Since 1957 the Napa Valley Register has seen floods and fires, a move from our old digs to new ones, a change in our name and countless changes in the community, but one constant remains: Geraldine Nalley, a professional in our ad services department, today marks 50 years at the Register.

“I love the business,” said Mrs. Nalley, the only one of about 100 or so Napa Valley Publishing employees who is universally greeted with the honorific. “If I didn’t I wouldn’t have stayed this long.”

Born Geraldine Bonfiglio at her parents’ home, Mrs. Nalley was raised on Napa Street. She met her husband, Clifford Nalley, at the old skating rink on Juarez Street. Clifford Nalley was then a skate boy, tightening or loosing skates as needed. They were married for 50 years before he passed away three years ago.

Mrs. Nalley has two daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

After a short while in the office of Bertain’s Laundry on Main Street, Nalley came to work at the Napa Register, then on First and Coombs streets and owned by a local man named Whitfield Griffith.

Her first job was an ad runner.

“I ran ad proofs,” said Mrs. Nalley. “I took the ads to the stores, where the proprietor checked them and I brought them back with the changes.”

Like many other aspects of newspaper publishing, that task is done electronically these days, through e-mail and various computer software programs.

Today Mrs. Nalley works with national advertisers and builds the Register’s dummy pages — the mock-ups showing which ad goes where and how much room remains on each page for articles and news photos.

In a brief interview, Mrs. Nalley identified another change in the business, one that others acknowledged at a celebration on her behalf Friday.

“Years ago (the newspaper) was so different,” she said. “We were more like a family. We were really close.”

While Mrs. Nalley was not ready Friday to offer up too many tales from the past, others were.

Jerry Hunter, a retired Browns Valley resident who was the head of the Register’s classified ad department, remembered getting in trouble with Mrs. Nalley when he underestimated the number of pages of classified ads that would run on any given day. Hunter said he used the SWAG method of estimating pages, which roughly translates as Sophisticated Wild Guessing.

“She cussed me out more than once,” said Hunter.

Current colleague Cindy Holbrook remembered the flood of 1986, when water was lapping up against the edge of the Register building, the power was out and staffers was scrambling to put together a small edition, which would have to printed by a sister paper in Novato.

Mrs. Nalley, then as now tasked with dummying the pages, was given a Coleman lantern in order to do her job.

Another colleague remembered a practical joke decades ago, when a person in a gorilla suit was hired to chase Mrs. Nalley around the Register, growling references to a night on the town she had shared with her sister in Denver.

“She has a gruff exterior,” said former Register Editor Doug Ernst, now the publisher of the St. Helena Star and Weekly Calistogan, “but she’s just a softie.”

Hunter said he believes Nalley has outlasted eight to 10 ad directors and probably as many Register publishers.

Staff writer L. Pierce Carson, who is in his 41st year on the Register staff, said, “Mrs. Nalley is more important than the publisher — with all due respect to the publisher — because she knows where everything has to go, what needs to be done and where the skeletons are buried.”