Both students at the University of Illinois loved dancing and danced exuberantly at their wedding in 1952 at the Sinai Temple in Chicago.
They moved to Los Angeles in 1955, where Howard Moes assisted Holocaust survivors who had come to America. June Moes became an assistant to James Corman, a lawyer and former Los Angeles City Council member who was elected to Congress as a liberal Democrat.
Eric Moes of Santa Rosa said his parents’ interest in politics, public service and advocacy was sparked by the Watts riots of 1965 and by their association with Corman, a key civil rights champion in Congress. The younger Moes said his parents also loved history and enjoyed lively dinner debates about historical and political events and figures.
Eric Moes said of his mother, “She had two sides: politics and art.” Eric’s brother, Adam Moes, from Hawaii, agreed, noting that their mother began her artistic career as an oil painter, and a very good one at that. When environmental awareness began to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she switched to textile arts – macrame, weaving, rug making – because they were non-toxic.
Over time, June Moes developed a passion for beautiful, highly intricate, and often historically inspired needlework. She taught needlework at Santa Rosa Junior College and in workshops across the country.
Throughout their sons’ childhood, the Moeses spent summers visiting national parks in a trailer, often stopping in Santa Rosa.
Adam Moes said his parents “viewed Santa Rosa as the gateway to the redwoods.” Eric Moes said their father would have wanted the family to move to Santa Rosa. June Moes was far less enthusiastic about living in what she then considered a cow town, but she relented.
The move took place in 1973. The Moes family settled in a house in Bennett Valley, not in the area that was developing into a recreational paradise that consisted of Howarth Park in Santa Rosa, the county’s Spring Lake Park and what is now Trione-Annadel State Park.
Howard Moes became head of Redwood Empire Industries, providing vocational training and employment opportunities for people with disabilities. Highly energetic and experienced, Howard led hikes across much of the Sonoma County countryside and became indispensable to the environmental education and conservation nonprofit, LandPaths.
June Moes worked for a time as a clerk at the county health department. She also tried to turn her love of textile arts into a career: for a few years in the late 1970s, she ran the Needle Magic shop on Mendocino Avenue, the former Lumsden House, better known as Belvedere.
She became a founding member of the Santa Rosa Quilt Guild, the Redwood Stitchers, and the Apple Blossom Stitches. She dyed her own fabrics and threads, produced and taught the use of kits to make intricate needlework, and amassed an extensive library of books on textile arts.
When her teenage sons began acting, she became a stage mother. “My mother was attracted to anything social,” said Eric Moes.
This introduction to local theater led June Moes to become president of the Santa Rosa Players and a loyal fan and advocate of the former Santa Rosa Junior College Summer Repertory Theater.
Both June and Howard loved hiking around Spring Lake, and over time they learned that the property on which the regional park was to be built was a popular wilderness area called McCrae Ranch when the state highway department purchased a piece of land in 1959 to develop it into a bypass for Highway 12.
In 1960, the Sonoma County Water Agency bought more than 200 acres of land there and built a flood retention basin to capture stormwater from Santa Rosa Creek and Spring Creek. It wasn’t until 1975 that the lake became the crown jewel of a new regional park — and one of the showpieces of a new county system — so until then, no one was particularly excited about the state’s plan to one day build a highway to the reservoir and then bridge it.
June Moes discovered that a bridge over Spring Lake had long been planned, and she set out to make sure it never happened.
“She was like a dog on a bone,” said Hensel, the Southeast Greenway activist.
Moes was instrumental in caring for her husband, Howard, after he suffered a massive stroke following open-heart surgery at the age of 80. He died in 2017 at the age of 90.
June Moes leaves behind her sons in Santa Rosa and on the island of Hawaii and two granddaughters.
A celebration of her life is being planned.
