Category: Member Stories

By: Carole Bennett, Class 1

The first graduating class of Leadership Santa Rosa was in 1984.  I remember being the first (and second) president of the brand new Alumni Association.  Classmate and attorney Glen Smith wrote up the original ByLaws.  I believe classmate Phil Salyer designed the distinctive LSR lettering that has stood the test of time and remains an exception brand for our organization.  The first picnic was a simple party for 30 LSR graduates in my backyard with a BBQ and seating on hay bales, and now the LSR AA year-end picnic has become a traditional event not to be missed.  The activities, friendships, and connections throughout years are what LSR AA is all about. The whole LSR concept has been a cherished thread throughout my life, and I am sure, most of yours.

Retiring as an instructor from Santa Rosa Junior College in 2012 left me with some spare time and loads of energy to focus outside the home.  Now living in Novato, I researched several organizations and was quite selective as to which I would join.  I now volunteer at the Novato Police Department where I show up each Monday in uniform and help process data and do billings for a few hours.  Currently I am the president of the Soroptimist International of Novato club where we raise funds and then disburse them according to our mission to help improve the lives of women and girls.  As part of this same club, I am involved with the production of community television programs that highlight our community.

I often looked up on the hill here in Novato over Highway 101 and wondered about that big white modern building referred to as the Buck Institute, which is an internationally recognized research facility.  After attending several informative workshops open to the public, I inquired about volunteer opportunities.  I was asked to help organize a special North Bay Science Discovery Day as part of the overall Bay Area Science Festival.  In 2010 our first NBSDD was held at the Sonoma Raceway, but with 4,000 visitors, we immediately outgrew the facility.  Since then we have rented the Sonoma County Fairground in Santa Rosa.  This has been a fabulous turn-key venue for our event which this year in 2015 welcomed 14,000 visitors.

The North Bay Science Discovery Day is a one-day event which is entirely free to kids and their families.  The idea is to get kids excited about S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math).  The target market is 4th through 8th grade kids, but those of all ages enjoy the event.  Over 100 exhibitors offer jaw-dropping hands-on experiences for kids:  dissecting giant squids, building and racing cars, inspecting insects and matching their mouth bites on plants, assessing right or left side dominance, using solar energy, making an electric circuit, checking out gluten, molecular bonding to make slippery slime, using ultraviolet light to see flu bugs, climbing around a Huey Helicopter, walking through the inside of a huge blow-up life-size whale, interacting with robots, and a ton more fun stuff!

So, now here I am residing in Novato and working with dynamic leaders planning this big fun event that happens back in Santa Rosa!  It feels as though I am pulling together a party for 14,000 people!  I continuously wonder if there are LSRAA grads who would like to be part of this fun event that truly changes the lives of kids.  Be sure to check our website for more details:  www.northbayscience.org.  You may want to consider being one of the dynamic exhibitors!  We have at least one LSRAA grad — Willie Tamayo of La Tortilla Factory.  You may want to consider having your company or organization strut itself in front of 14,000 people.  Let the future North Bay workers — the kids of today — know that jobs will exist here for them.  Consider donating your time or money to the event.  Remember, in order for it to be free for absolutely everyone, somebody does need to pay the bills.

I am sure that the LSRAA experience helped me have the confidence and courage to pull together such a fabulous event for our community.  I would love to talk to any group about what the North Bay Science Discovery Day is all about.  Send me a quick email:  carole@bayareascience.org.

by Chris Smith, LSR Class XI

So, did you hear about the LSR grad and Niners fan who took a limousine the more than 2,300 miles from Santa Rosa to New Orleans and merged with the tens of thousands of fans massed for Super Bowl 47, but never intended to go to the game?
This sort of behavior by Jack Tolin (Class 15) doesn’t much surprise friends of the adventurous, comical and charitable semi-retired oral surgeon. Jack is a guy who’s going to do good, and have fun doing it. To be one of four buddies who dressed in pink and trekked to the jam-packed Big Easy to spread awareness and raise money for the fight against breast cancer seemed to him the ideal excuse for a road trip.
“We probably spoke to over 1,000 people,” said Jack, who experienced LSR one year after his wife, Cheryl Tolin, of Class 14.
Jack and Sonoma County pals Dan Tregaskis, John Dubkoff, and Roger Sprinkle seized upon a drive to New Orleans after agreeing it would be great to undertake a journey with a cause. All four men have wives and daughters and have witnessed the terror of breast cancer.
So they made it the mission of their Super Bowl odyssey to aid in the battle against the disease. Jack did some research and discovered that the National Breast Cancer Foundation is an efficient organization that works to save lives through education and free mammograms for women in need.
The foursome created a fund-raising Website, rollin4cancer.org. They agreed they would not seek or accept any cash donations, but would refer folks to the Website and also let them know they can donate $10 by using a cellphone to text the word “Life” to 80888.
Jack and his pals printed up flyers and dressed themselves and one of the stretch Lincolns owned by John Dubkoff’s Triple Diamond Limousine all in pink. And off they went, to New Orleans. All the way there, and all the way back, they spoke to curious strangers about the mission and invited donations to the cancer foundation. In bustling New Orleans they quickly established themselves as the cancer-battling Californians in pink.
To date, their mission has prompted more than $6,000 in donations. Jack believes that even more consequential could be the dialogue the road trip sparked on the issue of breast cancer, and all of the people who were encouraged to look into the National Breast Cancer Foundation. “If one or two or those people got an early mammogram because of us and found something, it was a worthwhile trip,” he said.
Reflecting on his time in LSR, Jack called it a wonderful experience shared by some of his favorite people – “active participants in society.” His passion for service has him volunteering to teach English to a Mexican-American dental assistant through the Adult Literacy Program at the Sonoma County Library. He is the longest-serving member of the Credentials Committee at Sutter Medical and has joined the boards of St. Vincent de Paul’s and the Rotary Club of Santa Rosa. Jack has served homeless people at the soup kitchen, rang the bells alongside Salvation Army kettles and stepped up in myriad other ways to help others.
“It sounds sappy,” he said. “But, honestly, you get more out of it than you put into it.”

by Chris Smith

Do forgive the normally acute and engaged Mark Millan, LSR Class XI, if he seems during a conversation to be not quite all there.

Mark may have slipped back to Spain, where just recently he searched ancient, narrow streets for secrets to his DNA, witnessed the intoxicating madness of the running of the bulls and came to more fully appreciate the Iberian mystique that drew one of children far from home in Windsor.

Mark, a water issues expert and principal of Data Instincts, ventured to Spain with his nephew, Shaun, and with two far-apart generations of his family in mind.

He went to visit his daughter, Jenna, who’s 24 and since the start of the year has been living and teaching English in the El Born section of Barcelona. And he went to come as close as he could to retracing the steps of his Spanish grandfather, Ranferi Millan.

Mark posted journals – http://drinkingthewind.tumblr.com and http://espanawanderlust.tumblr.com – and at one point wrote: “We are drawn to the past to learn more about who we might be, where we come from and what it may mean. Deciphering pieces of our past that have been blown and scattered in the winds of time.”

He explored San Millan (“the origin of all things Millan & the Spanish language to boot”) and learned from a history-museum guide that Millan is not a common name in Spain. She told Mark his kin came most likely from the regions of Aragon and Navarra.
“So that,” he wrote one day, “is where we are headed next.”

He, his daughter and his nephew learned a good deal about his grandfather, who’d worked as a civil engineer. A professor in Barcelona advised them that an engineer in the early 20th Century would have been schooled in Madrid. “Aha!” Mark wrote.
He savored his bloodline connection to Spain and mounted a relentless search for the tastiest bottle of Rioja.

At Pamplona on the first day of the Running of the Bulls, Mark and his nephew waited for more than two “at what we thought was a great spot,” only to be displaced “by several friendly Pamplona cops about 10 minutes before the cannon went off.” As the bulls approached, the two Americans jumped a fence and joined a sardine-pack of viewers right up close to the street on which the bulls approached.

Mark wrote, “About 5 minutes later the bulls and steers went streaming by. Pandemonium ensued. What a crazy mix of people from all over the world thrown into a blender of narrow streets with six bulls (and a few cattle) to mix things up. I would do it again tomorrow.”

His daughter Jenna was shooting video of the Running with her iPhone when she realized a runner had been trampled. Her footage (http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-812952) was picked up on-line by CNN.

Mark came home unscathed but certainly not unchanged. If you check out his travelogue, you’ll find where he wrote that when exploring Barcelona, and Spain in general, “You are a wanderer who picks up stones and carries them in his pockets so that you may set them in the fire as you pass through the doors to the next life.”