cemetery for which, he says:

“I had paid eleven hundred dollars an acre … and I built the Town and Country Shopping Center on it, which only consisted of a couple of acres. (The remainder includes homes on several streets west of Montecito Blvd.) And I had it about three-quarters built and a guy comes along; it was (Realtor John) Tedford, standing at the bottom of the ladder, and he said ‘Hugh, do you want to sell this?’

“And so anyway I pulled a figure out of the air, $100,000; I owed $25,000 to American Trust, that’s how much money I had to build it with and five minutes later he comes back with a check for $5,000 and Mario Gracchi (a Russian River area businessman) bought the center.

“The idea for (the architectural style) had come from a man working for me by the name of Doc Yates. We called him Doc ‘cause he was a mortician. (Laughs) … Doc had been to Sacramento and seen a … center there called Town and Country and he had pictures of it. It looked interesting. It looked like it could be built very economically (it was) built it out of old bridge timbers. But we had available to us redwood at a low price in those days. So, that’s how Town and Country started. … when I sold it and made what I felt was an exorbitant profit of probably something like $25,000, well I couldn’t wait to build another one. I went over and bought the property on Montgomery Drive and built a center, in the same style, over there along with a lot of houses. How many? Twenty-one hundred.

“We bought altogether several hundred acres. When we went to (that area) it was a farm owned by the Hahman family. We paid $1,500 an acre for where Montgomery Village, the original village, is. And then the Catholic diocese paid $1,700 an acre where St. Eugene is.

“Then the Carithers (owners of The White House, the department store at Fourth and B streets) owned the property on the south side of Sonoma Avenue. They charged us the exorbitant price of, I think, $2,500 an acre. Then we bought the Hartley (walnut) orchard out there (east); it was 91 acres. And I think that was like $1,700 an acre.

“The original shopping center was just 12 tenants. No, it wasn’t in the city.

“When we built that I just assumed we’d hook on the (city) sewer. We had built houses along the west side of Farmers Lane. We had run the sewer to them. And I assumed we’d hook on the sewer. Well shortly before we opened the shopping center for business, the city engineer got ahold of me and said, ‘Hugh, you’re not gonna hook up to the city.’”

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THIS WAS one of many encounters with Santa Rosa officials. Blocks of Codding Homes, 2,600 of them by ‘55, stretched to Summerfield Road. They were selling faster than he could build them to young families taking advantage of the GI Bill and the “No money down! Move right in!” real estate boom. All of them, plus a commercial center, which had doubled and more since the original dozen, were well to the east of the city limits.

Codding: “It wasn’t in the city. And the city didn’t want it either. And they said we’re building everything to county road standards, which were less than city standards, which was true. And they were bound and determined they weren’t gonna annex us.

“So that led us to start an incorporation proceeding. And at that time Nell, who later became my wife, was a secretary in the office, or actually she pretty well ran our insurance division, and she circulated a petition with others and we had the necessary signatures. I think it took 500, if I’m not mistaken, of registered voters, something like that. And we had (them) and were ready to become a city. We had it on the supervisors’ desks.

“And that Sunday, prior to the meeting of the supervisors the next day, (City Manager) Sam Hood and (City Engineer) Bob Van Guelpen came out to my home, where I then lived on Midway Drive, and they came to the home and they said:

“’Well, Hugh, we’ve reconsidered and we’ll be glad to annex Montgomery Village to the City.’

“And I don’t remember any conditions at this time but ah, … I kinda liked the idea of having our own private city — Montgomery Village — but I think (annexation) made more sense and logic prevailed. And we became part of Santa Rosa. In fact, I remember Bob said at that time, he said, ‘You know Hugh, there’s nothing to stop you from running for mayor someday.’ And I said, ’Well that’s a joke.’”

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IT’S HARD to say which side dodged a bullet that year. In ’55 the promised new city was equal to Santa Rosa in acreage. And, in terms of energy, the “village people” were young, eager, flush with victory, and open to anything new and promising, eager to get going. The new city could have been a formidable foe for Santa Rosa’s leaders, almost all older businessmen, many second and even third generation.

There are many more Codding stories, of course. There’s Coddingtown, the county’s first of the new wave of “regional centers” in the ‘60s. There’s the five-plus years of lawsuits to stop the downtown mall. There’s the move to Rohnert Park and, now, Sonoma Mountain Village, all still family enterprises.

Hugh did become mayor of Santa Rosa — just in time to preside, with his customary flourish, at Santa Rosa’s centennial celebration in 1968. Many remember the city’s official post-parade luncheon at Lena’s on Wilson Street. That was Hugh at his best. As the guy in charge, wearing a late 1800s outfit, including top hat, he walked the banquet room with a microphone, chatting with the 100 or more guests and calling each of them by name. It was never more clear that it was impossible to dismiss Codding as just another post-war developer.

So, now you have just an inkling of why some of us consider the sale of Montgomery Village to be the end of a 70-year era. And, if you liked this kind of history, well, maybe one day, when the recent headlines have not produced the need for an immediate “back story” that needs telling, we can come back to Codding’s Montgomery Village, and his video interview, and let Hugh recount for you the truly amazing tale of how he did manage to get a working sewer line into that shopping center just in time for the “Grand Opening.”

It is an adventure makes his threat to incorporate seem tame.

As for the impending sale of Montgomery Village — well, times change. And sometimes it’s just more comfortable to look back than ahead.