Judy & Jim Tarbell

After early years working on Capitol Hill in DC and living overseas, Judy and Jim met in 1977 as back-to-the-land homesteaders in Annapolis, California, inland from the Sea Ranch in northwest Sonoma County. Those were wonderful days of community building which included co-developing the Annapolis Food Co-op, the Annapolis Historical Society, and the Apple Press newsletter that they ran off on the local school’s mimeograph machine and the Annapolis post mistress distributed to all the box holders for free.

The Apple Press led to the idea of publishing Ridge Review magazine, which led Jim and Judy to purchase Black Bear Press in Mendocino in 1981. With three kids, they moved into a two-room shack, next to the Presbyterian Church in Mendocino, with a toilet behind a screen in the kitchen. That quickly proved way too small and drove them to buy an 850 square foot, unfinished home on ponds in Little River. As beautiful as that was, their growing family again put them on a search for a larger abode. Early, on a beautiful November day in 1986, they made an offer on a century-old, Caspar farmhouse, a few minutes before all the coastal realtors toured the house. It has been their home ever since and has served as a venue for many Caspar gatherings.

Caspar proved a wonderful place to join a great community building effort. A huge variety of people participated – artists, musicians, businessmen, writers and folks of all political persuasions. Judy points out “It was a coming together of caring and creative people who shared a vision of what Caspar would be in the future.” Their enthusiasm and broad connections throughout the coastal community have made Caspar a wonderful place for everyone involved.

Jim and Judy’s connections through their printing and publishing efforts were a key part in their Caspar work. In 1998, when the successor to the Caspar Lumber Company announced plans to subdivide the Caspar Headlands, the incipient Caspar Community came together in a series of gatherings creating a proactive campaign to plan the future of Caspar. Randy Hester, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Landscape Architecture, who had written for Ridge Review, brought his graduate students up to Caspar to lead the Caspar community in a series of design charettes identifying the sacred aspects of Caspar that everyone wanted to preserve.

Those meetings prioritized saving the Caspar Headlands from private development. Judy quickly took the lead, connecting with their printing customers Joan and Marty Rosen. As a founding member of the Trust for Public Land (TPL), Marty facilitated TPL’s involvement in helping the Caspar Community’s campaign to turn the Caspar Headlands over to State Parks ownership. That campaign was aided by Judy’s relationship with another printing customer, Julia McIver of the California Coastal Conservancy. It was a deep dive into California politics, with tours given to then State Senator Wes Chesbro and several lobbying ventures in Sacramento.

After the Caspar Headlands were dedicated to public ownership in 2002, Judy immediately became active in turning the old Caspar School into the Caspar Community Center. Jerry and Susan Juhl started that off with a big donation. Judy built on that beginning by developing a strong relationship with the Santa Rosa Rural Development office of US Department of Agriculture. They, in turn, provided the newly established Caspar Community non-profit a mortgage to purchase the property.

Judy served as President of the Caspar Board for many years. She promoted a Caspar Community publicity campaign that began when New York Times reporter Patty Brown came to Black Bear Press researching a story about the alternative currency Seed, which Black Bear was printing. Patty Brown left with a story about how Caspar came together to save itself and plan its future for the next hundred years. That Times story led to articles in the LA Times, Preservation Magazine, the BBC and other local and national news outlets.

Caspar Community’s 2025 action to pay off the mortgage on the Caspar Community Center fulfilled one of Judy’s biggest dreams. Caspar Community was able to do that, in part, thanks to the contributions Judy made to Caspar Community over the past twenty-seven years. Judy says, “It has been a wonderful time.”