Walter Singer’s Journey: the Story Behind a Community Plaza Memorial
by Robin Chapman
It has been just twenty-two years since Walter Singer died, not much time, as history goes. But it has been just long enough for
many to have lost the thread of Walter Singer’s remarkable life story. During his lifetime, he was so active in local organizations and so
much loved and admired, people affectionately called him Mr. Los Altos. Following his untimely death, civic leaders dedicated a
sculpture to him in the newly remodeled Community Plaza. The bronze bust, created by artist Ingrid Jackson MacDonald, is now listed
on the Smithsonian Art Inventory of sculpture in public places.
When the Los Altos City Council voted recently to remove the bust and remodel the Plaza, council member Jarrett Fishpaw
put it this way: “I walked in Community Plaza most of my life without a single trace or clue as to the impact the gentleman
immortalized there had on the community."
Who was this man whose bronze tribute has graced downtown Los Altos for two decades?
Walter Singer was born in Germany in 1923, the son of a Lutheran mother and a Jewish father. In 1935, Nazi laws in Germany
stripped Jews of citizenship rights and outlawed marriage between Jews and non-Jews. The Singers were now in danger. In 1939, after
his father was arrested, the family fled to San Francisco with the help of a cousin.
“I arrived pretty much with the clothes on my back,” Walter Singer said in an oral history, now in the Los Altos History
Museum. “An extra set of underwear, an extra pair of shoes and four dollars in my pocket.” As his mother found work cleaning
houses, a friend told them about Frank and Josephine Duveneck, a philanthropic couple who might help. When Mrs. Duveneck visited
the Singers in San Francisco in the fall of 1939 and saw their tiny apartment, she went into action. Within an hour she had bundled
Walter Singer into her blue Ford for the drive down the peninsula to Hidden Villa Ranch.
At the Duvenecks’ warm, friendly table, the sixteen-year-old began to flourish. “I wanted some more potatoes,” he later
recalled. “And asked for them in German, which the word for potatoes is kartoffel, and nothing happened; so until I finally thought of
the right thing to say in English, I guess is when I had the additional helping of potatoes! They made me learn English, which was the
best thing that ever happened to me in my life.” Eager to learn more, Singer enrolled in Palo Alto High School, heading down the hill to
school each morning with the Duvenecks’ son Bernard.
After graduation, and two years at Golden Gate University, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving as a translator during World
War II. When the war was over he learned his father had died in a Nazi concentration camp.
He became a U.S. citizen, found a job, and, at a dance in San Carlos, met Marie Ohanian, who became his wife. The two were
wed at Hidden Villa Ranch. They moved to Los Altos Hills in 1961 and in 1976 purchased Los Altos Stationers, then located in the
building now occupied by Le Boulanger. After their teenage daughter Julie was killed by a drunken driver, Singer turned more and
more to a life of service. From the Rotary and the Los Altos Village Association, to the United Way and the Chamber of Commerce, he
volunteered. As one of the founders of the Festival of Lights Parade in Los Altos, it was Walter Singer who climbed aboard a float each
year to play Santa Claus for the children.
Then, in 1989 Singer got shattering news. He had contracted AIDS from a tainted blood transfusion given to him during open
heart surgery five years earlier. He was stunned. “I didn’t tell anyone besides my wife and son,” he said, “because of the stigma
attached to AIDS.” Several months later, fearing the reaction of his customers, he quietly sold his store, telling friends he had decided to
retire.
In the meantime, he heard about a fellow Rotarian, former Los Altos High School principal Dushan “Dude” Angius, whose
son Steve had contracted AIDS. He spoke to Angius and learned about the Los Altos Rotary AIDS Project. “I told him he would feel
much better—and might help a lot of other people—if he would talk about it,” says Angius, now 86.
“After six months of vacillating back and forth,” Singer said, “I decided to go public.”
When he took the podium at the Los Altos Rotary meeting, December 7, 1989, only Dude Angius and their friend Mary
Prochnow knew what he planned to say. “I’m going to talk to you today about a matter of life and death,” he began, as a hush fell over
the crowd and he choked back tears. When he stopped speaking, “Every member, some crying, some unable to speak, came up and
gave me a hug,” said Singer. “I had asked my fellow Rotarians if they would be my support group and they came through one
hundred percent.”
In return, he spent the remaining years of his life educating others about the egalitarian nature of disease. In the 1980s, people
who were diagnosed with AIDS faced a death sentence and a public that frequently condemned them. Walter Singer worked to change
that. He spoke to dozens and dozens of organizations. His story went national and then international—from the CBS Morning News to
headlines in more than four hundred newspapers. He took on a featured role in the Rotary film, The Los Altos Story, a Peabody Awardwinning documentary that has been seen by millions of people worldwide. Jane Reed, Rotarian and past president of the board of the
Los Altos History Museum put it this way: “It’s not taboo to talk about AIDS anymore. We have people like Walter Singer to thank for
that.”
He was just sixty-eight years old when he died in 1992. His funeral—presided over by both a rabbi and a protestant minister—
drew hundreds of people. Two years later, the city he loved dedicated a tribute to him in a small Los Altos plaza and hundreds more
people turned out for the ceremony.
Today, the Walter Singer bust is something busy people might not notice as they hurry about. But the journey it represents is
striking. It began in Germany just a few years short of a century ago, and led a refugee to a new life in America. “Walter was a giver,”
says Dude Angius, summing up this man’s life. Repeatedly, instead of turning inward in sorrow, he found the strength to turn his
sorrow into service. Bronze sculptures aside: this is Walter Singer’s lasting legacy.