Lee Torliatt was a native-born Sonoma County high school teacher, newspaper reporter and author of local history who seemed born to write and tell stories — most of them true.
The lean and lanky Torliatt, who died April 12 at 92, possessed a wit as sharp and dry as a Bedouin’s dagger. He savored causing people to ponder whether something outlandish that he said or wrote was a joke.
Case in point: His wife of 17 years, Marj, recalls that the first time they met, he wore shorts and had one knee wrapped in an Ace bandage. The former Marjorie Moore asked if he was hurt and he said no, he just wanted to cover up the place on his lower leg “where the wood attaches to the skin.”
In a similar vein, Torliatt was a recreational runner who more than once fell during a park jog. A doctor he knew noticed his leg was bleeding and suggested he find a dog to lick it. Torliatt wrote in an unpublished autobiography that when he next saw the doc, he told him he “had let a dog lick the wound, but that he (the dog) died a couple of days later.”
A longtime community volunteer committed to assisting people who struggled, Torliatt years ago helped to cook large-scale meals for clients of Santa Rosa’s former Catholic Worker Kitchen. He felt moved to compose a recipe book that featured these instructions for enough Chef’s Surprise to feed a hungry crowd:
“For this dish, one needs to gather together rice, onions, zucchini, rutabagas, yams, mustard greens, blemished tomatoes, kale and other donated products from available backyard gardens. To these add microwave gravy mix, a bottle of Kaopectate, a jar of hot chili sauce, three assorted rusty cans of anything handy, one pair of tennis shoes — with laces — white or colored, one clean burlap sack, a clove of garlic, some chrysanthemum leaves and a bottle of Alka-Seltzer.”
More seriously, Torliatt, a member of a deeply rooted Petaluma family, taught social studies in lively fashion at Santa Rosa High School from 1964 to 1969, then at Piner High until his retirement in 1993.
“We called him The Quipper,” said retired Piner teacher and coach Jim Underhill. “He was well liked by the faculty and students. He always came up with something clever to say.”
Torliatt also could write, a skill he exercised with flourish while working as a newspaper reporter as a teenager and then a young man. He recalled in his autobiography that as a Boy Scout he made his start in journalism writing dispatches that “kept the world informed about the doings of Petaluma Troop 7 through the Petaluma Argus-Courier.”
As an enterprising student at Petaluma’s St. Vincent de Paul High School in the late 1940s, Torliatt filed prep sports stories to both the Argus and The Press Democrat. From there he stepped up to covering his hometown’s storied Leghorns football team.
From St. Vincent High he entered Santa Rosa Junior College, where he wrote sports stories for both The Press Democrat and the school paper, the Oak Leaf.
Torliatt was 19 when he paused his formal education to join the U.S. Air Force. It was 1952, during the war in Korea. He was stationed in Japan, where he met his first wife, Ryo Sakakibara. He became a reporter for the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and sometimes worked nights on the Tokyo copy desk of the Associated Press.
One day in 1956, he and a few fellow Stars and Stripes staffers were piqued by a front-page account of a classic publicity stunt of the era by a guy in Great Britain: he hit a golf ball, drive after drive, the 60 miles or so from London to Oxford.
Torliatt and a buddy struck a deal to smack golf balls up the side of 12,395-foot Mt. Fuji. Torliatt recounted in his autobiography, “The trip took 10 hours and 50 minutes, cost 27 golf balls and 1,275 strokes. The story got on most of the wire service files, and was run in numerous parts of the world.”
After five years in the Air Force, Torliatt was discovered to have contracted tuberculosis. His new wife, Ryo, had to travel separately from Japan to the U.S. when he was flown on an ambulance flight to California. There, he was admitted to a military hospital in Livermore.
He remained there, under treatment, for two years. Meanwhile, Ryo worked, perfected her English and got by the best she could on her own.
Finally discharged from the hospital in 1959, Lee Torliatt, then 26, enrolled at what was then called San Francisco State College. To help pay the bills, he worked summers on the copy desk of the San Francisco Chronicle. Ryo became a luncheon hostess at the landmark Trader Vic’s restaurant, where she met the likes of newspaperman Herb Caen, French singer-actor Maurice Chevalier and Nina Kukharchuk, future wife of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Lee Torliatt earned an undergraduate degree, then moved to UC Berkeley to pursue a master’s degree in preparation to become a teacher. He completed his studies in 1964, and was hired as a social studies teacher at Santa Rosa High School.
He’d soon be eternally grateful to a seasoned Santa Rosa educator who also worked part-time at The Press Democrat, Doug Campbell. Torliatt wrote in his autobiography that Campbell “gave me some of the most significant guidance I have received, words I have tried to live by through the years. If one were an English or social studies teacher, he said, one should be able to talk on any topic for 20 minutes whether he knew anything about it or not.”
Torliatt launched his career in teaching. On the side, he indulged his intrigue in Sonoma County history and in newspapering. For about the first 15 years he taught, he worked summers and some weekends covering stories for The Press Democrat.
Columnist and history writer Gaye LeBaron was among the friends he made at the PD. She said, “Lee was a big, tall guy with an outsized sense of humor and a sense of history, which I think is so important for a teacher.”
As an ex-newsman, Torliatt kept bittersweet recollections of driving to Cloverdale in late 1965 on a PD assignment to cover a speech to the Sonoma County Farm Bureau by Ronald Reagan. The actor had entered politics and in 1966 would successfully challenge California’s governor, Democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown.
Torliatt wrote in his autobiography, “When I called the story in right on deadline, I reported how the crowd had roared when Ronnie said, ‘There was a disease that destroyed peaches, and I hope that I’m not getting into party politics when I tell you that disease was called ground rot.’” Torliatt couldn’t fathom why that got such a rise from the audience.
He soon learned why from PD editor Art Volkerts, a former west county farm boy. Volkerts told Torliatt his phone was on fire from people declaring that Reagan had in fact cited the peach culprit “brown rot” in a dig to the incumbent governor.
In 1969, Ryo and Lee Torliatt welcomed a daughter, Midori.
In time, her father let go of news reporting and began writing books of local history. His publications include “Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire,” “Sports History of Sonoma County” and “Historic Photos of Sonoma County.”
He was a board member of the Sonoma County Historical Society for about 17 years, and for most of that time edited and produced the quarterly Sonoma Historian journal.
Lee Torliatt and Marjorie Moore married in 2008.
As Torliatt approached the end of his life, which came from complications of pneumonia at Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center, family and friends gathered around him. The scene was reminiscent of the one in 1978, when Torliatt sat beside the care-home bed of his father, Peter, who appeared to be in a coma. The teacher and writer recorded in his autobiography, “I tried to cheer him up with a little lively patter, suspecting that he might have no idea I was even there.”
Torliatt continued, “I was beginning to tire of my lively performance when, without opening his eyes, his lips moved and he said what I presume were his last words:
“‘Lee, don’t be so God damn silly.’”
In addition to his daughter, Midori Verity of Santa Rosa, Lee Torliatt is survived by two grandsons.
A celebration of his life will be May 31 in Santa Rosa. For details, email midori@midoriverity.com.
Torliatt’s family suggests memorial contributions to Sonoma County Historical Society, www.sonomacountyhistory.org/ or P.O. Box 1373, Santa Rosa CA 95402.
Published by Press Democrat on April 23, 2025.
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