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TheHealdsburg HealdsburgTribune Tribune The Enterprise & Scimitar Enterprise & Scimitar
Visit for daily updates on local news views www.healdsburgtribune.com for daily updates on local news andand views Our 157th year, Visit Number 50 www.healdsburgtribune.com Healdsburg, California 1865 –December 15, 2022 Healdsburg, California Healdsburg, California
Our 155th year, Number 00© ur 155th year, Number 00©
AFTER 67 YEARS, A REPAIR BUSINESS HANGS UP ITS TOOLS
Date, Date, 20202020
HEALDBURG’S E&M OPENED IN 1955, SERVICED LUMBER MILLS AND WINERIES By Christian Kallen
HOLIDAY MUSIC Lew Sbrana, 87, guides the New Horizons Band in rehearsal for his final concert in Healdsburg, Dec. 18
at the Healdsburg Community Church.
Lew Sbrana Passes the Baton SUNDAY’S NEW HORIZONS CONCERT FINAL OUTING FOR LONGTIME HEALDSBURG BAND LEADER By Christian Kallen
When Lew Sbrana strikes up the band this coming Sunday afternoon at Healdsburg Community Church, it will mark the end of a remarkable career for a man who has probably touched more lives through music than anyone else in Healdsburg, and perhaps the county. For the last time, he’ll take up the baton to lead the New Horizons Band of Sonoma County though
a holiday season concert of Christmas, Hanukkah and big band music. The band is the local chapter of an international organization of community bands made up of musicians 50 years and older—the sort of senior who may have played in high school or college but left his or her instrument behind as they moved into family and career. For Sbrana, music has been his life, since even before he took his first school directorship in Boonville just after he left a stint in the Navy, where he played trumpet in the marching band. He graduated from Humboldt College (later Humboldt State University, now Cal Poly Humboldt) over 65 years ago. And though his first
teaching job was in Anderson Valley, he soon moved to Healdsburg, where he taught both high school and junior high students for 31 years. During that time, he also started a community band of adults of all ages, from high school grads to senior citizens, who rediscovered their love of performing music or who never forgot it. “I’m pretty sure it started in 1982,” he said of the Healdsburg Community Band. “A couple people contacted me about playing Christmas music, and they told me they played for a community band down in Rohnert Park. I said, ‘Oh gosh, I wish we had one here in town.’ The woman on the other end of the phone
said, ‘Why don’t you? Why don’t you start one?’ So that’s how we got off the ground.” Though he learned other instruments during his college music studies in Arcata, his fondness for marching band music has stayed with him for decades—he turns 87 this year. His Sousa Concerts were a popular staple of the Healdsburg Community Band for years, from the stage at the Raven Theater, where a Lew Sbrana giant American flag would be revealed as the band life of hundreds of peolaunched into “Stars and ple; it’s quite possible the Stripes Forever.” number reaches into the Add it all up—the sec- thousands. ondary school musicians, The New Horizons the community band, the International Music AssoNew Horizons group—and ciation was founded in it’s easy to see that Sbrana has affected the musical ➝ Sbrana Passes the Baton, 2
THE PLAZA WELCOMES A NEW HOLIDAY TRADITION LAS POSADAS CELEBRATION COMES TO HEALDSBURG By Christian Kallen
Photo by Erica Gutierrez
LAS POSADAS Procession in Healdsburg, Dec. 20, 2021.
For a town that’s changing so quickly, Healdsburg sure loves tradition. Whether it’s the second annual Merry Healdsburg or the 73rd annual Redwood Empire Invitational Basketball Tournament—or 100 years of
Prune Packer baseball at Rec Park—this is a town that values and honors its history. A new tradition could start this Friday night, Dec. 16, as Healdsburg Community Services and Corazón Healdsburg partner to bring Las Posadas to the Plaza for the first time—but possibly not the last. Las Posadas, which translates to The Inns, is a nine-day festival cycle between Dec. 16 and 24 that commemorates the biblical journey in search of safe refuge, where Joseph and Mary find shelter for the birth of Jesus. The story is that they ended up in a Bethlehem stable, where the birth was attended by barnyard animals, angels and magi. This tale is given resonance in much of Mexico and some parts of the ➝ Las Posadas, 8
Photo courtesy of New Horizons Band
➝ Repair Business, 7
Photo by Christian Kallen
There are many signs of change afoot in Healdsburg, from new restaurants under development, favorite espresso shops reappearing and multi-unit housing projects sprouting on the edges of town. But some changes are less visible, though ultimately more significant. E&M, a 67-year-old motor repair shop, is leaving behind the business that gave it an honored place in Healdsburg history to focus instead on an increasingly successful business sector—industrial automation sales and services. Given their trade, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that E&M stood for Electric and Machine, or some variation. In fact, the initials are those of founders Edgar Deas and his father, Mario, who in 1955 started with a small motor shop on Healdsburg Avenue, just south of the Plaza. A few years later, they moved around the corner to 12 Matheson, where they had a service garage next to Fred Young Mortuary (where now stands The Wurst). Later still, about 1983, they left the Plaza area and took over a warehouse at the corner of Mill and East streets. It was formerly a produce-packing facility for Sunsweet, known for its prunes when Healdsburg was celebrated as “the buckle of the prune belt.” Mario Deas is gone now, and his son, Edgar, is 86 and no longer active in the business he co-founded as a young man. His own sons,