Smith: The family of Lucy the French bulldog still hopes for a happy ending

How sweet it’d have been had the spirit of the holidays brought the return of Lucy, sought by one of the most ambitious, heartbreaking lost-dog campaigns we’ve ever seen.

Since the French bulldog was taken Nov. 28 from her family’s yard on Santa Rosa’s Third Street, Bobby Kumparak and Angela Stevenson have papered the region with posters and spent more than $12,000 on ads, billboards and such.

Trips to the Central Valley to check out potential leads introduced the couple to two female French bulldogs. Neither was Lucy, but Bobby and Angela found both to be in appalling shape, so they opened their wallet and hearts and brought the dogs - Penny and Porkchop - home.

Says Bobby, “We want to bring Lucy home first and foremost, but we couldn’t walk away from those girls.”

By now, hundreds of thousands of people, or more, are aware that he and Angela suffer from the loss of Lucy and offer $5,000 for her return, no questions asked. Just one person needs to do the right thing.

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THE LIFE & ART of Sonoma County’s long-ago King of the Hippies will be celebrated Thursday amid an unusual gathering at Sebastopol’s fabulous arts center.

It starts at 5:30 p.m. with an exhibition of artwork by Bill Wheeler. In 1965, Wheeler was a young Yale grad, wealthy heir and buyer of a wooded and splendid expanse of land in the coastal hills west of Occidental.

Wheeler imagined there a serene, unpeopled place for making art.

But things happen, and one day free spirits and Earth children by the dozens needed a new place to crash after local authorities shooed them from Lou Gottlieb’s nearby Morningstar Ranch. Wheeler allowed the rousted souls to reside and dance and garden and groove on his ranch until 1973, when it too was purged of hippies and hangers-on.

In time, solitude was restored to Wheeler’s life, and he resumed making art. He died on his ranch a year ago, at 77.

A celebration of his life will follow Thursday evening’s art show at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts. Ernie Carpenter, the former west county supervisor, will kick off the memorial at 7 p.m. and will share the mic.

Wheeler’s works will remain up at the Sebastopol center through Feb. 17.

And there’s more: At noon Saturday, artists grateful to Wheeler and his figure-drawing class at the Occidental Center for the Arts will dedicate and install there a memorial bench.

It’s a living tribute to Wheeler that the drawing class with live models still meets in Occidental every Thursday night.

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MAYORS AS PEOPLE: Against a national backdrop of polarized and fractious politics, four Sonoma County mayors fairly new to public office met up Sunday to sip wine and check out how they might help each other be the best mayors they can be.

Windsor Mayor Dominic Foppoli hosted the neighborly confab at his family’s Christopher Creek Winery. As they’d done also as new vice mayors, Foppoli and Sebastopol’s Neysa Hinton, Healdsburg’s David Hagele, Melanie Bagby of Cloverdale and a passel of pals partied and bonded and explored raising money for some local cause.

“It’s just being friendly,” Hinton said.

Maybe it’ll catch on.

You can reach Columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.