THE STORIES OF A SONOMA COUNTY HISTORIAN
“Oh my, oh my.”
That phrase, customarily uttered in an Irish brogue by Father James Kiely when confronted with one of life’s wonders or mysteries, served as a secret code between Lee Torliatt and me.
The two of us grew up a generation apart under Kiely’s watchful eye, just a couple blocks away from the towering St. Vincent de Paul Church he oversaw the bu in 1928. Kiely’s exclamation summed up our mutual obsession of delving into local history as a means of making sense of the world, but always coming up short.
After swapping stories of what W.E.B. DuBois called “the hideous mistakes, the frightful wrongs, and the great and beautiful things that people do,” we inevitably circled back to historian Shelby Foote’s appraisal of history as nothing more than “paradox, irony, and existential reality.”
Lee embraced that investigative cul-de-sac with both empathy and dry wit.
“Oh my, oh my.”
The two of us bonded over shared anchor places in our lives—the Petaluma neighborhood near St. Vincent’s where we both grew up in large family clans, and Sonoma Mountain, where our immigrant ancestors originally settled in the 19th century, and where I live today.
In the storytelling traditions of both our families— mine Irish, his French-Italian—facts were merely the bare bones of history. Unless cast in an engaging tale, they didn’t have legs. As John Keats noted, “a fact is not a truth until you love it.”
Lee loved facts, but not to the point they compromised his storytelling. Heaven forbid. Like the best history teachers, his stories had heart. They conveyed the humanity necessary to help students imagine the lives of people in the past, and the humor to show they were just as human as we are today.
Father Kiely liked to show up at the homes of parishioners unannounced, make a quick, five-minute inspection of the place, then abruptly leave. It was a vivid reminder that in a small town, knowing eyes are always upon you.
For Lee and me, they always were.
They bore witness to our stories—to who we were, how we got to be where we were, what we had been through, what we accomplished—just as we bore testimony to their stories before us, their footsteps we walked in, lending meaning to the transitory nature of our own wondrous presence.
“Oh my, oh my.”
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A version of this tribute appeared in the Fall 2025 edition of the Sonoma Historian
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Born in Petaluma, Lee Torliatt was a Sonoma County high school teacher, newspaper reporter, storyteller, and author of Historic Photos of Sonoma County, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire, and Sports Memories of Sonoma County.
