 |
 Robert Hubner
Bill Marler was not the easiest
child to raise.
The second of three children, he always looked for his own way
to do things. As a young teen in high school, when he wanted to eat
off-campus, a violation of school rules, he staged a "lunch-bag
rebellion" and urged his classmates to join him in boycotting the
cafeteria. At 16, in the summer between his sophomore and junior
years, he ran away from home. One Saturday when his parents were
out, he packed his duffle and left town, hitching a ride over the
Cascades. He called his folks when he got to Bridgeport, nearly 300
miles away, and announced that he wanted to find a job picking
fruit and wouldn't be back until the end of the season. They said,
"OK. But call once in a while."
Most parents would have gotten in their car and dragged their
kid home, he says. He asked them about it later, and they said they
figured he had some level of responsibility and would survive the
summer. "It was one of the best things I did in my entire life,"
says Marler. "I had to get a job. I had to keep a job. And I had to
work like I never worked in my life-and for almost nothing." Living
and toiling alongside migrant workers, he got a sense of
proportion, of society, and a better notion of what he wanted his
life to be like. Bucking bales, thinning apples, picking peaches,
picking cherries, and following the harvest season up into Canada,
he got fired from jobs, kicked out of houses, and often went hungry
when he ran out of money. "I came home and I was a completely
different person," he says.
After high school, he worked odd jobs and signed up for junior
college. His classmates were older students with jobs and kids, who
were trying to improve their lives through education. One day one
of them looked at him and asked, "What are you doing here? Why
don't you go to a university?"
So he did. He loaded up his truck, collected copies of his
transcripts, and made for Pullman. He came before being admitted-in
fact, he hadn't even applied. To the shock of the admissions
officer, he just walked in and said "Hi. I'd like to go to WSU."
Luckily, the administrator sent him up to see Lou McNew, a crusty,
affable academic advisor. McNew handed him an application and
scheduled him to take the Washington Pre-College Test. "It was a
Saturday, and it was just me and two football players in the room,"
says Marler. After breezing through the exam, he was admitted.
Marler looked up some of the guys from Bridgeport, sons of the
orchardists he had worked for. They urged him to join their
fraternity. One night over beers at the Spruce in Moscow, a few of
them let slip the details and rigors of fraternity initiation. No
way was he going to do that, thought Marler. At the next pledge
meeting, he spilled to his housemates, figuring if they all refused
to take part, they could stop it. Instead, one of them informed on
Marler, and he was asked to move out. "It was a good lesson in
picking your battles," he says. "What you think is inappropriate,
others might see as just part of the process." After he collected
his belongings from the front lawn, he found an apartment and a
summer job at the Bookie. Staying in town for the summer turned out
to be a very good decision.
At the time, student-body president Mark Ufkes '77 and his
friends were on a mission to increase student involvement in local
politics. Realizing that the City of Pullman neglected the needs of
the students, Ufkes wanted his classmates to vote, and even to join
the ranks of the city officials. He decided to encourage two
students to run for the city council that fall. It might have been
a good idea, but it wasn't an easy one. The first of his
hand-picked candidates backed out of the primary. The late
withdrawal left Ufkes and his friends desperate for a candidate,
and everyone had gone home for summer vacation. Then he spied the
19-year-old Marler and quizzed him about his concerns for the
community. "I remember thinking, he's articulate, he clearly wants
to get involved," says Ufkes. One afternoon while sitting poolside
at the North Campus Heights apartment complex, he urged Marler to
run.
Marler didn't think about his age and lack of experience, or
that he hadn't even lived in Pullman for a year. He borrowed $12
for the filing fee and signed up. He survived the primary simply by
being the only challenger to the incumbent, longtime Pullman
resident Crista Emerson. But once his name went on the main ballot,
he woke up. He knew he'd have the student votes, but that wasn't
enough. He needed the support of the townspeople to win. "I
realized I had a choice to make," he says. "I could do nothing and
ignore it, or I could actually work at it." So he walked all over
town, knocked on doors, pounded signs into yards, and handed out
his home phone number so voters could share their concerns. He
sought out debates and welcomed interviews, "Lo and behold, I was
actually good at that," he says.
In the end, Marler didn't win the race. The incumbent lost it.
Her disdain at having to run against a kid who came to debates in
feathered hair and blue jeans worked against her, he says. Marler
won the election by a 53-vote margin and became the first student
to sit on Pullman's city council.
"The thing about Bill, he wanted to do the right thing," says
Ufkes. "From the beginning he had a passion for advocating for the
community." First, with the help of council members Bill Gaskins
'69 and Ken Casavant ('71 Ph.D.), he tackled a fair housing
ordinance to improve the quality of the town's rentals and to
prevent landlords from discriminating based on race, religion, or
sexual orientation. It had been an issue for the older students and
a hotly contested concern for the Pullman community, and Marler
grabbed it and ran with it.
"He was just a young college student at the time, but he had
Pullman's interest at heart," says Gaskins, a professor in WSU's
pharmacy school. With Marler's help, the council became a
progressive public body. Besides the fair housing ordinance, the
council created the town's public bus system and reoriented the
community to consider the concerns of the student population.
"I remember thinking, God, he's so young," says Ufkes. "But when
he had an issue to decide, he went out and did the homework he
needed to understand the situation."
Marler stayed an extra year in Pullman to complete his four-year
term, something most of his fellow council members never thought a
student would do, then moved on to law school at the University of
Puget Sound (Seattle University) before going to work at a large
law firm in Seattle and becoming a trial lawyer.
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