Gaye LeBaron: Do you think you’re a Sonoma County old-timer? It’s time for old-older

OK, the year is moving right along. Spring is here and we have sprung forward as prescribed, celebrated all the national birthdays, delivered our Valentines, honored the Irish and now we will watch another Easter drift past.

Time flies. (Or, as one of my favorite bits of restroom stall graffiti puts it: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”)

We create our pasts so quickly they are easy to forget. Which is why, on occasion, it is absolutely necessary to play the Old Older game.

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YOU’RE OLD, as another baseball season begins, if you were a faithful follower of Norm Maroni’s Rosebuds, when they drew crowds at Doyle Park. An extra point if you can name the bar where Maroni made enough money to support his baseball habit. (Did I hear “440 Club”?)

Ah, but you’ve logged a few more miles if you remember when the Pittsburgh Pirates had a farm team in Santa Rosa and rookie “greats” like pitcher Vernon Law (you could look him up), played before a hometown crowd that sometimes included the part owner of the Pirates franchise who crooned under the name of Bing Crosby.

Old in Sebastopol if you patronized Pease Pharmacy, the quintessential “corner drugstore,” at the intersection the two main streets, a building that now houses a theater called MainStage West.

Older, I guess, if you bought your first car from Pellini Chevrolet, which is now, officially, gone forever, making way for a new corner drug that will be no more like Pease than The Barlow is like an applesauce cannery.

Starting with Older this time to visit the Hoag House, built in 1856, which was the oldest continuing residence in Santa Rosa in the 1960s. It was still home then to the two Hoag sisters, both in their 90s. One, Aletha, was born there, and would show visitors, with great pride, a quilt that their mother had carried across the plains in a covered wagon.

Merely Old if you remember when the house was moved from the spot where it had stood for 118 years to make room for a savings and loan (now the Community Bank site), prompting preservationists to wonder what part of the term “landmark” our city fathers didn’t understand.

Old if you remember when Occidental, Forestville, Graton and vicinities were referred to by those names and there was no generic “west county.”

New thought: Why aren’t Valley Ford, Bloomfield, Bodega Bay, Jenner and Sea Ranch called “west county?” They are well to the west of Graton.

(Possible answer: It’s not geography, it’s politics. Red state, blue state, old state, new state.)

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OLD if you remember what frightened small children before there were zombies. I vote for flying monkeys.

Old if you went to junior high, not middle school. Older if you mastered the art of penmanship, parsed sentences and learned your times tables before your eighth-grade graduation from grammar school.

Getting on in years if you understand that “penmanship” has nothing to do with raising rabbits.

Old if you remember the melodies emanating from the cages of canaries inside the Fifth Street entrance to Kress. Or the lunch counter at that store’s Fourth Street door where the NAACP held a sit-in in the ’60s.

Quiz time: Can you name the other two five-and-dimes in downtown Santa Rosa? (Woolworth’s and the National Dollar Store.)

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OLD if you hung on the fence behind El Rancho on Santa Rosa Avenue to watch the Raiders practice.

Older if you knew that Rosenberg’s opened the lingerie department after hours one night each summer so Raiders could buy outsized corsets and girdles and bras - for their rookie initiation.

Old if you remember the giant Levis pinned high on the wall overlooking the men’s department in that fine store.

Come to think of it, Old if you remember department stores.

Older if you rode to the store’s mezzanine with the last real elevator operator in town – then slid down the banister when your mother wasn’t looking.

Older if you know that the Rosenberg Building (not the same place, newbies) had the first elevator in Santa Rosa.

Older yet if you have been told that the first elevator in the county was in a multi-story hotel in (wait for it!) Monte Rio.

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THAT’S exactly how Old Older is played. You start with pro football, one thing leads to another and you find you’ve composed an essay on a random subject. Like elevators.

Older if you remember Joe the Hermit, an Italian gentleman of limited means who lived in a shack built of sheet metal and other spare parts along Santa Rosa Creek, upstream from the Carrillo Adobe.

Joe, who harmed no one, lived out his life in his hermitage, courtesy of developer Hugh Codding, who had big plans for the land but let him stay on. When Joe died in the early 1950s, Codding, who had a sense of history, named a street for him - Hermit Way, near the creek, off Montgomery Drive.

Old if you remember when the radio stations were known by their call letters, not clever names. Only KSRO remains, although Kzest for KZST and The Krush for KRSH come close.

Otherwise, it’s The Mix, The Wolf, Froggy, The Fox and KLove.

Older if you remember a short-lived entry in the radio derby here called KJAX where all the deejays were named Jack. Jack-Be-Nimble etc. But they weren’t really.

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THE POSTWAR exhibit at the History Museum makes mention of cruising and displays a carhop menu from Gordon’s Drive-In. But that doesn’t tell the whole story of the “tooling” procession from College Avenue to Fourth Street through Gordon’s parking lot, and back around again.

Nor does it offer an estimate of the city revenues derived from tickets for “rapping out” with “straight pipes” issued by the motorcycle cop whose nickname was “The Rat.”

And that is what passed for late teen delinquency in those “Happy Days.”

Nor does the Topaz Room menu on display tell the tales of deals made in that long bar and dining room, which was so fancy it was off-limits to enlisted men in World War II. It was also where the City Council dined on Tuesday meeting nights. In a backroom, of course.

It was upper class, was the Topaz, bordered with glass cases of fancy crystal and a ceiling draped with yards of parachute silk. Wise guys were heard to suggest that it looked like the inside of a coffin.

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EVERY new adventure suggests an older one. The forthcoming annexation of Roseland (Is it a foregone conclusion?) brings memories of the outrage that accompanied the annexation of Oakmont in the 1960s.

Unlike Roseland, which is an area nearly as old as Santa Rosa itself and adjoins the city limits, Oakmont was a “retirement community,” a brand new idea, and it didn’t even come close to the city limits. It was connected, by a 7-mile stretch of Highway 12 that allowed a strip annexation, bypassing still-rural Rincon Valley where most residents had no immediate interest in becoming Santa Rosans.

How the times do alter! Many of the 1960s scoffers who poked fun at the idea of an “old folks” community, thought of all the residents as “outsiders, called it “Croakmont” as I recall, are now - yep! - living happily in Oakmont.

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SO WE’RE OLD and Older. Last winter (now that it is spring, I can say that) I was in Treehorn to buy a copy of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men.”

It was a fairly new paperback and had photos on the cover from the movie version, including Sean Penn and James Gandolfini.

I mentioned to the clerk that it made me feel old because I saw an earlier film from the same book with Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge.

She said, somewhat sternly, “We must never let anything make us feel old, because we don’t get old, we just get wiser.”

Hold that thought. Maybe next time I’ll try for a Wise Wiser game.

Or maybe not.

Are we, in fact, wiser than we were back when we laughed and laughed at the predictions that machines would take over the world?

Now, put down that iPhone, reel in your drone and answer my question.

Are we still laughing?