Former California lawmaker John Dunlap, champion of farm worker rights, dies at 99

Former state Sen. John F. Dunlap, who represented the North Bay in the state Legislature for a dozen years and was the last of four family members who formed a 124-year political dynasty, died Monday at his home in Napa. He was 99.

His family is awaiting official confirmation of the cause of his death.

Dunlap, an attorney and World War II veteran, was best known for supporting farmworkers’ rights and protecting the environment, issues that didn’t resonate in his district at the time.

“John was at the cutting edge of the environmental movement at a time when the district was pretty conservative,” said Doug Bosco, a Santa Rosa attorney and friend of Dunlap since the 1970s. “He had to do a lot of explaining.”

Bosco, a Democrat, was elected to the Assembly in 1978, the same year that Dunlap narrowly lost his bid for a second state Senate term to Republican newcomer Jim Nielsen.

Dunlap, who grew up on the family prune ranch in Yountville, worked with then-Gov. Jerry Brown to pass a 1975 law that created the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, extending collective bargaining rights to farmworkers, Bosco said.

Congressman Mike Thompson, a St. Helena Democrat who served in the state Senate in the 1990s, said that was an example of Dunlap’s willingness to take “a courageous stand” on issues.

Farmworker rights were not popular here at the time, but “it was certainly the right thing to do,” Thompson said, noting that Dunlap became a “national leader” of the movement.

“He was a very intelligent man, very thoughtful, who cared a lot about the district he represented,” he said.

Thompson said their friendship dates to 1988, when he became a candidate for the state Senate. “I knew him. I respected his work,” he said.

In the 1990 Senate race, Thompson defeated Nielsen, the man who had displaced Dunlap 12 years earlier. Nielsen returned to the Senate in 2013.

“I always had great respect for Sen. Dunlap, who was a former opponent,” Nielsen said in an email. “He was a man of strong and true convictions, and one whom I considered a friend.”

Dunlap’s home in Napa was the setting when the late environmentalist Bill Kortum and others hatched the concept for Proposition 20, the 1972 ballot measure that created the state Coastal Commission and took control of seaside development away from local government.

With backing from then-Secretary of State Jerry Brown, the measure was approved by 55% of state voters, despite hefty donations from opposing special interests.

It came as local environmentalists were fighting a plan to develop a 5,200-home project called The Sea Ranch on an untrammeled stretch of the Sonoma Coast south of Gualala, which had gained approval from county supervisors.

Proposition 20 was the first law of its kind in the nation and brought plans for subdivisions on dozens of sprawling coastal properties to a “grinding halt,” according to the late Peter Douglas, who served as chairman of the Coastal Commission for 25 years.

The commission ultimately cut the number of Sea Ranch lots by more than half and mandated multiple public access points.

When Dunlap arrived in Sacramento in early 1967, he was part a freshman class that included Assemblyman Pete Wilson, who went on to become a U.S. senator and governor, and George Moscone, who resigned in 1976 to become mayor of San Francisco.

Another newcomer was Ronald Reagan, who started his first term as governor the same day Dunlap was sworn into office, according to Capitol Weekly.

The Coombs-Dunlap family’s 124-year legislative dynasty began with John Dunlap’s great-grandfather, Nathan Combs, who came over the Oregon Trail to California and founded the city of Napa in 1847.

He served two terms in the Assembly, including the bloody session of 1860 in which Assemblyman John C. Bell was stabbed to death on the Assembly floor by a rival lawmaker.

Nathan’s son, Frank L. Coombs, served in the Assembly from 1886 to 1930 and his son, Nathan F. Coombs represented Napa County in the Senate from 1948 to 1960. His nephew was John Dunlap.

All of his ancestors were Republicans, with Dunlap the lone Democrat.

Dunlap’s chances for a second Senate term in 1978 were initially promising, with a well-known name in his community, an incumbent’s fundraising advantage and a comfortable Democratic majority in his district, the Capitol Weekly said.

But as the campaign year wore on, public safety and property taxes became the primary issues and Nielsen, then a young farmer who received endorsements from former Democratic legislators, squeezed out a narrow victory.

Dunlap graduated from Napa High School in 1940 and enrolled at UC Berkeley. He served four years in the Army Air Corps during the war, then finished his degree at Berkeley and went to UC Law School in San Francisco.

After graduation he joined Coombs and Dunlap, the family law firm in Napa.

John and Janet Dunlap met in 1945 when she was traveling by train to visit her brother in Southern California and he was a young soldier from Napa returning to his Southern California Army base.

They married in 1947 and raised four children. In 2007, Janet died of acute leukemia at age 84, after 60 years of marriage. John Dunlap remarried after nearly a decade as a widower.

“My father was a truly good man with a great imagination, an offbeat sense of humor, a commitment to the Earth and above all else, his children and wife,” his daughter, Jane Dunlap of St. Paul, Minn., said in an email.

“I will miss him beyond measure and recognize how lucky we are to have had him with us for so long,” she said.

“What a guy, huh?” said Maggie Fishman, a Santa Rosa Junior College board member, who said she was impressed by Dunlap’s speech to one of her Sonoma State University classes in the early 1970s.

After graduating, Fishman called Dunlap and wound up with a job as campaign worker in his successful state Senate bid in 1974.

“He had a real empathy for people who were struggling,” she said. “He found a positive role for government in people’s lives.”

Reflecting on his lifetime in Napa County in a 2017 interview, Dunlap noted the town’s considerable changes.

When he graduated from high school in 1940, Napa County had 28,000 residents and a close community, he said. Now grown to more than 100,000 people, the county “has become a fancy wine-celebrated area,” but there is nowhere else he’d rather live, Dunlap said.

His most recent campaign work was for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.

In addition to his daughter Jane, Dunlap is survived by his wife, Mary Lu Kennelly of Napa; sons Peter Dunlap of Petaluma and David Dunlap of Napa; daughter Jill Dunlap Golis and son-in-law Pete Golis of Santa Rosa; daughter-in-law Margaret Dunlap of Petaluma; five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Plans for a memorial service, likely in May, are pending.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.