Santa Cruz Sentinel from Santa Cruz, California • Page 26

B-2 SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL Sunday, September 5, 2004 SANTA CRUZ STYLE 'It's a natural inclination to meet someone and connect them with someone I think they will ELliANOR Wasson, 96 "It gave them a feeling of importance," she says of the women. "It really paved the way for the doctors to work with them." Panhandlers, politicians It's easy to find stories about Wasson. Her friends talk about how, at 96, she'll cook dinner for them when they come to visit. Of how she is deadly in a game of rummy. Of how she is just as comfortable with a panhandler as a politician.

Her kindness is legendary among those who know her. Once, after he had written his now-famous first book, says Robbins, he received some 80,000 letters from his readers. He could not answer them all, so he sent a form letter to most of them. But there were some that touched his heart and he felt bad he could not write back. Wasson, he says, took those letters and sent each person an individual reply.

"My name is Eleanor Wasson," she wrote, "and John Robbins asked me to write to you. She sent out literally thousands ofletters.hesaid. Two-and-a-half hours later, ou say you have to leave after having examined pictures of Wasson's grandson's new bride, the cover of her soon-to-be-released biography called "28,000 Martinis" and a handout on what famous people had to say about being vegetarian because you confessed you still eat meat. As she walks you to the door, she stops by a leafy house plant with a single white bloom. "I've had this plant for 25 years, and it never bloomed," says Wasson, reaching out to touch a leaf.

Then one day, she says, she stopped in front of the plant and told it she loved it. One week later, a single flower bloomed. Dan CoyroSentinel as an informal meeting hall. Eleanor Wasson's home serves people say. "It's a natural inclination to meet someone and connect them with someone I think they will like," she says.

Once, she says, when she was in Beverly Hills after World War II, she began volunteering at a women's psychiatric ward at a veterans hospital. She was having lunch at Romanoff's, where all the power ly as if there was a train coming down the track. A week later, an unexpected $25,000 check arrived in the group's mail, Robbins says. "Is she a magician? A psychic? Or is she so aligned she intuitively knows?" says Robbins. "Maybe it's a little of all those things.

"Maybe it's a lot of those things all at the same time." A woman of convictions Wasson has firm beliefs. She believes in vegetarianism. She believes in a martini at 5 o'clock vodka, straight up with a lemon twist. She does not believe in war. She does not like George W.

Bush. The subject of the president and the war in Iraq comes up several times in a conversation with Wasson. "To think this great nation has attacked a people who have never done anything to us in order to get one man," she says. "That is horrible." Her abhorrence of war may have something to do with how a 10-year-old Wasson felt the day World War I ended, a war that was supposed to be the end of world conflict. "Just think how it felt to believe there was no more war?" Wasson says.

"That was how we felt on 1111." So last week, she asked the group of women who meet at her house each week to visualize John Kerry taking the oath of office because visualization is a strong part of her beliefs. "If you say to Eleanor, 'This is never going to says retired real estate agent Alexandra Joyet Snyder, "she will just say, 'If you believe that, then it won't So everyone visualized. A moment of visualization is exactly the kind of thing that might happen at Wasson's house, with its spectacular view of the Monterey Bay. Every Monday night, a group of women who call themselves "Women Rise for Global Peace" come to Wasson's to talk and listen to one another. On Wednesdays, she has a rebellious Catholic priest a brilliant man who speaks nine languages, she say come to her house to lead discussions on a range of topics.

Other times, she will summon people just because someone interesting has arrived. Marjorie Hauser, who met Wasson over one of Wasson's famous martinis, remembers the time she got a call from Wasson on a Sunday afternoon. "Will you come over to my house?" asked Wasson in her elegant voice. "I have someone I want you to meet." Hauser went because, as her friends say, "when Eleanor calls, you come." There in Wasson's living room was Robert White Mountain, an elder of the Lakota tribe, Hauser says. He spent the afternoon telling the group of Wasson's friends the plight of his people.

Not too much later, Hauser, who recently retired as president of a high-tech company, found herself heading up two rummage sales to raise money for the Lakotas and another woman from the group went to Wounded Knee to teach the Lakotas to build cob houses homes made out of mud. It's why people call Wasson "The Great Connector." "That's the best thing I do," Wasson says when you mention what Wasson Continued from Page Bl Which is also why, her friends say, when Wasson calls you on a Sunday afternoon and asks you to come by, you do. "Would you like some tea, dear?" Wasson asks and heads for the kitchen in her house, which sits high on a Santa Cruz hill. "Would you like some help?" you ask because, after all, Wasson is 9C and you are half her age and run four miles a day. "Oh no, dear," says Wasson as she sets the water to boil.

"You just sit there and rest." Her father's story If you want to know a little about Wasson's character, it helps to know the story of her father. He was orphaned at 11, she says, and struck right out on his own. In 1893, he and a friend, a certain Mr. William Wrigley set up concessions at the Chicago World's Fair. Wrigley sold gum.

Wasson's father sold sandwiches. Pretty soon, Wasson's father was sending young men into the second-class section of trains to sell food, which the railroads didn't provide. It wasn't long before Wasson's father owned a chain of small restaurants along the railroad line. And then became vice-president of a rajlroad line himself. He was a multimillionaire and "a wonderful, well-educated man," says Wasson, "even though he never went to school." Which explains a little how Wasson, at the age of 81, decided to sell her house in Santa Monica Canyon and move to Santa Cruz after she met environmental author John Robbins, who lives here.

Within two weeks of their meeting, she says, she began running into all kinds of people in Southern California who either were from Santa Cruz, or somehow knew the place. Wasson had never even visited here before. But a short time later she bought a house. Because there were, she says, all those signs. Among the stars Wasson is a sturdy, rich-voiced woman who wears a tailored blazer and slacks.

She serves tea in a silver pot on a silver tray. The cups are delicate and made of china. Wasson lived much of her life in Beverly Hills where her husband, George, headed the legal department for 20th Century Fox movie studio, she says. He was handsome, smart and funny, Wasson says a Stanford Law grad. He and Wasson got their start when George unwittingly outfoxed Fox.

He was making $150 a month in 1928 when studio heads called him, says Wasson. They offered him a salary and he turned it down. When they upped the offer, he turned that down, too. Finally George accepted the third offer, but it wasn't until his first paycheck that George realized he had been negotiating a monthly salary, while the studio was talking about his weekly pay. "We went from $150 a month to $800 a month, and that's when bread was five cents a loaf," says Wasson.

"George and I laughed ourselves silly over that one," Wasson says. In those years, George and Eleanor lived among the powerful and elite. They had a large house in Beverly Hills, a nanny and a cook, and attended cocktail parties with the rich and famous. Among Wasson's friends were stars like Celeste Holm, Claudette Colbert, Betty White and Will Rogers. One year, her daughter was invited to a birthday party for Shirley Temple.

It was an enchanted kind of life and Wasson spent those years rais ing her children, doing volunteer work and developing her activist ways. She was named coordinator of Volunteer Services for UCLA her first paid job and appointed to California Gov. Earl Warren's Mental Health Commission. But life changed when her brilliant and always elegantly dressed husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Wasson says she could stand the fact he would sometimes hit her with his cane, but when he put his hands around her neck and tried to strangle her, she became afraid.

She decided to put her husband in the Motion Picture and Television Home, but didn't know how to tell him. He was so confused, he would not understand why he had to go away. On the night before he was to leave, Wasson sat by her husband's bed while he slept and imagined what she wanted to tell him, as a scientist friend had advised her to do. "Darling," Wasson addressed her husband in her mind, "because of your illness, you are sometimes hostile, which makes me afraid. I have to take you to the Motion Picture Home, but I will come and visit you every day.

"And, I love you," she finished. And George, who had not talked coherently for some time, suddenly spoke, Wasson says. "He said, 'Darling, do not be afraid. Go on and do your Wasson remembers. Those sentences are one of the things Wasson counts as a miracle in her life.

George died four months later at the age of 83. They had been married 53 years. A spirit of love A small creek dances less than 6 feet from the foundation of Wasson's home. It comes from the high Sierra, she says a spring that burbles up by the Lutheran church and tumbles past her house. That the creek traveled so far and never dries up is also something of a miracle to Wasson, like the time, she says, when a man she had just met sent her a bunch of pink roses because it was her birthday.

He did not know that her mother always sent Wasson a bouquet of pink roses on her birthday, she says. Or that her mother had just died. It's all part of a foundation of spiritual beliefs that Wasson says "has made my life very wonderful." Raised an Episcopalian, Wasson turned to the study of reincarnation in 1932, when people in Beverly Hills did not talk of such things. We are put on this earth to learn a lesson so we can evolve, she explains. We are all made of energy like Einstein said, which does not go away.

"I do not believe in God as we know God, who sits on high in judgment," she says. Rather, she believes "there is a universal power of love and we are all part of it." Most of the time, Wasson doesn't talk about her spiritual beliefs. But if you ask her about them, she will. "Eleanor is one-of-a-kind, one of the most deeply spiritual, deeply aligned human beings I have ever met," says Robbins, author of the best seller "Diet for a New America" and two other books. And like others you ask, he has his own prickle-down-the-spine story.

Once, he says? the board of EarthSave which Wasson is on was debating whether it had enough money to expand its programs. When everyone finished talking, Wasson spoke up. "The money will be there. I can see it," she said as matter-of-fact- SEMINAR Open Studios Attention Artists! Now you can afford to advertise your open studio in Santa Cruz's best read local newspaper. Reach over 70,000 potential customers with your ad.

Contact Peggy Townsend at ptownsendsantacvuzsentinel.com. cost of sample ad below actual size. Larger sizes available. ful went to eat and meet. While she was talking with the handsome actors Reginald Denny and Leon Ames, she remembered how the psychiatric patients seemed unreachable until someone played music for them.

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