Gaye LeBaron: A look back at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts

Consider it a birthday gift for old Luther Burbank, who would have been 167 on March 7 - if he had lived so long. Certainly it is good news for the stick-in-the-muds, meaning those who resist change, prefer the familiar and don’t like to see the old ways tossed in the dumpster.

I refer, of course, to the news that the Luther Burbank Center is getting its proper name back next month. Or as my friend Gabe Meline, who advances wisdom about the arts and music for KQED, wrote in mock-heroic upon learning the news: “Santa Rosa, our long nightmare is over.”

The good people who maintain Burbank House & Gardens downtown had proposed a different sort of birthday gift, suggesting an “Unbirthday” when well wishers make a cash donation instead of baking a birthday cake. Not a new idea, but a sound one.

But we have to admit that the gesture by the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians - granting the naming rights that come with their support of the center to give us back the LBC - takes the cake.

There are lots of back-stories to choose from in this matter. Example: Do we all understand that Burbank’s birthday is Arbor Day? Only in California. It’s all over the calendar in the rest of the nation. But California honors Luther, who, in his half-century of Santa Rosa residency, planted trees all over town. He often enlisted the help of children, teaching them environmental values before we knew there was such a thing. Many remembered their dig-in-the-dirt encounters with Luther as high points of their childhood.

(And don’t start with me about Old Courthouse Square. I’d be surprised if Luther planted many, if any, redwoods, which are - let’s be real, folks - trees meant for the forests primeval, not for yards, city parks or freeway landscaping.)

But I digress.

As has become patently clear in the conversations and online comments that followed the news of the Return of Luther Burbank, many of us never actually used the Wells Fargo name.

As has been pointed out, there are several buildings and institutions named for our favorite son. One that was forgotten in the short list that accompanied the news story was the first and most important Burbank name of all - Luther Burbank Auditorium on the Santa Rosa Junior College campus.

The second building on the campus, completed in the 1930s, it is the first one seen as you pass through the college’s arched gate. The positioning is purposeful. The land the JC is built upon had been purchased soon after his death in 1926 and was to be a park in his memory, bearing his name.

The Chamber of Commerce held the title and made plans to raise the funds, but the stock market crash came in 1929 and all bets were off.

Floyd Bailey, the college’s first president, bent on finding a proper campus for his young institution, which shared quarters with Santa Rosa High School, saw the Great Depression as opportunity. He convinced the civic leaders to part with the title to his new district for a dollar and promised to keep the front of the property park-like and build a structure facing Mendocino Avenue, naming it for Luther. Done and done.

For the way-back story, we go back to LBC to explore briefly how it came to be that in the first place.

That’s quite another story, which began in the 1960s with a dynamic Assembly of God minister building an enthusiastic congregation at his church on Steele Lane in a building that is now the City of Santa Rosa’s Recreation Center.

The church was active in community affairs. It was a distribution point for the Patty Hearst food giveaway (which is a blast from the past too complex to explain here). The choir began a Christmas tradition known as the Singing Christmas Tree, drawing crowds to the Vets Building.

The Sunday numbers swelled and talk began of building a larger facility - a new church and elementary school on River Road between the freeway and Old Redwood Highway. To this end, the church set up a “trust fund” whereby “investors” could use the church as a kind of bank. Their money would earn competitive interest while the funds were used for the expansion.

The building, of course, caught the public imagination. It also, apparently, aroused more than curiosity. A lawyer who was a board member of a local bank questioned the process, wrote to the minister expressing concerns and, when nothing changed, sent a note to the newspaper. The missive was dropped on the desk of reporter Bob Klose, who was already at work on a feature piece about this very successful religious venture.

Klose’s story took on a whole new aspect. (Think “Spotlight,” but on a local level.) He began with some calls to financial regulatory agencies, asking procedural questions, naming no names. But it became apparent that the church was acting as a bank without the obligatory license.

Official investigations began and, by the end of the 1970s, regulators issued a cease and desist order that shut the fund down until the church repaid all its investors. While some people got all of their money back and others got part, the church, having spent it on the structure, was forced to declare bankruptcy. The court ordered that the complex be sold at auction on the proverbial “courthouse steps.” The sale actually took place in a parking lot behind the Federal Building.

That’s the bad news. The good news is what came of it.

Santa Rosa’s Rotarians had established a nonprofit known as the Luther Burbank Memorial Foundation, which had been casting about for ways to bring a proper performance venue to the area.

Actor Raymond Burr, who lived in Dry Creek, was the first to point out that the church would make a great theater. The Rotarians took up the idea and, being shrewd businessmen, broached it to Henry Trione

Trione, already well known for his philanthropy, saw the value to the community and agreed to be the front man and find others to invest with him - Henry’s Angels, the newspaper called them. Familiar names like Person, Codding, Friedmans, Stone, Galeazzi, Ayers, Headley, Freeman, Kerr and Manley.

Only four of them, in addition to Henry, were signed and sealed when the auction took place in 1981.

The value of the church holdings had been set at $7.2 million. Trione’s bid was $4.5 million. When the court agreed, he gave them a cashier’s check and went looking for more friends.

A short-lived corporation of Henry’s Angels leased the complex to the Luther Burbank Foundation.

It caught on immediately. The Santa Rosa Symphony called it home for three decades, before moving to the newly built Green Music Center. Comedian Steve Allen was the opening act. The crowds came and the holding company passed title to the Luther Burbank Foundation and the LBC was underway.

Credit where it’s due: The high costs of entertaining being as they are, the infusion of money from Wells Fargo, along with the naming rights, was certainly welcome to the foundation directors 10 years go, even if the public grumbled about the name.

In time, the shaky origins of the busy complex that has been such a part of the local culture were pretty much forgotten.

But a passage from Trione’s 2015 memoir “Footprints of the Baker Boy” recalls his moment at the auction, when it became clear that he would be putting up the front money. He writes:

“Rod McNeill (a Rotarian who had brought him to consider the church complex initially) liked to tell people afterward that I turned to him and said, ‘You S.O.B! Look what you’ve got me into!’”

Clearly, it wasn’t a church any more.