The Kendall Family Saga, Part 3

Sheriff Matt Kendall’s father Burl was born in the Fort Bragg Lumber Company hospital in Fort Bragg in March, 1935, and spent his early childhood with his parents Alonzo Francis and Fern Kendall, the managers of the Point Arena theatre and an adjacent laundry. His parents lived on the family ranch on Garcia River, a four hundred acre playground he loved.

When Burl was seven years old, his parents separated and moved to the San Francisco Bay area, his father to work at the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard in Vallejo, his mother to be a nurse at the Army Hospital in San Francisco. Burl then moved in with his grandparents Courtney Leon and Ada Kendall on the south end of the Garcia River ranch, quite near the current Point Arena High School.

Later in life Burl often shared with Matt and his brothers and sisters stories of his childhood adventure outdoors on the ranch, deer and quail hunting on other farms and in the Manchester cemetery, fishing on the Garcia and playing on the Point Arena docks. With typical Kendall generosity he regularly provided his uncle and aunt living north of Manchester at Irish Beach, John and Beatrice Acuistapace, with the product of his hunting expeditions, quail, and sometimes for fun a robin or two, not knowing that Italian cooking often used robins for making a brilliant polenta. (My Navarro friend Bill Witherell used to shoot robins in my vineyard for his wife Lena to prepare this incredibly savory dish.)

Burl also regaled the kids with stories about riding from Point Arena to San Francisco on the passenger steamer Seafoam, later wrecked in a gale on a reef along the Mendocino Coast. Round trip ticket for the voyage cost $5.00. He also told them stories about the Kendall ancestors, about the day-long car ride from Manchester to Boonville with his grandfather to stay at the new version of the old ancestor-built Anderson House, now relocated downtown and called the Boonville hotel. Ancestor pioneers and their family’s role in Boonville and Manchester history were often parts of his story-telling.

After World War II, when he was a teenager, Burl’s grandparents, now in their seventies, sold the Garcia River ranch and moved to Santa Rosa. Burl went with them and matriculated at SR’s Piner High School, later moved in with his mother Fern and her new husband Bill Moungovan in Petaluma and graduated from its high school in 1953. Always ambitious, he worked summers in the Mendocino Coast woods and mills, including the Don Philbrick mill in Comptche.

After finishing high school Burl moved to Eureka and got a job working for the Northwest Pacific railroad, first doing rail track maintenance and repair, carpentry, and later a fireman on one of the railroad’s last remaining steam locomotives. One night he got an engineer’s summons to work on an engine he’d not previously boarded, and couldn’t find the firebox he was to stoke. It was a new diesel electric locomotive, and he became the air horn blower at rail spurs and grade crossings. Burl knew he would soon be out of a job. 

In 1955, age 20, Burl joined the Air Force, wanting to get formal training in electrician’s skills. The Air Force’s medical examiners found he suffered blindness in some colors of the spectrum, but qualified him for duty as an Air Policeman. After basic training at Sheppard Air Force Base near Wichita Falls, Texas, he was posted to Germany and Spang-Dahlem air and missile base on the western outskirts of Berlin. 

At Spang-Dahlem his principle duty was the exciting job of guarding its aircraft and missiles’ security by patrolling, sometimes by day, sometimes at night, its perimeter fences. He soon found the principle security threat was rabbits, not Communist saboteurs, so he trained his issue K-9 guard dog, Carlos, to assist him. He also used his skill at recycling spent ammo shells with bullets and shot in his Manchester youth hunting days to do the same with birdshot for his AF issue M-l rifle cartridges- in order to have the right ammo for rabbit hunting.

In 1960, Burl was honorably discharged from the Air Force, returned to the Mendocino Coast and asked his uncle and aunt Acquistapace to live with them at their Irish Beach dairy. In exchange for his room and board he worked supporting the farm, including milking cows in the barn twice a day. And that year he got his first civilian job working for the County’s Department of Transportation driving trucks and heavy equipment around the Coast’s roads. At work a fellow employee introduced him to his future wife, Judith (Judy) Hurley.

Late in 1960 Burl and Judy were married in Reno, then moved back to Point Arena and set up home on the main street in town across from Iversen Road. Judy went to work as a clerk in McMillan’s general store on main street, now a vegetarian breakfast/lunch joint where both the local intelligentsia and tourists hang out. Burl, of course, found after-hours work at Joe Scaramella’s gas station pumping gas until Judy got off work evenings, a long day of employment for both husband and wife.

In 1965, Burl, Judy and first child, daughter Britt, moved to Covelo. By the 1960s the Mendocino Coast was changing. Ranch profitability was declining, these properties were being sold and subdivided, and Burl’s hunting and fishing grounds were being posted with “No Trespassing” signs. 

Not long after the Covelo move Burl traded for a piece of the Kendall Manchester property ten acres of land some ten miles east of Covelo and north of the county gravel road over the Mayacamas mountains connecting Round Valley to the Sacramento Valley. The parcel was on a high ridge looking over a fork of the Eel River on the edge of the National Forest, the perfect place for an avid hunter/fisherman. Four Kendall children succeeded Britt, Amy in 1967, Matthew Burnham in 1969, twins Mark Leon and Luke Burl in 1973.

In 1968, Burl joined California Division of Forestry and Fire Protection, now Calfire, and worked for CDF until 1992, when he retired at age 58. Early on He was promoted to Captain but never rose higher in rank despite his distinguished service career because, he believed, he chose to be with his wife and their “heathens,” as he described his children, and to live on his beloved homestead rather than be posted to an assignment somewhere else in California.

In retirement Burl of course kept active on the mountain ranchlet, raising a few cattle, building some cabins on the place for his visiting children, making firewood and hunting and fishing in the surrounding forest and its streams. Pretty big bucks up there in those mountains. Judy died in 2003, Burl in 2022, age 87, having moved down to Willits to live there with his daughter Britt and her husband.

Much of what I write here about Burl Kendall is borrowed from the extended anecdotal obituary son Matt wrote for local newspapers, a wonderful memoir of a father’s life and adventures all over Mendocino County and Texas and Germany. In its closing celebration of his father Matt wrote: “Burl Kendall was a good husband and father…he and my mother always did their best for all of us.”

In several recent interviews at his home Matt shared with me his own recollections of growing up in Round Valley. His first memory, around age four, is of his just-born younger brothers, Mark and Luke coming home from the Ukiah county hospital.

I asked Matt about his schooldays experiences. He entered Kindergarten at the Covelo public school. His mother Judy was a fervently religious person, and west of town there was a one room Seventh Day Adventist private school run by a very capable husband and wife, Ross and Beverly Dishman. Matt attended this school from grades four to eight and upon reflection believes the Dishmans were for him valued educators.

Matt reminisced with me positively about the Covelo school educational environment. At first the class enrollments for younger grades were about thirty students, but his graduating class was down to only a dozen. The students were a replica of the local community with kids from logging, millworker, ranching, and native American families. Logging and millworking family students felt no deference to kids from the ranch and millowner families, or bias toward the native Americans. Everyone at school saw themselves as a community of friends. 

Matt wasn’t an ambitious student in high school. He enjoyed sports and hunting more than the classroom experience, and ended his formal education through his junior year, later qualifying for a diploma via a GED. Like all Kendall ancestors his post-school life was ambitious. His first job outside Round Valley was way down in Marin County working on the Stewart Ranch out by the Point Reyes lighthouse, managing cattle, attending to horses the ranch boarded for weekend riders, and maintaining the places’ fences.

Next he got a job on the Lone Pine ranch northeast of Covelo, and then transferred to closer to home and town, working at LP’s local Crawford Mill. At Crawford he pulled strips from milled lumber heading for the planer, drove the water truck and ran the log loader bring logs from the outside deck to the head rig. Pay in 1987 was $9.00/hour.

At age 19, Matt enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College majoring in marketing. And, Kendall-energy motivated, also worked part-time at a feed store in Fulton, northeast of downtown Santa Rosa. A college friend working with him at the Fulton store also held a part-time job at the Sonoma County jail. After dropping out of Santa Rosa JC, Matt returned to Mendocino County and got a full-time job as a deputy at the Ukiah County jail, no credentials required for the hire. 

In 1991 he enrolled at College of the Redwoods in Eureka and attended its on-campus Policy Academy, earning credentials to become a full-time deputy as a patrol officer in early 1992, stationed in Fort Bragg under the leadership of Tony Craver, later County Sheriff. In 1995, right after the Bear Lincoln/Bob Davis killing, Matt was transferred to Covelo as resident deputy in in a community he knew well from his early days growing up in Round Valley.

Later on in 1996 Matt was appointed narcotics affairs officer for the whole county. In 1999 he was promoted to sergeant, and in 2000 he moved to Willits after he was appointed supervising deputy sheriff managing deputies from Willits to the Humboldt County line until 2015. From 2015 until 2018 he was appointed as sergeant investigator working in Ukiah.

In 2018, Sheriff Tom Allman appointed Matt Undersheriff, an administrative job managing the department and its budget and staffing. When Allman retired in late 1999, before the end of his elected term, Matt was appointed as his successor in January, 2020. In 2021 he ran for office in the off-year local election against a write-in candidate and received about 90% of the ballots cast.

Matt married his wife Melissa, born Rose in 2015. Melissa has two children from a previous marriage. Matt has a daughter from an earlier relationship during his Covelo deputy years. Today they live on a small, quiet farmlet of some 75 acres of sidehill and Creekside bottomland, together with Melissa’s father Jim Rose. Their home and land is part of a historic and large sheep ranch first developed in the late nineteenth century, more than a thousand acres, Matt surmises that ran along the creek for a mile or more. These pioneers probably grew grain on the flat near their home, as Matt still finds pieces of old farm equipment there, as well as ox shoes, possibly a remnant of the pre-tractor plowing and harvesting equipment activities.

Melissa and her late husband bought the 75-acre parcel in 1997, logged the sidehill Douglas fir old growth trees across the stream on the sidehill. Her father, Jim Rose managed a sawmill in Cloverdale and got permission from its owners to use the sawmill on weekends to turn the fir logs into planed lumber to the construction of a house. This construction material didn’t just provided the home’s framing, but also its flooring, paneling and even the Newel posts supporting the staircase to the bedrooms upstairs.

For the moment, the thousand-year Burnham/Kendall family saga of migration from Scotland and England to colonial New England and nineteenth century Anderson Valley, Manchester, Covelo, elsewhere in Mendocino County, the San Joaquin Valley and the rest of the world ends with the stories of father, son Matt, and his children. And though I won’t be here to report, I wager there will be more chapters to the saga and the special personalities who acted it out. 

Throughout the generations I couldn’t help but notice a remarkable charismatic energy in the Kendall personality. I have to admire a person who is both a fearless enterprise building entrepreneur in both agriculture and commerce, one who boldly moves on every decade or so to mine a more ambitious business opportunity, who at the same time is a loving and supporting parent to his children while finding the time to enjoy relaxing and recreating in the woods and streams surrounding his home and family. Definitely a role model for me.

* * *

Reporting Error: 

Two weeks ago I speculated that the family genealogist who researched and assembled the five-hundred page family history may have been part of the Windsor County, Vermont branch of Kendall clan. Wrong. The heroic assembler of this precious record of California history was Dorothy A. Kendall, wife of Calvin Kendall. The document’s title page is signed and dated, Petaluma, March, 1992.

NEXT WEEK: The Fashauer Family’s Story, From Alsace to Greenwood Ridge and further.