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Yahoo!CALLING SAM WAKE: I don’t know that Selmer Wake was a drinking man. But if he were, I’m guessing right now he’d be popping a few corks from six feet under. Given the events of this week, Wake would have had a lot to celebrate. But Wake died on May 28 at age 93, so whatever celebrating he might have done will have to take place on the other side.
Selmer Olen — pronounced “O-Leen” — Wake spent the better part of 60 years scheming and dreaming with rare passion and effectiveness on behalf of adult education programs here in Santa Barbara. He was the visionary who got stuff done. Had Wake been able to hang on just a few days longer, no doubt he would have been on hand this Wednesday when his lifelong friend and co-conspirator Helen Pedotti announced she was giving $278,000 to help adult ed instructors from Santa Barbara City College get into the county jail. The plan is to help inmates get their GEDs, take ESL classes, or pick up some computer skills. And Tuesday night, Measure V — City College’s $77 million bond measure — passed with flying colors, winning nearly 70 percent of the vote. To get such support for a tax increase doesn’t happen every day. In fact, the last time City College managed to persuade voters to pass a bond was back in 1972. On the table then was $3 million, which was needed to buy the 34 acres that’s since become City College’s West Campus. Wake helped lead that campaign. It’s also worth noting that the vast bulk of the $250,000 raised to campaign on behalf of Measure V came from the Foundation for Santa Barbara City College, an entity that Wake helped to create more than 35 years ago.
Wake’s passing last week got lost in the whirlwind created by all the eulogies delivered on behalf of Father Virgil Cordano. I’m not taking away anything from Fr. Virgil, whose penetrating warmth, intelligence, and acceptance seemed wonderfully at odds with the institution he so loyally represented, the Catholic Church. But Wake deserves more than a few toots of the trumpet to mark his departure.
When I visited Sam Wake a few months ago, he was too fragile to attend an Independent luncheon event at which he was to be honored. A small man, he was gobbled up by the recliner from which he happily held court. When he stood, he walked with a decided limp, the result of a boyhood accident that left one leg considerably shorter than the other. But what stuck with you were Wake’s eyes, startlingly blue and shockingly bright. And, of course, there was the Sam Wake smile — full of knowing mischief — that made you almost feel sorry for all the people with whom he’d crossed swords during his career.
But only almost.
In later years, Sam ran his world from the command central of his recliner, his computer, and his phone system. Emails and calls would pour in. Sam stayed in touch. When I was there, he got a call from a high school sweetheart. The high school Wake attended was in Pierpont, South Dakota, a small town located about 150 miles from the middle of nowhere. Wake was one of seven kids; his mother and father — immigrants from Norway — ran the general store there. When Wake was six, both parents died. Tuberculosis. County authorities wanted to place the Wake kids in orphanages, but Sam’s oldest brother and sister, only teenagers, adamantly refused. They’d raise their siblings, they vowed, and raise them they did. To keep warm, Wake remembered hanging out at the Pierpont newspaper. In the process, he learned how to set type the old-fashioned way, a trade that would employ him in the years to come. He also came to understand and enjoy newspaper people, a trait that would aid him immensely. Wake moved to Santa Barbara in 1939, after graduating from the University of Oregon, to teach at Santa Barbara Junior High.
In 1946, Wake was assigned to run the adult education program, then administered by the high school district. The classes were technical and utilitarian — shorthand, business; things like that. Wake took a crow bar to the curriculum and pried it wide open, offering liberal arts classes, current events symposiums, music, languages, you name it. In 1949, he had a major hand in the creation of the Starr King Parent-Child Workshop — still going strong — which provides low-cost childcare, teaches parents what it means to parent, and generates a genuine sense of community. He just loved it. “No grades, no degrees, no credits — just the joy of learning,” he explained. When Wake took over adult ed, it had 1,500 students. When he “retired” in 1972, it had 13,000. Today, there are about 50,000.
Where this passion came from, no one knows. It was just there. His wife, Bee, was a high school teacher and one of his brothers is a retired professor from Berkeley. In today’s climate of exhaustion, torpor, and despair, Wake’s boundless optimism in learning for learning’s sake seemed almost sweet and quaint. But there was nothing the least bit sweet or quaint about the nonstop political battles he found himself waging to protect — and expand — his programs. The glee with which Wake told his war stories made it clear that he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He battled with superintendents who didn’t take his mission seriously enough. He battled with state politicians who regarded adult ed as institutionalized self-indulgence paid for at taxpayers’ expense. And he battled with John Birchers — who thought Dwight Eisenhower was a willing agent of the worldwide communist conspiracy — and other conservatives who, in the early 1960s, suspected Wake was an unwitting errand boy for the Kremlin. They didn’t know what they were up against. Wake was both a Unitarian and a Rotarian, and combined the lofty idealism of one with the dollars-and-cents pragmatism of the other. He created an adult ed advisory committee and packed it with movers and shakers from all walks of life. First, there were 10 members, soon 40. These were people accustomed to having their phone calls taken, and Wake proved effective at infecting them with the same enthusiasm that animated him. During Wake’s tenure, 640 people would sit on this committee. These were the shock troops he could — and did — rally when under attack.
But often, Wake didn’t need much help. In his hands, the telephone was a mighty cudgel. When Wake thought budget cuts threatened his program, he’d brandish it. “Sam was not the least bit timid about calling you and telling you what he thought,” said former City College über executive Peter MacDougall. “And he wasn’t shy about telling you what you should think, too. His passion was the program. That’s why you had to love the guy.” If Wake stepped on toes, sometimes, he had his own feet stomped on, too. One time he was accused of operating a “slush fund” with money collected from the sale of coffee and cookies. Wake quickly showed how he invested the proceeds back into the program. When a disgruntled underling accused him of wholesale fraud over how he ran a program designed to get people off welfare, state investigators were called in. This was during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Wake had discovered that a sizable percentage of people on welfare were dyslexic. He was aggressive in seeking funds from the state to help them with their learning disabilities. “Why were all the people with dyslexia in California living in Santa Barbara?” one skeptical state official wondered. Not only was Wake exonerated after demonstrating that he’d adhered strictly to state protocol, but the federal government cited his program — which saved taxpayers about $3 million — as a model for emulation. Out of all of this later came City College’s Learning Disabilities Department. Not bad for a gimp from Pierpont, South Dakota.
In the meantime, I plan to hoist a toast for Sam Wake, a lucky man who created much of his own good fortune. We should all be so blessed. And while he was around, we were.
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