Library Won't Have Genealogy Area

Tulare - The new Tulare Public Library will not have a genealogy room, a decision that has upset members of the Sequoia Genealogical Society which has partnered with the library in maintaining and expanding a collection since 1976.

Library director Michael Stowell proposed to the Tulare Library Advisory Board in August that the genealogy area be eliminated from the new library plans in favor of a homework center that would serve more people.

“Even in the best of budgetary times, the square foot costs to support the efforts of the Sequoia Genealogy Society have no real defensible position for the city of Tulare,” Stowell said in a letter to board Chairman Dr. Ned Kehrli. “I believe the city of Tulare should support this activity, but at a much different level than currently planned.”

Stowell said Monday that in 1980 the collection was drawing in many people, but that since the late 1990s, he has noticed the number of visitors has declined dramatically and that the collection now attracts only three or four people a day on the average.

The target audience for a homework center would be the nearly 15,000 students who live in Tulare, he said in his letter to Kehrli.

He also said the Genealogy Society has a “significant endowment fund” in excess of $125,000 and, with “even modest continuous fund raising activities,” could fully support its own facility.

He and City Manager Darrel Pyle said the city is trying to help the society find a new home for the collection and, contrary to a statement one society member sent out in an e-mail blast last weekend, does not plan to kick-out the organization from its current site in 10 months.

“There nothing that needs to happen in 10 months,” Pyle said. “Sometime within the next couple years, we'll have to find a permanent solution.”

Lorene Clark, president of the society, said the organization was “blindsided” by the news in August that the Genealogy collection was not moving to the new library and she maintained the utilization figures Stowell cites are misleading.

“He's looking at walk-in people, which is part of it,” Clark said. “You have to look at how many requests are fielded on a daily, weekly or monthly basis” by people who contact the volunteer staff by telephone, Internet or letter.
“We're not back there playing bingo when we go into there to volunteer,” she said.

As for the endowment Stowell mentions, Clark said the organization has about $16,000 in checking and savings and, as of August, about $90,000 to $100,000 in stocks.

This sounds like “a lot of money upfront,” but whether the society could venture out on its own, purchase land or build a building and still have enough money to pay for maintenance, rent and other costs is not clear, she said.
“Part of the problem is the city hasn't told us what it's going to do,” she said. “We don't know if the city is offering some support or no support,”

Stowell's letter to Kehrli “made it sound like the Society has been upheld and supported by the library all these years,” but what was happening is both the library and the Genealogical Society were each upholding their end of a 1976 agreement, Clark said.

That agreement was related to a small genealogy collection that Visalia resident Inez Hyde bequeathed to the society, along with funds from her estate. The society has spent thousands of dollars on equipment and books for the room since then, she said.

The library at one time had a staff person who worked in the Genealogy Room part-time, but when she retired three years ago she was not replaced and society volunteers have taken her place, Clark said.
In her August 2009 letter to Mayor Craig Vejvoda, Clark raised the issue as to whether the city's decision would violate the 1976 agreement.

City officials said he would not. The Tulare Voice was unable to view a copy of the agreement before Monday's deadline.

Stowell said the city will return to the society all the items that were part of its original collection and anything they donated or purchased.

Re-location options the city is exploring on behalf of the Society include the current library's Centennial Room, which Pyle said is not attached to the older portion of the library, which is expected to be demolished, and is near the Tulare Historical Museum.

Enclosure of the back patio at the Tulare Center is another option that would not require construction of new restrooms, he said.

The city is seeking proposals to develop the current library site once the new one opens and it is possible space could be made in that project, Pyle said.

“We will find them a permanent home,” he said. “And hopefully this conversation and discussion will lead to more visibility [and awareness] of the Genealogical Society.”

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Hillman Clinic
Progress Celebrated

After spending a hectic year acquiring, renovating and getting a license for Hillman Healthcare Center, Tulare Regional Medical Center (TRMC) officials paused Oct. 22 to hold an open house celebration at the former county facility.
Hillman, now painted in the soothing deep plum and Victorian garden colors that adorn other TRMC facilities, has drawn comments from his patients, said Dr. Felix Trapse, one of four family practice physicians at the clinic.
“It's alive now,” Trapse said. “There're plants everywhere and the painting and environment is more relaxing.”
The doctors and TRMC officials also say the number of patients they are seeing at the clinic is starting to grow following a drop-off that occurred when the building was closed for four months and services offered at other locations. Hillman re-opened in July.

“I still see a lot of patients I use to see when I was with the county,” said Dr. Truc Nguyen, a family practice physician for 23 years for the county before TRMC took over operation of the Hillman and Lindsay clinics on March 1. “We have new patients too.”

The patient load is “definitely picking up, now that former patients know Hillman has reopened, Trapse said.
Steve Debuskey, TRMC's vice president of outpatient services and a former clinic administrator with the county, said another factor affecting patient numbers has been the lack of Medi-Cal certification, which is required before Medi-Cal's managed care patients can be seen. “I think most of those patients stayed with the county [which has other clinics], but I think a good number also went to Tulare Community Health Clinic too,” Debuskey said.

Conway Praised

The Hillman and Lindsay clinics, which both were licensed by the state in early August, can and do treat other Medi-Cal patients, deferring billing until the certification is obtained, he explained.

Licensing, which would typically have taken a year, was completed within six month because Assemblywoman Connie Conway and others convinced the state the clinics were needed, he said.

Conway and her successor on the Tulare County Board of Supervisors, Pete Vander Poel, both were praised for their efforts on behalf of the clinic.

Dr. Parmod Kumar, president of the Tulare Local HealthCare District board, which operates TRMC, thanked Conway for taking his phone calls at all hours of the day and night.

Conway joked that not only did Kumar, who is her neighbor, call her, but he would plead his case to her when she stepped outside in her bathrobe to pick up the morning paper.

“At the end of the day the person who wins is the patient,” Kumar said.

The board president praised Debuskey, Hillman medical director Pradeep Kamboj, executive director Paulette Carpenter, clinical director Carol Thiele, the clinic physicians, county officials and others for their help in the transition of Hillman from a county to a TRMC rural health clinic.

He gave special praise to Chief Executive Officer Shawn Bolouki, who was unable to attend because of a family emergency, saying it was “his commitment to the community and especially to the poor of the community that resulted in all this.”

The Hillman clinic is projected to see 43,000 patients a year. It has 21 physicians on-staff, including five primary care doctors, 14 specialists and two obstetrician/gynecologists.

The brief program also included the airing of a new upbeat video about Tulare Regional Medical Center, which features comments from many community and hospital leaders and images that are displayed as Michael Jackson's “Man in the Mirror” plays in the background.

The video will be used as Bolouki and other TRMC leaders visit local service clubs and organizations to talk about the hospital.

The hospital district also operates a third rural health clinic on Cherry Street, across from the hospital. All three clinics received full accreditation from The Joint Commission in May.

The hospital district is also working on plans to open a clinic at 16796 Ave. 168 in Woodville, Debuskey said. The building the hospital owns on the corner of Gem Street and Terrace will be moved to the location.

TRMC has established a joint powers agreement with financially strapped Kingsburg Hospital and is working on a management agreement which would allow it to manage that facility – which also has a rural health clinic – as well.
Two Kingsburg board members attended the open house.

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Noted Composer, Tulare
Native Roger Nixon Dies

Tulare - Tulare native Roger Nixon, a well-known composer and music educator who taught 30 years at San Francisco State College, died Oct. 13 at a Burlingame hospital.

No services were held for the 88-year-old musician, who died at Mills Peninsula Hospital from complications of leukemia.

A prolific composer, Mr. Nixon's compositions for band, wind ensembles, orchestra, opera, keyboard and chamber and choral group are played throughout the world.

His musical excellence earned him a Phelan Award, the Neil A. Kjos Memorial Award, the ABA/Ostwald Band Composition Award and five grants from the National Endowments of the Arts.

Prior to his induction into the Tulare Union High School Hall of Fame in December 2007, Mr. Nixon told the Tulare Voice he sometimes ditched school at Tulare Union – where he was a member of the Class of 1938 – because he wanted to spend more time playing the clarinet.

“I was just obsessed with it,” he said, adding that school officials at one time even threatened to put his mother in jail because of his absences.

Mr. Nixon was born in Tulare on Aug. 8, 1921, to Posey G. Nixon, owner of Leggett's Department Store in downtown Tulare, and Betty D. Nixon, a gifted thespian.

His formal musical education began at the old Central Grammar School under the tutelage of Harold Bartlett, whom Mr. Nixon described in 2007 as “a very gifted teacher” who taught students how to compose music, as well as play.
During his high school years, Mr. Nixon attended summer school in Pacific Grove, where he met Frank Mancini, a clarinetist with the John Philip Sousa Band who later became his teacher and mentor at Modesto Junior College. When he was a high school senior, Mr. Nixon earned the first chair in the all-state orchestra.

His friends and classmates remember well his love of music in high school.

“I always expected that somehow music would play a very important part of his life,” said Gerry Soults, a fellow member of the Class of 1938. “He was in the band and in the orchestra and I was happy to learn he really went on to make his mark in the music world.”

Jim Leonard, a friend since he and Mr. Nixon were third graders at Wilson School, recalled one evening when they were suppose to take two girls to a dance and his friend was about an hour late because he was listening to the San Francisco Symphony on the radio.

“Roger would not do anything until that concert was over,” Mr. Leonard said.

College Years

While studying in Modesto, Mr. Nixon won a national contest for a piece he wrote for a woodwind quartet and was strongly urged by his music theory teacher and by the principal adjudicator for the contest, Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, to attend the University of California, Berkeley.

Although still an undergraduate, Cal officials allowed him to attend graduate seminars led by English composer Arthur Bliss and Swiss-Jewish composer Ernest Bloch, whom Mr. Nixon said were very influential in his career.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, he returned to Tulare, where he conducted the United Methodist Church choir, which he said “was the best in town.”

He later returned to Cal, where he earned his master's degree and later a doctorate, studying with Bloch and Roger Sessions. He also would travel to the University of Southern California to study with Arnold Schoenberg.
Mr. Nixon taught at Modesto Junior College from 1951 to 1959 and joined the music department at San Francisco State in the fall of 1960. He retired in 1990.

He told the Tulare Voice that one of the highlights of his career was meeting Josef Krips, who conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the premiere of two of his works, Mooney's Grove Suite” in 1968 and the critically acclaimed “Viola Concerto” in 1970.

Fueling his reputation as one of the world's leading composers for bands was the decision of the University of Michigan band to take the first piece he had written for band to Russia.

“This carried a lot of wallop,” Mr. Nixon said. “It helped tremendously.”

In 1976, he helped to write and arrange music for the American Bicentennial celebration and also composed pieces that reflect the California experience. Among them are Festival Fanfare March,” which is often performed by military bands, “Fiesta del Pacifico” and “Chamarita!” which reflects the imagery and joyful spirit of the Holy Ghost celebrations held in California's Portuguese-American communities each year.

Mr. Leonard, who now lives in Hanford and kept in close contact with Mr. Nixon and his family over the many years, said he almost has a complete collection of everything recorded that was written by his friend.

“He always sent me everything that he recorded,” he said. “I'm going to give that to the [Tulare] museum.” The Music Department at UC Berkeley has a complete collection, he added.

Mr. Nixon's survivors include: his wife, Nancy, San Mateo; three sons; two daughters; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

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