Because the 12 months draws to a detailed, Lookout Santa Cruz looks back on the distinguished people Santa Cruz County lost in the course of the 12 months in “Remembrance 2022.” Our series began with longtime Watsonville teacher and civil rights activist Mas Hashimoto and continues with former bookseller and community activist Gwen Marcum.
Back within the BIRE days — that will be “Before the Web Ruined The whole lot” — any ambitious bookstore would work to take care of an intensive periodical section. And as many longtime locals might inform you, the newspapers and magazines selection on the now-defunct Capitola Book Café was a thing to behold.
Actually, regulars on the Book Café would show up each morning — especially Sundays — to get their hands on the most recent Latest York Times, however the newspaper racks went far beyond even that. Should you were so inclined, you had the prospect to scan the Sydney Morning Herald or Le Monde, straight from Paris. And the magazines? The variety of titles was dizzying. A curious soul could spend near an hour with the magazines, right there by the front window, without even venturing into where the actual books were.
This playland of stories and culture was the realm of Gwen Marcum, considered one of 4 co-owners of the Capitola Book Café for greater than 25 years. Should you visited the Book Café and asked Marcum in regards to the latest mystery or fantasy novel, she might need pointed you to another person. But in case you desired to talk newspapers or magazines — or the present events that kept those publications in business — she would have on a regular basis on the earth for you.
Marcum — who died in April on the age of 86 — was co-owner of the Capitola Book Café from near its opening in 1980 to 2007, along with her friends and partners Marcia Rider, Kathy Kitsuse and Judy Stenovich, a quartet affectionately known in local literary circles as “The Ladies.” The beloved mid-county bookstore lingered a bit under a unique ownership group before closing its doors permanently in 2014.
Each of the partners within the Book Café had her area of interest, and Marcum’s was clearly oriented toward the sociopolitical world. In a way, she was representative of a certain pre-baby boom generation of political progressives that got here to characterize Santa Cruz County after the University of California got here to town.
She was originally an Iowa farm girl who traveled widely, lived in Africa for some time, worked in Washington, D.C., and was indeed in the group of a few quarter of million people near the Lincoln Memorial to listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in person.
From her perch on the Book Café — situated where the CineLux theater now sits in a small shopping mall off forty first Avenue — she cultivated a form of cosmopolitan familiarity with what was going around on the earth while maintaining a discreet Midwestern brand of modesty.
“She was very humble about what she knew in regards to the world,” said Gwen’s daughter, Andrea Marcum. “And she or he at all times enjoyed intelligent conversation, but brought people to those intelligent conversations without dumbing anything down. She just made everyone feel welcome into an mental conversation or a political conversation.”
Marcum also brought the world to Capitola in the shape of living, respiration authors. She was instrumental in bringing in brand-name authors and celebrities to the Book Café, including Salman Rushdie, Anne Rice, David Sedaris, Michael Moore and countless others. Laurie R. King, considered one of Santa Cruz’s most successful writers, credits Marcum for helping her launch her profession as a novelist. King and Marcum had change into friends when each were the wives of UC Santa Cruz professors.
In 1993, King mentioned to her friend that she was about to publish her first novel. “The very first thing she said was, ‘Oh, let’s do an event,’” remembered King, “which was amazing to me, because I actually didn’t need to inflict myself on the book world.”
As a gesture of gratitude, King launched nearly every considered one of her subsequent novels on the Book Café before it closed. “They were at all times perfectly lovely,” said King of her various events on the Book Café. “They were super community-focused, and an awful lot of that was Gwen’s doing. She built a community up at UCSC, and she or he built a community on the Book Café.”
Gwen Marcum grew up within the small town of Menlo, Iowa, where she was a 4-H kid — a 1956 photo of her along with her prize-winning steer, Sparky, still hangs in a Texas steakhouse. Later, she went to Ghana in West Africa on a student exchange.
Eventually, she made her option to Washington, where she earned a master’s degree in political science at American University. In Washington, she worked within the office of Sen. Albert Gore, the previous vice chairman’s father, and met (and eventually married) Africa scholar John Marcum. Within the Sixties, she devoted her efforts to civil rights activism, participating within the “Freedom Summer” as considered one of the numerous volunteers who went into the Deep South to register people to vote.
The Marcums moved to Santa Cruz in 1972, where John Marcum accepted a school position and have become the primary provost of Merrill College at UCSC. For Gwen, being the wife of a university provost meant developing social skills and community-building know-how that served her well later when she became a co-owner of a bookstore, said Laurie King.
“[As wife of a provost], you will have to be an adept administrator, a careful accountant, an emotionally attuned counselor, a guidance person for somebody’s future,” said King. “I mean, all those things [came in handy] on the bookstore, where someone might say, ‘What’s there to read?’ Well, you will have to do an evaluation of the person to search out out what they’re excited about, after which give them something that can change their lives.”
Marcum engaged within the Santa Cruz community in other ways as well, most notably as a youth sports coach, specifically in girls’ basketball, which was a specific passion of hers.
Through all of it — the hard truths of growing up on a farm, the enlarged perspective of living abroad, the insights from working inside the federal government, the experiences within the South in the course of the civil rights era, the demands of the role of a university administrator’s spouse, the turbulence and hard selections of being a independent small-business owner, and 80-plus years of amassed experience — Gwen Marcum learned a thing or two about how the world works, and she or he was at all times desperate to share it.
“She was just devoured current events and news and headlines,” said Richard Lange, a longtime worker on the Book Café who later became a part of the ownership group that took over for The Ladies. “She had the within scoop on this or that. She knew more about how Congress worked and will name more people in Congress than anybody I knew. But, the flip side of that, Gwen was at all times extremely modest. Attempting to get her to [talk about her accomplishments] was like pulling teeth.”
When Lange first got here to the Book Café as a 22-year-old, he said, he was poorly read and inexperienced on the earth of books. But Marcum was there to offer him guidance and mentorship. “I used to be really rough around the sides,” said Lange. “I had read nothing. And I used to be just kinda out of my element. And Gwen just treated me like a grown-up, and took me seriously as a reader. She cared about what I thought of things. And that was a really encouraging experience.”
Andrea Marcum, like all of Gwen’s three children, worked in her mother’s bookstore for some time in her youth. (She is planning to maneuver back to Santa Cruz County in 2023 after years in Southern California.) She remembers her mother taking great satisfaction in her role as a form of curator of the Book Café’s periodical section, not a lot for the good diversity and breadth of it, but due to what she could deliver through it to certain people she knew.
“When a magazine didn’t sell,” said Andrea, “you’d rip the quilt off it and send back [the cover] for credit. And I just remember she would have all these skeletal leftovers [of magazines]. And she or he would at all times know who would like to read what from these leftover magazines. And there have been at all times boxes and boxes of these items within the hallway of our home, able to exit to individuals who she was sure could be excited about them. She knew what people would care about. She was really gifted at that.”
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