By Mike Hazlip—
For 77-year-old Michael Lagomarsino, community volunteer work not only keeps him active, but he says he’s learned something about himself in the process.
Lagomarsino has lived in Citrus Heights for more than 40 years, but was born in Lodi and spent much of his youth traveling due to his father serving as an Air Force sergeant.
“I like to say that I spent about the first 16 years in two foreign countries, Germany and Texas,” he says.
Lagomarsino finally settled in the Sacramento area after his father was sent to France where he would have had to attend boarding school. After graduating high school, Lagomarsino joined the Army in 1962 where he worked in electronics.
After a few years in the Army, he applied for a job as a relay operator with AT&T, but a hearing loss prevented him from getting the job. Lagomarsino was at a fork in the road, as he calls it, when he went to work as an avionics technician at McClellan where he stayed for the next three decades.
He retired in 1999, just as McCllelan was being decommissioned, and joined the ranks of many people in the area with newfound time on their hands.
With the encouragement of his wife, Lagomarsino started volunteering at the Aerospace Museum of California in the early 2000s. For the first time, he found himself outside of a government facility and interacting with the general public.
“That’s why it was so different working with the general public at the museum,” he said. “Becoming a docent, I had to relate a little bit to that. Volunteering helped me get over my shyness for quite a while.”
Eventually, Lagomarsino was asked to oversee the restoration hangar at the museum as he worked with other volunteers. He says he tried to make history come alive for visitors to the museum.
“I enjoyed the work at the museum,” he said. “I finally got out of my shell and enjoyed talking to people. I always believed that as a docent, every exhibit in the museum, you must be able to tell a story about it.”
Lagomarsino left the museum when he said new leadership took over, and he didn’t agree with the new direction the museum was taking. Once again, he found himself at another fork in the road and decided this time to get involved in the Citrus Heights community he has called home for four decades.
He remembers an issue that came before the City Council, and Lagomarsino and his wife decided to attend a meeting. He says they the only ones who took the time to stay until the end of the meeting.
“At the end of the meeting, I looked around and she and I were the only ones there,” he said. “From that day forward both of us decided we didn’t want the City Council members to feel that we weren’t interested.”
That began Lagomarsino’s involvement in the community of Citrus Heights. He now serves as president of the Area 3 neighborhood association as well as president of Citrus Heights Residents Empowerment Association, and has previously served on the city’s Planning Commission.
Lagomarsino also volunteers at the Citrus Heights Police Department, first starting out as a court liaison working as an intermediary between the court and the police station. His job was coordinating communication between the District Attorney’s office and the Police Department so that officers would not waste valuable time driving downtown for court cases that were postponed or cancelled.
“The whole idea was trying to cut down the officer’s time away from his job,” said Lagomarsino, recalling his first volunteer duties with the department.
Eventually, he joined other volunteers working in code enforcement.
“Most people in the city don’t realize a lot of the parking enforcement is handled by the volunteers,” he said. “We’re all trained to handle it.”
He says he can recall one tense situation on a code enforcement call when a man became aggressive.
“I was afraid to turn my back because I didn’t know if he had a weapon or not,” he said. “So I made a call on the radio and asked for an officer. Next thing I know there were seven officers there.”
Lagomarsino later opted to volunteer doing something that wasn’t as physically demanding, and currently works to cross check the department’s electronic records with paper copies — a project he expects to complete by the end of the year.
“I’ve enjoyed working with the people and the officers,” he says. “We’ve had some great officers come through who have gone on to bigger and better things.”
“The 13 years I’ve been with the department, it’s been great to see the officers growing with the profession. In a way, I’m proud to be with the department.”
Looking back, Lagomarsino says he has no regrets in any of the choices he has made in his career or service to the community.
“You always question yourself whether you took the right fork at times,” he said. “Whether it’s getting married, or continuing your education. The best thing to do is don’t think about it after you made the decision because you can’t go back on ‘what if.’”
After 52 years of marriage, Lagomarsino credits his wife with keeping their relationship going.
“I can’t tell you why we’ve been married this long to tell you the truth,” he said, noting they’ve had their arguments. “She’s a wonderful wife.”
Lagomarsino says he would like to see more people become involved in their communities. Three of Citrus Heights’ 11 neighborhood areas might be “going dark” he says, because of a lack of interest. Areas one, two, and four are currently in need of community members to step in.
“Take an interest in your local government, take an interest in what goes on in your city, take an interest in what goes on in your neighborhood,” he says. “Just don’t sit there and complain about it.”
Editor’s note: To learn more about the city’s 11 neighborhood areas, see article: Neighborhood groups REACH out to connect Citrus Heights residents. Volunteer opportunities with the Police Department can be found online here.
