The Arts Council of Sonoma County's Achievement in the Arts Awards is created not only to raise funds to bring more music, theater, dance, literature and music to the county, to make the county of Sonoma as well known for the Arts as it is for Wine and Food, but also to recognize the impact individuals have made in expanding the recognition of the Arts within the county. Education plays a vital role in the nurturing of such an ambition and monies raised go to expanding that role in our mission. Below is the list of honorees that we believe have made a significant contribution to that aim.

With the cold eye of an accountant and the touch of Midas, Henry Trione rose from economic anonymity to become Sonoma County's most influential citizen during the last half of the century. Trione, 78, began as Sonoma County's first mortgage banker, but along the way he became the county's premier financier and deal-maker, the man who could make things happen. And did for 50 years.

Trione's influence was born of his tremendous wealth and judicious use of power, a winning combination during the explosive growth in Sonoma County following World War II. If a big deal was cooking in Sonoma County, Trione, a baker's son from Humboldt County, was involved either directly or behind the scenes.

A short, stocky man with a patrician nose and penetrating dark eyes, Trione made fortunes in banking, timber and wine, always insisting he was just lucky. A regular guy, he said, who was in the right place at the right time. ''Wealth comes from the growth of the economy. Good times make heroes out of very lucky people,'' Trione has said in passing off what most consider the Trione touch, an almost instinctive ability to sniff out a deal and make millions. Many of the millions that Trione harvested in the fields of commerce have been returned to Sonoma County in a big way.

Trione's largesse was behind the creation of the 5,000-acre Annadel State Park and the Burbank Center for the Arts. His money helped turn the old post office into the Sonoma County Museum. He gave Boy Scouts a summer camp and is the financial godfather to dozens of nonprofit groups ranging from Ducks Unlimited to the Volunteer Center of Sonoma County. Trione doesn't like to talk about the money he gives away, often donating anonymously to causes dear to his Republican heart. When asked how much he has given, Trione, the secret benefactor, politely declined comment. ''That's not significant,'' he said. ''I don't like publicity. You know that.''

Trione not only gives away his own money, he encourages his rich friends to dig deep, too. He is the spiritual leader of the county's wealthy and well-connected, giving the blessing necessary for the upper crust to get behind a community project, charity or politician.....Tim Tesconi

Steven Oliver, is recognized in Sonoma County for his past involvement with the former Museum of Contemporary Art at the Wells Fargo Center and his role as chair of Community Foundation Sonoma County’s Taskforce on the Arts.  Most recently, Oliver has been a proponent and an enthusiastic supporter of plans to develop an Arts District in downtown Santa Rosa.

Oliver and his wife, Nancy, own a working sheep ranch in Geyserville that features one of the country’s largest collections of site specific art with works of such world-renowned artists as Ann Hamilton, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman. While not open to the public, Oliver donates tours of the ranch, often led by him, to Sonoma County arts organizations to use as fundraising events.

Beyond Sonoma County, Oliver is Chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where he also served as President from 1995 to 1997 and oversaw the completion of the $95 million fundraising campaign to build the new museum.  Oliver also served as Chairman of the California College of the Arts, where he still serves on the Board, and he is a former President of the Oakland Museum. In addition, he was Chairman of a division of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997 and served on the Board of Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden from 2000 to 2004.
.
As a builder and president of the award winning construction and development firm, Oliver and Company based in Richmond, Steven Oliver has completed over 1,000 buildings across Northern California.  His expertise in all aspects of the building process and commitment to fulfilling aesthetic desires while respecting financial parameters has benefited non-profit arts organizations such as the Berkeley Repertory Theater, the Oxbow School in Napa, the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, and the Charles M. Shultz Museum in Santa Rosa.

Donald Green is, perhaps, mostly widely known for his outstanding contributions to the telecommunications industry. He founded three companies that won national attention: Digital Telephone Systems, Optilink Corp and Advanced Fibre Communications. He is widely considered to be the "father" of the many telecommunications companies that developed in the North Bay region over the last three decades.

The Arts Council of Sonoma County honored Don and his wife Maureen for their nurturing of choral music, arts education and musical performance capacity in the North Bay. With a love for Baroque music, Don and Maureen have been active members of the Sonoma County County Bach Choir, under the direction of Sonoma State University, for nearly two decades. Before moving to Sonoma County in the late 80s, Maureen managed the San Francisco Bach Choir and was noted for her outstanding fundraising efforts for classical music events in the Bay Area. She has also been an active organizer for the Bach Society.

The Greens were honored in 2005 for their dedication to the cause of enhancing the quality of music instruction and performing arts venues in this region. In 1997, the Greens pledged $10 million to Sonoma State University for the construction of the Green Music Center, which, as of 2007, has broken ground is on it's way to full construction. The Center will be the new home for the Santa Rosa Symphony and is expected to showcase world class entertainment. Last but not least, Don and Maureen's vision has led to the Green Music Festival and Green Farm Youth Summer Music Program.

The Greens are also generous philanthropists in the areas of child welfare and animal rights, among other causes, and have served on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations in the Bay Area. Born in England, Donald and Maureen emigrated to Canada in 1956 and to the United States in 1960. Don was educated at the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London and Maureen is a geologist by training. They have four children.

Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, Gioia received a B. A. and a N.B. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.

Gioia has published three full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 book Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. Gioia is also a prolific literary anthologist. His anthology, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, co-edited with X. J. Kennedy, is the best-selling college literary textbook in America. His many other anthologies include Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 100 Great Poets of the English Language, and The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction.

Dana Gioia was also a long-time commentator on American culture and literature for BBC Radio. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate and The Hudson Review. His poetry has been set to music by many composers in genres from classical to rock, including a full-length dance theater piece, Counting the Children. He has written two opera libretti, including Nosferatu (2001), with composer Alva Henderson, published by Graywolf Press. A recording of Nosferatu was released by Albany Records in 2005.

Gioia is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, German, and Romanian. He has published a translation of Italian Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale's Mottetti (1990) as well as two large anthologies of Italian poetry. His translation of Seneca's The Madness of Hercules (1995) was performed by Verse Theater Manhattan. In 2001, Gioia founded "Teaching Poetry," a conference dedicated to improving high school teaching of poetry. Also, he is the founder and co-director of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, the nation's largest annual all-poetry writing conference.

Dana Gioia has taught as a visiting writer at Johns Hopkins University, Sarah Lawrence College, Colorado College, and Wesleyan University. He is the former Vice President of the Poetry Society of America and has served on the boards of numerous arts organizations. He has been awarded five honorary doctorates. Re nominated by President George W. Bush in November 2006 for a second term and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Dana Gioia is the ninth Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Before moving to Washington, D.C., Dana Gioia lived in Sonoma County, California. He and his wife Mary have two sons.

Renowned as a pianist and conductor, Jeffrey Kahane is recognized by audiences around the world for his mastery of diverse repertoire from Bach to Gershwin. He has established a reputation not only as music director of two unique ensembles, but also as a truly versatile artist equally sought after as soloist, conductor, and chamber musician.

A native of Los Angeles, Jeffrey Kahane began classical piano studies at the age of five with Howard Weisel. At age 14, he was accepted as a scholarship pupil by the great Polish-born pianist Jakob Gimpel, whom he credits as one of the most profound influences on his vision of music as a vehicle for dramatic narrative, poetic expression and ethical purpose.

Kahane picked up the guitar around the age of 10 and learned to play folk and rock music. He spent a good part of the next years dividing his time among practicing the piano and the guitar and dreaming about ways of bringing together different kinds of music and different audiences.

Kahane left high school after his sophomore year to attend the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In San Francisco, he played keyboard instruments in the San Francisco Symphony, explored jazz, and played in the pit for a touring Broadway musical. His career took a major turn in 1981 when he became a finalist in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Two years later in 1983, Kahane won the Grand Prize in the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Israel.

In 2006–07, Kahane enters his tenth season as Music Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and continues his successful tenure as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. He also continues as Artistic Director of the Green Music Festival in Sonoma County, having recently completed his tenth and final season as Music Director of the Santa Rosa Symphony.

In addition to music directorships with two remarkable orchestras, Kahane’s guest engagements during the 2006–07 season include a return trip to Texas to conduct the Houston Symphony with soloist Joyce Yang. He also plays and conducts with the St. Louis, Chicago, and Toronto symphonies in 2007 and appears in recital with San Francisco Performances. Kahane performs chamber music in New York with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and joins Henning Kraggerud for two recitals in northern California. In addition, this season he completes the second half of a project with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra to perform all 23 of the original Mozart piano concertos.

Jeffrey Kahane’s belief in the educational and inspirational power of music to inspire young people led him to found the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s Family Concerts series. Under Kahane’s leadership, the orchestra has also increased its Meet the Music series for school children this season from four to six performances. For educational projects undertaken with the Santa Rosa Symphony, Kahane received one of the first MetLife Awards for Excellence in Community Engagement from the American Symphony Orchestra League; and in May 2005, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by Sonoma State University for his services to the Arts and Education.

Dan Benedetti, past President and current Chairman of the Board of Clover Stornetta Farms, was born in Petaluma. He attended St. Vincent grammar and High schools and went on to Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State University. His first job in the dairy industry was as a driver-salesman in Fort Bragg in 1971. He was a Clover distributor in West Marin from 1972 to 1977, when he took charge of Clover Stornetta sales in Napa County. In 1985 he moved to Clover's headquarters in Petaluma, and was named president in January, 1987.

Dan is proud of Clover Stornetta Farm's sustainable agricultural practices, humane treatment of their dairy herds, their commitment to family farming and the fact that Clover milk comes from cows not treated with the growth hormone rBST.

Dan is currently Chairman of the Board for Clover. He is also an active citizen of the community serving as a Board Member of the Dairy Institute of California, Exchange Bank and Associated Independent Dairy of America. He is on the President's Advisory Board of Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University and the Culinary Institute of America.

Dan lives in Petaluma with his wife Anne. He has three grown children, two of whom work for Clover, and is now a grandfather three times over.

For someone who's Sonoma County's most recognizable woman, Gaye LeBaron has always been a reluctant celebrity, more comfortable as a journalist than a public figure. More scholar than center-stage character, LeBaron was headed for a life in education when talent and circumstance sidetracked her to The Press Democrat and a career that would span 45 years. During nearly a half century as a columnist, LeBaron personified The Press Democrat, becoming what newspaper colleague Pete Golis describes as "the closest thing to a celebrity that we have in Santa Rosa." Friends say LeBaron is basically a private person, somewhat shy and sensitive to the personal attacks occasionally hurled by ruffled readers.

She lives in a 1946 Codding Built home in East Santa Rosa, the site of many Press Democrat, community and neighborhood parties over the decades. Holidays at the LeBarons' usually include people, young or old, who would otherwise be alone - all part of the couple's inclusive and generous nature. The LeBarons also have had a home at Bodega Bay for more than 30 years, giving them deep connections in the coastal community as well as Santa Rosa. Since the late '60s the beach house has been the gathering place for a group called the Bodega Bay Eating, Drinking and Debating Society, a dozen family friends and their offspring who divide into teams for football in the sand over Thanksgiving weekend.

It was through her columns that LeBaron, the wife, mother, friend and neighbor, became a public figure and local celebrity. But to LeBaron's way of thinking, celebrities are movie stars, not someone who toils in daily journalism writing about the meek and mighty and the big and small events that define a community. LeBaron's star status was firmly set in 1988 when The Press Democrat did an exhaustive search to identify the 10 most powerful people in Sonoma County.

The main reason she took the job and stayed in Santa Rosa is she had fallen in love with The Press Democrat photographer John LeBaron, a dashing bachelor and fourth-generation Sonoma County resident who zipped around town in a sports car. She was 18 and he was 25 when they first met at Santa Rosa Junior College. Only Gaye remembers the first encounter"John doesn't remember the first time. It was while I was a student at Santa Rosa Junior College and John was on campus as a Press Democrat photographer," said LeBaron. The couple married in 1958 and worked together at The Press Democrat until John LeBaron left the paper in 1968 for a position at SRJC. He was a photography instructor at the college until his retirement in 1997.

"I've been very, very fortunate in having a husband like John. He doesn't have an envious bone in his body," LeBaron said. "There are not many husbands who would have put up with me and my life." It was a life of long hours at the office, deadlines and nights and weekends spent at social and community functions, everything from parades to wine auctions and historical lectures to charity balls. John, an award-winning photographer who has been honored by the arts community, said he was always proud of Gaye's accomplishments and never covetous of the attention she receives or the power she commands.

But Gaye still bristles at the insensitive people who would come up to John and say, "You must be Mr. Gaye LeBaron." "John has is own identity."she bristles.......Tim Tesconi

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 26, 1922, Charles M. Schulz was the only child of Dena and Carl Schulz. From birth, comics played an important role in Schulz’s life. At just two days old, an uncle nicknamed him “Sparky” after the horse Spark Plug from the Barney Google comic strip, and throughout his youth he and his father shared a Sunday morning ritual reading the funnies. Schulz always knew he wanted to be a cartoonist and was very proud when Ripley’s newspaper feature, Believe it or Not, published his drawing of the family dog in 1937.

Schulz put his artistic ambitions on hold during World War II while serving as a machine-gun squad leader, though he regularly sketched episodes of daily army life in his sketchbook. Following his discharge in 1945, Schulz returned to St. Paul to pursue a cartooning career. Between 1947 and 1950, he drew a weekly comic panel for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and also sold seventeen comic gags to The Saturday Evening Post. After many rejection slips, Schulz finally realized his dream of creating a nationally-syndicated daily comic strip when Peanuts debuted in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950. By 1965, Schulz was twice honored with the Reuben Award by the National Cartoonists Society for his talents, and Peanuts was an international success.

When Schulz announced his retirement for health reasons in December 1999, Peanuts was in more than 2,600 newspapers worldwide; he died shortly thereafter, on Saturday, February 12, 2000, just hours before the final Peanuts Sunday strip appeared in newspapers. The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, opened in his honor in August 2002, with the mission of preserving, displaying, and interpreting the art of this legendary cartoonist.

Corrick Brown first performed as piano soloist with the Santa Rosa Symphony at age 15 under its founding conductor, George Trombley. After studying conducting at the Vienna Academy under Hans Swarowsky, along with such luminaries as Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado, Corrick Brown was chosen to be the Santa Rosa Symphony's second Music Director in 1957.After 38 years at the helm he chose a partial retirement and is now the Santa Rosa Symphony's Conductor Laureate. As Conductor Laureate, Brown performs one concert set each season. His distinguished career has included performances of most of the works of Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner and Igor Stravinsky culminating in a memorable performance of that composer's "Rite of Spring".

After graduating from Stanford University, Mr. Brown did graduate work at the University of California, studying with Manfred Bukhofzer, Roger Sessions and the Griller Quartet. After Vienna, he continued his studies at the Conductors' Workshop at Asilomar, directed by Dr. Richard Lert, the former conductor of the Berlin Opera. Mr. Brown's guest conducting activity has included performances throughout California and abroad in Spain, Austria, Germany, Italy and Turkey. His performance of MacDowell, Ives, and the Brahms 2nd Symphony in Baden-Baden in 1991 brought the following from the German critics: "The orchestra, playing with commitment under the superior leadership of the American guest conductor, offered impressive sound perspectives." and..."Joy in music he not only conveyed to his musicians, but also to the audience who thanked him with sustained applause."-Bad Tagblatt

Following Germany, Mr. Brown traveled to Moscow and conducted a concert and broadcast of the Moscow Radio and Television Orchestra in the magnificent Hall of Columns. The program was a tribute (the first in Moscow for a living American Composer) to his friend, composer Kirke Mechem. A recording of this concert is available through the Symphony office. In 1997 he conducted closer to home: the annual Symphony concert at the Bohemian Grove encampment.