Book: Life of Al Molina

A Barefoot Boy with Shoes On: The Life and Journals of Naturalist Al Molina
(Original title for book - a description Bev (Al's wife, my Mom) used for Al)

Written by Annette Nibley

When I started interviewing people for a book about Al Molina shortly after his death, I didn’t know much about him. I knew he had taught biology at the College of Marin for thirty-six years, that he was a seasoned naturalist, and that he was a lot of fun on a field trip. I knew he admired Ed Ricketts, the quirky marine biologist thinly disguised as “Doc” in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I knew he called diatoms “folks” and that he loved spicy food. Much more than that I didn’t know. I asked people to tell me about him. I was surprised.

“His being transcends language,” said one former student. “Everything about him I loved,” said another. The eyes of big burly men filled with tears as they spoke of him. One by one people described, in superlative terms, a humble man—a gentle, joyful man—with such a welcoming heart and enthusiastic spirit that it was clear much more had happened than merely the teaching of biology. This man had touched people at a very deep level of their souls, and they were changed by him. “He was someone I never stopped thinking about,” said a man who had been a student of Al’s in 1960, over four decades ago.

Al Molina was in love with the planet Earth and all that lives and operates on it. He was in love with tides, the movement of tectonic plates, erosion, and the weather, as well as every creature, from the titanic gray whale (which he hung over the edge of the skiff to kiss in San Ignacio Lagoon) to the homely “fat inn-keeper” worm. And he was in love with flora. He would rhapsodize about the sensuous, flesh-like bark of the madrone, the tiny intricate houndstooth pattern of a lichen, the Homeric journey a single grain of pollen makes to fertilize the ovary of a flower.

I remember the first time I heard him discuss a flower so small I could barely see it from eye level. I was walking a little behind when I saw the group huddle, which meant that Al had stopped to say something interesting about a plant or other attraction. I drew in close to hear him say we were looking at a filaree, which bears a nifty spiral seed that screws itself into the ground. I was looking down thinking, What is he talking about? All I see is a little pink thing no bigger than an asterisk, he can’t possibly making such a fuss about that. But he was, and it changed the way I looked at the world under my feet. He showed me there were more things in the dirt worth making a fuss about than I had ever suspected.

Al was also crazy about people. He was kind to everyone he met. He would stop to help a stranger change a tire, or invite the firewood delivery boy in for dinner. He treated every person he met with the deepest respect—be it the bright, informed animal lover or the loudmouth who tosses his cigarette butt in the tidepool. With his students, his generosity of spirit knew no limits. He had enormous patience, and could answer the same question a hundred times without ever an edge of annoyance in his voice. And while answering he would be looking right into our eyes, and we could sense that he wanted us to have everything we needed to know. He thrived on it. He loved giving people what they wanted, and he especially loved making the connection between a single human being and the natural world. He loved seeing the light turn on. He never got tired of it.

Whatever he showed you, he made you see for yourself that it was wondrous. It was so obvious once you looked, but before he showed you, you would never have thought to look in quite that way. I asked people what they thought the secret was, how he was able to unlock the mysteries before our eyes. “It’s love,” said one former student. “He loved everything so much, and he made us love it all, too.”

You could say that Al Molina cared about one thing only: turning people on to the wonders of the natural world. It was his life. And his teaching job at the College of Marin was the avenue through which he accomplished this work. He felt having the job was his great privilege, and he never stopped feeling grateful for it. For over thirty years he would tell every new class how lucky he felt to be working there. To a group of strangers out on a whale-watching excursion he was leading, he would always point to the shore and announce, “I work at a great little school right over there.”

I met Al two months before he died. It was his last “Natural History of Marin” class, an eight-week course that comprised field trips to various ecological niches in the northern California county of Marin—chaparral community, redwood forest, salt marsh, riparian habitat. That first time in the field with him, up at the top of Mt. Tamalpais, on a cold, clear February day, I felt strangely ecstatic, like everything I needed in the world was right there. He treated me and everybody else as if he had known us for years. He talked and talked and talked, in his soothing baritone, never in a hurry, and never repeating himself. Everything was new, everything was interesting. It was all about having a good time and arousing our senses.

“This is a California nutmeg, Torreya californica—you can recognize it by the sharp needles. We used to say they were sharp enough to draw blood, but then the Boy Scouts started sticking eachother with them, so we had to stop saying that.” He is excited when we see some ravens doing their swoopy pre-nuptial aerobatics, and he tells us how to distinguish them from crows. “Ravens are solitary; crows like to hang out in groups. And they sound different: crows caw, ravens croak,” he says. Then we listen.

“These are just kids goofing off,” Al tells us, as we watch the birds dip and dive over our heads. “They’re not actually courting now, they’re just practicing for when they grow up.” He shows us the soaproot plant, and tells us how the Native Americans would pulverize the root into a lathery substance for washing; and about its delicate evening bloom, held aloft by a tall stem: “I remember lots of times coming back from Point Reyes in the early evening, and seeing millions of these along the side of the road, all these little white stars, bobbing in the breeze.” He addresses his story to individuals, talking while looking at faces, into eyes.

His presence is incredibly gentle. His quiet joyfulness bubbles over all the time, and it makes us feel giddy and euphoric just to be around him. He is having so much fun that we can’t help but get enthused ourselves. He makes us feel like giggling. Everything is fresh and exciting. “Look at this you guys, this is really neat,” he says, with a grin in his voice, about some little plant or creature. He tells a little story about a plant, ties it in to something else, and then reminds us what a nice day it is, and how lucky we are to be here together, sharing the wonders of nature. He tells us how much he likes what he does: “I was just a poor Mexican kid, growing up in south Stockton,” he says. “A lot of my friends ended up in jail, or dead. I could have been one of those kids, but I was just lucky.”

Al has on a worn pair of tan cords and a T-shirt with a faded “Baja California” on the front. He has, as always, his hand lens hanging on a piece of fat blue yarn around his neck. He wears a tattered backpack, full of books and extra reading glasses, whose salty encrustations bear witness to countless maritime excursions. He carries a well-worn copy of his bible, John T. Howell’s Marin Flora, which has virtually none of the actual covers showing, for all of the duct tape holding it together. The corners are mashed in and softly rounded, and “Molina” is artfully printed in serif block letters on the side. He refers to the book often.

He is six feet tall and barrel-chested, sturdy, trim in the waist and legs. His large dark face is framed at the bottom by a mostly white Abe Lincoln beard, and his thinning hair is scraggly and longish. His teeth are crooked and his nose is too big. He likes to be tan—it means outdoors, hot weather, and being Mexican Indian. He has a big unabashed grin that he wears a lot. He is loaded with charisma.

“There was something about him,” I heard many women say. “All the women had crushes on him,” said one woman, “and I’m including myself in that number.” One woman said it bluntly: “He was a stud!” The men feel the attraction too, but they describe it differently. “His enthusiasm was contagious,” they say, or, “He had a very comforting presence.” But one thing is for certain: He has an enchanting effect on people—men and women alike.

Some describe him as soft-spoken, while others call him robust. He is both. “He had a big strong body but he was soft on the inside,” says one woman. His large face is sensuous: he has soft deep brown eyes, full dark lips. His brown hands are so beautiful as to be arresting; he picks up and holds each living thing with utter gentleness, and points with long graceful fingers in a way that imparts magic to the object he holds. His actions are fluid, his voice soothing. He doesn’t ever call attention to himself—he wants only for you to see the things he loves, the way he sees them. There is such tranquility around him, and yet the atmosphere is charged with his electricity.

“I think this is Viola adunca, but I’m not sure.” Down he goes onto his belly in the dirt, and with his hand lens carefully peers into the flower’s insides to look for tiny clues which will tell this viola from another. It occurs to me that he could say, “it’s either this or that flower,” or he could make his best guess and save himself the trouble. But he takes this business seriously, and he always gives it his all.

As we walk along, we disperse a bit, like little ducklings in a pond, but as soon as Al opens his mouth, we all scurry back to gather around. His pleasant voice flows over us like a river of words. He tells us the name of every new plant we encounter. Common name, family name, Latin name, always in that order, to aid our recall.

“This is the California buckeye, my favorite tree. Hippocastanaceae family. Aesculus californicus. It has a polygamous flower—it’s male at the end but the rest is female. How would you like to be male at one end and female at the other?” he teases. With every plant there is a story: “The seed is a fish stupefier, but it’s non-toxic; so the Indians liked it because they could grind it up and put it in the water to help them catch the fish.”

As we mosey along, he keeps a tranquil mood, talking not loudly, but so we can hear, stopping to tell a story, pass around something to smell or taste, or just look up and see how it all fits together. “When you first see all the plants and trees together up on the hill, it looks kind of like a mosaic. But then when the individual plants get to be your friends, you can recognize them at a distance. It makes the mosaic more interesting.” He identifies every flower, shrub, and tree as we take furious notes. He wisecracks, “When you go home and look this stuff up in the book, you’ll find out I was just making it all up.”

Whatever he turns his attention to becomes special, imbued with a quality of dreamlike beauty we remember from childhood. We stop and gather as he shows us the tiny white urn-shaped flower of the manzanita. He has us all look inside the small opening with our hand lenses. It is remarkable, so small, yet so perfect. “Remember when you were a little kid, and you’d get those Easter eggs that were hollow and had a little scene inside? That’s what these remind me of.” He waits while we all look; none of us will soon forget the quarter-inch long treasure.

When Al Molina died on April 6, 1997, at the age of sixty-two, we were not at all prepared. We couldn’t imagine the world without him. Will the wildflowers bloom at Chimney Rock next spring without him to herald them? Will we lose our ability to see without him here to show us? Who will fill the void? A deep, hollow pain settled upon our hearts.

Over the course of his thirty-six years of teaching, the number of people Al touched grew into the thousands. Many of them found their lives transformed. Some went on to get master’s degrees and doctorates. Many wrote books, or became naturalists and teachers themselves. Some left the corporate world to devote their lives to wildlife research. Some, like me, were simply awakened.

The hallway in front of Al’s office at the College of Marin was piled high with flowers and offerings, and his door was plastered with poems, notes, and anguished scribblings. “Please let there be a beyond for you,” one student wrote in a poem. Another wrote, “I didn’t know you were in my heart so deep until I couldn’t say hi anymore.”

A picture of a breaching whale was taped up on the door, with these lines written at the bottom:

From “A Barefoot Boy with Shoes On: The Life of Naturalist Al Molina” (unpublished), by Annette Nibley.

Al Molina grew up in the Central Valley of California, the son of Mexican immigrants. Al’s father, Gilberto, did stoop labor in the fields, and his mother, Rosie, worked at a dry cleaner. From a very early age, Al learned to take care of himself at home, but there was never a lack of love in the Molina house.

“Pollito, lo siento,” Rosie would say as she left for work. “I wish I didn’t have to go. Be a good boy.”

The one thing Gilberto and Rosie wanted most for their children was that they have a better chance in life, and they were smart enough to know that the key to this was an education, which both of them lacked. From the time their children were small, Gilberto and Rosie impressed upon them that

college would be a part of their future, no questions asked. For children of immigrants at that time, this was highly unusual. But because of the resolve of their mother and father, Al, his brother Hugh, and his sister Esther all went to college, all got advanced degrees, and all became teachers themselves.

As a young man, Gilberto Molina, Al’s father, left his family home in Michoacán, a lush, mountainous province in southern Mexico, at a time when danger and instability wracked the country, following the revolution of 1910. Many Mexican peasants came to the southwestern United States at that time, looking for work and a better way of life. Gilberto traveled with his uncle and cousin the sixteen hundred miles to Los Angeles, a bustling city, full of cars and trolleys, and people in a hurry. The men brought from home two old guitars and a mandolin—and a repertoire of corridos learned from their fathers—and made a living entertaining the patrons of smoky bars on the edge of the city.

It was in Los Angeles that Gilberto met Rosie. Rose McAlpine was a mere teenager when she met and married Gilberto. Although she was many years younger, she towered over him, but these disparities did not discourage Gilberto. The difference in their heritage was another matter altogether—not for them, but for their parents. Rosie was born in Mexico, but her mother was Spanish and her and father was Irish. In their minds, their European heritage was superior, and Mr. and Mrs. McAlpine considered Gilberto Molina to be rather uncivilized. Rosie had pale skin and soft features—making Gilberto seem all the more swarthy by contrast. Short, sturdy, and very dark, Gilberto was a full-blooded Tarascan Indian—one of the few Mexican Indian tribes who were never assimilated by the Aztecs. Gilberto and Rosie wed, but without the blessing of Rosie’s parents.

Gilberto and Rosie left Los Angeles for the Central Valley, where jobs working in the fields were plentiful. Agriculture was rapidly becoming a booming business in the Central Valley, and the burgeoning towns dotting it were becoming home to immigrant Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Irish, Dutch, Italians, Armenians, East Indians, and “Okies” (the Dust Bowl refugees of the American Midwest). The young newlyweds settled in Stockton, went to work in the fields, and started a family right away. Huberto was the first child to come along, and three years later came a girl, Esther. A third child died in infancy. Then Alfonso, six years younger than Esther, was born on February 2, 1935. Alfonso was the much-adored baby of the family, and Rosie’s favorite.

The Molinas bought a house in French Camp—the poor rural neighborhood at the south end of town—at the corner of Eighth Street and Lincoln. A lot of immigrants lived in French Camp, where the streets were unpaved but folks proudly kept their yards immaculate. The floors of the Molinas’ ramshackle house slanted this way and that, and the kitchen was nothing more than a flimsy lean-to in the back with a couple of gas burners and a table, but Rosie kept it spotlessly clean.

Money was always a concern, and even on the most frugal diet of arroz, frijoles, and tortillas, five were a lot of mouths to feed. Rosie got a good-paying job at the dry cleaner in town, pressing clothes and filling the big drums with chemical solvents. If someone present at the time could have foreseen the future, they would have advised her not to take the job, which would ultimately have lethal consequences for her.

Life in the valley had its difficulties. Sometimes the “peat wind” would blow—a big black cloud on the horizon giving warning of the dreadful visitor to come—a wind dense with particles of ground-up leaves and soil, churned and ground up by the Caterpillar tractors for years, so fine that when it blew it permeated everything—blew right in through cracks around the windows, clung to drapes, got into cupboards, and even into closed boxes inside them.

Before Alfonso was in school, Gilberto took him to the fields, sat him down at the end of a row in the shade of a canvas tarpaulin, along with the kids of other workers, and gave him a pad and pencil to draw with. Alfonso liked it when Gilberto started at the far end of the row and worked toward him; that way, every time he looked up, his father was closer than before.

The Molinas didn’t have anything to give their children in terms of material comforts—the kids wore shoes until their toes were peeking through to the outside—but one thing they gave was more valuable than anything money could buy: they made sure all three kids got an education. Many immigrant children in those days never made their way into the school system at all, or if they did, often dropped out to go to work in the fields with their parents. But Rosie wouldn’t have that for her children.

Even though she herself had not finished grammar school—Gilberto hadn’t either—she came from an educated family, and she understood the difference schooling would make in the lives of her children. She read to them, helped them with their homework, and impressed upon them that school was a great privilege—that education conferred a big advantage in life. Alfonso understood at an early age that high school, and even college, was in his future.

Alfonso was not scared about his first day of school, even though he only spoke Spanish. He knew how to spell, and a few words in English—his sister Esther had taught him—and so when the teacher asked his name, he proudly replied, “M-O-L-I-N-A!” He was a polite, quiet kid—always considerate of other people—and there was something about his easy, gentle manner that drew other children to want to know him.

Learning to read and learning English came easily for Alfonso—his mother had read to him constantly when he was a toddler—and he loved library books. He loved to read about the ocean, and see pictures of the impossibly big, blue expanse of water and the peculiar animals that lived underneath it. He thought the ocean was like the Eiffel Tower: he knew it existed, but somewhere else—not in his world. But in his head it remained a favorite fantasy: someday finding the ocean to be real, its sparkly surface belying a world of mystery underneath.

One day after school the teacher surprised the kids by taking them to get their own library cards. This would be a day a grown-up Al would look back on as a day that changed his life. Never again would he worry about being poor, because learning—the access to knowledge—was worth more to him than anything money could buy. He would go to the library every week, load up a potato sack with as many books as he was allowed to check out, and lug it home over his shoulder.

Rosie and Gilberto left for work at the crack of dawn, and with his much older siblings already away at college, Alfonso learned to get himself up and dressed, make his own bed, cook himself a decent breakfast, and clean up his dishes. Off he’d go to school, and the still-empty house awaited his return.

Alfonso befriended a nice kid at school named Vernon Dander, who lived just up on Seventh Street, a few blocks away. They did everything together—roamed the neighborhood on their balloon-tire bikes, explored the wash for frogs, collected bottles to turn in at the Chinese grocer for a few pennies. Sometimes they cashed in immediately, and got a pack of Kool-Aid to eat dry from the envelope. “Let’s save up twenty-five pennies and split a strawberry milkshake,” Vern would say. When they had enough pennies saved, they rode their bikes a few blocks on sun-softened asphalt to the air-conditioned soda fountain, where they gulped an icy-cold shake, made with strawberries fresh off the vine, that filled both boys’ glasses to the rim.

Heat was a fact of life in the valley, and when the ice man came around at the end of his rounds, Alfonso and Vernon would shout when they saw the truck coming down the street.

“The ice man!” they yelled, as they ran alongside, knowing that when he stopped, the ice man would let them scoop up the dregs of the slippery cold chips from the bottom of the bin, which they would gulp down or press against their overheated foreheads.

Vernon’s dad had a good job with the phone company, and his mother stayed home and took care of the household. Alfonso liked the way it smelled of fresh-baked cookies at Vern’s house after school. He figured this was how it was in white families—Vern must have had some advantage coming from this kind of household, since he was not only the top student in school but the best athlete as well. Alfonso wondered if it wouldn’t be of some usefulness to appear more like an All-American kid; he dropped “Alfonso” and began introducing himself as “Al.”

Vern’s dad started up a Boy Scout troop. Al didn’t fit the Norman Rockwell image of a Boy Scout, but then, neither did most of the kids in the little troop. Al couldn’t afford the regulation tan shirt, but he wasn’t the only one. Like the other boys who were poor, on meeting day he wore his best T-shirt and tied the red scarf over his shoulders.

Al liked making new friends, but what he really loved were the camping trips. He loved being outside—he had camped overnight once with his dad when they rode the hauler’s truck out to Manteca to pick melons, and he had loved sleeping under the stars, having a dinner of potatoes and onions fried over a popping campfire—but before Scouts, he had never seen an acre of dirt that hadn’t been plowed under for a profit.

With a few rations stuffed in their knapsacks, Al’s and his troopmates scampered down the railroad tracks from French Camp to Littlejohns Creek, where they set up camp in an old stand of gnarled Valley Oaks, one of few such thickets in the valley that had so far been spared the grading machine. Al felt a tug at his heart—there was something sacred about these ancient trees, he was sure of it—and while the other boys were busily setting up camp, roasting marshmallows, and playing jokes on each other, Al got lost in observing his new surroundings—he found new birds, new flowers, and so many strange new critters down at the creek. That night, Al secretly sensed there was something of his destiny being whispered to him in the rustlings of the wise old oaks.

When the troop had raised enough gas money for a more distant outing, they traveled westward, and camped high atop Mount Diablo, where they listened to the howling of coyotes and watched a dusky full moon rise above the carpet of clouds below. And they traveled eastward, climbing the steep road into the Sierra Nevada to Yosemite, where Al and Vern learned about glacial valleys, and then pushed their bikes halfway up the steep rim trail and burned out their brakes coming down.

But it was Al’s first glimpse of the ocean that he would remember as long as he lived. The occasion was a statewide Boy Scout assembly in San Francisco, concluding with a picnic at Ocean Beach, and the reality exceeded even his grandiose expectations.

There it was in front of his eyes, reaching clear to the horizon and beyond, with its ceaseless movement, the wind painting varying rhythms on its vast blue canvas, as the hypnotic glintings of the surface chop gave way to pounding surf that sent spray high into the air. Al couldn’t help wondering what made the waves—what magic hand was at work here. It was so powerful, and held so many secrets in its cold, dark depths, and yet it was so sparkly, so lively, so welcoming on its surface. He remembered touching all the oceans on the globe in his classroom, running his finger from one to another without having to lift his hand, and realizing that they were all connected—that the Earth really has one big ocean, and this is it.

As the old school bus chugged over the hill, back to the inland territory of French Camp, and the sun set behind them, Al tried to recall all the feelings to imprint them in his mind. He thought of the magnificent swooping seagulls, and their wistful cries. He thought of the feel of hot sand under his feet, the pungent smell of kelp washed up on the beach, and the way it felt to touch the slimy stuff and pop its plump air bladders between his fingers. As they drew nearer to home, and the familiar smell of cut grass roused him from his daydream, Al promised himself that, someday, he would return.

Al knew by the time he was thirteen that he wanted to teach biology for a living. He said so in his elementary school yearbook, McKinley Memories, in 1948, the year he graduated from the eighth grade. Throughout his life, Al’s inborn interest in nature had been broadened by other influences—his mother’s encouragement and emphasis on education, his teachers, and his outdoor experiences with Scouts. But it was a serendipitous encounter that finally tied it all into a bundle.

Al and his classmates piled in a school bus and headed up to Stockton College, the local junior college at the north end of town, for a field trip designed to get the kids thinking about their further education. The kids tromped through the print shop and the cabinet shop, but when they got to the biology lab, Al was rapt as Dr. Arnold, the biology professor, showed them the microscopes, the puzzle-like cut-away models of flowers and cells, the colorful charts of mysterious biological processes, and the wall of shelves holding glass bottles full of preserved bugs and worms.

Dr. Arnold took notice of this especially curious boy. After his talk, while the other kids were single-filing out of the laboratory, Dr. Arnold tapped Al on the shoulder and asked, “How would you like to see the aquarium animals?” Al was so excited he could hardly contain himself. There, in a dim room where aquaria gave off a mystical glow, he saw all the creatures he had read about in his picture books—anemones with their translucent wiggling tentacles, starfish hugging the rocks, a wary eel curled under a rock ledge. Outwardly, he tried to appear well-mannered and calm, but inside he was leaping with joy.

“Here I was, this grungy little Mexican kid with a torn T-shirt,” Al would later say of this occasion, “and this guy John Arnold took me aside to tell me teaching biology was a real job people do, that you could make it your living. It hadn’t occurred to me before that.”

Besides Vern, Al had another good friend in the neighborhood, Vince Morales. Vince was Mexican, and his father was a laborer like Gilberto. Like Rosie and Gilberto, Vince’s parents had never finished grammar school. Vince did not aspire to college or getting out to see the world—he envisioned himself learning a trade and raising a family in Stockton.

But Al liked Vince, and they did stuff together that Vern wouldn’t dream of. Once they concocted an elaborate scheme to distract the grocery store owner and filch a whole box of bananas from out front. They occasionally pilfered a watermelon that was left unguarded in the back of a harvest truck. Facing another Christmas without a tree, Vince had a suggestion: “Hey, Al! I know a way we can get that tree for my family! Follow me!” They liberated a scrawny white fir off a tree lot and dragged it behind them as they fled the scene on their bikes.

In his philosophical reflections, Al would later say that he could have easily wound up as one of the kids from his neighborhood who went to jail. Plenty of their friends ended up there, or even dead from drug overdoses and suicides, but it’s doubtful Al would have been one of them. For one thing, Al and Vince had kind hearts—they enjoyed putting smiles on the faces of little orphan kids with their community service clubs a lot more than they ever enjoyed gain at the expense of others. And for another thing, they had good sense. This they got from their parents, who taught them what it meant to be good people.

A simple code of behavior was expected: “Do the right thing”—not that they always heeded it, but it was always in their minds. These were attentive parents—watching out for their own kids and their friends’ kids as well—and no youngster could stray too far under their watchful eye. The role of the parental involvement was clear: “Our moms kept us from going bad, and our dads showed us how to work,” says Vince Morales.

But still, Al might not have set his sights very high if it hadn’t been for Vernon Dander. Vern was the top student in school, a good athlete, involved in student government—the all-American boy. Al was pushed to his best academic performance by his friendly competition with Vern. Vern aspired to the Naval Academy at Annapolis—his future was getting out of Stockton, getting educated, and seeing the world.

“Vince was where I came from, and Vern was where I was going,” Al would later say of these relationships. Vince reminded Al of his heritage—of his father—the laborer or tradesman, satisfied with a minimum amount of education. But Vern brought out another part of Al, the high-achiever, the goal-setter, the altruist. Because of his friendship with Vern, Al was able to see himself as a competent person with the potential to change the world in some small but significant way.

After the tenth grade, every student in every neighborhood of Stockton left his local high school and became part of a huge eleventh-grade class at Stockton College, a combination high school/junior college, as part of an experimental plan to encourage students to stay enrolled beyond high school graduation. The poor kids rode the bus in the from the south, and the richer, mostly white kids came in from the north. But the two populations didn’t clash—they blended into all kinds of affiliations and friendships.

Stockton was a true melting pot in those days. It was 1950—a decade before the Civil Rights Act, and several decades before the nation was engulfed in “multiculturalism”—and here was a blending of all ethnicities without a hint of self-consciousness about it. The friendships were all that mattered to these kids, and their parents had a saying: “There’d be a knock at the door and you’d never know what color was going to be there.” A glance at the Stockton College yearbooks of that era would support the assertion that Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Whites at Stockton College were all equally represented in student government, sports, activities, and academic honors.

The goal of Al’s group of friends was to have every hole punched on their student activity cards by the end of the year, and sometimes studying was sacrificed for the cause. Al participated in all kinds of groups—social, athletic, civic, academic: in his first two years, he was quarterback of the football team, he belonged to several clubs, and he was in all the variety shows.

One thing that everyone knew about Al was that he loved to entertain people. At the orphans’ home, when they went to deliver refurbished toys, Al relieved the awkwardness by doing a solo flea circus act until the kids were in stitches. And he gained notoriety around school for a wickedly funny paper he wrote about the evil person who stole his favorite pencil, a paper that gave the teacher a case of the giggles like no one had ever seen. Al was funny, fun to be around, and had a knack for lightening up any tense situation by telling a joke or a story. His humor and generous manner made him extremely popular Stockton College. At the end of his twelfth grade year, Al ran for student body president and won.[1]

On a sweltering September day in 1952, the stadium was packed for the first pep rally of the year. Al had his speech prepared—his first as student body president—and the new song leaders were practicing their routines. Al noticed a girl in a cheerleading uniform kneeling beside a low hedge with some bright red pompoms on the ground nearby. Bev Tyrrell was one of the new song leaders about to perform, and her tummy was not handling the nervousness very well. Al went over to the bushes and knelt down beside her.

“I’m fine, really,” Bev answered, but her face was pale and she was too weak to get up. She was embarrassed that her nerves had gotten the better of her. Al put his hand gently on her shoulder.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “They’ll love you. Just relax and have fun. Once you start, you’ll be having too much fun to worry.”

When she was feeling better, Al helped her to her feet. Bev couldn’t believe this boy would be such a gentleman, and show such concern for her, when he himself was about to make a speech in front of the whole student body for the very first time. He made quite a first impression on her. And it was mutual: when she went out onto the field to do her routine, Al couldn’t take his eyes off her.

At first Bev thought Al was a little odd—he liked to stare out the window at birds—but she was intrigued. Here he had the most powerful position in the school government—as a thirteenth grader, no less—and was quarterback on the football team.

“It’s no big deal,” he would always say about his accomplishments. His humility impressed her. She was impressed with a lot about him, in fact—the respect with which he treated his parents, for instance, or the fact that he gave up his free time to take young Scouts camping at Littlejohns Creek.

Al Molina was a charmer, although he would not have believed such a statement in a million years. He thought his nose was too big and he had too many teeth to fit in his mouth, and he was always self-conscious about not having enough money to buy nice clothes. But his appeal went far deeper than looks. His respect for all people—all living things, for that matter—shone through in everything he did. He had the gift of gab, and said clever and witty things that delighted people. He was always ready to smile, but never to phony effect. He was as warm as a person could be, and he made people feel comfortable being themselves.

Bev wasn’t Al’s first girlfriend by any means. There was the nice Italian girl who lived at the dump owned by her father. There was the skinny blonde with the beautiful singing voice, and the well-endowed girl about whom all the boys had impure thoughts. But Bev was different. She was the kind of girl Al thought was—for him, anyway—unattainable. Not only did she have it all—good looks, personality, brains, integrity—but she was from the north side of town—the “right” side of the tracks, and Al’s friends knew as soon as they saw Bev’s freckle face and blue eyes that Al was a goner. Al invited Bev to the homecoming dance, she accepted, and thus began a love story that would endure for decades. He never in his life quite got over the fact such a good woman had found her heart’s desire in him.

By all accounts, Al did an outstanding job in his first year as student body president. Students and faculty alike wrote glowing praise in his yearbook—for example, “You’ve done more for Stockton College than just about anyone, ” and, “Best wishes to the best president this school ever had.” The school paper, the Collegian, ran a story on the front page: “This is the first time in the history of the student body that a 13^th grader holds the top office and is eligible to serve a second term,” said the article. Al had doubts about whether he wanted to run again. “It would be fun and I’d really like to have a second go at it, but there are my grades to keep up, and it’s a hard thing to do in this job,” Al told the Collegian. But he did run again, and again he won.

His last year at Stockton College, Al concentrated more on his office and his grades than on amusement: Bev wasn’t on campus to distract him; after she graduated from twelfth grade, she left Stockton College to go to beauty school. His friends were gone, too: Vern was accepted into the Naval Academy and moved away, and Vince left school early to take an auto body apprenticeship. Al wanted to transfer to a four-year college, but the only one in Stockton, the College of the Pacific, was an expensive private school and out of the question.

A football scout from Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, up in redwood country, was interested in recruiting Al and some of his buddies from the Stockton team. Al thought it would be great to play for Humboldt, but the part that cinched it for him was that the football team were guaranteed jobs at the local plywood factory. This offer was a godsend, and both Al and Bev knew he couldn’t pass it up, even though it meant they would be apart (in those days, couples kept the propriety of separate living quarters until they were married). It would be difficult to endure the separation, but they knew Al would never have another offer like this.

“I have to go, sweetheart, you know I do,” Al said to Bev while he was preparing to leave. “But don’t worry about us—You know there’s no other woman in the world for me,” he assured her. “And besides, between school, work, and football, I won’t have any time to be looking around, anyway!” he joked.

They made an agreement to remain true to each other, although both of them knew it was utterly unnecessary, because neither of them could imagine ever being with anyone else for the rest of their lives.

Al graduated from Stockton College in 1954, with an A.A. in biology, after which he left his Stockton life behind. His new life was as a student at a good four-year college, right by the ocean, both of which were dreams come true for Al. Arcata sat at the edge of Humboldt Bay, which was separated from the Pacific Ocean by a long sand spit. Humboldt State was a liberal arts and sciences school, also offering programs in the trades usual to the area: forestry and lumbering, dairying, fisheries, and conservation. It was a small, friendly school with a cozy atmosphere and a sense of community between students and faculty, who were addressed by catchy nicknames like “Pop,” “Mac,” and “Murf.”

The Stockton College football recruits caused quite a stir among the locals—this big bunch of guys in red jackets blowing into town on a warm fall breeze—and the newspaper interviewed them all for a front page story. It told about Al and his buddies and their jobs on the graveyard shift at the Arcata Lumber Company—eleven o’clock at night until seven in the morning, five nights a week—power-sanding plywood until their ears were ringing and their arms were numb to the shoulder. At the end of their shift, they caught a quick breakfast at The Coop and maybe a brief nap, and then went to class. But they were always tired, and could sleep anywhere; taking a girl to the movies on a Saturday night was an excuse for a two-hour nap.

The guys all worked hard, but Al seemed to have a greater sense of purpose in being at Humboldt than his friends did, and he didn’t indulge in much collegiate socializing. He was completely focused on his education, and every spare minute he had was spent studying. Between the plywood factory job and school, Al had no time for clubs or student government, and even his football participation lasted only a semester.

Al chose a major called Wildlife Management, a program founded and run by Dr. William “Doc” Lanphere. But Doc’s true passion was botany, and Al soon found himself likewise smitten with that subject. Al loved Doc Lanphere’s plant taxonomy class and worked very hard to get an A. But at the end of the semester, Lanphere said to him, “Molina, I’d love to give you an A in this class, but there are four students who have higher scores than you do, and you know I only give four As.” Al was terribly disappointed, even a little angry, but it didn’t mean he didn’t respect Doc’s decision. Al knew Doc was a good teacher, even though he could be cantankerous at times.

Although he was very busy with studying and work, Al missed Bev terribly. She was in Stockton, living at home and working at a beauty salon, and they both looked forward all week to their Saturday-night phone call, but it wasn’t enough. Bev went to Arcata for a visit over semester break in February, and when she got home she told her parents, “I’m getting married as soon as it can be planned.” Her mother and aunt advised that, if pressed, all the plans could be made in two months. Bev said, “Okay then, April.”

In a situation paralleling that of Al’s own parents, this proposed betrothal did not meet with the complete agreement of Bev’s folks, who did not envision their daughter marrying a Mexican man.[2] They did give their blessing, however, and on Saturday, the 17^th of April, 1955, Al and Bev were married in a formal ceremony at Morris Chapel in Stockton, on the campus of the University of the Pacific. The newlyweds had only time for a one-night honeymoon in the redwoods on the way back to Arcata—Al had to be in class first thing Monday morning.

The first year was hard. They were broke, and to make things worse, they hardly saw each other. Bev worked all day at a jewelry shop, Al studied in the evening and then worked all night, and their sleeping schedules didn’t coincide. They rented part of a small Victorian house on H Street that had been divided up into awkward little units: from the front door, you had to cross through the bedroom to get to the living room and kitchen. They were always tiptoeing past each other in bed, because one of them was always in it.

It was the last year of Al’s bachelor’s work; he and the other “wildlifers” were beginning to surmise that the fields of conservation and management weren’t really taking off as they hoped, and they worried there might not be jobs, so most of them changed majors. Al changed his to conservation education and life science. He took classes in secondary education, botany, bacteriology, and mammalian physiology.

In the summer of 1956, Al took marine biology from Fred Telonicher. Telonicher was considered the guru of marine biology of the north coast at that time. He had been teaching at Humboldt since 1927, almost thirty years—he and his wife Margaret had helped Doc Lanphere get the wildlife program started by hatching pheasant eggs in their oven. He also taught biology and zoology, but marine life was his passion. The marine lab at Humboldt State was still a decade off—it wouldn’t be built until 1966—but it would eventually bear Fred Telonicher’s name.

Telonicher didn’t have a doctorate and wasn’t the least bit embarrassed about it. He didn’t believe in titles—he believed that dedication and passion were what separated the men from the boys. Telonicher was all-business when it came to his classes, and he would have loved to have more students like Al Molina, though he didn’t see many who were quite that dedicated. Al’s teachers all recognized in him a special passion, a special drive – science was what Al lived to do.

In July of 1956, Al Molina graduated from Humboldt State College with a baccalaureate in Life and General Sciences and a minor in Conservation Education. The high school in nearby Eureka offered him a job right away—but not to teach biology, or botany, or even general science. They wanted him to teach drivers’ ed. He and Bev were barely making ends meet, and they needed the money. Rationalizing that he had to start somewhere, that at least he would be teaching, and that eventually the school would have a science opening, he accepted the offer.

When Doc Lanphere heard word of this, he roared, “Molina, come in here and shut the door!” Doc lambasted him up one side and down the other, bellowing about what a dumb idea it was, and told him that if he didn’t go on to get a master’s degree, he would be volunteering to go through life with one hand tied behind his back. Bev agreed, even though she knew it would be tough. Eventually Al was won over, and the young couple resolved to do whatever it took to pay for another two years of school.

Bev got a better-paying job at a beauty salon, and Al was earning a little bit student teaching, and they were scraping by. They had a close-knit social circle made up of young married couples in very similar circumstances to their own. “What’s mine is ours” was the motto that they lived by. The wives worked and the husbands went to school; it was a team effort, and nobody felt like they were sacrificing. They were all broke, but that didn’t stop them from having fun. They all got together at somebody’s apartment, brought something they had on hand for pot luck, and entertained themselves with cards and music. The Molinas’ first Christmas dinner was mushroom soup and toast, but they didn’t realize they were lacking anything. They remembered it as a very good time of their lives.

At the age of twenty-two, in the last year of his degree work, Al was offered a position at Humboldt State College as Instructor of Biological Sciences. In June of 1958, he was awarded his master’s degree in secondary education with an emphasis in life science.[3] His close relationship with Doc Lanphere and his love of plants nudged him in the direction of botany, and his thesis, entitled “Botanical Microtechnique,” outlines thoroughly the processes involved in preparing slides of plant material for instructional purposes. Pretty dry stuff, but at the end, Al includes a quote that reveals something of the kind of teacher he might make: “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brains is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.”

Two weeks after graduation, Al received a letter from Uncle Sam: He was drafted into the U.S. Army. He would be at Ft. Ord before he knew what hit him.

“What are we going to do?” Bev exclaimed. It seemed so unfair, especially since there was no active engagement of the armed forces at the time. The Korean War was over and Vietnam had not started yet. It just seemed like such a horrible twist of fate that their plans would be thrown into disarray. The Molinas were all prepared to settle into their new life in Arcata, with Al finally finished with school and earning a good salary teaching biology at Humboldt State.

But it wasn’t to be. Bev went back to Stockton and lived with her parents while Al was in basic training, and regardless of where Al was assigned, they planned to return to Arcata after his term of duty and pick up where they left off.

After basic training, Al performed so well on the Army placement tests as to be classified HAP, or High Aptitude Personnel. The result was an assignment so cushy—two years at Letterman Army Hospital in the Presidio of San Francisco—that his sergeant couldn’t believe it and teased him mercilessly about it. Bev came back from Stockton, and she and Al set about finding an apartment in the area.

Al worked as a technician in the radioisotope clinic of the hospital. Medical use of radioactive isotopes was a brand-new practice—nobody really knew what this stuff might do to you—and Al would put on his lead apron and give a patient a dose of radioactive iodine on a long-handled hook, and then trace the path of the isotopes through the body and compile data. The technology he was learning was unknown even to most doctors at the time, and Al gave lectures and instructed physicians from all over the country in the use of this new medical treatment.

Al was very good at his job, and he was wonderful with the cancer patients that he worked with. He considered going to medical school—the Army would pick up the tab—and becoming a doctor. But there was something about Al that made him ill-suited for this line of work: He was far too sensitive, and found that dealing with sick and dying people, especially the children, ripped his heart out. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep, or had bad dreams. It took too great of an emotional toll on him, and he and Bev both knew it. So after his two-year tour at Letterman, Al expected to go back to Humboldt as planned, and accept the standing offer to teach biology there.

While Al was at Letterman, Al and Bev lived in a tiny apartment in Mill Valley—so small that friends were always asking the question, “Where’s the rest of it?” It was fine for the two of them, but when they learned Bev was expecting, they moved into a house on Poplar Avenue just off Shoreline Highway. They loved the Bay Area, and they spent much of their time outdoors, making explorations of nearby Mt. Tamalpais, Point Reyes, and Bolinas Lagoon. One day they headed over the hill to the College of Marin in Kentfield to look for a tennis court. It was a lovely place, and they held hands as they wandered around the grassy expanses of the peaceful little campus, with its low, tile-roofed buildings nestled among the old oak trees, the deep green shoulder of Mt. Tam resting serenely behind. “This is a nice place,” Bev said. Al agreed, and on a lark, he applied for a job.

In 1962, when Al Molina had been teaching at the College of Marin for two years, he met a young marine biologist by the name of Gordon Chan at a meeting of local biology teachers. Chan, a teacher at Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo, was working on a doctorate in marine biology at UC Berkeley; he had in the prior three years received grants to study at three of the top marine stations on the West Coast: Hopkins, Friday Harbor, and Pacific. When he met Al, Chan was in the process of doing a long-term study of marine life at Duxbury Reef in Bolinas, at the southernmost tip of the Point Reyes peninsula.

Coincidentally, Bolinas happened to be the spot where the College of Marin owned a couple of old buildings that they had purchased from the Coast Guard in 1955. The buildings, a picturesque two-story home and an adjacent boathouse, were being underutilized by the school—a couple of arts and crafts classes met out there— but the property was twenty miles of winding roads removed from the Kentfield campus, and the administration didn’t care much about it. Al knew about the property; he went to Bolinas often to poke around in the tidepools off the point, and he had often wondered if something more interesting couldn’t be done with the buildings on Wharf Road.

The Coast Guard had erected the buildings as a rescue station in 1917 because of the ships that were crashing into the enormous shale reef that jutted out a half-mile into the sea at the tip of the peninsula. Steamships headed south in the fog on their way to the Golden Gate couldn’t see the reef, which was named “Duxbury,” for one ship that ran aground on it in 1849. The reputation of Duxbury Reef grew to fantastic proportions, and no ship’s captain in his right mind would go anywhere near its “dreaded fangs,” as one writer of the time said of it. By the time the Coast Guard station in Bolinas was completed, Duxbury Reef was being avoided so effectively that there was never another major shipwreck there. The Coast Guard abandoned the place at the end of WWII, and the buildings were declared surplus. The Coast Guard sold the buildings to the College of Marin for one dollar, on the condition that they always be used for educational purposes only.

It was on this same Duxbury Reef, the largest shale reef in North America, that Gordon Chan was conducting his study of marine life in 1962. When Chan told Al about his study, a light went on in Al’s head. At the time, marine biology was not being offered at the College of Marin, but Al had always held the hope that one day he would teach it. This set of serendipitous circumstances provided Al the perfect opportunity to act on his dream. After brainstorming with Chan for several months, the two young men came up with a plan. On April 25, 1963, Al submitted a forty-page report to the Junior College Division of the California Department of Education proposing that he and Gordon Chan develop the Bolinas property into a marine biology teaching and research center.

Al applied for funding under the National Defense Education Act. The NDEA agreed to furnish half the money if the local school district would furnish the other half. The offer of matching federal money appealed to the college board of trustees, but perhaps more enticing was the visibility the project would bring the school. At that time, Stanford and University of the Pacific were the only northern California colleges with marine stations operating; if the Bolinas project were funded, the College of Marin would have a facility before even Berkeley, Davis, or Humboldt State. The marine station would put the humble junior college on the map—and the trustees gave it the green light.

That summer Al received a National Science Foundation grant to study with Joel Hedgpeth at UoP’s Pacific Marine Station, where Gordon Chan had studied a few years before. Hedgpeth is one of the most highly regarded biologists in the field: he had just published a book, Introduction to Seashore Life, about the shoreline environment of Northern California; and he had also revised two editions of Edward F. “Doc” Ricketts’ Between Pacific Tides, the bible of intertidal life of the Pacific coast of North America. Al’s dream was well on its way to becoming reality: in spring of 1964, with $100,000 in funding from various sources, construction of the Bolinas Marine Station was begun.

On June 22^nd, 1964, with reconstruction just barely begun, the pilot class at the Bolinas Marine Station convened. Twenty-seven college students gathered at the lab bleary-eyed in the pre-dawn chill, before heading out to the reef. “I know it’s hard to get out here so early, but it’s really worth it. You’ll see,” Al said. His heart was pounding as he recalled his days as a student at Humboldt, following Fred Telonicher onto the teeming reef at Arcata for his first thrilling introduction to tidepool life. But here he was, at the edge of the sea, waiting to take his own class of students onto the reef, while his marine lab was being built, and he found it all a bit hard to believe. He was grinning ear to ear.

The students made their way gingerly onto the massive exposed reef, and Al stopped and waited for the kids to gather around. “You don’t realize it, but you’re standing in the most densely populated life zone in the world. It’s the intertidal region, and it’s unlike anywhere else because sometimes it’s water and sometimes it’s land. The creatures that live in tidepools have to be able to tolerate living both under water and exposed to air. They also have to withstand the pounding of the waves.

“So you’re thinking, if it’s so harsh, why are so many things living here?” Al asked, and then he waited. “Food?” asked a student. “Exactly,” he replied. “The reason there is so much living here in the tidepools is that there is so much food.” He paused for a moment before going on. Al knew how to use pauses to good effect—just to let things sink in. He continued, in his gentle voice, “In most environments, food is scarcer than space, but in the intertidal, it’s the other way around.”

As distant breakers sent ripples of fresh seawater into the tidepools at their feet, Al continued. “So not only is every square inch of space covered by some plant or animal, but competition for sites is so fierce that some things are living on top other things.” He stooped down and picked up a rock to reveal several strange-looking worms. “A lot of guys, like these flatworms, and some crabs and things, live under rocks.” He replaces the rock carefully. “Some guys dig holes in this soft shale, and others live in crevices or gravel bars. Some critters, like hermit crabs, just move into somebody else’s house.”

Al went back and forth, one minute giving perspective on the large processes, and the next minute homing in on one little creature. He lifted a starfish off a rock and had everyone look with their hand lenses at the tiny pincers covering its back. “These pedicellariae are how he keeps himself clean. He’s constantly picking up anything that settles on his back and throwing it away. Who wants to let this guy nibble your arm?” Everyone wanted to try, and they giggled as the animal grabbed on to the hair on their forearms.

The sun was not yet over the crest of Bolinas Ridge, but the kids had forgotten all about how cold they were. Al got very excited when they found a nudibranch, which looked something like a slug. They carefully scooped it into a glass vial and looked at it through their hand lenses. It was covered with finger-like tentacles of coppery orange tipped with white. The translucent body had an electric-blue rim around its periphery and a bright orange stripe running down the middle. It was a gorgeous creature, its whole body undulating with color and motion. “Hermissenda crassicornis,” he told them, and explained its place in the taxonomic picture.

They all lost track of time, and meanwhile the tide had come in. They kids laughed and screamed as they got soaked to the waist making their way back to the beach. They all agreed the excursion was worth getting up early for, as Al had promised. In a few short hours a bigger picture had emerged for the students. Al had made them see how all life is dependent on other life, how these minute creatures and plants interact with one another, and how special they all are. One student captured the essence the tidepool visit: “Al showed us the hugeness of all the life that lives at the edge of the sea.”

By the summer of 1965, construction of the marine lab was completed. The original Coast Guard buildings were not demolished; they were actually perfectly suited to their new incarnation—the charming old two-story house for offices and library, and the boathouse for lab and classroom—so they were kept and refurbished, but remained close to their original 1917 appearance. Heating was installed in the main building so as to allow students to stay overnight; the little kitchen in the back was the warmest room in the house, however, and Al could be found there, in the chilly morning hours before tidepooling, brewing coffee and grilling pancakes for the students gathering around the small table.

Al and Gordon finished converting the boathouse into a teaching lab, installed lab equipment and aquaria, catalogued a marine sciences library, began a museum collection, and acquired some boats: two Boston Whalers—one they kept in Bolinas and one on Tomales Bay—and an old 31-foot diesel-powered cabin cruiser they got for $150 from state surplus. They named the cabin cruiser P.T. Wilson, after old Doc Wilson, who retired in 1963.

They also designed and built a circulating seawater system to literally bring the ocean into the classroom. Ocean-like conditions are almost impossible to maintain in the ordinary aquaria of a marine lab, and specimens can only be kept briefly before being returned to the sea; but with a seawater circulating system, these conditions—proper temperature, proper salinity, oxygen, and nutrients—can be maintained continuously, enabling the creatures to live life as if they were in their own homes. A circulating system is what sets the “marine station” apart from the “marine lab.”

The circulating pump was the beating heart of the Bolinas Marine Station. It was an ingenious system: a pipe running from the ocean under the street to the marine station had a trap door that could open only with the incoming tide; it let in clean, oxygenated seawater flowing from the open sea. When the trap door opened, a magnet activated pumps that drew the water into a 6,000-gallon storage tank, and from there it was circulated through tanks inside the buildings and in the courtyard.

Being the only marine station on the Pacific Coast operated by a junior college, Bolinas drew the top high-school science students in the state to the College of Marin. Students from other colleges came as well: kids from U.C. Davis, U.C. Santa Barbara, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and Berkeley attended summer classes at Bolinas, attracted by the sophistication of the facility and the reputations of Al and Gordon.

Al wanted to bring younger students to Bolinas, too—elementary school kids, Scouts, underprivileged kids—and offer them the same kind of opportunity to get excited about nature that he had been afforded as a kid and had always been grateful for. He sent out a survey to schoolteachers and youth leaders in Marin, asking if there would be any interest in bringing the kids for field trips and close-up looks at undersea creatures in the tanks. The response was dramatic; the survey indicated that many thousands of youngsters would come through every year.

Al took his findings to the trustees, who agreed to open the Bolinas Marine Station to visits by schools and youth groups on a year-round basis. The children’s program became formalized as College for Kids, and in addition to the regular College of Marin students, four or five thousand kids came through annually.

Al was proud of what he and Gordon had created, not for his own self-aggrandizement, but for the enthusiasm it gave people, for the hope and passion it stirred in students, young and old. “Some of these kids have expressed real gratitude that we are concerned for their future,” Al said in a 1966 memo to the board of trustees. Al also taught a summer class just for teachers, and he wrote: “Numerous teachers have reported a personal ‘re-awakening’ of their interest in the natural sciences…Ours is a position of leadership and initiation.”

The lab was a hotbed of academic activity. Guest lecturers—Joel Hedgpeth, for one—came from the top universities to give presentations to the College of Marin students. Baseline studies were being conducted by students doing independent work at the lab—work that would reach far into the future by providing the foundation for ten- and twenty-year studies on marine life. A new teacher named Dave Baver was hired, and with him the curriculum expanded to include oceanography, marine technology, and fishery biology.

In his 1966 memo, Al asked the college administrators for support. They sat in offices twenty miles away in Kentfield, far removed from the intoxicating salt air and contagious joy of the lab. He advised the board that this was a unique situation, especially within the junior college system, and he wanted desperately for them to understand the marine station’s value and continue to fund it, but he knew it would be a tough haul in the years to come.

To the administrators, Al looked like something of a renegade—operating out of their sight, spending college money, and pretty much calling the shots—and they were bound to be nervous. Al acknowledged their fears and tried to head off trouble before it began: “We are treading on new territory, and the situation calls for open minds and close communication,” he said hopefully.

In 1966 Gordon Chan was hired to teach year round at the College of Marin, at the Kentfield campus as well as the marine station. He was an outstanding addition to the faculty—educated at Stanford and working on a Ph.D. at Berkeley, an experienced teacher, and a top-notch marine biologist and researcher. By this time, Noel Nelson, Russell Ridge, and Ruth Nash had also come on board at Kentfield, and the life sciences department was filling out nicely.

That same year, Bolinas Lagoon, one of the richest wildlife habitats in Marin County—and Al’s living laboratory for his marine biology students—came frighteningly close to being dredged and developed into a boat marina and commercial complex. Hundreds of thousands of birds using the Pacific Flyway stop to rest or winter at Bolinas Lagoon, a serene 1,450-acre estuary filling the shallow basin between Bolinas Ridge and the Inverness headlands. At the narrow inlet where the lagoon meets the Pacific Ocean is Kent Island, a large parcel of sand and tidal mudflats and a teeming ecosystem of mud crabs, snails, ghost shrimp, clams, and all shapes and sizes of marine worms.

Untold numbers of wading birds depend on these shallow tidelands for food, and Bolinas Lagoon is the primary feeding ground for the magnificent herons and great egrets that have established their nests high in the surrounding redwoods. If the proposed harbor design went into effect, the lagoon would be dredged, and Kent Island would be covered with restaurants, retail shops, and parking lots. The ecosystem at the lagoon would be effectively annihilated.

The saga of Bolinas Lagoon began in 1957, with the formation of the Bolinas Harbor District, an agency charged with the task of—within ten years—“substantially improving” the huge tideland parcel. The first order of business was to create access, and this coincided with Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown’s promise to build a thousand miles of new freeway in California. The scenic two-lane highway that meandered lazily around the edge of the sleepy lagoon was to be replaced with a straightened, four-lane highway, accomplished by making cuts into the hillsides (where the herons nest) and filling along the edge of the lagoon. Other freeways cutting along the tops of Bolinas Ridge and Tamalpais Ridge would eventually connect the Bolinas/Stinson Beach area to the Golden Gate and Richmond bridges.

In 1966, with the “improvement” deadline approaching, the Bolinas Harbor District hired architect Norman Gilroy to design a development plan for the lagoon. Kent Island, which was owned by Mrs. Anne Kent, of the same Kent family that has donated lands for Muir Woods and the College of Marin site in Kentfield, was the key parcel in the plan. The one-hundred-eleven-acre plot would be raised, filled, and formed into a U-shaped island that would house a hotel complex, two restaurants, fourteen hundred boat slips, marine shops, harbor offices, parking lots, a boat sales complex—and to top it all off, a helicopter landing pad. The island would be reached via toll bridge off Highway One. The entire lagoon would be dredged for a yacht harbor, and the shorelines at Bolinas were earmarked as planned residential and community shopping.

Al’s second-story office at the Bolinas Marine Station overlooked Kent Island, and as he gazed out at a passing flock of brown pelicans and thought about the pending desecration, he was conflicted. Of course he desperately wanted the lagoon to be saved, but Al was not a fighter, and he avoided confrontation and antagonism of any kind. He loved and respected all living things with a passion bordering on the fanatical, but he truly thought love should be enough to protect them. Surely if he did his job well enough, if he got people to understand, to love the natural world the way it deserved to be loved, this sort of thing would never happen. The fact that the baser instincts of man often prevail caused him a great deal of pain, and he preferred not to deal with it at all.

But there was simply too much at stake here, and, reluctantly, Al entered the battle. He organized groups of his college students to go out and collect data, which they compiled into reports on the benefits of preserving the lagoon. Towards the end of 1966, several meetings were held to discuss the environmental impact of the harbor plan. Al and his students attended, as did other biologists and engineers. The opposing viewpoint was represented by Norman Gilroy, the planning department, and the Harbor District. On behalf of the College of Marin, Al presented his reports and findings at these meetings, and he also gave testimony rebutting the reports of the opposition.

By early 1967, things weren’t looking so good; the Gilroy Plan, as the development project was called, seemed to be gaining momentum. But then something miraculous happened. As long as Kent Island was in private ownership, the Harbor District could condemn it—take it (with compensation) from Mrs. Kent for development. But, if a public agency owned the island, it could not be condemned.

A group of devoted activists and wildlife lovers, being evidently much smarter than the Harbor District people, devised a clever plan that could stymie the entire Bolinas Lagoon development project, if Mrs. Kent would go along with it. They secretly approached her and told her about their plan to outsmart the Harbor District and preserve the island, and Mrs. Kent was delighted to go along with it. She thereby agreed to sell the island to the secret cabal for $85,000, a fraction of its actual value.

The conservationist cabal then immediately donated the parcel to the County of Marin, on the condition that the land be forever preserved as a wildlife sanctuary. Now, with the island in public ownership, it was off limits to the Harbor District. This was the winning coup. Without Mrs. Kent’s island, the entire marina project was sunk.

[1] Since Stockton College started in grade eleven and went through grade fourteen, Al served as student body president in his third year out of four.

[2] Bev’s parents divorced, and her father passed away, but in time Al completely won over the affections of her mother. Bev comments, “My mom thought Al walked on water.”

[3] Humboldt State did not yet offer a master’s degree in biology.