Petaluma’s Peter Sellers: Frederick Geers (1955-2020)

“To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.” —Bob Dylan

Friendships forged while growing up usually change as time passes, but memories made together in youth often create bonds for life. Frederick Gardiner Geers, who recently passed away, was such a friend. Although we grew up in Petaluma in the 1960s, we didn’t become friends until high school in the early 1970s, when I joined two of the cliques where Fred played a central role, journalism and theater.

Creative and whip-smart, he was wired with an intense energy softened by a satiric wit. Behind his coke-bottle glasses and tight-lip smile—used to hide his bad teeth until he had them all replaced in high school—Fred was our enigmatic Peter Sellers, a private person who presented himself in a series of different guises, sometimes playing Inspector Clouseau; at other times, Dr. Strangelove. During the rare instances he dropped his thespian guard, he revealed a poet’s sensitivity to the world around him.

From time to time, Fred’s natural intensity got the better of him, and he would erupt in head jerking, eye blinking, and uncontrollable cussing. When Fred fell under one of his spells—an event that often occurred while we were riding aimlessly around in someone’s car—it was like being caged with a seething bobcat. “Time to let Fred out,” became our a customary fire drill. In retrospect, it’s possible that he may have been touched in adolescence by Tourette Syndrome.

Like many in our high school gang, Fred was something of an “at-risk kid.” We all had troubles at home that we tacitly acknowledged but never discussed, in something of an unspoken bond. In Fred’s case, life centered around his mother Jean, as his father was not in the picture.

Jean Gardiner was the daughter of the president of Heald’s Business College in Fresno, who was also a fig farmer. In 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, she moved to Hawaii to work for the Army Corp of Engineers as a civilian medical secretary. On the morning of December 7, 1941, she was driving to work at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base when a Japanese plane dropped a bomb onto the road in front of her. She survived the blast, but experience stayed with her for life, fueling a lifelong animosity toward the Japanese.

Jean remained in Hawaii until after the war, giving birth to a daughter with her first husband, an army major. After their divorce, she returned to California, where in 1950 she married John Geers, an Army private, and took a job working at Hamilton Air Force Base. Their son Frederick was born in Fresno in 1955, when Jean was forty-six, after which she and her husband purchased a small ranchette in Cotati, and Jean acquired a horse named Thunder.

The Geers divorced in 1958, when Fred was three. Jean took Thunder and her two children back to Hawaii for a couple of years, then returned with them to Petaluma. She rented a farmhouse west of town where they could board Thunder, and took a job as a medical transcriber at Letterman Hospital in the Presidio. Fred attended rural Wilson School were he became a devoted Cub Scout.

I first became aware of Fred during a Washington’s Birthday Cherry Pie Eating Contest in junior high, in which he placed a close second. By that time, Thunder was gone, Jean’s daughter was married, and Fred and his mother were living in an old Victorian on Petaluma Boulevard, a block away from Walnut Park. At the beginning of his sophomore year, Fred moved to Hawaii to try living with his father, who managed a hotel in Hilo. He returned after a semester, scarred by the physically bullying he received from the local Hawaiian kids who tormented him for being a mainlander.

At Petaluma High, Fred and I both worked on the school’s newspaper, the Trojan, where a fellow member of our gang, Tom Gaffey, was the top editor. Tom and Fred helped form an Explorer journalism troop in the Boy Scouts led by Ralph Thompson, managing editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. Soon after I joined the troop, we launched a newspaper, The Bugle, for the Boy Scouts of the Sonoma-Mendocino Area Council, with Fred serving as editor.

Fred and I also collaborated on an underground newspaper in high school, inspired in part by “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, which, much to our delight, became a source of controversy for the school administration.

Along with journalism, Fred engaged himself in theater, where his shape-changing theatrics translated well to the stage. He appeared in almost all of our school productions, most notably in the musical Carnival as B.F. Schlegel, the larger-than-life ringmaster who creates a sense of family for a group of quirky performers working his rinky-dink carnival.

While the drama club on campus was populated with colorful personalities, few matched Fred for true eccentricity. At cast parties he distinguished himself on the dance floor, often dancing solo to his own ecstatic rhythms for hours on end. His own taste in music tended toward progressive rock, especially the band Yes, who provided the soundtrack to his teenage years.

After graduating with honors from Petaluma High in 1973, Fred enrolled at San Francisco State. In the years that followed, he remained in the Bay Area, working as a freelance writer and a chef, and for a brief time, running the historic Lorenzo Theater in San Leandro as a repertory venue, featuring both films and live performances. During opening night’s musical concert, Fred took a lit cigarette away from a defiant customer, who responded by stabbing him with a knife, setting off a melee that the police had to break up.

In the early 1980s, Fred worked as a chef at the first farm-to-table gourmet restaurant on the Healdsburg Plaza, just as the town was beginning to draw wine tourists to the area. Over the next decade it wasn’t unusual to find him cooking at some tony restaurant in San Francisco, whirling around the kitchen with his sous chefs like a dancing dervish ringmaster.

Although Fred never married, he had a number of long-term relationships, including with actress Diane Varsi, who was nominated while still a teenager for her role in the film Peyton Place.

Fred left the culinary business in the mid-1990s to become a technical writer at a software company. After the company merged with the open source software developer Red Hat, Fred was suddenly worth millions, at least in stock options. His paper fortune evaporated in the dot com bust of the early 2000s, after which he returned to cooking and freelance writing. During the 2010s, he served as the longtime chef at Ireland’s 32, San Francisco’s legendary Irish pub on Geary Street.

One of the last times I saw Fred was at an open house celebration for Tiburon attorney Jon Rankin, a charter member of our high school gang. Fred and his female partner at the time arrived by Uber, dressed in long, black overcoats as characters from the film the Matrix. True to his Peter Sellers nature, Fred never broke character the entire evening.

At the time of his death, Fred was employed at Episcopal Community Services in San Francisco, running a kitchen for feeding the homeless and the needy. After his 65^th birthday on March 18^th, he was sent home to the Inner Richmond apartment where he lived alone, to self-quarantine during to the Covid-19 pandemic. He died two weeks later of a heart attack while asleep in bed. In a final gesture so characteristic of Fred, he exited the stage on April Fool’s Day.