How he has lived to 100: A former Sacramento City Councilman ‘set the bar high’
He was abandoned by his abusive father during the Great Depression in Sacramento. He was determined to stay out of an orphanage and did so by couch-surfing decades before the term was coined. He was homeless generations before homelessness became a national plight. He was fed by people who took a liking to a spirited young man living a spirit-crushing life of meager subsistence and major trauma.
He survived. He turned his diploma from Sacramento High School into a good living and a Tahoe Park house, where he lived with a loving spouse and two sons. He offered a life for them that was denied to him by the alcoholic abuser he later forgave.
If that’s where the story of Ritz Naygrow ended, we would call it a triumph. But it didn’t end there. Naygrow built what was once a huge business in Sacramento in the 1960s, ’70s and into the ’80s. On a dare, he ran for the Sacramento City Council – serving in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
He was a big man in town but has lived quietly since selling the Sierra Spring Water Company in 1988, which at one point covered four blocks in midtown. It shipped bottled water to 17 states, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and had branches in western Canada.
“Amazing,” said Tom Naygrow of his dad’s life. “He set the bar high.”
He did, but he’s still not done. Ritz Naygrow turns 100 on Dec 3.
He’s outlived his life expectancy for an American man born in his time (76.6 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control). He’s outlived his name recognition in Sacramento, the existential threats that shaped his life and the loving people who enriched it.
A century birthday amid COVID
His name isn’t even really Ritz. His last name isn’t really spelled Naygrow. It is: Rizzieri Negro. It’s a distinguished Italian name that got twisted to suit American tongues and a rigid American social order a century ago.
No matter.
Ritz Naygrow has lived long enough to barely recognize the Sacramento where he created his life out of nothing and where he continues to live, unafraid, amid a COVID-19 pandemic that has canceled the party for 400 people that his family was planning for this week.
His son Tom, who is 73, said the pandemic eroded their plans. “It was going to be 400 people,” he said. “Then it was 200 people. Then it was down to 50 people and then no one.”
Since the pandemic started, Tom Naygrow said his dad has refused to let the specter of sickness and dying distract him from living his life.
“He said to me, ’I’m not going to live the rest of my time watching TV and watching people die,’” Tom Naygrow said.
And so he hasn’t. Ritz Naygrow has lived a century not allowing anyone or anything ruin his life. He never smoked or drank because he saw what it did to his father, John. He never stopped to brood or agonize over being homeless or hungry. He emancipated himself from caustic relatives.
He didn’t take it to heart when Sacramento High classmates voted him “Most Popular” because, he suspected, they got a kick out of the poorest kid with no parents (his dad was gone, his mother dead) being recognized as such.
Ritz Naygrow owned two shirts and a pair of pants in those years, Tom Naygrow said.
To look at old pictures of his dad then, the pants seemed so stiff. “You would think the pants could’ve stood up by themselves when they weren’t being worn,” Tom Naygrow said.
Ritz Naygrow has lived to a 100 by being brave.
From bottled water to the City Council
When he had the idea in 1950 that selling bottled water could not only sustain his family but be lucrative, Naygrow was undaunted on that frightening first day.
“Our first day’s sale was 62 cents plus 3 cents tax,” Ritz Naygrow said. “And we grew that company to doing over $54 million in revenue and serving over 250,000 in customers.”
He said his work could be stressful, so he compartmentalized. “When you go home, work stays at work,” he said.
Naygrow lived that philosophy but Tom Naygrow said that, for a long time, his dad just wasn’t home.
“The bottle water business was a dark-to dark-to dark business. You went to work in the dark and came home in the dark,” Tom Naygrow said. “When my brother Dan was in kindergarten he was assigned to draw a picture of our family. So he drew a picture of us holding our mother (June’s) hand. When the teacher asked where our father was, my brother said, ‘He’s at work.’”
Tom Naygrow said his mother showed the picture to his father that day. Ritz Naygrow said: “I think we have to make some changes.”
So they did. After that, Ritz Naygrow returned home on workdays for dinner with the family. Then returned to work at night.
June Naygrow was his high school sweetheart, a cheerleader at Sacramento High while Ritz was a football player. When Ritz married June, he got a wife who loved him and a father he never had with his father in law, Melvin Brandon.
“He didn’t have a son,” Ritz Naygrow said. “He always wanted one so adopted me emotionally. He took me hunting and fishing...He worked the railroad for 45 years and he saved $6,000. He gave me his entire savings and said, ‘You go ahead and run, Ritz.’
“He worked the midnight shift until 8 in the morning and then he came down to the water plant and worked for me for free until we were established.
“He gave me the best advice I ever got. He said ‘don’t listen to the naysayers. People like you will be a success.’ I thought I would be successful. He knew I would be.”
Ritz Naygrow became a Sacramento City Councilman because he didn’t listen to the naysayers. His son Tom said that Naygrow talked about running for the council and was told by friends that he couldn’t do it.
So he did and served from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. He was the councilman in the Tahoe Park district later represented by current Mayor Darrell Steinberg, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty and the current councilman, Eric Guerra.
“I think he marvels at what he’s done now,” Tom Naygrow said.
Ritz Naygrow still longs for his wife June, who died in 2005. “She’s my favorite memory,” he said. “My girlfriend of four years who agreed to be my wife. I miss her the most.”
She died at Mercy Hospital and the hospital remembers the family that made a $250,000 philanthropic gift to equip the Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation Exercise Suite on the Mercy campus.
Naygrow has also given more than $400,000 to the Colonial Heights Library.
“Ritz Naygrow has contributed so much to our community,” Guerra said. “He and June helped establish the Colonial Heights Library on Stockton Boulevard and just before the pandemic, he was willing to fund our STEM Literacy program...for under-served kids. Ritz and his family really pay it forward.”
It’s what Tom Naygrow said about this dad: “He set the bar high.” He lived his life, didn’t let others define him, took care of himself and the people he loved, cared about his community.
What’s his advice to the next generation of Sacramento?
“Become as independent as you can first before you try to help others so you won’t be a detriment to yourself. Stay focused and when you become successful, pay the golden rule forward.”
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
