The man who transformed Sugar Loaf - The curtain closes: But James Mari's legacy lives on

Sugar Loaf — The wildfires took a break, for a day, from their angry spread northward. Jim Mari, a retired Orange County real estate developer known for designing attractive housing communities, lakes and ponds, passed away in his Big Sur home overlooking the Pacific on July 5. Back in the postwar era of square, sterile “Levittowns,” Jim, my grandfather, designed neighborhoods that incorporated the ambient topography instead of working against it. He served as a Chester councilman from 1955-63 and, through his last year, always asked for news from “home.” Born in 1915 in the year of Babe Ruth’s first career home run, Jim, a hard-working Teamster and occasional sculpture model, moved upstate from Woodside, N.Y., with his bride, Helen, in 1939. Shortly thereafter, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and Jim answered his country’s call to service, shipping out to the Aleutian Islands to build airstrips as a civilian contractor. He was a fast study, spending days running machinery, nights hitting the sack to Tokyo Rose’s radio threats of impending attacks on their little camp, and finding time to write letters to his beloved wife and daughters, Helen and Diane, back in Sugar Loaf. Jimmy’s prime acres Upon his return to his beloved hamlet, Jim applied the skills he’d honed in the Aleutians to a lifetime of real estate development. He began as an excavating contractor and invested his profits into countless hundreds of acres of prime real estate from area farms on the suggestion of his efficient, forward-thinking wife, Helen. He soon found himself working more on his own real properties, taking great pride in seeing the small communities he’d designed transformed into living neighborhoods. He never forgot his old neighborhood, however, returning frequently to serve as Godfather at christenings or to deliver farm-fresh gifts to his family and old neighbors in Woodside, where many Italian dialects drifted in the salty, steamy summer breeze through the porches and open markets. My cugino, Danny Repole, with whom I worked at the Glenmere Mansion, related stories of “Uncle Grimaldi’s” periodic visits to the old neighborhood from “upstate,” carrying such gifts as whole, butchered pigs over his shoulder. Danny and his siblings were awestruck by this giant who visited their dad and uncles, the Repole brothers, Jim’s childhood friends. Two of the Repole brothers served as “Fraticelli,” or Franciscan Friars, and the charitable “Rule of St. Francis of Assisi” ran deep in the neighborhood. “Dad” carried it, quietly, with him at all times. I was reminded of the Franciscan rule when I spoke with one of Dad’s old Chester friends, Eddie Otterstedt, last week. Eddie, a youthful 91-year-old, bespoke his deep respect for his dear friend “Jimmy,” who “did more charitable work for the town and village of Chester, and would never talk about it, than anyone alive today could possibly remember.” Eddie went on that Jimmy did so much for the town and village for which he was never thanked that it was, in Eddie’s words, “unreal.” When Eddie contacted Jimmy for a price on digging the foundation for the American Legion House (site of the present-day CVS), Dad, fiercely proud to be an American (and later equally proud of his son, Robert’s, voluntary service in Vietnam), said he couldn’t take the Legion’s money, he’d do it gratis. Jimmy, he said, went on to donate his own time and equipment to erect the steel framework for the building, and when his crane’s boom buckled from the weight of one of the girders, “Jimmy” wouldn’t allow the legion to ‘kick in’ toward repair costs. ‘Those are the rules’ What James Mari is better remembered for are the subdivisions he designed and developed, back before real estate development became fashionable in the region. He sold his last residential Chester parcel, the Greens of Chester, years after retiring in Big Sur. In fact, 17 years of zoning and planning approvals later, he was actually paid for the transaction. He taught me many invaluable lessons, none of which I’ll never forget. Once, when he was subdividing an expansive, pastoral lot, his naturalist grandson suggested that he donate the land to someone who might keep it pristine. “What — do you want it?” he asked. “Sure,” I said, as we enjoyed our liverwurst and onion sandwiches in his dusty office after I’d drifted the track pins in the D8. “Okay” he said. “I’ll ask your grandmother to bring you the deed and the tax bills. You’d better get a night job to cover the ten thousand plus in school taxes.” “I never questioned it again, just as he never questioned why, decades after his own children had graduated high school, he was paying tens of thousands in school taxes to several different school districts, each year, for his properties. “Those are the rules, Jay,” he said. “I knew them when I went in. You have to factor everything in before you gripe about it.” Another time, while I was bleeding the fuel system in the Case loader, I asked him why some folks thought that he and other successful Italian-American contractors like him were somehow, inexplicably, tied to mob interests. “What day is it, today?” he asked me. “Saturday,” I told him, after thinking for a second. “Where are these people right now?” he asked. “At work?” “No,” I said. “They’re probably at home.” And I thought about the six-day workweek he often pulled, the 12-hour days, and the fact that he went directly home to his beloved Helen each evening, wasting not “dime one” at bars. “Those people watch too many ‘Godfather’ movies and spend too much time and money in bars,” he said. “If they worked six days a week and invested their profits instead of blowing their money at bars, they’d do well too. And they wouldn’t have time to criticize other people.” The curtain closes I got down to the Bronx, last month, to see the Bombers in their final season at the old Yankee Stadium. I picked up a nice, warm Yankees blanket for Dad. Whenever I visited him in Big Sur, we’d watch the game, and he’d often be chilly. Now I’m a Mets fan, a fact that Dad lovingly tolerated with the Mets blanket I’d given him years back to keep around him each evening when the fog would rise up off the Pacific, and bring a chill to his old bones. The Yankees blanket was snuggled around him into his last week, and my handwritten estimation of Girardi’s skipper-ship was kept nearby, as well — in case he needed to give it more thought. At 93, Dad was older than “The House that Ruth built” and every bit as solid. But even rocks, as Dad knew from a lifetime of breaking and moving them, don’t sit tight forever. The curtain call sounded both for him and, this autumn, the stadium. So after returning from California, I attended the Lycian Centre’s “On the Lawn” concert and marveled at the crowd enjoying a perfect summer evening by Swetlow’s Pond, which Dad built back in 1950. I wondered what he’d think sitting there with me, chatting with Sugar Loaf’s cheerful, more recent residents, who now live on the shores of the pretty little pond he built. Kids ran around, barefoot, on the grass. The mountain shone over the scene, bathed in bright, pink alpenglow. I laughed, knowing he’d be pleased, as I certainly am, to see his old pond appreciated, and his dear Sugar Loaf alive with the laughter of kids on skateboards, the perfume of Peter’s Candles in the air, and the occasional, whining buzz of Mark Laroe’s old sawmill in the air. In fact, I‘m pretty sure I heard him clapping after the band bowed.