pet connection

President-elect Barack Obama has put out a call for Monday, the holiday set aside to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to be a day of service. The Obamas themselves have pledged to volunteer tomorrow, and here’s the call to service from the man who on Tuesday be the President of the United States.

You can sign up for service opportunities here, on the “official” site. But honestly, you don’t have to do that. Just take a minute to sit yourself down and see how you can help. It’s something everyone can do. Pets, people, your community, the world … whatever you can do, figure it out and do something today. (Not just today, of course, but it’s a start, right?)

I hope you will tell us about how you helped. But you don’t have to.  In fact,  I have a story about good works, done quietly:

Nowadays when you hear the name “McClatchy” you probably think of newspapers on the brink of extinction. That’s the McClatchy Corp., a huge chain of newspapers and other media businesses.

As a Sacamenna kid, I still think of the McClatchy family business instead, the one that owned the Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto Bees and was all about the central valleys of California. The McClatchy family was wealthy and powerful, and no doubt liked being so, but they lived in a fairly modest way and dedicated themselves to the public good whether by breaking railroad monopolies, supporting the local theater company or getting trees planted all over what are now some very gracious old Sacramento neighborhoods. (It wasn’t all good, of course: The McClatchy’s Bees also threw their influence behind keeping “the wrong kind” of people out of California.)

Eleanor McClatchy gave up her dreams of a life in the theater when her brother died suddenly and young. She ran the family business from the time her father died in 1936, and remained reserved, hard-working and non-complaining until her own death some 40 years later. My time at the Sacramento Bee overlapped hers by a year or so and I only met her a few times in my life, briefly, but she was clearly a class act.

Hard to imagine now the days when any decent-sized town had more than one newspaper. In Sacramento, there were two, and the Union was the other.

At one point, the Sacramento Zoo wanted an elephant, and the Union started a drive to get one, as a point of civic pride. Why, no real city in post-World War II America could have a zoo without an elephant!

When Winky the Asian elephant finally arrived, she moved in to a house said to be paid for by Eleanor McClatchy, the gift on condition of anonymity. (Winky died in an elephant sanctuary just last spring, by the way, at the age of 56.)

That’s just the way Miss McClatchy did things. Nowadays the whole family would no doubt be considered eccentric. They lived in nice old family houses, drove fairly ordinary cars, wore their clothes until threadbare. (That last is utterly true: Eleanor’s nephew, the late C.K. McClatchy, was famous for having sweaters older than some of The Sacramento Bee’s reporters when I was new there and younger than those very sweaters.)

Above all, the McClatchy family gave to their community,  generously and quietly.

If that’s your style, do something on Monday and smile to yourself knowing what you did.  And if you want to share, let us know what you did.

It’s all good.

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