Son of Joe Rodota reveals what his father would say about homeless camp disbanded on Rodota trail

Rodota’s son talks about encampment on west Santa Rosa trail named for his dad, Sonoma County’s first parks director.|

At least once a day, Joe Rodota Jr. gets an email about the Joe Rodota Trail, the paved, 8½-mile connector between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol that lately has become synonymous with squalor and homelessness.

“My dad’s been dead for almost 25 years,” said Rodota, 60, “which means a lot of my friends have never met or heard of him. So they’ll ask, ‘Is this trail yours?’ People can’t quite understand what’s going on.”

To clarify: the Joe Rodota for whom the trail is named was the first director of Sonoma County’s parks department. Hired in 1967, he spent the next quarter century building a regional park system from 400 to 6,000 acres. Widely admired, he died in 1997 in a car wreck.

His son, also Joe Rodota, is an author and playwright whose long political career included a four-year stint as deputy director of public affairs for President Ronald Reagan, and seven years as cabinet secretary, then deputy chief of staff, for California Gov. Pete Wilson.

Had his dad been a legislator, his son said, with a smile, “he’d probably be an overpass, or an underpass.”

Instead, his father’s name is associated with a trail that had morphed six months ago into a homeless encampment with a population as large as 250. Last week essentially all of the campers dispersed, as Sonoma County authorities evicted residents from their tents and moved many of them to area shelters.

Joe Rodota is reluctant to speak for his late father. But it’s a safe bet his dad would share his son’s belief the situation is tragic on several levels.

“It’s obviously a tragedy for the people who, through economic hardship, or mental illness, or addiction, have fallen through the cracks,” he said. “So there are hundreds of tragedies there.”

It’s also sad, he said, when a park is lost to an encampment.

Parks, he pointed out, are for families that don’t have big backyards, or the means to travel. They’re for seniors who need to get out and about.

“They’re for everybody,” he went on. “So it’s a tragedy when, for whatever reason, an individual or group of individuals decides that a park no longer belongs to everybody, it belongs to them.”

Rodota Jr. now lives in Sacramento, but was in Santa Rosa Wednesday for a rehearsal of his latest play, “The Jeane Dixon Effect,” a look back at America’s first celebrity psychic.

Seeing his father’s name in the news for a homeless encampment, rather than a beloved hiking and biking trail, is “disappointing,” he said. “But it’s nothing compared to what the people who are there have to deal with.”

As an outsider, he said, he wants to be “respectful of the pain people are experiencing.” He also referred to “the importance my dad placed on every park in the county,” and expressed hope the trail can be “reclaimed.”

In addition to being passionate about parks, Joe Rodota was a “fairly shrewd bureaucrat,” his son recalled. “He made sure that every supervisor’s district had a good mix of parks for residents.”

Rodota Sr. drove a ’36 Ford and spent weekends covering every corner of the county, shaking hands, spreading good cheer and scouting potential parkland. “We would get in the car, and drive to some part of the county,” his son said. “If there was a crab feed somewhere, he would find it.”

Rodota knew who owned what, and would confide in his son, “In 20 years, I’m going to go back to that family and ask ’em to give us that land. We’re gonna put a park there.”

After graduating from Montgomery High School, the younger Rodota attended Stanford University, then embarked on a career in policy and politics. In addition to working for President Ronald Reagan and Gov. Pete Wilson, he was policy director for the Bush-Quayle campaign in 1988. When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor in California in year 2003, Rodota served as the campaign’s director of policy.

His book, “The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address,” was published in 2018. His previous play, “Chessman,” tells the story of “Red Light Bandit” Caryl Chessman, who was executed in 1960 in California.

On Wednesday, he sat in a downtown Santa Rosa conference room running lines with boyhood friend Rob Olmsted, who will direct “The Jeane Dixon Effect,” and Valerie Leonard, highly regarded stage actress and graduate of Santa Rosa’s former Ursuline High School, who has been cast as Jeane Dixon in this one-woman show.

The table was cluttered with manuscript pages, takeout food and an ersatz crystal ball Rodota had brought along, to get people in the correct mood.

“What if we went into Hoover after Scene 7,” Leonard suggested at one point, “before the cat.”

Soon after, they took a break to feed their respective parking meters. Walking along Old Courthouse Square, Rodota recalled the day in 1990 the Joe Rodota Trail was dedicated.

Addressing a crowd of citizens and dignitaries, his father shared a memory of another park dedication he’d attended in the mid-1960s. Another public servant had retired; this park was being named after them.

By chance, Joe Rodota Sr. was standing beside a grandson of the man being honored that day. At one point the little boy blurted, “Grandpa must have been really great if they named a park after him.”

That simple remark reduced Rodota to tears. “Because in my father’s world,” his son said, “there was no greater honor than to have your name associated with such a source of joy - with something as wonderful as a park.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Ausmurph88

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