DORIS GENTRY Raising 100+ foster boys over 20 years photo by ART & CLARITY ▲ RICK ENOS Math, banking, finance and analytical skills have been the driving ▲ A compadre to all in the valley R ick Enos is the man with the giving heart. After serving as an Army officer in Vietnam, he returned home and got a graduate degree in finance and accounting. It wasn’t his passion to get into the restaurant business, but when he walked into Victoria Station he was hooked. He helped grow the chain to fifty stores, and seven years later to 102 restaurants. He had three young sons and was looking for a change. The former owner of Victoria Station was living in Hawaii and called Rick to start Compadres in 1983. Eventually they opened a Compadres in Yountville, and moved the store to its current Lincoln Avenue location in Napa in 2007. Giving back to the community has been one of the most rewarding parts of Rick’s job. Though his boys are now adults and work in the business, you will always find Rick with a big smile serving up food at over fifty events, fund raisers and youth sports every year. He has also served fifteen years at Cal Dining (UC Berkeley) and the Big Game at Stanford for the past ten years. Enos also likes to give kids their first job experience and help mentor them for future employees. “I love serving people, being behind the table and doing the volunteer parties for events,” said Enos. “I’m not going to retire anytime soon. This is my favorite time in my life.” force of a life lived coast to coast for Doris Gentry. You know when she has been put in charge of getting something done: her contagious laugh and bright eyes are her calling cards. Her no-nonsense approach life was learned the hard way when she left home at age fourteen and lived on the streets. She never saw herself as a victim, but took hard strife as a learning opportunity. In 1976, she took over a nearly bankrupt employment agency and turned it into the largest non-franchised agency in Los Angeles County, garnering the labor contracts for over sixty workers a day from Hitachi Corp, Sanyo, Kubota Tractor, YKK Zipper and dozens of other firms. She later sold the company at an embarrassing profit, relocated to southern Illinois and invested/created a dozen firms, including Optima Management, a venturecapital investment corporation providing consulting services to banks in the region. Today the Doris Gentry of Napa Valley is all about foster care and helping kids stand up, step up and achieve more. In the past twenty years, she has raised more than one hundred foster teenage boys. Doris is the embodiment of taking lemons and making lemonade. Now she teaches foster teen boys to do the same thing. photo by KARI RUEL J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 4 17
NVLife_Feb_2014
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