Al Maggini, the dashing and ageless World War II combat veteran whose historic run of volunteer service and philanthropy placed him among Sonoma County’s most celebrated citizens, died Thursday at the age of 107.
A potent sense of responsibility drove Maggini all his life to do the right thing. His father died when he was 13 so he stepped up as the man of the family. He later trained as an Air Corps navigator and went to war against Hitler though he wasn’t required to.
“It was my duty to my country,” the veteran of 35 bombing missions over Germany told The Press Democrat last November.
Following the war, Maggini resumed his career as a stockbroker and became one of Sonoma County’s most productive and generous community leaders.
He lived for many years with his wife, Helen, in the adobe home they had built in Sonoma Valley. They’d relocated to Santa Rosa when Helen died in 2002.
In addition to the long days he worked as a successful, widely respected stockbroker, Maggini served more than three decades as a trustee of Santa Rosa Junior College, and more than six decades on the charitable board of what is now Providence Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. He’s credited with attracting more than $200 million to the hospital’s mission.
At SRJC on Thursday, President Frank Chong praised Maggini as “one of a handful of people who over time shaped and molded the JC into what it is now.”
The three-story Albert Maggini Hall on the college’s Santa Rosa campus stands in tribute to his myriad contributions to the school.
“He was a man of great faith, great humor and great humility. A real rarity these days,” Chong said.
The soon-to-retire college president said the extraordinary length of Maggini’s life wasn’t as remarkable as “how well he lived it.”
Santa Rosa banker and vintner Vic Trione, longtime friend of Maggini and also a neighbor in the Wild Oak development near Oakmont, recalled that even when the long-widowed Maggini was several years past age 100, he still drove his Porsche Carrera GTS over the hill to Napa Valley to visit his girlfriend, Karen Carson, who was in her 80s.
Trione would tell Maggini, “Al, you really are a cradle robber!”
“He lived life to the ultimate,” said Trione, who most Sundays sat right behind Maggini at Oakmont’s Star of the Valley Catholic Church. “He was sharp as a tack to the very end.
“It was a life to strive for.”
Dapper, funny, caring, genuine and movie-star handsome, Maggini was asked often for the secret to not only living past 100, but remaining so vital. He’d sometimes answer, “I’m not sure I can credit the martinis, but they didn’t hurt!”
Though he held a valid drivers license at age 107, Maggini stopped driving a car nearly two years ago. He’d pilot a battery-powered golf cart from home to the nearby Star of the Valley Catholic Church and to meals at the adjacent Wild Oak Saddle Club.
Assistance from a corps of relatives and friends allowed him to remain in the home he loved, where he died Thursday morning. His primary helpers were nieces Alice Maggini Rowan and Carol Maggini Wade, both of Santa Rosa. Their late father was Alfred Maggini, one of Al’s two brothers.
The nieces said that as advanced age at last took its toll, he needed some help getting around. Otherwise he did remarkably well right to the end.
“He ate dinner last night,” Rowan said. Observed her sister, Wade, “He appreciated us, he told us so all the time.”
Gaye LeBaron, the retired Sonoma County history writer and Press Democrat columnist, first met Maggini when she was a high school student in Sonoma. In recent years she became one of the people who enjoyed pampering him — she’d take him home-baked cookies.
“Al was very appreciative, and he was very appreciative of my cookies,” LeBaron said.
Maggini’s nieces said he was not ill recently, he was just wearing down. Said Wade, “The cause of death was a very long life.”
Wade and her sister have jotted down some of their favorite “Al-isms.” A favorite would flow from Maggini, a man who delighted in a nice drink and meal, as he savored whatever his nieces had served him.
Shared Wade, “He’d say, ‘Livin’ on velvet.’”
“He found pleasure in everything,” she added, “because he grew up not expecting a lot.”
Albert A. Maggini was born in San Francisco on Sept. 5, 1915. He’d have enrolled in college following graduation from St. Ignatius High School in 1933, but the Great Depression was on and his father, who’d run a Ford dealership, had died at just 39.
His nieces recalled hearing Al Maggini say, “My life changed when Uncle Charlie (his late father’s brother) put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You’re the man of the family now.’”
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