Gary Alan Patton

Born December 26, 1943, San Francisco

“My name is Gary Patton.”

That is how I always started off my speeches – and I have made a lot of speeches in my life. Anyone who might want to review my speech list can click this link

I was first elected to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors in November 1974. Thereafter, I was reelected four times, in June of 1978, June of 1982, June of 1986, and June of 1990. I served as an elected official, in other words, for twenty years. I was only twenty-nine years old when I was first elected to office, and I think I was then the youngest County Supervisor in the State of California. I was fifty years old when I retired, after choosing not to run for reelection in 1994. County Supervisors are important public officials. There are five Supervisors in every California County (except in the City and County of San Francisco, which has eleven). Those five persons are pretty much in charge of the county. Cities have their own local governments, but if it’s not in a city, the County Supervisors are in charge.

Anyone interested in what I did as a County Supervisor can find a link to “The Patton Record” on my personal website. There was lots of controversy involved! The local newspaper named me as one of two persons who had the most significant impact on Santa Cruz County during the Twentieth Century. That doesn’t mean the newspaper approved of that impact, by the way! Luckily, the voters did!

My personal website also links to other information about me, and it happens to be where you can read my blog, “We Live In A Political World.” As I write this, I have been writing daily blog postings for over eleven years now. Often, they’re pretty good, if I do say so myself!

My sister Nancy started off her self-introduction on this family website with exactly the phrase that I just employed: “As I write this....” I am borrowing from Nancy! Her self-introduction was written down when she had just passed her 73rd birthday. I am writing my self-introduction in early August 2021, as I am approaching my 78th birthday.

I was born on the day after Christmas, 1943, in San Francisco, California, and our family did move around a lot, as Nancy says, so I can claim some association with San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Fort Wayne, Indiana (where Nancy was born), Redwood City, California, and Palo Alto, California – before my father and mother moved our family to Santa Cruz County in 1961.

1961 also happened to be the year I graduated from high school in Palo Alto, in June. After a summer at “Wildwood,” my family’s new home in the Santa Cruz mountains, I went to Stanford University, and then Stanford law school after that, so I kept that Palo Alto connection. I did spend the summer of 1968 in Asia, teaching English vocabulary at Linson College in Macau, a Portuguese colony close to Hong Kong. That summer with Volunteers in Asia turned out to be pretty consequential. I met my wife Marilyn during that summer of 1968, and we were married in September 1969. After we got married, we lived, briefly in Idylwild, California, and then in Felton, California, and then we lived in New York City from Fall 1970 to Summer 1971, while I attended Union Theological Seminary, as a Rockefeller Brothers Fellow and where Marilyn taught at the Hewitt School. In 1971, we returned to live in the City of Santa Cruz, and “as I write this,” we have lived in the same house in Santa Cruz for exactly fifty years.

I start having some memories from Redwood City – mostly of bad things I did. We know that “memory” is a “reconstruction,” most often, rather than an accurate statement of what really happened, but I recall my parents telling me that the move from Redwood City to Palo Alto was basically intended to prevent me from becoming a juvenile delinquent. I am leaving out the bad stories from Redwood City on the advice of friends and family. In Palo Alto, there really aren’t many “bad” stories. In the Fifth Grade, at Walter Hays Elementary School, I was the captain and quarterback of our school’s flag football team. We won a city championship, and I got my picture in the Palo Alto Times with Chuck Taylor, who coached Stanford football. In the sixth grade, I couldn’t make the team. I simply didn’t grow, while everyone else did!

Nancy says that she lived in seven houses before she graduated from high school, and that this was related to a certain “instability of place” that has affected her life. I was with her all the way, of course, from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Redwood City, California, to the three different houses where the family lived in Palo Alto, and then on to the home in Santa Cruz. Somehow, that “instability of place” didn’t strike me the way it apparently did Nancy.

My youth was nothing if not “stable,” the way I experienced it. That was because of my parents’ determination to make our family solid, and reliable, and secure. They did a great job of that. My Dad told me once, in fact, that he decided, as he was growing up, that he wanted to create a family that was economically secure and completely stable – exactly the opposite of the experience he had had. He and my Mom did that in exemplary fashion – and I have greatly benefitted! I like to think that Marilyn and I have continued that tradition. Yeah! Maybe too much, Marilyn might say. Like we haven’t moved in the last fifty years! Marilyn, in fact, would probably have liked a little more variety! Why, for instance, since we live in a “beach town,” couldn’t we have found a house, somewhere along the line, where you could actually see the ocean?

I have had a wonderful life (and I am listing below some events and highlights beyond what I have narrated here). “As I write this,” I am getting towards the end of my life, and if my children and my grandchildren ever do browse through the memories incorporated into this website, I hope they will be able to understand how grateful this particular Patton is for what my grandparents, my parents, my brother and sisters, my wife Marilyn, and my children, Sonya and Philips, have meant to me.

I love you all. Love to everyone!

Highlights (just a few):

Stanford
Stanford in France
The Honors Program in Social Thought and Institutions
Volunteers in Asia
Resisting the Draft
The Harry Lundberg School of Seamanship
My merchant marine trip
Being on the open ocean. My participation in a sea rescue.
Hong Kong/Macau/Marilyn
David and Betty Dilworth and Marjy, David, and John
Nancy, Will, Rick, Emily, and James
Richard and Christine
Liz
New York City
Union Theological Seminary / Meeting Dorothy Day
Saving Lighthouse Field
Measure J
Twenty years on the Board of Supervisors
Learning Spanish
The Planning and Conservation League – PCL
LandWatch Monterey County
Around the world travel – France to Fiji and beyond
My friends Andy Schiffrin and Denise and Al Holbert
Larry Spears
The entire Spears Family (all of them and those weekly Zoom calls)
Dylan, Delaney, and Jay
Bob Dylan
Hannah Arendt
Gandhi and King
My daily blog