Local heroes 2014

As is tradition at the Chico News & Review, Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks for those among us who volunteer and otherwise give their time to make our community a better place. We thank them for fighting to keep our water free of fracking chemicals, for rescuing our stolen bikes and our neglected cats, and for enriching Chico’s culture through the promotion of the arts and music. So, pass the mashed potatoes and raise a glass around the holiday table to the local heroes in our midst.

The fearless fractivist

Joni Stellar

Earlier this year, local “fractivists” who’d gathered more than 10,000 signatures to get a ban on hydraulic fracturing in Butte County on November’s ballot faced a setback when a Big Oil-funded legal challenge forced county officials to reject their petition based on “facial defects.” In July, Joni Stellar—treasurer for Frack-Free Butte County and one of the petition’s sponsors—faced two high-powered lawyers from a Sacramento-based law firm in court and, without the advantage of a law degree, convinced the judge to waive the rejection.

Stellar is no stranger to courtrooms, she explained recently. A lifelong nature lover, her activism in the early 1990s twice landed her in legal trouble for what she describes as “crimes in defense of nature.”

She lived in Colorado at the time, and was first arrested for felony trespassing while protesting activities that she said in retrospect resembled fracking. Citizens in the area were complaining that their water was catching fire due to an experimental fossil-fuel extraction facility, and the court ordered Stellar to complete 200 hours of community service.

Stellar served 30 days in jail soon after for tree-sitting to block a logging operation. She had spent five days living on a platform mounted 60 feet off the ground in a 500-year-old tree until a fully armed SWAT team arrived to take her down. Stellar said she evaded capture for several hours by zip-lining through the forest canopy.

She then took a long break from activism to raise her grandchildren and work as a teacher, and in 2003 met and married husband Allan, a fellow nature lover and fan of civil disobedience—Allan is a CN&R contributor whose story about camping in Lassen Volcanic National Park during last fall’s government shutdown resulted in $250 in fines (see “Lassen solitaire,” cover story, Nov. 7, 2013).

Stellar described an early date, when she and Allan were hiking in the desert discussing their favorite birds. Just as Allan mentioned a Steller’s jay, one of them (which she explained is not usually found in that environment) flew by. When the two married, they decided to take the last name “Stellar.”

The couple moved to Concow in 2008 and designed an off-the-grid home made of cob (a natural building material made from earth and straw). The following year, a threat to a Concow Creek swimming hole renewed Joni’s interest in environmental causes. Soon after, she joined Butte Citizens Action Network, which in turn started Frack-Free Butte County.

The fracking ban ballot measure was waylaid by the Butte County Board of Supervisors’ decision to sit on the matter, rendering it ineligible for the midterm election. Stellar said she hopes the supes enact their own prohibitive ordinance and, if not, she won’t back down.

“We’ll keep fighting, and do whatever is necessary,” she said.

Married to the arts

Richard and Pat Macias

“I joke that I moved to Chico so I could sit on my deck and drink the occasional margarita,” said Richard Macias. “That hasn’t happened yet.”

It’s not hard to see why. Macias, a retired architect, has become so busy since he moved to Chico in 2006 that he has little free time. He’s president of the Chico board of the North State Symphony, president of the Chico Heritage Association, and a member of the boards of the Chico Art Center and Habitat for Humanity.

Compared to his wife, Pat, however, he’s almost a layabout. She’s president of the board of directors of the Museum of Northern California Art, but “driving force” might be a more accurate title. She has many devoted helpers, but it’s fair to say that it’s she, more than anyone else, who is pushing the museum forward as it seeks to engage and excite the community and raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to transform the Veterans Memorial Hall into an art museum.

She is determined that people understand just how valuable the museum is, how much potential it has to transform the region and inspire its residents, and she’s tireless in her effort to help it succeed.

The Maciases are from Michigan by way of St. Louis and San Francisco. They met in Ann Arbor in 1979 and married in 1983. For many years he worked at HOK, the nation’s largest architecture-engineering firm, where he designed universities, mostly in Asia. She, meanwhile, worked as an art educator.

In San Francisco, he took a job with the California State University system as a facilities planner. Pat at the time was teaching art at Piedmont High School in the East Bay. When he retired in 2006, she did likewise.

They had friends in Chico and had visited here several times. Chico reminded them pleasantly of Ann Arbor, so they built a new home off Dayton Road that Richard designed. It’s a strikingly modernist structure, with flat planes and bright colors, and stands out in the neighborhood. The interior of the two-story house is bright, thanks to expansive windows on the north side, and filled with tasteful artwork, most of it modernist in style.

As busy as Pat is these days, she still finds time to teach an art class every Monday evening at the Torres Community Shelter, where she’s known as “the art lady.” Meanwhile, Richard—who has a 22-speaker sound system in his studio for listening to classical music while he restores classic mid-century furniture—is on the North State Symphony’s committee to select a new music director. It’s a role, he says, that is becoming more difficult as the four finalists continue to cycle through Chico, each to conduct one of the season’s four programs. They’re all superb, he says, but very different.

If there’s a single word to describe the Maciases, it’s passion—passion for art, for music and, most of all, for engagement with their community. We’re all fortunate that they chose Chico to be their home for the rest of their lives.

The cat advocate

Judy Alberico

Judy Alberico is a cat woman who follows through on her feline devotion in a number of ways. She volunteers at the Butte Humane Society’s cat adoption center and spay-and-neuter clinic, as well as at the Chico Cat Coalition, which rescues abandoned and feral cats, neuters and spays them if needed, and then shelters them until they are adopted.

She also volunteers for PawPrints Thrift Store, whose goal is to raise money to help pay for the spaying and neutering of both cats and dogs and also helps fund the Neighborhood Cat Advocates, a feline welfare organization that Alberico and friend Shelly Rogers launched in January of last year.

Rogers, who is also a board member and volunteer for the Chico Cat Coalition, nominated Alberico for local hero consideration.

“She works harder for the cats than just about anyone else,” Rogers said. “I think her mind must be working constantly. She sends out emails at 4 a.m. with ideas and reminders of things that need to be done. Her artwork is amazing. Between her donated paintings and her eye for design when it comes to putting together raffle and auction items, she has brought in thousands of donation dollars for just about every animal welfare agency in town.”

Indeed, Alberico’s artwork—oil paintings—is impressive and she’s used her talent to help humans as well as cats and dogs. In the aftermath of 9/11, she created paintings using local firefighters posed as if on the job and then placed them in scenes near the Twin Towers. She sold the paintings locally and sent all profits back east via Chico firefighters who paid visits to New York City, where 340 firefighters had lost their lives.

Alberico grew up in Sutter County, the youngest of five children whose family moved here from Oklahoma.

“My dad worked in an orchard in Yuba City,” she said. “We lived in the country, way out in the middle of nowhere, and as such, animals became my friends.”

She said she has lived with animals throughout her life, though ironically at the present she has none in her home.

“Yes, there is not one cat in my house,” she said, “but there are 65 at the coalition, and everywhere I go I deal with cats.”

On the day she was interviewed for this story, she had gone to PawPrints at 6 a.m. to take in donations and clean the place. On other days, when not volunteering at the humane society, she is at the Chico Cat Coalition, beginning her day at 5 a.m., tidying up and tending to the 60 or so residents waiting for adoption.

Longtime cat advocate Sarah Downs also lauded Alberico and the efforts she puts forth on behalf of cats.

“Judy is the sweetest, most dedicated person I know,” Downs said. “No one works harder than her.”

Bike thief vigilante

Steve O’Bryan

Nobody leaves a trail of slime like a bike thief—not in Steve O’Bryan’s opinion. That the longtime owner of Pullins Cyclery considers two-wheeled theft a heinous crime is no secret. In fact, many Chicoans go to him first if their bike gets ripped off.

That’s because, since he and his wife, Katy, took over the shop in 1984, O’Bryan has helped recover dozens of stolen bicycles—approaching 100, he estimated during a recent interview—and he’s stepped up his efforts recently, helping track down 23 bicycles this year alone.

O’Bryan casts a wide net in the effort, spreading information via social media and old-fashioned word of mouth, keeping a suspicious eye on the bikes brought into Pullins, and searching in the right places. He never hesitates to get police involved when confronting hostile bike thieves and has even testified in juvenile court.

What compels him? He knows the bitterness of losing a beloved ride. Indeed, the first stolen bicycle he tracked down was his own—a Schwinn Panther II taken from his parents’ garage in the early 1970s. He found it in Lindo Channel, where somebody had “just dropped it off the freakin’ bridge into the dry creek bed,” he said.

Since then, O’Bryan has always looked in the creeks for hot bikes. “It’s been my experience that people will steal bikes, go ditch them somewhere, then come back later,” he said. “If you find it in the interim, I don’t think they worry about it too much; they just go steal another bike.”

It helps that he never forgets a bicycle. One classic in particular stands out to O’Bryan: a purple, French-made Andre Bertin road bike he’d given to his friend, Molly Adams. A few years ago, O’Bryan recalled, it was stolen after Adams locked it in front of Café Coda.

Days later, “some kid” rolled past Pullins on the unmistakable Bertin. “I ran out there just as the light turned green,” he said, “and grabbed hold of the seat.”

The “lame” story O’Bryan was fed—the kid said he’d borrowed the bike from a friend, so it wasn’t really his to hand over—is a go-to when thieves are confronted, he said.

“So, I take my phone out and tell him, ‘OK, we’ll talk to Chico PD about it and you can spend the night in juvenile hall,’” O’Bryan said. “Most of them don’t want to do that, so Molly got her bike back.”

O’Bryan urges bike owners to take a photo of their bicycle and write down the serial number because, in this age of rapid information-sharing, the chances of recovering a stolen bike are better than ever.

“If you can report it fast enough and post a picture, a lot of people see it,” he said. “A lot of bikes get recovered by people just paying attention and being brave.”

Arts maven

Maria Phillips

In this annual giving-thanks issue, it’s not common for the CN&R to posthumously celebrate a local hero. It’s so much better to bestow the honor while they are among us, to provide a picture for the rest of us of someone currently doing good works for the community and maybe even buoy their efforts in the process. But with art historian, painter and local-arts advocate Maria Phillips—who died on Oct. 5, at the age of 70, after a long battle with cancer—we have no choice. She may be gone, but her influence as a passionate crusader for local art is still strong and too heroic not to honor.

After retiring as an arts professor—at Chico State, Butte College and Georgia State University in Atlanta—Phillips and fellow artist/art historian Dolores Mitchell opened Avenue 9 Gallery in 2004. The space became a hub of Chico art activity, hosting community-building shows by local as well as visiting artists. In 2009, it was the recipient of the Excellence in Arts award by the Janet Turner Museum. For the last three years, the gallery has operated as a local-artist guild, and when it closes its doors in January, it will leave behind an 11-year legacy of showcasing the works of more than 400 area artists.

Avenue 9 was the home base for Phillips’ many arts-promotion efforts, starting with ChiVAA, the Chico Visual Arts Alliance, an umbrella organization linking artists with local arts organizations, namely through its printing of a Chico Art Map and promoting monthly ARTabout art walks. She also spearheaded the effort to produce the annual Art at the Matador spring arts festival at the Matador Hotel, and in 2012 received the city of Chico’s Mayor’s Art Award as well an editor’s pick for “Best art maven who doubles as a community activist” in the CN&R’s annual Best of Chico issue.

“Maria was my cohort in utilizing art to make people more aware of being part of the community,” said Artoberfest organizer Debra Lucero when asked about her friend and fellow arts promoter. “Nothing was impossible, nothing too difficult. There were only possibilities with Maria and only solutions.”

In addition to promoting art, she was also an advocate for many local causes, including the successful push to stop the M&T gravel mine west of Chico and the more recent Saving Bidwell Mansion campaign to raise money for the local institution when it faced closure due to state budget cuts.

“[Maria’s] gift to Chico was her imagination and drive that resulted in many firsts and some new traditions,” Lucero added. “She was fun. She was intelligent. And she somehow managed to get you to do things that you didn’t really want to do. The Saving Bidwell Mansion campaign was one of those things for me. She prodded and poked and said, ‘We need you to be involved,’ and so I was. That was Maria. I miss her.”