Chris Smith: The valiant and fiery and sweetened life of Santa Rosa’s Ed Poe

It’s common for cookies or brownies or such to be set out at a reception following a memorial service.

Usually, the confections don’t prompt all the smiling and nodding that happened at the packed celebration of the life of Ed Poe.

His short name was huge to firefighters throughout Sonoma, Mendocino and Napa counties and beyond, and to fellow ranchers, and to fellow combat veterans aware of what he did and what he survived at Iwo Jima and elsewhere in the Pacific during World War II.

Nearly legendary, also, was Poe’s sweet tooth.

HHHHHH

THERE’S A STORY about the Navy vet and longtime state fire boss refusing to toss aside a tuna sandwich besieged by yellowjackets because the rule of the rancher who’d fixed him lunch was that he couldn’t have at her home-baked cookies until he’d finished his sandwich.

Poe could spot smoke still undetectable to others, but his vision grew selective when his wife, Lorraine, was shooting him the “Move away from the sweets” look.

Ed Poe had been missing Lorraine for nearly two years when he died March 15, at 92.

HHHHHH

AT THE SERVICE at Santa Rosa’s First United Methodist Church, speakers recalled a rare fellow who was driving engines to fires in and near Fort Bragg before he was old enough for a driver’s license.

Poe became the California Division of Forestry’s district ranger for the Sonoma Coast. In the summer of 1978, he headed up the attack on the Creighton Ridge fire that burned more than 11,000 acres in and around the Cazadero area of western Sonoma County.

More recently, Poe, despite being long retired, would appear on the fire lines and share his respected perception of what the flames would do next and what needed to be done to out-maneuver them.

He was almost 80 when he showed up at 2004’s Rumsey fire north of Lake Berryessa alongside friend Jack Piccinini, a son of sorts, and another of the region’s best-known fire leaders.

Berryessa, now that was an area Poe knew like the back of his hand. He was born on a ranch in the Napa County town of Monticello that in 1957 went under water with the filling of Lake Berryessa behind Monticello Dam.

Before that happened, Poe’s family moved to Fort Bragg. Working alongside his dad, Poe became a teen firefighter.

hhhhhh

HE GRADUATED from Fort Bragg High in 1944 and went immediately into the Navy, then to the war in the Pacific. Early in ’45, he was at the controls of landing craft commonly called a Higgins boat and was ferrying Marines to the strongly defended beach at Iwo Jima.

He wrote his folks a short time later that he assumed they’d read of the human cost of taking that island from the Japanese. “I am OK,” he wrote, “and still raring to go.”

Decades later, if coaxed, he’d say a bit about dropping a load of Marines at the shore and watching them be mowed down. He and other young seamen were moving the bodies of Marines onto a ship when they noticed something stunning: the American flag was being raised atop Mount Suribachi.

With the end of the war, Ed Poe returned to California and resumed defending lives and property as a state firefighter. After his memorial, some admirers toasted him by holding aloft a little something sweet.

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