Senior News July, 2001 Vol. 20. No.  7

 

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Senior News: HSRC's newspaper moves to United Way building

The panther rests: Remembering Bill Landis

Vacationing at home

Crescent City: First Northcoast Redwoods Writers Conference scheduled in September

High cost of energy: Cal. Commission on Aging files amicus curiae brief in FERC petition

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The panther rests
Remembering Bill Landis
by Barbara Clarke

Bill Landis prowled and growled throughout Humboldt County, Sacramento and on the pages of Senior News for more than 30 years of political activism. He died June 3 in Eureka at the age of 90.
One of the founders of the Humboldt County Gray Panthers, he wrote a column "Prowling and Growling" in Senior News for more than ten years beginning in July 1981, just after the newspaper was begun. In his column he called much to readers' attention-the need for a national health care program, the high cost of prescriptions, the corporatization of health care and the cuts of the Reagan federal and the Deukmejian state budgets.
He was elected to one term on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors in 1962 as representative of the 5th District. During his term he strongly supported establishment of Redwood National Park, a controversial issue in his district where many constituents worked for the timber industry. After his defeat for a second term, he became business agent for the Humboldt County Employee Union (AFCME) for ten years.
His tenure as a respresentative and advocate for senior citizens was exemplary-he wrote his monthly column for ten years, created a number of surveys of local medical services with the Gray Panthers and spent ten years as a member of the California Senior Legislature.
During his CSL tenure, he advocated for a state legislative bill to create "time banking" in which volunteers can register, volunteer their time to another member, and "bank" the hours for their own needs in the future. Though the state legislation never came to be, Landis created the Service Exchange Bank at the Humboldt Senior Resource Center where he was a regular lunch participant. The SEB operated from 1994 to 1999 with some 200 people participating.
Landis always had regrets about the lack of a single payer health care system for all Californians-and all Americans for that matter. "We're the only industrialized nation that doesn't offer preventive care. People have no medical care unless it's job connected. We need some kind of system," Landis said in a 1996 interview in Senior News.
He had been working since 1968 to enact a single payer health care system. "The first such bill was introduced in 1905," he said. "I'd tell the President, give me the same kind of health care plan you have."
Senior News will miss his sharp wit and thorough-going democratic spirit. In a May 1984 column in which he wrote about why he was a democrat, he wrote, "I think most democrats of my generation have empathy toward people due to their personal experience in the Great Depression.... Reagan justifies his ideas by calling many of us old-time democrats starry-eyed liberals who have not adjusted to present economic realities. But we democrats know present economic realities-it's better to be ill-sheltered, ill-clad and undernourished in Sweden, France, West Germany, Israel, Canada and Great Britain than it is in most of the United States."
Landis was born in Oakland, California, March 30, 1911, attended UC Berkeley during the depression and joined the Army after Pearl Harbor in 1941. After the war he married Marian Adele Anderson of Ferndale. The family moved to Humboldt County in 1950 where his wife died in 1988. In recent years he kept company with his dear and special friend Marcie Murphy of McKinleyville. He is also survived by his five children-Bill Jr., Jim, Chuck, Gary and Adele, and seven grandchildren.
The family has asked that memorial contributions be made in Bill's name to the Humboldt Senior Resource Center, 1910 California St., Eureka, 95501.
- by Barbara Clark