'Unprecedented' 

Ron Samuels is walking through Marimba One's sprawling shop off O Street in Arcata. The place is filled with the whir of industrial fans and a constant pinging from five separate tuning stations spread through the facility, where tuners are hitting rosewood keys with custom mallets and grinding layers from their undersides until they find the perfect pitch. This is where some of the world's best concert marimbas are made to take the stage with the likes of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra or help teach a next generation of greats in institutions like the Julliard School of Music.

But today Samuels' focus is closer to home. He stops at a vibraphone. The instrument resembles a marimba but with the rosewood keys replaced with metal bars, which hover over tubular resonators. At the mouth of each resonator sits a disk that spins when the instrument is turned on, giving each note the vibraphone's trademark tremolo effect. When Marimba One began making the instruments back in 2016, incorporating resonators similar to those that help set its namesake product apart from others on the market, Samuels says it made some improvements. First, he says, they did away with the motor traditionally used to spin those disks — called fans — at the mouths of the resonators, as it made an audible hum that detracted from the sound of the instrument. Instead, he says, the company incorporated a silent magnetic drive system and tooled it so the fans always stop in the open position.

The company has made vibraphones for internationally renowned musicians like Jason Marsalis, but Samuels says this particular one, its golden keys gleaming, is special, headed to Fortuna High School along with a concert grade 5-octave marimba.

"When we get the chance to make something for someone local, we step up and make them an exceptional instrument," Samuels says, explaining the opportunities are few and far between, which makes sense as there simply aren't many schools or musicians locally who can spend $13,000 to $25,000 on a marimba or $6,000-plus on a vibraphone.

At this point, you might be wondering how Fortuna High School came to make such an extravagant purchase. Well, that story begins in 1942, with a 12-year-old freshman.

Born June 25, 1929, Alice Eloise Gunnerson spent her early childhood in Nebraska before drought and the Great Depression pushed her family west in 1934, eventually settling in Rio Dell. It was there that Gunnerson learned to play tonette and the clarinet, spawning what would be a life-long love of music. According to her obituary, Gunnerson excelled in music class at Rio Dell School, as well as all other subjects, so much so that she completed sixth and seventh grades in a single year.

Gunnerson was not yet a teen when she enrolled at Fortuna High School but it seems hard to argue she didn't make the most of her time there.

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• Photo by Thadeus Greenson
• A Jewel marimba, the brainchild of Ron Samuels, allows two people to play simultaneously while facing one another.

"It looked like she was involved in just about every club on campus," Fortuna Union High School District Superintendent Clint Duey told the Journal. "She was all over the yearbook."

Gunnerson ran track, played tennis, skated in the roller skate club and graduated with honors at the age of 16. She also played in the school band, which apparently left an indelible mark.

After graduating from Fortuna High School at the age of 16, Gunnerson got a job with the Pacific Lumber Co.'s payroll department and started playing with a couple small dance bands that played the Grange Hall on Saturday nights, as well as other functions. She joined the U.S. Marine Corps at the age of 21 for a three-year enlistment, becoming the first woman from Humboldt County to do so, according to the obituary. Stationed in Arlington, Virginia, she was selected to play the saxophone in a military band.

After her time in the Marines, Gunnerson worked in Germany for the Department of State, taking the opportunity tour the region in her VW Karmann Ghia from Sweden to Italy. When she returned stateside, she got a job with the Santa Clara Unified School District, where she went on to work for 32 years until her retirement. She was also a member of the Nostalgics, an orchestra that played at dances and events. Gunnerson spent her retirement traveling everywhere from Alaska to the Bahamas, kayaking and building a wood craft shop attached to her house, where she designed "very useful unique articles that she had no problem marketing," according to her obituary.

After Gunnerson died at a San Jose skilled nursing facility in 2021, Fortuna High School was contacted by the executor of her trust and informed she'd written the school's music program into her will, crediting her experience in the school band with fueling her life-long love of music.

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• Submitted
• Fortuna High School students play a five-octave marimba and a vibraphone from Marimba One.

Fortuna High School Music teacher Ian Campbell says he remembers the day clearly a few years ago when former Superintendent Glen Senestraro caught up with him on campus to tell him a former band student's trust had left the program some money, excitedly estimating the amount to be more than six figures. In the end, the district would receive more than $1.2 million.

"At little Fortuna High School, this is unprecedented," Duey says. "We feel so fortunate and grateful that one of our esteemed alumni thought about us and made just an incredible donation. We're just so very grateful."

While some districts might be tempted to use such a windfall to a single program as reason to pull their limited discretionary funding to be spent elsewhere, Duey says Fortuna Union High School District has made a commitment not to do that.

"We're not going to spend that money on music teacher salary — that's the district's obligation," he says, adding that the same goes for maintenance. "We are strictly going to keep that money for enhancement of the program. ... It should fund our music program in perpetuity."

Duey says the decision was made to put $1 million of the donation into a certificate of deposit with Redwood Capital Bank. The plan, he says, is to draw off the interest annually — estimated to be about $50,000 — while letting the principal roll over. This, he says, will allow the music program to make annual upgrades and enhancements while ensuring the bulk of the money sits untouched for generations to come.

The remaining $200,000, Duey says, is being used to make some immediate improvements to the music program, which includes marching, concert and jazz bands, a drum line and classes in percussion, choir and wood, wind and brass.

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• Photo by Thadeus Greenson
• Marimba One founder Ron Samuels readies a vibraphone headed for Fortuna High School for a demonstration as consulting engineer Steve Cole plugs it in.

In addition to the world-class instruments purchased from Marimba One, Campbell says he's replaced some of the program's wind instruments and next month, at the start of the new fiscal year, he plans to order new handmade uniforms for the marching band. (Duey jokes that the current ones haven't been updated since he was in high school, some 30 years ago.) Duey says Campbell also purchased new sheet music with some of the funds.

Duey says knowing the program will have a steady influx of money annually allows Campbell to plan out instrument upgrades, adding it's coming at an exciting time for music in the Eel River Valley generally.

"For the first time in a long time, we're starting to see the numbers of students in music increasing," Duey says, noting that Fortuna Middle School relaunched its music program six or seven years ago, creating a pipeline to the high school's program. "It's slowly building."

Campbell agrees, pointing to the Fortuna Honor Band, a multi-school effort that sees seventh through twelfth graders put on an annual two-day event as a mass band, with students participating from Rio Dell, Scotia and Hydesville. With 80-something kids on stage, Campbell says the event had to be moved to the Fortuna River Lodge last year because the school theater was too small. This year, he says, it came back to campus but was held in the school gym, having outgrown the River Lodge.

"There's just a lot of community support for the band," he says, adding that four local teachers and a retired music director help him with the annual effort. "That's really helped bring our numbers up. The event just brings all these students together and shows them how awesome music can be."

Duey says he's excited about the impact the Gunnerson donation will have not only on current students, but generations of students and families in the Eel River Valley to come.

"I just can't overstate how amazingly grateful we are to the family of Mrs. Gunnerson for leaving us this incredible gift," he says. "It's going to change lives for musicians for many, many years just because someone was so kind to do this for us."

As someone who has spent his whole life in love with music and now works every day to share that love with his students, Campbell says it's pretty amazing to step back and think about what Gunnerson has done.

"It's pretty amazing," he says, adding that it's exciting to see students react to the new instruments coming in. "The kids are worth it. They work hard and they appreciate having instruments that are going to play well and be consistent and solid, and they take great care of them."

And Campbell says the "incredible" instruments from Marimba One have so far been the highlight.

"The kids were just instantly all over it," he says, noting that advanced players have been practicing four mallet solos on the marimba while it just seems to have a gravitational pull for younger students. "It's just amazing to have a really great sounding instrument to learn on. That's inspiring."

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• Photo by Thadeus Greenson
• Marimba One master tuner Brian Stern with some unfinished marimba keys.

Back in the Arcata shop, Samuels' pride in the company he dropped out of college to build is evident. He talks excitedly about the "Basso Bravo" resonators the company — already internationally renowned — spent thousands of hours and years perfecting to replicate the resonating qualities of a guard and a tuner's way of artfully putting together a keyboard to make sure "it's like a fine dinner, with everything blending well." He talks about the company's new project to make synthetic marimba keys out of natural fibers that almost replicate that rosewood sound, and the new Jewel Marimba he recently created that allows to people to play it together, facing one another. And he talks about how, at 25, he heard the sound of a marimba and it quickly consumed his life. He says he loves that an instrument his company made may have the same effect on some kid in Fortuna, noting he'll be personally delivering the instruments in a few days.

He picks up a pair of mallets and begins to play the vibraphone, its vibrato notes filling the expansive space.

"The way to make it fun," he says, "is to make it sound good."

Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal's news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 321, or [email protected].