The Wallace we know

It was late COVID summer, 2020. I was recruiting for an idea, an idea that was to become Lookout Santa Cruz. 

Wallace Baine ventured out to our home, which, as luck had it, possesses a deck well set up for social distancing. Wallace sat at one side of the deck, I was a good, maybe safe, 15 or 20 feet away. He’d arrived in his nifty convertible, license plate “Juali.”

We talked about the possibility of Wallace becoming Lookout’s first full-time correspondent, and he was warming to the idea. He had already easily become the dean of Santa Cruz working journalists, 30 years of meeting daily and weekly deadlines, mostly for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and then for several years for Good Times, as the continuing layoffs at the Sentinel claimed even him.

Wallace bought the Lookout vision, as far-fetched as it initially seemed to almost everyone locally. He knew what a well-staffed daily (digital) newspaper, made up of enough journalists who care about their community, means to a community. And Santa Cruz County, from south to north, had become his community decades after the soft-spoken boy from North Carolina had arrived. He knew that a newspaper needed to be ready to cover whatever comes along, and he wanted to be part of it. 

You’ll remember that year of 2020 just served as a warmup to the following half-decade of news, which we’re just now concluding: COVID and its long aftermath, the George Floyd murder and the Black Live Matter protests and consciousness-raising it inspired, and the CZU fires, unprecedented destruction that still consumes too many of our friends and neighbors to this day. What followed has been the tentacles of those stories and so many news ones.  

He’s been the chronicler supreme of arts and artists and the biographer of those who have sculpted Santa Cruz County with his Shapers series. In total, he’s written 1,126 stories for us, atop all those thousands he wrote before he joined us. Ink doesn’t run in his veins; words, so near-perfectly crafted words, do. 

In his 34th year in our unique business, Wallace joined with a half dozen of us and journeyed to Columbia University, as we joyously accepted the 2024 Pulitzer for Breaking News; as usual, he was the nattiest among us. 

He’s more than a reporter or writer. He’s been a conscience of this often contentious community. So many of his pieces tell us more, and really ask the question, “What’s the right thing, the best thing for Santa Cruzans to do?”

I think of his five-year, full-time work with Lookout as a capstone to what now has become among newspaper people an almost unprecedented career. As he’s becoming an ongoing contributor, continuing trivia impresario (at Abbott Square each summer) and able-to-relax man about town, you, his readers, need to know a little more about him.

That Wallace that you read in print (well, text, but close enough) is the singular and authentic Wallace Baine. His writing seems effortless, but it’s not, still work,  and often composed in the back of our office on an aqua beanbag, which we are keeping in place for him. Whether jumping on a news story or tackling something as complex as our ongoing series, Changing Santa Cruz, he has amazed his colleagues, several half his age, with his journalistic dexterity. But what stays with all of us is the heart, the voice, that he brings to his work is just who he is. Soft-spoken, soft-hearted, always looking to do his part.

In old newspaper parlance, he would have been the columnist everyone knew, and would read, no matter the topic. But a dirty little secret of way too many of those columnists was that they were prima donnas, arrogant, spending little time with their colleagues, especially the newbies. At Lookout, Wallace has been one of 10 in our newsroom, his talent and experience understood by all, but still a reporter taking on whatever needed to be covered like anyone else.

He can remember being a young journalist. He gave me a photo early on, which I prize. It’s the young, shaggy Wallace, notepad in hand, interviewing Anthony Dominick Benedetto, yes, Tony Bennett, on a visit to Santa Cruz in the 1980s. On the back, he wrote the inscription: “To Ken, tongue-tied with Tony Bennett, your friend, Wallace.” 

We all start somewhere, and Wallace was lucky enough – unusual in this trade – to build a career and win growing reader esteem in one community for 35 years, so far. You’ll still see Wallace’s byline in Lookout, but more occasionally, as his so-well-deserved free time kicks in. He and I have talked about 2026 and beyond and what those contributions might look like. And about bigger dreams of perhaps creating a news-based Santa Cruz, next-gen wiki, which captures so much of what has made our hometown such a unique place for so long, even as we all wonder among the imminence and impact of landscape and social change. Because in addition to being a reporter, he’s also been a keeper of our collective memory

If you’ve enjoyed his work, you might want to drop him a note. I’m sure he’d think that not necessary, but how many times do we have a chance to offer a timely “thank you”?

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