Former State Assemblyman Howard Wayne died Thursday on his seventy fifth birthday at Scripps Inexperienced Hospital after lapsing right into a coma, his spouse, Mary Lundberg, introduced Saturday.
Plans have been being made for a non-public burial service and for a subsequent celebration of Wayne’s life and accomplishments, she mentioned.
Wayne served within the state Meeting for 3 phrases — from 1996 to 2002 — and thereafter returned to his job as an assistant state lawyer normal specializing in shopper fraud.
After retirement, he continued in public service and was a member of the San Diego County Grand Jury when he took in poor health. He made an unsuccessful run for the San Diego Metropolis Council in 2010.
Wayne’s mother and father, William and Blanche Wayne, have been among the many early members of Congregation Beth Tefilah, which later merged with Congregation Adat Ami to develop into the Ohr Shalom Synagogue. William Wayne was a companion with Holocaust survivor Lou Dunst within the Logan Division Retailer.
A lifelong Democrat, Wayne served on the San Diego County Democratic Central Committee. He volunteered in lots of Democratic campaigns, amongst them the not too long ago profitable judgeship bid by former Chula Vista Councilman Tim Nader.
Alongside together with his spouse, Mary, he traveled in 2006 to South Africa to assist the post-apartheid authorities set up a brand new authorized system.
Whereas within the Meeting, Wayne served as chairman of the Pure Sources Committee and the choose Committee on Biotechnology. One of many payments he shepherded into regulation was to require testing for pollution attributable to runoff alongside the San Diego County shoreline.
He was an opponent of integrating recycled sewage into the town’s water provide, deriding such proposals as “toilet-to-tap” schemes.
In a 1998 interview, Wayne recalled that he was within the slowest studying group in elementary faculty, however after working together with his mom, he excelled at studying and was in a position to skip a grade.
He entered San Diego State College at age 15, finally serving as president there of the Faculty Younger Democrats. Following commencement, he enrolled on the College of San Diego Legislation College, the place he grew to become an editor of its regulation assessment. He joined the state Legal professional Normal’s Workplace in 1973
He dated his curiosity in politics to age 11, when a maternal uncle, Hank Freedman, took him one evening to the galleries of the 1960 Democratic Nationwide Conference in Los Angeles, when John F. Kennedy was nominated for president.
Younger Wayne adopted the presidential election carefully, watching the televised debate between Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
“I knew state by state what electoral votes have been: I may make an affordable guess how they’d come out, and one in all my happiest days was when JFK gained,” he mentioned.
At a gathering of the Kensington Faculty Democratic Membership in 1982, he met Lundberg, a former Peace Corps employee in Sierra Leone, who had come to San Diego to go the Peace Corps recruitment workplace right here.
After cuts have been made in that program by President Ronald Reagan, she enrolled in regulation faculty on the College of California Davis, prompting a long-distance romance. They have been married in 1988.
She went to work within the U.S. Legal professional’s workplace. Theirs was a wedding of a Catholic and a Jew — an intermarriage that Wayne mentioned couldn’t have labored if both of them had robust emotions on non secular issues. They’d no kids, with Wayne suggesting that the time for elevating a household had handed them by.
Wayne’s curiosity in politics led him to actively marketing campaign in San Diego in 1988 for having members of the Metropolis Council elected by district fairly than citywide.
In 1990, Wayne ran unsuccessfully for a Metropolis Council seat vacated by Lucy Killea when she succeeded Larry Stirling within the state Senate. He was defeated by Mike Gotch.
In 1996, Dede Alpert vacated her Meeting seat in a profitable effort to succeed Killea within the state Senate. That opened a path for Wayne’s victory, through which he defeated Republican Tricia Hunter.
Whereas within the state Meeting, Wayne was named alumnus of the yr by Hoover Excessive College.
Chatting with the scholars there, he mentioned: “They’d an important public faculty in San Diego and I used to be combating within the Legislature to make public faculties reasonably priced as a result of I wished them to have alternative.
“I additionally informed them two issues. One, if you get that achievement, you may have an obligation to guarantee that the ladder of alternative is there for individuals who are after you.”
In a soccer analogy, he mentioned he additionally informed them “their academics have been coaches, their mother and father and grandparents have been cheerleaders, they usually have been on the sector and have been the captains of their staff. It was actually on their shoulders to reap the benefits of this and use the chance.”
Wayne’s survivors, along with his spouse, embody a brother Robert, an lawyer in Seattle, Washington, and a big prolonged household.
Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. A model of this report initially appeared in San Diego Jewish World, a member of the San Diego On-line Information Affiliation.
