It started with a horse and a wagon.

In the early days of Napa, long before the valley became synonymous with world-class wine and weekend getaways, a family named Bacigalupi made their living doing the work nobody talks about but everybody needs. They picked up the garbage. Generation after generation, they showed up — for their neighbors, for their community, for this valley they call home.

Today, that horse and wagon has become a fleet of state-of-the-art trucks, and Napa Recycling & Waste Services employs more than 220 people under the leadership of Greg Kelley, a fourth-generation family member to run the business. But ask Greg or his mother Carolyn what the business is really about, and the answer hasn’t changed in a hundred years.

“It’s not the most glamorous work,” Greg says. “But we pick up garbage in the community, and community’s really important.”

It’s a philosophy that extends well beyond the family business — straight to the doors of Queen of the Valley Medical Center, where the Bacigalupi family has shown up just as steadily, for just as long.

Carolyn’s eldest son was born at the Queen in 1959, just a year after the hospital opened its doors. Since then, the family has welcomed babies there, kept vigil there and visited friends there across four generations. Greg’s wife Medley still remembers coming to see her father after back surgery when the building was a single story with a lawn out front. Today, her daughter is a nurse there. So is her sister. And her niece.

“It’s just where you go,” Medley says. “And it’s always here.”

“We’re so lucky to have such a wonderful hospital,” Carolyn adds. For her family, that’s not a casual observation — it’s a conviction backed by more than six decades of loyalty.

What strikes you, talking with this family, is how naturally they draw the parallel between their business and the hospital. Neither is glamorous work. Both are absolutely essential. Both have evolved enormously over the decades while staying rooted in the same mission: serving the people of this valley, no matter what.

“You need a local hospital that you can rely on, 24/7,” Greg says. “It’s a privilege to have a good hospital.”

That sense of privilege has translated into decades of philanthropic support — personal gifts and giving through the business — most recently directed toward the Caregiver Education Fund, which helps nurses and clinical staff pursue advanced certifications and training. For a family with so many loved ones working within those walls, it’s personal.

That rootedness runs just as deep on the other side of the family tree. When Greg married Medley, whose family — the Manasses — has called Napa home for just as many generations, it was less a merging of two families than a continuation of a story that had been intertwined for decades. Their grandparents went to school together. Their parents were close friends. As Carolyn jokes: “There were only 12 people here, so we’re all friends.”

The next generation of that commitment continues to take shape, one shift at a time — in the nurses’ station, where Kim, McKenzie and Chandler, Greg’s sister-in-law, daughter and niece, care for the same community that helped raise them.