A ‘King’ who treats Sonoma County royally is about to turn 90

90-year-old Arturo Ibleto will sign copies of his memoir at an Oct. 9 celebration at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.|

Merely months after Great Britain grandly feted the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, Sonoma County prepares to celebrate the reaching of that same milestone by The King.

The future Queen of England was born in London on April 21 of 1926. That Oct. 2, Arturo Ibleto, the North Bay’s future Pasta King, took his first breath in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his father, Augusto, worked at the time.

“I don’t remember anything about South America,” Ibleto writes in the new, self-published memoir he’ll sign at his Oct. 9 public birthday party in Santa Rosa. He was only about 2 when his mother, Maria, returned with him to the family’s rocky, riverside hometown outside of Genoa in the Liguria region of northwestern Italy.

It was also in 1926, at the Bamberg Conference in Bavaria, that 36-year-old Adolf Hitler reconfirmed his supremacy over Germany’s Nazi Party. The global war ignited by his aggression would disrupt and define the childhoods and coming of age of millions, certainly those of Princess Elizabeth and of the sturdy, hard-working Italian boy who’d become Sonoma’s magnanimous monarch of marinara.

“I never get old because I was never young,” he writes in “Freedom Fighter to King: A Proud American Dishes Up Gratitude, Common Sense and Second Helpings.” Retired Santa Rosa human resources manager Jody Edwards and this reporter helped him make the story of his remarkable life into a book.

It traces his evolution from a young, anti-fascist guerrilla fighter to an immigrant farmhand in Sonoma County and on to the caterer, restaurateur and frozen-foods maker who’s introduced generations in the North Bay to pesto and polenta - and who can’t help himself from volunteering to feed crowds at benefits for causes throughout the region and around the world.

As a boy, Ibleto had learned to make pasta and minestrone and grind chestnuts into flour and catch fish with his hands when, at barely 17, late in 1943, he was conscripted into fascist Benito Mussolini’s National Republican Army.

He has said many times he survived the war because he told the truth.

Ibleto had completed hasty combat training when a lieutenant ordered him and other young recruits into formation for review by a general. Ibleto was placed in the front line because he was one of the bigger boys.

The general walked slowly across the formation, pausing to ask one recruit and then another, “Where do you want to go?” The expected response was, “Roma, Sir!” The young soldiers were to defend Rome from the advancing Americans.

The general stopped before Pvt. Ibleto and asked where he wanted to go. He replied, “Home.” A childhood friend of Ibleto who’d also been forced into uniform answered the same. The general walked on. But following the review, the lieutenant pulled Ibleto and his friend aside, beat them and locked them up. Ibleto is certain they were to be sent by train to Germany for slave labor, or worse.

He and his friend managed, with the help of a brave stranger, to escape. Ibleto says telling the general the truth saved his life because he’s certain all of the boys sent to the defense of Rome died there or along the way.

Ibleto joined the Italian Resistance. As a 17-year-old partisan he delayed and frustrated Hitler’s army by dynamiting bridges and tunnels.

“We put mines on the road and when the Germans come by they blow up,” he says in his book. “We slow them and also weaken their front line because they have to send men to look for us. It allows the Allies to move faster toward Germany.”

The young partisan any number of times came close to being captured or killed. He recalls in his memoir, “I save a hand grenade on my body so I could blow myself up rather than be caught.”

He beat the odds and early in 1945, at age 18, welcomed the advancing Americans. Though tempted to travel with them on the march to toward Berlin, he concluded for several reasons it was time to go home.

Ibleto reunited in his village of Sesta Godano with his parents, his two sisters, older brother Aldo, greatly diminished by years as a prisoner of war, and younger brother Angelo, who’d had to function as the man of house though he wasn’t yet 12.

Arturo Ibleto the war veteran knew one thing for sure: “I wanted to leave Italy, go overseas.”

“I had enough of the politics there,” he says in his book. “If you affiliate with a particular party in Italy then you not a friend with person in other party. They hate each other. I don’t like it. I don’t want to stay there anymore.”

Soon after the war, he applied to emigrate to America to a place with a funny name he’d heard from an old family friend who’d been a farmworker there back before the First World War: Petaluma.

It was 1949, and Ibleto was 22 when he at last received the necessary papers. He arrived in Petaluma not only virtually penniless but owing the $500 he’d borrowed for the journey. Willing to take any job, and to work harder than anyone else, he picked zucchini and other vegetables for two brothers named Ghiradelli. One had a daughter, Victoria. Ibleto counts as one of his luckiest days in America the 30th of September, 1951; the day he and Vicki married in Cotati.

The party on Oct. 9 at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds will celebrate both his 90th birthday and his and Vicki’s 65th wedding anniversary.

All are invited to the celebration at the county fairground’s new Saralee and Rich’s Barn. Dinner will feature Angelo Ibleto’s famous boneless roasted pig.

His brother the Pasta King will sign copies of the new book, which also can be ordered online at lulu.com. Art Ibleto will donate to charitable causes all proceeds of the book sales.

And net proceeds from the sale of tickets to his birthday/anniversary party will go to the completion of Saralee and Rich’s Barn.

Scheduled to speak at the party are two of Ibleto’s longtime friends, Congressman Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg.

Ibleto, McGuire wrote in a book-cover tribute, “has a big heart which has fed Northern California’s soul and we are forever grateful.

“Long live the Pasta King!”

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