Smith: That strange, lovely redwood was Pete Tapian's baby

The ridiculously rare redwood that was plucked up and moved away from the SMART tracks in Cotati last week had been planted and babied about 70 years ago by the late Pete Tapian, a Philippines-born worker of soil who for decades cultivated the seed park that became Rohnert Park.

No one seems to know where Tapian got the seeds or seedling for the now famous Cotati redwood that produces both normal and white-yellow albino leaves, and both male and female cones.

One of Tapian’s nine children, Windsor resident Sandy Roope, 64, holds childhood memories of him tending to the young tree like he did the vegetable garden that fed his family.

“He would cover it when it was frosty outside,” Roope said.

Her dad, for 34 years a key worker at the Waldo Rohnert Seed Farm, had planted the redwood in a corner of his family’s farm in Cotati Valley, years before the city was incorporated in 1963.

For decades the redwood coexisted with the nearby Northwestern Pacific Railroad tracks. But earlier this year, the people building the SMART commuter train system disclosed that the healthy, 52-foot-tall tree would be chopped down because it stands too close to the widened rail bed.

The fairly horrified response to that plan led to SMART’s decision to instead relocate the tree. Last week’s uprooting, cautious moving and transplanting made no sense to some people, and it was cheered by arborists who appreciate the immense scientific value of the tree and to locals who love to look at it.

Perhaps most elated by the elaborate effort to save chimeric albino redwood is the large family of Pete Tapian and his late wife, Frances, a Coast Miwok. To them, that odd and beautiful tree is a sacred, living legacy.

A few of the couple’s surviving children and 60-plus grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great- grandchildren witnessed the move about 450 feet to a piece of SMART property farther from the tracks.

Now, said daughter Roope, “We’re praying that it survives.”

THE HONOR SYSTEM worked perfectly at the Gravenstein apples and blackberries stand that Susan Clark operates on her family ranch on Guerneville Road.

She can’t just sit there and wait for customers, so she leaves unattended the wild berries and the apples from trees that date to 1886. Nearly all of the people who stop by would take some fruit and drop some money in the cash box that was firmly attached to an old oak.

“People were just wonderful about it,” said Susan, who has lived all her life on the ranch. It seemed that on occasion someone would take apples or berries without paying, but she figured they were hungry and she didn’t mind.

The other evening, though, she walked out to close up the stand, and she saw that somebody’d gone to considerable effort to rip off the cash box.

That hurt, yes it did. But Susan said the Gravs were pretty much done for the season, and she’s thinking that next year she’ll ask her partner, Kim, to anchor a new cashbox even stronger.

She’s not about to shut down her honor-system fruit stand, not on account of one bad apple.

THE 1968 CAMARO ripped off from Sonoma on Thursday leaves a hole the size of a five-car garage in the hearts of dad-and-son Doug and Nathan Sanders.

The Rally Sport was tired and yellow when Doug, an auto repairman, bought it a decade ago. He and Nathan worked on it on and off, accomplishing most of the restoration two years ago.

The car, now all black, had been running well and was nearly finished.

Said Nathan, now 20, “My dad and I always agreed we would never sell the car or trade it for anything since we had put so much heart into it. It was to be passed down generation to generation.”

Doug parked it outside of the Safeway on West Napa Street and ran in for a few items. Exiting the market to find the Camaro gone, Doug hoped it was a joke. It wasn’t.

Should you see the Camaro, father and son would appreciate a quick call to the Sonoma police.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.