Toolin’ Around Town: Longtime Petaluman Christa Bechler keeps busy

As we age, we are often reminded to maintain a healthy lifestyle by engaging in social activities, taking classes, or volunteering.|

As we age, we are often reminded to maintain a healthy lifestyle by engaging in social activities, taking classes, or volunteering. For some, this may take a little encouragement. But for Christa Petersen Bechler - whose calendar is full of engagements - it’s how she lives.

Along with memberships in Hermann Sons Lodge (more than 50 years), Petaluma Museum Association, Petaluma Woman’s Club and Petaluma Garden Club, plus taking a history class at the Petaluma People Services Center, Bechler finds time to attend performances at Cinnabar Theater and holds season tickets to the Green Music Center.

Motivated to live a rich and fulfilling life and appreciate what she has, Bechler could write a guidebook on keeping active and getting out and enjoying life.

“I’ve always tried to do whatever I was capable of,” said Bechler, who turns 84 on March 11. “I feel that we should continue learning something new all the time.”

Her father, Hans Juergensen, emphasized that his daughters get an education and learn a trade, so they would not have to clean houses if they ever had to support themselves.

Bechler was 19 in 1954, when she came to Petaluma to visit family, including her uncle, Pete Petersen, an egg rancher living on Center Lane. She planned to stay a year and improve her English before returning to her hometown of Flensburg, Germany, a picturesque city located near the Danish border. She helped on the ranch by collecting, cleaning and sorting eggs for packaging. In Flensburg, Christa had attended business school and completed a pharmaceutical apprenticeship. Ironically, her first job here was housekeeping for a wealthy San Francisco family.

She met Harold Petersen as soon as she arrived at her uncle’s house. Although they’d never met, he’d already decided he was going to marry the girl coming from Germany. He didn’t care that she wasn’t attracted to him, she said. When she dated other men, if they didn’t have a car, Petersen drove them, always trying to sit next to her. When it was time for her to return, he drove her to the travel agency to buy her ticket - and proposed.

They married in 1956.

Petersen was a carpenter who became a contractor. Bechler, who’d been taking English classes in night school, took a job with American Trust Company. She quit when their son, Nils, was born in 1957. Daughter Lisa was born in 1968. To augment their income, Bechler started an egg route delivering 600 dozen eggs one day a week in San Francisco. Later she became her husband’s bookkeeper and worked at Empire Optical for eight years before retiring in 1988, the year her husband died.

She and Bob Bechler, a retired San Francisco Fire Department battalion chief, became friends and married in 1993, eight months before he died of cancer. After his death, she was employed as manager at Hotel Petaluma, retiring in 2002.

The life Bechler experienced in Petaluma was one she never could have imagined growing up in war-torn Germany. As a child, she was often awakened by sirens alerting her family to take refuge in a bunker for protection from the allied bombers that were targeting an industrial area and shipyard in Flensburg.

After retiring, Bechler became interested in researching and writing about her family. She traveled to German often to gather information she categorized into four separate volumes of text and photographs, including translating her father’s World War I letters.

“When I started writing, I was impressed that so much information came in,” she said. “Not many families know where they originated. I was lucky for the information that came to me.”

Her latest pastime is making Shutterfly books - accumulating photos of subjects or events, writing descriptions and having them bound in book form. She’s created five Shutterfly books, including 37 years of vacations in “Tahoe Family Vacations,” and “Christa’s 80th Birthday Party.”

Looking back on her 65 years of living in Petaluma, Christa said, “In many ways I feel very fortunate.”

(Harlan Osborne’s ‘Toolin’ Around Town’ runs every other week. You can contact him at harlan@sonic.net)

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