Former Santa Rosa Mayor Charles R. Chuck LeMenager dies at 96

In one chapter of Chuck LeMenager’s long, accomplished and high-flying life, he was the mayor of Santa Rosa in the 1960s and savored his role in the creation of the current City Hall and downtown library.

There were many other chapters.

LeMenager, who died Monday at age 96, was an Army Air Corps veteran who became a successful businessman, Republican Party leader, developer of planned residential communities and, for a time, the California Director of Housing and Community Development under Gov. Ronald Reagan.

LeMenager had been gone from Sonoma County for decades when he retired and returned to one of his primary passions. He resumed flight lessons after more than four decades, earned a private pilot license and bought a used, single-engine, four-seat airplane.

“He flew that thing thousands and thousands of miles,” said one of his sons, Jack LeMenager of Massachusetts. The younger LeMenager said his father was eager every day for the next flight, the next challenge and experience.

“He was a very driven guy,” Jack LeMenager said. “He was always looking for what’s next. He was never happy standing still.”

Charles R. LeMenager was born June 3, 1926, in Chicago. He would note in a memoir that LeMenager is a Belgian name that Americans commonly pronounce lemon-AY-jur or lemon-AH-jur.

He wrote, “I was raised pronouncing it like lemon-dodger (without the ‘d’).

As a 16-year-old fascinated by flight, he saved some money, then secretly traveled about 50 miles by bicycle and train to an airport in Valparaiso, Indiana, for flying lessons. He wasn’t able to continue long enough to earn his license.

At 17, with World War II raging, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and commenced its cadet pilot program. But there was a glut of pilots, and before his turn for combat came, the war ended.

Upon his honorable discharge, he went to Long Beach. His parents had left Chicago for Southern California about the time the war began.

LeMenager took work as what he termed a “cookbook chemist” at a Proctor & Gamble plant. Soon disenchanted, he moved on to an entry-level job with the Fluor Corporation, a large engineering and construction firm.

In 1948, LeMenager and the former Nancy Hampson were wed. They would be married nearly 51 years and give birth to four children.

Fluor assigned Chuck LeMenager to a couple of locations before making him vice president of industrial relations at the plant in Windsor that produced laminated beams and cooling towers. That was 1958.

As a new, 32-year-old executive with a major Sonoma County employer, LeMenager immersed himself in the community. He became vice president of Santa Rosa’s Chamber of Commerce, and with the encouragement of Mayor Jack Ryerson, joined the city’s Board of Public Utilities.

LeMenager ran for City Council in 1962 and was elected. He would serve until 1967, alongside with the likes of Ryerson, Charles DeMeo, Hugh Codding and Robert Tuttle.

A major focus of the council at that time was the funding and construction of a civic center, or city hall. LeMenager and his colleagues were responsible for the now popularly decried decision to move a section of Santa Rosa Creek into an underground, concrete channel and build the city administration center over it.

LeMenager served as mayor in 1965 and 1966, and in ’66 won a second council term. That same year, Republican and Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan was elected California’s governor. He asked LeMenager, who was active in the Republican Party locally and on the state and national levels, to be his director of Housing and Community Development.

LeMenager accepted the post. His announcement to his family that after nine years in Sonoma County they were moving to Sacramento was not received merrily.

“My mother wasn’t too pleased,” said Jack LeMenager, then a student at Santa Rosa Middle School. “She loved Santa Rosa.”

LeMenager served a term in government service, and in 1970 returned to the private sector as a developer of large residential communities. Projects included the 3,250-acre San Diego Country Estates in the town of Ramona in San Diego County.

LeMenager told a newspaper reporter in 2018, “I call it a community designed for living.” He borrowed that phrase from Santa Rosa, which had called itself “The City Designed for Living” since 1946.

Nancy LeMenager was chief designer of the house the couple had built in 1979 on a hill above the 17th tee at San Diego Country Estates. From the time Chuck LeMenager retired in the late 1980s and returned to flying, he delighted in exploring the U.S. and beyond in "Red Bird," his Cessna.

Nancy LeMenager died in 1999.

In 2001, Chuck LeMenager married Elizabeth “Betty” Boos Haas. They moved four years ago from Ramona to Prescott, Arizona.

Jack LeMenager said the two loved to go to Hawaii. And just weeks ago, as Chuck LeMenager approached the end of his life, he still was telling his wife, “I’m going to take you to Maui.”

In addition to his wife in Prescott and his son in Winchester, Massachusetts, LeMenager is survived by daughter, Kay LeMenager, of El Cajon; sons, Tom LeMenager, of Oceanside, and Bill LeMenager, of Niceville, Florida; brother, Warner LeMenager, of Pasadena; sisters, Jeanne Toland, of Oceanside, and Donna Prinzhorn, of Temple City; eight grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and two great-great-grandchildren.

His family suggests memorial contributions to the Salvation Army, Stony Circle, Santa Rosa, 95401, or https://santarosa.salvationarmy.org, or to a Boys and Girls Club.