Sally of all trades

One gets the sense that Sally Long’s “lesson of love,” coupled with a rugged Alaskan upbringing, during which her family lived without television, running water or electricity, set the stage for her to become the warm and tenacious person that she is.

In 1986, when Long was 10 years old, a woman named Susan Butcher won Alaska’s famous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the second woman ever to win the grueling 1,150-miles-plus race.

“My father’s response was, ‘Those dogs obey her because they love her. Men’s dogs obey them because they whip them,'” Long recalled. “I decided that I wanted to be the one that got things done because of love. … I got the opposite lesson from what my father was trying to teach me.”

And as the owner of The Music Connection in Chico, race caller/trophy presenter at the weekly go-kart races at Cycleland Speedway, and a pianist/singer and athlete (the avid runner and cyclist has competed in four triathlons), the 29-year-old Long has definitely accomplished a lot because of that love.

It’s definitely rare that you’ll see her outside of work.

Long can be seen in action at the noisy, action-packed Cycleland Speedway (owned by Long’s stepfather, Lowell Moural, and run by the whole extended Moural-Long family) every weekend calling the races for go-kart drivers from ages 5 to 50. When she’s not there, she can be found at her quieter (and cleaner) music store, where Long has been equipping budding musicians with instruments for more than a decade.

Long, who has been calling go-kart races since she was 22, began as a ticket taker at Cycleland (located about 14 miles south of Chico on Highway 99) when she was 15.

Long said a lot has changed since then.

We get on the subject of 14-year-old Red Bluff go-kart racer Leana Kenyon, whom I met while strolling through the busy and muddy pit area at Cycleland, and later cheered on as she came in third after a gutsy and successful move of driving over the back tire of the car she was trying to pass.

“Leana, she’s a good driver,” said Long, who raced go-karts two years ago at the Tehama District Fairgrounds in Red Bluff, where she also had been calling races at the time. “You know, when I first started announcing, there was one girl that raced. It’s changed to where it’s not unusual for there to be girls racing. They’re not a novelty. They’re legitimate.”

Long also puts her musical gift to work at the tracks. When she was 19, Long started singing the national anthem at races, “really bad,” as she put it.

“I have people coming up to me now saying, ‘You know, you’re getting better,'” Long said with a laugh. “Well, I’ve been doing it for a decade!”

Long, who has been playing piano since she was a kid, decided that she wanted to work in a music store. She started working at The Music Connection when she was 18 and bought the business at age 26.

“I just came in and asked for a job,” said Long, who plays piano and sings at Grace Community Church every other Sunday. Long began managing the store at age 22, after the owners moved away from Chico, and even left behind her studies as a recreation major at Chico State to run the operation.

“I didn’t want to leave [the store] to do an internship,” Long explained. “I thought, ‘What’ll happen if I go?’ I knew I couldn’t. At the time, it was hard. It was a lot. I didn’t realize it was an apprenticeship for owning it.”

Long expresses a genuine love for her increasingly successful store, which is moving into bigger digs (right across the street next to Spiteri’s Deli) in July.

But Long has also had to deal with the prejudice that can come with being a young, and female, business owner.

“Some people think I’m a spoiled rich kid. They think my family bought me a store,” Long said. “No, I worked my ass off! It never occurred to me that, because I’m a girl, there’s something I can’t do. I don’t separate myself much from my work. I don’t think of work as something to escape from. … I take [everything I do] personally, and I love it.”

In fact, when it comes to hiring new employees, Long is adamant that they share the passion and the love of music and people.

“People bring me their résumés,” Long continued, “They say, ‘I can type’ or whatever. I don’t care. I ask them, ‘Can you care? Do you care?’ I can train them to do all the other stuff.”

Outside of her ’round-the-clock work schedule, Long leads an uncluttered life—having ditched her phone, her television and canceling her health care. She has no car payments and rents a room in a house.

At work, however, Long is all business. She’s a fierce advocate of music education for children, and makes a point of having plenty of quality rental instruments and music books on hand for beginner musicians at her shop.

Long became animated when she described the “crap guitars from Wal-Mart” or a “30-year-old clarinet they can’t get a note out of” that can potentially frustrate a budding musician.

“It never occurs to them that it might be a bad instrument!” Long said.

Local jazz singer Holly Taylor, a voice teacher at The Music Connection, speaks glowingly of Long: “I love Sally for a variety of reasons, but the main one is her genuine love of everything that has to do with music and musicians,” Taylor explained. “She loves everything music, whether it’s funky-cool or just oozes ‘music geek.’ … She has teachers who teach strictly classical piano or violin technique and she also has teachers that teach screaming, loud rock ‘n’ roll guitar, and Sally genuinely loves and respects each one of us.”

The same goes with Cycleland, which has been part of her life for more than a decade and recently kicked off the 2006 season in April.

“At Cycleland, it’s my job to connect spectators to the event. … It’s [also] my job to walk up to [the racers in the pit] and see how they’re doing. I know all of them. It behooves me to know all of them rather than saying, ‘Who are you?’ That’s crushing to a little kid!”