I first met Ross Selvidge decades ago because of our tennis shoes.
“Nice kicks,” he said, at some city event or other.
I was wearing Jack Purcells. He was wearing Jack Purcells.
This was back when, pre-Zappos, it was really hard to find the old-fashioned brand — which in recent years was bought from PF Flyers by Converse, which was subsequently bought by Nike, and has rebounded in popularity — anywhere at all.
I think I came across them in a mail-order catalog. I bought and wore them out of nostalgia; they were the tennies my father wore in the 1950s.
Ross wore them out of a deep, innate conservatism. He was deeply, innately conservative in the best sense of the word. He simply didn’t believe in change for change’s sake. Ever-dapper, his sartorial style never moved beyond the preppie, Brooks Bros. look popular on college campuses — PCC and USC for him — in the early 1960s.
While, over the many years of our casual friendship, I continued to wear Jack Purcells, as did he, I remember saying to him at one point, “You know, Ross, while I still totally dig their looks, have you ever tried to actually play tennis in them? They offer the support of a pair of bedroom slippers. That’s why they invented, I don’t know, Stan Smiths.”
“But I do play tennis in them,” Ross replied. “Why would I change?”
For all I know, Ross wouldn’t wear the Adidas-made Stan Smiths — currently also undergoing a worldwide revival; they were all the rage in Italy this summer — because, although few people seem to grok this, Stan Smith is a real person, a Pasadena person, who, before he became the world No. 1 player and won both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, played tennis for the Pasadena High School Bulldogs.
Ross Selvidge did not go to PHS. He went, as did I, to its crosstown rival John Muir High. And Ross was nothing if not loyal, true to his school, his country, his Navy, his friends.
Ross died last Friday, aged 76. I had no idea that he was ill. Being ill was not the kind of thing Ross talked about.
So let me celebrate the kinds of things Ross did talk about. I don’t think I have ever met anyone in my life who more adamantly believed in doing what is proper. He hated corruption, he hated bureaucracy for its own sake, he hated financial malfeasance. When he was an elected member of the Pasadena City College Board of Trustees, he would call me up and we would get together and, totally off the record, he would outline for me the smoke-and-mirrors campaigns he believed were being used to justify some campus expenditure.
He had a doctorate in finance, and taught real-estate and investment courses at USC and elsewhere. He could, and did, run the numbers with the best of them, and believed in using logic and logic only in reaching his conclusions during his service on the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority, on the Pasadena Planning Commission, on the Rose Bowl Operating Company board.
While I would imagine Ross was a Republican, he was not knee-jerk anti-tax. If something was needed, and a tax was the best way to pay for it, then he was for that tax. In fact, it was his leadership that led to the then in-crisis Pasadena Public Library passing a citywide special parcel tax that to this day ensures the excellence of that institution.
Ross was mystified when the Pasadena Star-News, which he then perceived as a liberal outfit, endorsed a no vote on the tax when I was the paper’s editorial page editor. We did so because my then-boss, the brilliant, eccentric, wonderfully energetic Hope Frazier, executive editor of the Star-News, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Whittier Daily News — who was certainly not a Republican — put her foot down. When I told her that polling showed that, after public safety, the library was considered the No. 2 most important city function by Pasadenans, Hope said, “Then it should be the No. 2 item in the city budget, and there shouldn’t be a need for a new tax.”
Pasadenans disagreed. They voted in overwhelming numbers to tax themselves to shore up the library and keep all its neighborhood branches open. Ross was still working to promote the latest re-upping of that tax at his passing.
I have never met anyone quite like Ross Selvidge. Pasadena, and any city in the world, will be a better place, if we can somehow figure out how to create another person so dedicated to doing the right thing.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.
