Janet Nicholas, former Sonoma County supervisor, dies at 78
Janet Nicholas, the former county supervisor from Sonoma Valley, whose decades in local and statewide leadership earned her respect for the tough questions, high standards, intelligence and humanity she brought to public service, has died.
“She had a sense of humor, a sense of what was happening and a huge sense of right and wrong,” said her husband, Bob Nicholas.
Said friend Gaye LeBaron, the Sonoma County history writer and former Press Democrat columnist, “Janet was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met … and, course, from supervisor she went on to so many bigger things.”
A force in Republican Party politics across California and beyond, Nicholas was appointed by former Gov. Pete Wilson to the state Board of Prison Terms and then the state Board of Education.
She died Friday morning as she was setting off for Costco from her and her husband’s longtime country home outside of Sonoma. Bob Nicholas said she called to him, “Is there anything you need?” as she walked toward her car.
Her family believes she was stricken by cardiac arrest or a stroke shortly after she pulled onto the road. Her Nissan Rogue drifted down an embankment and rolled.
Nicholas died at the scene. She was 78.
Born in 1946 in Denver, the former Janet Gross grew up in the Los Angeles area. She was just 16 when she enrolled at UCLA with a triple major.
While in college she met law student Bob Nicholas, whose parents, George and Eileen “Johnnie” Nicholas, founded near Petaluma in 1938 what would become a major, international turkey breeding operation. They moved it a short while later to Sonoma Valley.
Janet Nicholas had launched her career and helped to plan Florida’s Disney World when she and Bob settled in Sonoma Valley not long after their marriage in 1969. They raised two daughters and in 1981 the couple founded Nicholas Vineyards.
Janet Nicholas had served on the Sonoma County Planning Commission, when, in 1984, she ran against and defeated incumbent 1st District Supervisor Bob Adams, a former deputy sheriff. Among the supervisors who welcomed her to the board was Ernie Carpenter, a west county liberal.
“She was a conservative and a Republican,” Carpenter said, “but she was old-school and she really cared about people. She wasn’t an ideologue of any kind.”
Carpenter recalled that he and Nicholas worked well together on a General Plan that protected agriculture, which was important to her, and also open space, which was important to him.
It became soon evident that Nicholas was creative and driven, and also funny.
Her daughter Laura Havlek, also of Sonoma Valley, remembers her hosting members of the state Transportation Commission at a Chinese restaurant. The commissioners finished up, then discovered Nicholas had placed the exact same message in each of their fortune cookies:
“Happiness comes to those who fund 1st District roads.”
Her district received the funding.
Paul Ingalls covered the Board of Supervisors for The Press Democrat in the 1980s.
“Janet was gracious, funny and always self-effacing, but she was also scary smart and a force to be reckoned with,” he said. “I remember one hearing before the Board of Supervisors at which she responded to a speaker by telling him, ‘I’ve heard your comments and my reaction is, ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’”
The former reporter and editor added that Nicholas, whom he befriended following his retirement, “always had some new intellectual concept or endeavor that she was excited about, but she was also deeply interested in you and what you were doing, and she spent more time asking you questions than she did talking about herself.”
Voters in Sonoma County’s 1st District re-elected Nicholas to a second four-year term in 1988. Also that year, Tim Smith was elected to represent the county’s central 3rd District, a seat he would occupy for the next two decades.
“Janet was nothing but very kind to me when I came on the board,” Smith said.
“She was very smart, a very classy person,” he said. “She was much more conservative than I was, but it didn’t matter. Most of the issues around the county don’t have much to do with liberal and conservative, but with getting things done for people.”
Nicholas, Smith said, “knew how to connect the dots and get things done.”
Midway through Nicholas’ second term as supervisor, tragedy struck her family and prompted her to switch her professional focus.
In 1990, Pierre Creager, a delusional, 24-year-old man whose father had worked for the Nicholases for decades, attacked and killed 74-year-old Eileen Nicholas in her home. The murder of her mother-in-law fired in Janet Nicholas a desire to act to protect Californians from such crimes.
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