ABOUT CHERI (2022)
Cheri Clark came to Sunbow as Harry’s spousal equivalent in 2002. She has played a huge role in how the farm looks and how our products are marketed. Cheri had an extensive career in both the Alternative and conventional Business communities where she learned to prioritize customer service.
Childhood
Cheri was born in Fresno California in 1951. Her mother came from England in 1945 as a WWI war bride. She had worked for General Eisenhower and had been a model. Her father returned from the Signal Corps to a career in women’s clothing and window display and design. They moved from Fresno to Los Angeles. When Cheri was two her parents divorced.
Cheri grew up in Culver City, North Hollywood and around Sunset Strip. Her mom owned and ran a nursery school and worked in accounting. She and her mom and her little brother moved to Huntington Beach where she graduated from High School. At the time Cheri was “totally a cheerleader” and a beach girl.
On to Oregon
Cheri left home, dropped out, and became a hippie. She, like her whole generation, lived with a constant fear of nuclear holocaust. She began working in health food stores, seeing clean and wholesome food as a way to bring about change. Eventually she went to work for Yogi Lajpatral Sharma where she learned that he was after all only a man. With that disillusionment she then began another channel of her quest and left for Oregon in 1975 with her first husband Geoff. They dreamed of a better life.
Via a decision to live in the sunshine and cold of Bend, Oregon, – what was then a pristine small town, Cheri learned about snow, black ice, and the tourist trade. She and Geoff decided to move to Corvallis in 1976 through the Dorn family connection. In the small university town she worked restaurants, worked for a Chiropractor, then helped her friend Ruby Moon establish Light House health goods store, Ruby’s ethnic boutique called Golden Crane, and a co op vegetarian restaurant on the Willamette River known as the West Bank Cafe. Geoff began a long career at New Morning Bakery as the soup chef.
Away and Back
Through a series of seeking adventures Cheri ended up in Wrangell Alaska. Her partner at the time worked in the woods; she worked in cafes and bars. Together they moved to Petersburg , working the fish cannery processing salmon, then crab. While there she had an ectopic pregnancy which changed her life. She returned to Corvallis alone.
Something drew Cheri to the feeling of community she had found in Corvallis and her friend Ruby. Cheri was to leave Corvallis 5 more times over 23 years. One of those periods was during her marriage to Larry Kangas, a mural artist. They ran the mural business together, and the work is famous all over the Pacific Northwest. He painted more an a 1,000 murals, some of which can be accessed on the internet. Over the years Cheri also did various businesses in Seattle, Portland, Ashland, and Grants Pass. Her career spanned alternative food, health, and both women’s and mens clothing.
Harry and Sunbow
She met Harry MacCormack in 2001, although she had knowledge of him when he and his wife Mia sold Tofu from the Sunbow Soy Dairy in the late 70’s at businesses where she was involved. Cheri and Harry decided to move in together in April of 2002 when they went to Finley Wildlife Refuge and spent 4 hours sitting in a meadow talking. The first project they did together was an extensive remodel of the then over 90 year old farm house. Then Cheri designed and implemented landscaping around the house and the driveway entrance to the farm and the market room. Then Cheri and Harry set up The Institute Of BioWisdom, the Sunbow Farm website, and Cheri suggested that they slowly move the farm toward local on-line marketing and customer delivery or pickup. After all that Cheri set up trips to England, Wales, New Zealand and Australia, to visit relatives and to give Harry an international audience for lectures and books.
Cheri and Harry began putting energy into how the farm would be passed to another generation around 2010. Harry had set up a family Trust in 1997. Their work attracted first Nate Johnson, then Yadira Ruiz who together started Sunbow Produce in 2014 and participated with Harry and Cheri setting up the LLC legal work in that year. Which allowed Cheri to retire from her work with office work, website design, creating the weekly email produce list, farm customers, both online and doing deliveries. After a health scare in 2015 Cheri lives a quiet life which includes daily walks, appreciation of all the beauty that is the nature part of the farm, and staying relaxed in a world of climate change and human turmoil. She loves the hummingbirds that visit the feeders year round. The deer, fox and quail that visit gives her joy.
