Letters to Bill

I first met Bill Walton on December 31, 1978, at a historic concert -the Grateful Dead’s closing of Winterland in San Francisco. I was 19 years old.
We immediately had something in common: music. Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young & so many others. Over the years, I would run into Bill at concerts. Every time I saw him, I’d walk up, say hello and remind him where we had last met.
Then one time, years later, before I could say anything, Bill remembered my name.
I thought that was crazy.
Later, after we became friends, I realized this was one of Bill’s superpowers. He remembered people. Not just famous people or important people. People. Someone he had met briefly years before could walk up to him, and Bill remembered them. More importantly, he made them feel like he was genuinely happy to see them.
Our friendship really began in 2009 when Bill joined our SDSI board. From there came years of dinners, concerts and time together, often with our wives, Michelle and Lori.
Some of my favorite memories weren’t big public moments. They were personal ones.
I took Bill to meet my father-in-law, a lifelong basketball fan, and watched the two of them talking basketball, history and life. Through my father-in-law’s role as a professor at Cal State San Marcos, I arranged for Bill to speak to students on campus. I also brought Bill to Father Joe’s Villages, where I served on the board. He saw firsthand the work being done to help people experiencing homelessness, and in typical Bill fashion, he didn’t just visit, he cared, asked questions and became a big supporter.
Most people knew Bill as the legendary basketball player or the wonderfully unpredictable broadcaster.
That wasn’t the Bill I knew.
I knew a compassionate father, a caring community leader, a loyal friend and an incredibly curious, progressive thinker. For somebody who had accomplished so much and was recognized almost everywhere he went, he remained remarkably interested in other people. He wanted to know what you thought. He wanted to learn about things he didn’t know. That curiosity never seemed to leave him, even later in his life.
And Bill had this incredible ability to put a smile on people’s faces. He walked into a room & the energy changed. His passion for life was contagious. He could make an ordinary person feel special simply because, for those few minutes, Bill made that person feel like they were the most interesting person in the room.
Looking through these pictures and thinking about the years we spent together, I don’t feel sad.
I smile.
Because that’s what Bill did. He made people smile.
I met him as a teenager at a Grateful Dead concert in 1978, never imagining that decades later I would be lucky enough to call him my friend.
There are people you meet in life who are successful. There are people who are famous. And then, much more rarely, there are people whose presence makes you want to be a better person in your own life.
Bill was that friend to me.
Dana Shertz