Sandy Kimball

The first time I met Brother Dennis was when I volunteered to work in the Society's archives. Back in those days, the archives were a cramped, tiny room, literally under the eaves at Saint Mary's College Library. At 5'5" I could scarcely stand up straight in those quarters as they were already bulging with all the material that. Brother Dennis had begun collecting on the Moraga Rancho and its people.

Little did I know at the time that that material-all those facts and anecdotes-were to play a major part in my life many years later when I was asked to write what became Moraga's Pride. As the first 3/4 of the book were based on the research that Brother Dennis had spent virtually his entire adult life acquiring, his collection of index cards and files in the archives became my primary source from which to write.

In that year of 1984 Brother Dennis and I quickly settled into what became a regular routine. I would write during the week, then spend three or four hours each Sunday afternoon at the Saint Mary's Brothers' residence with Brother Dennis going over my work. Almost immediately I realized that my main problem was not lack of material. It was entirely a question of what had to be left out in order to create a book of practical size and affordability.

The number of facts and figures was all but overwhelming. Brother Dennis had been so thorough and dug so deeply and consistently into the Rancho's history that our afternoons together became a struggle-he urging me not to eliminate any of this material and I trying to explain that such was a publishing impossibility. Almost every sentence in those early chapters was read, analyzed, re-read and discussed. Few pieces of information were left out without his impassioned plea that, "this is so important to the Rancho's history."

Obviously, we did work out these differences, but it was with sadness on Brother Dennis' part as he envisioned all the readers who would never be given the opportunity to share everyone of these wonderful tidbits of history. (By the way, all of those bits and pieces of the Rancho's past, whether included in the book or not, do exist, tucked away on 3 x 5 cards in several card files, now safely ensconced in the History Center.)

After the publication of the first edition of Moraga's Pride and over the next few years, Brother Dennis, even badly handicapped with arthritis, laboriously re­ typed the entire first part of the book. He then added a plethora of new material and, in many cases, put back some of the facts that I'd eliminated from the first edition. So, when it was time to update Moraga's Pride in 1999, I was handed his renewed efforts from which to work in re-doing the early chapters of the new edition. As he was then living in retirement in Napa, those Sunday afternoon discussions were no more, and I was free to edit away without interruption. As I blue-penciled my way through all those new additions, I could still hear his voice pleading, "but this is so important to the history of the Rancho."

I don't think it was regret over the long hours and many years he'd spent collecting this material that motivated his insistence that it all be included in the book. He was so truly enamored of the Rancho, its stories and its memorabilia, that he wanted the world to know all that was possible to know about our past.

Few communities have been so fortunate to have such a dedicated citizen in their midst. Perhaps Brother Dennis should be called "Moraga's Pride."

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