WRITE ABOUT FOOD for long enough, and eventually you’ll find yourself presiding in your pajamas over a pit 3 feet deep, shoveling hot coals over a 16-pound turkey. Such is the power of ...

Willie Benedetti, the lifelong Sonoma-Marin rancher and greater than fiction, cigar-puffing country character perhaps best known for his enormous, smoked-then-grilled turkey legs, died Friday at 69.