TREE OF HOPE

Waiting in the UC Davis Cancer Center lobby five years ago this December, looking at the bare tree the staff had set up, Joan Giboney decided to make sure future trees would be dazzling. An interior decorator by trade, she wanted to use her talents to raise the spirits of other patients who needed cancer treatment during the holidays.

The Cancer Center’s next tree stood 20 feet tall; it glittered with lights and danced with hundreds of gold, plum and teal ornaments chosen to complement the lobby’s color scheme. A sale of the elegant ornaments, held in mid-December, raised $3,000 for breast cancer research.

Joan Giboney died the following March, 10 years after she was first diagnosed with breast cancer and two years after the cancer recurred. The longtime Lodi resident left behind a devoted husband, two daughters, two grandchildren—and plans for the following year’s toy-themed tree.

Each year since, Giboney’s family and friends have continued the tradition. In just three years, they have raised more than $13,000 for breast cancer research at the UC Davis Cancer Center.

“For our family, this tree so symbolizes my mother,” says Corrine Christensen, 37. “She was always thinking about other people, and what she could do to lift their spirits. You see my mom when you see the tree. She’s right there.” Reared in Lodi, Christensen now lives in Spokane, Wash., with her husband and their two little boys. She helps plan the annual event via phone and e-mail, and flies back to California every winter to help trim and un-trim the tree.

Thea Giboney, 35, a health-care project manager living in Walnut Creek, also devotes herself to the tree project. “Each year patients come up to us and say they were feeling sad when they walked into the Cancer Center, but because of the tree they had a better day,” she says. “That’s what my mom hoped for.”

For Richard Giboney, 67, who donates ornaments for the tree each year, the annual event not only honors his late wife’s memory and wishes, but also brings his family back to Lodi every winter. In addition to Corrine and Thea, his brother, John Giboney, returns, coming from Southern California.
This year’s Giboney Tree of Hope was decked out in patriotic red, white and blue, with an emphasis on snowmen. The Giboney clan and five of Joan’s dearest Lodi friends spent a full day hanging more than 2,000 lights and 700 ornaments, and dressing the tree in bows and garland. And for this month before Christmas, it is bringing warmth and beauty to hundreds of cancer patients and keeping Joan Giboney’s name and spirit alive.

To receive a notice about next year’s sale, call the Cancer Center at (916) 734-5800.

When I first stepped into the main hall of the new Mondavi Center, I was struck by how much it resembled the architectural rendering that I had seen when the center was still just an excavated hole in the ground. The drawing portrayed the hall with a warm amber glow—what I had heretofore chalked up to artistic license. But here was the real thing—every bit as warm and golden as the drawing had foretold.

The reason was the wood: the Douglas fir paneling that, along with sandstone from India, lines the hall. It is tight-grained and honey-colored and now on very public display after spending a century at the bottom of a lake.

When cut down, the trees were already hundreds of years old, part of an old growth forest in British Columbia that was harvested before the turn of the 20th century, back when that sort of thing was allowed. The logs were floated on the waters of Ruby Lake north of Vancouver to await transport to a mill. But they got no farther. The Howard Logging Co. went bankrupt, and the logs were left to sink to the bottom of the lake where they remained, preserved in the cold water, until just a few years ago.

Recognized for the treasure they were, the logs were brought to the surface by a man who had first seen them when he was a boy swimming in the lake.

The logs were sold to the Bacon Veneer Co., which submerged them again, this time in hot water, cooking them to soften the fibers. They were then thinly sliced and dried and each piece numbered so they could be reassembled in order, as they now have been in the Mondavi Center.

“This is special timber,” says John Masciola of the Bacon Veneer Co. “Technology allows us to slice these logs, and they can be packaged and stored and last almost indefinitely—to be used when the application is befitting.”

Now here they are, themselves a work of art in a facility that’s all about the arts. How fitting.