Before Edgar Wayburn went hiking in Yosemite Valley, before he helped protect more than 100 million acres of Western wilderness, before he won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Edgar Wayburn was a Macon boy on a train.
Back then, perhaps sometime about 1913, his name was E.A. Waxelbaum. He was riding with his mother, Mamie, to visit her family in San Francisco, where his grandfather was one of the first Reform rabbis in the city.
Family lore says that the little boy first became enthralled with nature and wildness as the landscape of the West unfurled beneath the rails.
This week, Wayburn’s niece Lise Dayan of Macon and her brother Gus Kaufman Jr. of Atlanta fondly recalled their famous uncle, who died Friday at age 103.
In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded Wayburn the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award, saying Wayburn had “saved more of our wilderness than any person alive.”
As a five-time president of the Sierra Club, Wayburn led the movement to create the Golden Gate National Recreation Area around San Francisco, Redwoods National Park in California, and 10 national parks in Alaska — well more than 100 million acres altogether.
“He was very quiet and soft spoken, but he put his hand on your shoulder and would talk to you in whatever vernacular you understood,” Dayan said, remembering the intensity of her uncle’s bright blue eyes.
“He spoke to you like you were the most important person in the world, and that’s how he lobbied,” she said. “He would just wear people down.”
Wayburn’s powers of persuasion and the intervention of another Georgia native, President Jimmy Carter, helped win passage of the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. It almost doubled the nation’s park land.
Unlike some of the more incendiary members of the conservation movement, Wayburn preferred to work quietly behind the scenes.
“Even though he lived in San Francisco and lost his Southern accent, he had the manner of a Southern gentleman,” Dayan said.
Wayburn was never a professional lobbyist. He was a doctor with four kids, whose wife, Peggy, was a conservationist in her own right.
“I thought one lesson Dr. Wayburn taught us was the profound difference one volunteer can make in our country,” said Mark Woodall, chairman of the Georgia chapter of the Sierra Club. “He did all his work as a volunteer on the weekends or other breaks from a busy family medical practice. That ought to be inspiring.”
Unknown in Macon outside of family
Dayan said Wayburn often stopped to visit family in Macon on his way to or from Washington, D.C. But he seems known to few in Macon, aside from family friends. No local libraries or bookstores carry his 2004 book, “Your Land and Mine: Evolution of a Conservationist.”
Macon Sierra Club activist Lindsay Holliday recalls learning about Wayburn’s legacy for the first time in 2002, when the club’s national executive director, Carl Pope, visited Macon to campaign against power plant pollution. “I think that’s the first time I heard and understood this Macon boy had done such great things,” Holliday said.
Gus Kaufman Jr. said Edgar Waxelbaum was born on Oak Street. His father, who owned a shoe store and was involved in other businesses, died when Edgar was 2. Edgar’s uncle Lewis became his stepfather.
Kaufman said the family lived on College Street, but young “E.A.” liked to hike across the Ocmulgee River through the woods to the Jackson Springs Road area long before Shirley Hills was a neighborhood.
Kaufman said he believes his uncle attended Lanier High School and graduated at age 16.
His family taught him the value of education and social activism. According to Kaufman, Edward’s mother, Mamie Waxelbaum, graduated from the University of California in 1900. She became a community activist in Macon, where family members were prominent members of Temple Beth Israel.
Kaufman’s mother Marian, also known for her community involvement in Macon, died at age 93 just two days before her brother Edgar.
Waxelbaum to Wayburn
The young Edgar Waxelbaum attended the University of Georgia, originally with the intent of becoming a writer, Kaufman said. But he was attracted by medicine and went on to Harvard Medical School.
When he finished, he went to Germany for a residency in the early 1930s. There he saw the Brownshirts, a paramilitary organization of the Nazi party, marching as Adolph Hitler rose to power, Kaufman said.
“I think that scared him a bit ... and he changed his name when he came back from Germany” to Wayburn, which sounded less Jewish, Kaufman said. “I think he just made it up, sort of simplifying Waxelbaum.”
After returning from Germany, Wayburn moved in 1933 to San Francisco, where his uncle had a medical practice. His memoir recalls how he was struck by early forays into Yosemite National Park and the wilds around San Francisco. He joined the Sierra Club when it had just a few thousand members.
But Wayburn did not become an activist until after he returned from four years in the Army Air Force during World War II. He began to fear the effects of post-war development around San Francisco.
“It was an amazing thing how he managed to preserve the whole vista north of San Francisco,” Kaufman said. “This is before anyone thought about doing that kind of thing.”
Kaufman spent the summer of 1967 living with his uncle and aunt in San Francisco and hiked with them in Redwoods National Forest and Muir Woods.
Wayburn remained an avid outdoorsman all his life, taking rafting trips in Alaska in his 90s, Kaufman said.
In his memoir, Wayburn explained: “For me, conservation has been a compulsion; I acted because I felt I must.”
He wrote, “In destroying wildness, we deny ourselves the full extent of what it means to be alive. ... And in protecting wild lands we seek not mere survival, but our hope, our solace, our inspiration, and our joy.”
To contact writer S. Heather Duncan, call 744-4225.
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