The jobs that bookend Wade Holland’s wildly eclectic
professional life have at least one thing in common: a lot of time spent
listening to strangers. But aside from an occasional flareup of controversy,
the long hours a county planning commissioner spends in public hearings
offer little in the way of intrigue – at least when compared with
Holland’s first line of work, as an American spy in Cold War Germany.
In the early 1960s, the Inverness resident roved the
East German border in an Army truck equipped with antennae designed
to intercept Soviet radio telephone signals. "We just gathered
and tape-recorded the stuff, and listened to it once to see if there
was anything really hot on it," Holland said. He and his fellow
intelligence officers were always ready to beat a hasty retreat westward,
he said, if they heard the word "Paris" in a Red Army dispatch.
At 69, Holland – who in January was elected vice-chair
of Marin’s planning commission – still has a somewhat boyish
demeanor. His brown eyes are lively with intelligence, he tends to talk
with his hands, and his mouth slides easily into an abashed smile. Holland’s
friends say his shyness can’t be disentangled from his sense of
humor.
Internet pioneer
When he got out of the Army in 1962, Holland’s
Russian skills (he had studied at the Army Language School, now the
Defense Language Institute, in Monterey) landed him a job at the Rand
Corporation, a Santa Monica-based think tank specializing in research
contracts with the US military. Part of his job was editing a bimonthly
journal on advances in Russian computer technology, Soviet Cybernetics
Review.
It was there, working with computers the size of a
small restaurant, that Holland helped hone the science of "packet
switching" – compressing large amounts of information and
sending it out in short bursts. In the world of computer proto-science,
packet switching was a groundbreaking technique, and led to the creation
of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, which
was used by military officials and government researchers to share information.
It evolved into today’s global Internet.
A devout liberal, Holland found himself at home among
his left-leaning colleagues at Rand, which in those days resembled "a
university without students," he said. But working on defense contracts
became less palatable as the Vietnam War escalated, and he left the
corporation in 1968. The same year he was married, and with his wife
Sandra bought a house in Inverness. Splitting his time between Los Angeles
and West Marin, Holland became a food critic for the renowned Jack Shelton
dining guide. He also wrote restaurant reviews for the San Francisco
Chronicle.
Political passions
"In those days people could work half-time and
afford to buy a house in Inverness," Holland recalled. Filled with
young couples raising families, Holland said, Inverness was "kid
heaven," in contrast to its present population, composed heavily
of weekenders and older residents settled in to retirement.
From 1975 to 1980, Holland was business manager for
the Marin Waldorf School in Terra Linda (by then his two sons had been
born, and Holland was living full-time with his family in Inverness).
During that time, he authored a Q&A pamphlet on Waldorf education
that is still in print, and to date has sold 250,000 copies.
Holland still finds time for politics, particularly
certain activist causes, such as the push for universal healthcare.
It’s hard to imagine a breach in his courtly manner, but according
to friend and current Inverness Public Utility District manager Karen
Gann, politics can do the trick – his "outrage at perceived
injustices," she said, has driven him to heights of eloquence that
sometimes verge on shouting, all of it in a friendly spirit of debate.
Managed waterworks
In 1980, when the IPUD bought the town's waterworks,
Holland became a director of the board, and in 1985 was hired as the
district's general manager. For the next 17 years, Holland administered
the district, overseeing the water system, as well as the finances of
the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department.
During that time, Holland’s precise habits of
thought became something of a legend in West Marin public affairs.
"The part that's striking about Wade was how clear
his thinking was," said IPUD Director Scoby Zook, who joined the board
several years before Holland retired in 2002. Holland is a "stable,
steady, creative sort of thinker," Zook said.
Holland's tenure as IPUD manager was not without brief
spates of controversy. In 1990, Holland objected to a plan put forth
by several board directors to make Inverness a "nuclear-free zone,"
barring the district from buying products made by companies that also
manufactured nuclear weapons.
The problem with this idea, Holland and others pointed
out, was that virtually all of the district's equipment came from corporations
and universities that also did nuclear-weapons research. When directors
put a nuclear-free zone measure on the ballot, Holland threatened to
resign if it passed.
Although the measure passed, Holland didn't resign.
Soon after the vote, then-Director Barbara Dewey, a backer of the nuclear-free
zone, said her camp had been able to iron out its differences with Holland.
"We kissed and made up," Dewey cheerfully noted.
‘I never did anything I didn’t like’
Holland came out of retirement in 2004, when Supervisor
Kinsey tapped him to represent West Marin on the seven-member county
planning commission. Essentially a court of appeals for controversial
construction projects, the commission and its staff wield enormous power
in directing development across the county, much of it in West Marin.
"It’s essential for West Marin to have a
local voice on the planning commission," Kinsey said. Holland,
he added, "epitomizes personal integrity," and has "a
sensitivity to what it means to live in a rural area, the aesthetics,
commitment to the highest level of environmental resource protection,
and sensitivity to the community without being willing to just cave
in to fear."
Looking back on his past incarnations as spy, computer
scientist, restaurant reviewer, education pamphleteer, utility district
manager, and planner, Holland sees one common theme: an interest in
"starting things up." He also likes moving on as his enthusiasms
evolve. "I never did anything I didn’t like at the time,"
Holland says.