I Visited Sonoma - Jill Valavanis
Jill’s Sonoma Journey - I Visited Chapter
This is the first of three stories about Jill’s relationship with Sonoma.
🟩 I Visited – Chapter 1 (You are reading this story.)
Click the story title above to continue Jill’s journey as she grows up in Sonoma, leaves, and chooses to return.
🟥 I Got Involved in Community – Chapter 3
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Jill visited Sonoma from an early age because of the friends who had introduced her parents. She found those childhood visits boring, but the family connection helped bring her to Sonoma when her father needed a new home for his business.
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I first came to Sonoma as a child to visit John and Evie Berger and their family. They were important people in our lives: John and Evie had introduced my parents, Herb and June Sable, in Oakland around 1959. My parents were fabulous outdoorsy people. They loved backpacking, camping, hiking, folk dancing, and having adventures. They fell in love and married about a year after they met.
John and Evie had four boys. I already had an older brother and a younger brother, so a visit with four more boys was not my idea of a wonderful day. I would sit quietly or play by myself in the backyard. I did not particularly like coming to Sonoma then. That is funny to think about now, given how much of my life has unfolded here.
My father was a mechanical engineer and an inventor. He had worked as a sales representative and visited factories, including one that packaged margarine. He watched women in white lab coats pick up tubs of margarine two at a time and place them into cardboard boxes by hand. The margarine was still warm, so it could slosh onto the lid. My father felt there ought to be a way to make that job easier while handling the tubs carefully.
He developed a custom case-packing machine that could open a box, load the tubs, and seal it. He had a plant in Richmond, and we lived in the Oakland Hills. After years of commuting in the East Bay, he and my mother started thinking about moving both the business and our family.
They took out a AAA map and drew a big circle around the Port of Oakland. My father’s machinery needed to ship from the port, so wherever we moved had to be within about an hour’s drive. Sonoma was inside the circle.
My parents considered other communities, but Sonoma had something extra. We had already been coming here to see the Bergers. We knew people here, and we knew it was a charming town. In 1975, my parents bought a house on Avenue del Oro and moved our family to Sonoma.
Those visits I had found so dull as a child turned out to be the beginning of a much longer relationship with this place. I arrived as a seventh grader, the day before school started, with no idea how much Sonoma would come to mean to me.
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Jill’s story shows how a connection to a place can begin before someone feels attached to it. She did not enjoy visiting Sonoma as a child, yet the friendship that brought her family here helped make Sonoma a possible home years later.
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This story was created from an interview with Jill Sable Vallavanis conducted by Don Lundgren. Jill’s words have been edited for length and clarity while preserving her voice, experiences, and meaning.
