Sam Prather, 1942-2022

I don’t recollect when or how Sammy “Prather Ranch” Prather and I first met. But I do know it wasn’t long after I arrived in Anderson Valley in 1971. Perhaps it was at the Floodgate bar, our social club down the road a mile from my Navarro home highway gate; or maybe through my friend and mentor Lyle Luckert, Nash Mill Road diversified farmer and sheepman with whom Sam was a partner in running bands on leased ranchland all over The Valley. What I do know is that somehow he and I became friends immediately, despite his inveterate social shyness. In any formal company Sammy would avoid contribution to the gossip and speculation we all engage in around Valley’s bars, coffee shops, or leaning on our pick-up trucks, and when addressed directly, he would usually study his boots while crafting a one sentence reply to the query about his views.

So what motivated the friendship between such disparate public personalities? Since I was a teen ager I have always had an attraction for private personalities, each of them, red-headed, green-eyed somewhat reclusive souls, who enjoyed being by themselves pursuing with great talent some kind of craft or skill. I enjoyed our time together, partially for the privilege of learning their craft from them, partly for the comfort of mutual reflection and meditation while on a project or journey together. Sam and I occasionally took long road trips in his yellow GM pick-up in pursuit of, say, some purebred rams or yearling ewes over to Winters in the Sacramento Valley and back, some seven hours of driving. We didn’t say much, often silence for half an hour or so, but what we did talk about usually increased my knowledge of good sheep grazing practices. He and I even got involved in 1970s street politics when Kenny Hurst, Ukiah libertarian lawyer Oscar Klee and I persuaded Sam to do a piece of street theatre in front of the US Government offices on Grove Street San Francisco — to protest the US tax code “fleecing” its citizens. Sam’s shearing of three ewes on the sidewalk, then dumping the fleeces in the building front doorway, with a supporting crowd around us, one warm February lunchtime got us, thanks to Oscar’s political connections, on the Five O’clock News that evening.

Sam Prather and I were almost the same age, born a year apart, he an Aquarius, I a Capricorn. And as I hung out with him in the seventies, helping him run his sheep on my place, on Day Ranch and Johnny Williams place, now Navarro Vineyards, I not only learned all the skills needed to run my own sheep band, including best pest and disease prevention and medication practices, but also found out that he was arguably the most prestigious Columbia Ram breeder in the United States. That came to light over the years while we attended the Cloverdale ram sale each year, also the livestock exhibition during the Cow Palace rodeo, or the Dixon County fair livestock sale, also a huge event. In 1978 we even drove with Lyle Luckert all the way to Salt Lake City to the National Ram Sale. In all these venues, including Salt Lake “everyone” knew Sam, would accost him socially, either in the pens, at the auction or in a bar or restaurant around the showgrounds. Sam, of course, would greet each friend monosyllabically while studying his boots. He never would introduce me to his peers. So I did this myself, introducing myself as Sam’s “main-man” helping him out in the hills or in the shearing pens.

The other piece of Sam’s personality I want to celebrate here is his instinctive kindness and generosity to those not as fortunate as him and to the community he cared about here in The Valley. A small example: the migratory sheep shearer who did much of Anderson Valley’s extensive herds back then was a joyous Tex-Mex, Augustine Vargas. He was not only our contract employee for tagging and shearing, but also after hours our close friend and social companion. Augie was a great reliable shearer and crew manager. His weakness was a lack of those skills on the domestic front. He had an ex-wife back in Uvalde, Texas, I believe, he owed alimony to and a family in Bakersfield where he spent the winter before heading north for the season. In the Valley he was always broke, just enough money to feed himself, but not enough for gas to get to his next job site up in Humboldt County and on to Idaho. So each year Sammy, then Sam and I would “lend” Vargas money, I remember giving Augie a check for $500 one year, so he could get on down the road to his next job. Sammy and I knew our “loans” were a gift, and never nagged Augie or talked about it among ourselves.

Then there was the son of a 1970s girlfriend of several years, a Ukiah bartender single mother. Teenager Johnny Steele behaved typically of a work-stressed single parent’s teenager, always getting into petty trouble, doing too much drugs, being generally defiant toward the rest of the world. Jed Steele caught Johnny stealing his several marijuana plants growing in his Day Ranch rental garden, after the kid had sold half of his Jed plants harvest. By age twenty Johnny was deep into crank and getting into worse trouble around Ukiah. Sam quietly took over the kind uncle role, provided Johnny with an allowance, helped him find a job in Ukiah and supported him avuncularly for a generation. Once in the late eighties I encountered John at the Sam Prather Memorial Barbeque one Saturday evening during the Fair. John accosted me, no fear, told me how glad he was to see me after all those years, told me he’d retired from dope stealing, and told me about his life since back then. I hope John sees today’s Sammy memories and is still as comfortable with his life as Sammy helped him make of it two generations ago.

Last and most memorable to me of Sam’s generosity to the Valley community was what I named right away the Sam Prather Memorial, those incredible ambitious outdoor barbeques under the redwood grove by the livestock stalls each Apple Fair Saturday night. Same had proposed to the Fair Board that out of gratitude to the arts, crafts, livestock exhibitors that made the Fair what it was, they should offer each of them, parents, children, all, a free meal to celebrate their contribution to its success. No interest. So Sam, out of his own pocket, paid for those elaborate Saturday sundown outdoor dinners. And with help from Christine Clark and others, created arguable the most ambitious outdoor meal I’ve ever eaten, and for three hundred people some years. And everyone pitched in to prepare, cook and serve the food. The centerpiece of course was the barbeque, a quarter ton of lamb, goat, beef, chicken, also potatoes, corn, grilled in waves for hours by Justin Clark, Morgan Baynham, Tom Lemons, Kevin X, three or four others taking turns. Four kinds of salad were next at the serving table, then all sorts of locally baked pies and cakes. And lots of beer and even local wines. One year I remember even finding raw oysters on the half shell served.

And sitting at the picnic tables, meeting and talking with families from the Salinas Valley, Shafter or Wasco in the San Joaquin or Laytonville closer to home was both fun and instructive about farming practices all over California. I miss those Fair barbeque Saturday evenings, particularly listening to the FFA and 4H kids talk about the love of raising goats and chickens, and wonder if they’ll ever happen again. Begrudgingly Sam did let me and the Colfaxes make a contribution to the barbeque’s expenses.

So there are some the recollections I’ve been having this past week about my in a sense lifelong friendship with Sam Prather. When I was working in New York in the 1990s and returning to The Valley for the summer and year-end holidays, first local news stop I made upon reentry was to his home and ranchlet on Anderson Valley Way. Sam didn’t talk much, but he knew everything that had happened here since my last trip home. Typically I never knocked, just walked in the kitchen door, and the conversation began in the typical Sammy way: “Wiley Ranch…:” I “Prather Ranch.” Then we shook hands.