Town’s ‘Savior’ Came Up Short

MARIPOSA, Calif. —  When Wilfred L. Von der Ahe Jr. arrived in this struggling Sierra town 16 years ago, just about everybody saw gold. After all, he was the wealthy scion of a storied Los Angeles family: founders of the Vons Grocery Co., devout Catholics lauded by the Vatican for their charitable giving, and power brokers who presided over the finest country clubs.

He seemed to be just what Mariposa needed: a deep-pockets savior.

Perched at the intersection of California 140 and 49, Mariposa lives and dies by tourism. It boasts the oldest continuously operating county courthouse west of the Mississippi River, the esteemed Mariposa Museum and History Center, and the California State Mining and Mineral Museum.

But Mariposa relies almost exclusively on Yosemite traffic, and as the national park suffered in the 1990s--from recession, a federal government shutdown, rock slides and floods--the town did too. Already low property values were depressed still further. Unemployment soared into the mid-teens and stayed there. Businesses struggled and failed.

Von der Ahe, then 51, didn’t waste much time.

He bought thousands of acres around these forested hills. He purchased half the tiny historic downtown. He took over the Mariposa Mine, once owned by Civil War general and explorer John C. Fremont, and snapped up the town’s rattiest motel. Von der Ahe planned to bring it all to life, and everyone here wanted in on the action.

Realtors sidled up to him. Every club and cause competed for a handout. Strangers smiled at him with nervous yearning. Even the ambitious county assessor stepped in, advising Von der Ahe on his growing portfolio. Suddenly, one man seemed to promise a renaissance.

“With all the money he had, everyone was thinking, ‘Oh boy, this is going to be nice,’ ” said Mike Wright, the county’s former chief appraiser.

Now, many in Mariposa think, be careful what you wish for.

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Plenty of people come to these pine-studded hills to start over. Some run from the law. Others simply crave the peace and quiet of the rolling ranchland, just an hour’s drive from Yosemite Valley’s humbling power.

Von der Ahe was seeking refuge too, from his family’s outsized expectations.

Charles T. Von der Ahe immigrated from Copenhagen to Los Angeles, and opened his first Vons Groceteria at 7th and Figueroa streets in 1906. He built a chain of 87 stores, then sold in 1929 in time to avoid the stock market’s collapse. In 1932, he gave sons Wilfred and Theodore the financial backing to relaunch Vons Grocery Co. Their flagship store offered a bakery, deli, meat, grocery and produce departments under the same roof and was dubbed a “supermarket”--a term that caught on nationwide.

From the Jonathan Club to the Wilshire Country Club and beyond, the Von der Ahes were civic powerhouses and prolific donors. Among the many buildings that bear the family name are several at Loyola University in Westchester. The family sold the Vons chain in 1969 in a deal valued at $120 million, but remained involved until Wilfred’s retirement in 1975.

From the beginning, Wilfred Jr. was drawn to a different path. The eldest child in a staunchly Catholic family, he graduated from St. John’s Seminary College in Camarillo in 1964 and, following in an uncle’s footsteps, became a priest.

Then he and the conservative Von der Ahe clan parted ways. He marched with Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers, backing the historic grape boycott even though that stance hurt supermarket owners such as his father.

He gave impassioned homilies. He backed the Catholic Worker peace and justice movement and attended group therapy sessions with other hippie priests. But his sermons deviated from church dogma. He offended congregants in Long Beach by using profanity, and he socialized liberally with nuns.

Ultimately, he was called in by conservative then-Cardinal Francis McIntyre for a reprimand. His father accompanied him. But after the second scolding, Von der Ahe Jr. was suspended. When he was ordered to move out of his parish rectory, he was so mortified that he holed up in a motel rather than knock on his parents’ door.

“I think it crushed him,” said Dan Delany, a former classmate who left the priesthood in 1967 just before Von der Ahe did. “He never associated with the Catholic Church after that, never had his kids baptized.... His response was to abandon the whole thing.”

His brothers had followed their father’s entrepreneurial example, launching a successful real estate development company in 1970. Wilfred Jr. dabbled in that family business, but “he didn’t trust the other Von der Ahes,” said Maureen Murphy, a former nun who later became Von der Ahe’s longtime girlfriend. “If you peeled away the layers, it was, ‘I want to be like my dad, but I want to be making it on my own.’ ”

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Lean and ruggedly handsome with laughing blue eyes, Von der Ahe retreated to a rambling home on Bass Lake, not far from Mariposa. He married there, had a child and adopted three more. But it was only in 1986, a few years after his wife died of cancer, that Von der Ahe made this town his permanent home.

Then the buying spree began.

First, there was land. On one 1,600-acre holding here, he launched an ambitious reforestation project, planting more than 1.2 million redwood, cedar and noble pine seedlings. There were grazing tracts, office buildings and a planned subdivision spanning three counties. But it was when he gobbled up the estate of Italian grocer Emile Trabucco in 1989 that the town really took notice.

The purchase included 2,300 acres of ranchland outside town and four historic buildings that dominate one side of Mariposa’s downtown. They include the Gold Coin Club, an 1850 adobe used as an office by Fremont and later operated as a bar, and the brick and metal Trabucco warehouse, built in 1858 as the MacDermott and Co. general store.

Then came the purchase of the rundown Mariposa Mine, an ugly commercial building on the north end of town, and the dilapidated Mel-O-Dee motel.

Von der Ahe’s father had impressed on him that wealth should grow steadily, said former Mariposa County Assessor Steve Dunbar, a friend who advised on many of the purchases. For each property, there was a plan for improvements to make the investment worthwhile.

Expectations in town ran high. Bud Graham, a former Mariposa Realtor, acknowledges that he was among an army of hungry businesspeople who “tried to suck up to him to curry favor.” The Friends of the Library scored the use of a building. The county leased Von der Ahe’s downtown parking lot for $1. The hospital got a series of anonymous donations. But the list of requests was long.

“He could be selfless,” said Graham, who became friends with Von der Ahe when he stopped expecting business from him. “But it’s hard to be selfless when you’ve got the whole world asking you for money, the whole world thinking you’re going to bring downtown Mariposa up to snuff.”

At first, it seemed that he would. In 1991, Von der Ahe helped get the downtown buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He envisioned the Trabucco Warehouse as a family restaurant. He visited Old Sacramento, using it as a model for what he hoped Mariposa could become, and drafted blueprints.

But as the years wore on, Mariposa got to know Von der Ahe a little better.

When he tried to launch his own cafe, he meddled so much that his chef quit before it opened. When he rented out the restaurant, that backfired too.

“He had strange things that tripped him off,” said Shirley Felix, who spent five hours negotiating a simple lease, only to have Von der Ahe refuse to renew after Felix poured $30,000 in improvements into the property. “He put me through hell.”

Von der Ahe was generous with the few he trusted. He gave Delany down payments to buy halfway houses in Los Angeles and Sacramento for the poor and infirm, offered a veritable stranger and his family a stay at his palatial Bass Lake home, and reached out to help recovering alcoholics in Mariposa. But he was guarded and suspicious with most, and frugal to extremes, buying old vegetables and taking cold showers.

Once, he emerged with a bag from the Friends of the Library bookstore. “He was so proud,” said Tom Ohmer, a friend and classmate from Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks who also ended up in Mariposa. “He said, ‘I’ve done all my Christmas shopping and I only spent $2.’ ”

When he found pleasure, it was outside the realm of material wealth. Once, he invited David Marks--a local herb farmer and intimate friend--to lunch after an agricultural fair in Fresno. But at the car, “he goes to the trunk and pulls out two foot-long carrots,” Marks said. “He’s standing there soaking wet, happiness all over his countenance, chewing on a damned carrot. I said, ‘Wilfred, you look like a man who has everything.’ And at that moment, he did.”

To rare friends such as Marks, Von der Ahe was neither the town’s savior nor its betrayer. He was just a man who mostly wanted to be left alone to collect antiques, dabble in history and geology, and ride his mountain bike across his vast forest lands. But for most around town, disappointment and bitterness set in like a cold fog.

Controlling and secretive in his business dealings, Von der Ahe refused to hire help, holing up alone in an office overrun by paper. He was in over his head.

Rehabbing the buildings was a daunting task. They sat for years, filling up with bats. A government grant for restoration work was sent back when Von der Ahe failed to step up with required matching funds.

Today, most of his properties remain shuttered. The Mel-O-Dee is a picture of decay, its porch railings pried away by vandals for firewood and its windows punched out. The mine sat flooded, its outbuildings recently set afire by teenagers.

“I think in his heart he wanted to preserve history, but he really didn’t know what to do next,” said Kerry Lee, curator of the Mariposa Museum and History Center. “He got overwhelmed.”

Others are less forgiving.

“He hurt the town,” said Pauline Trabucco, 85, daughter of the grocer. “It was in a way very sad.”

Von der Ahe surely would have lived a happier life if he’d never bought the properties, or had hired someone to manage them, said Marks, but “he couldn’t let go.”

In recent years, Von der Ahe took to showing up at night to raid Marks’ fridge. The pair discussed philosophy, science and family. A shrewd and honorable businessman, Wilfred Sr.--who died in 1998--had little patience for his dreamer son.

“In one of his more reflective moods, Wilfred told me his father looked at him and said, ‘You’re never going to become successful,’ ” Marks said. “It set the stage for some real tragedy.... Wilfred was a delightful man. A businessman? Boy, was he bad!”

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Still, he kept trying.

After Von der Ahe Jr. was diagnosed with leukemia two years ago, he seemed to soften. First hospitalized in Fresno, he reconciled with family and friends he had pushed away. This year, his family moved him to City of Hope in Duarte, where he rallied after a stem-cell transplant.

There he sat, his sister recalled in a eulogy here, in a red ski cap and plaid flannel shirt, surrounded by 14 file boxes stuffed with his papers and plans for Mariposa.

He agreed to seek help with the historic properties. Rep. George Radanovich, who represents Mariposa, had been urging Von der Ahe to relinquish control or seek resources to preserve them. The congressman runs a wine-tasting room in the heart of the historic district and had eyed the buildings with despair.

Then, in late June, Von der Ahe’s body abruptly rejected the donated stem cells. He was 66.

In death he came full circle, embraced by the world he had resisted and rejected years before. An old elementary school classmate, Roger M. Mahony--now a cardinal--said the funeral Mass at St. Charles Borromeo in North Hollywood, accompanied at the altar by 10 priests. Dolores Hope was among those attending, and a reception followed at the exclusive Lakeside Country Club.

“It was an L.A. funeral for an L.A. family, for a person that didn’t really exist down there,” said Dunbar, the Mariposa friend and advisor.

Two days later, Radanovich and federal and state historic preservation officials toured Von der Ahe’s properties. It was a long-planned visit to get improvements rolling. A memorial followed.

The family has declined to discuss the estate or Von der Ahe’s life, saying he would have shunned the attention. But plenty of questions remain in this mountain town.

“What’s in the will? What’s going to happen?” said Carol Harner, whose ranch borders one 2,300-acre Von der Ahe holding. “That’s the big question of the town.”

Von der Ahe’s rundown properties still dot Mariposa and surrounding communities. Many residents are eager to see the buildings sold to individual owners who might kick-start a desperately needed revival.

Others are urging Von der Ahe’s eldest daughter--executor of his estate--to donate the sites to the county or state. It could take months before the transfer of the estate, held in trust, is complete.

In the meantime, this town of 1,373 waits and wonders, its modest fate in the balance.

“Everybody would like to know what’s going to happen,” said Lyn Maccarone, who owns the restored Mariposa Hotel and Inn next to Von der Ahe’s buildings. “We’ve been waiting a long time.”