Dr. Grauer's Column - Blue Suburban Wagon

Blue Suburban Wagon
By Stuart Grauer

Last week, after more than thirty years of stories, surf wax, cassette tapes, desert dust, and countless student expeditions without a single breakdown, we sold the old blue Grauer School Suburban Wagon to a lovely local couple.

We even took a small loss on it so it might stay nearby. That felt right.

As everyone around here knows already, the Wagon was never just a vehicle. It was a part of the original school, a rolling piece of our founding imagination. Before we learned campuses were supposed to be polished brands with strategic plans and drop-off lanes, there was this oversized blue beast lumbering through North County carrying kids, dogs, camping gear, drums, surfboards, art supplies, and whatever else learning required that week.

Communities need more than buildings and programs. Those don’t have to be strategic. They can just be ordinary and real: stories and shared artifacts and symbols that over time remind people why the place exists at all. The Suburban lived that life. It said what we needed to say.

The legend started when local philanthropist Bill Owens was happy with the way the school was teaching his son, Jon. One morning at drop off, he barked out, in his high-powered business way, the all-time classic donor question: “What do you need?” If you ever want to help a leader or organization, there is no better question, at least, if you really mean it. And I knew Bill did.

“We need a 9-passenger Suburban Wagon,” we answered. “We’ll have the largest campus in the county: The County.” I needed a car, too, and I was learning that there does not need to be a separation from my family, teacher, and surfer lives—the Suburban drove them all the same and always would.

During those early years, when the school still felt fragile and improvised and a bit wild, the line between school and expedition was blurry. Learning happened at tide pools, in Baja fishing villages, in the mountains, around campfires, beside estuaries, and in the front seats of old trucks heading somewhere uncertain. Oh, and around desks. It felt easy and natural for me to bust through that often-hardened school/natural world barrier, but for many kids it was tough—once aboard that blue vessel, things got easier for them.

Out of boundaries, students learned to navigate roads and themselves at the same time, and they learned that school was a bigger thing than they had thought—it was the world and, once you were out there, there really wasn’t anything to do in it other than learn.

Somewhere in the 1990s, the Wagon became the unofficial soundtrack vehicle of the school. Students passed around cassette tapes and argued over music while we rattled down freeways toward field studies and service trips. There are former students now in their forties and fifties who still remember those rides.

At one point I let a student, Leslie, drive it way down on the Baja desert floor. That probably tells you everything about the era.

The Wagon survived because people loved it enough to keep resurrecting it. Don Kish, the former Bell Labs physicist/genius and one of those rare school characters every small school seems blessed with once in a generation, rebuilt the engine entirely from his home driveway and garage not once but twice. On expeditions to Joshua Tree and Yosemite, Don sometimes slept underneath the Wagon itself like some desert mechanic-philosopher keeping watch over the tribe. Near the very end, after 35 years, we gave Don’s rebuilt engine a compression test and discovered it still had almost the same compression as when it first rolled off the line. He loved that car.

Over the years the Wagon accumulated so many coats of blue metalflake paint that magnets hardly stuck to the doors. So it always showed well in parades. One year I put on a Santa Elvis costume and drove it in the Encinitas Winter Holiday Parade. The Wagon-and-Elvis combo won the Judges Award for best entry—the top parade award that year. That was Encinitas in those years, and I hope still.

The Wagon hauled supplies during campus projects. It became a kind of moving memory bank. I began realizing that the Wagon had crossed some invisible threshold from old truck to vintage. During the pandemic years I started driving it around Encinitas again, and people would throw shakas as we rolled through Swami’s. By then the seat belts had became unreliable and so it was not a great student car, but it still had a presence and was part of an identity we all shared. And when my daughter Audrey (Class of 2011) and her new husband Brent drove away in it after her wedding, it nearly killed me.

Schools have objects like this sometimes. Not expensive objects. Not strategic objects. Maybe: Totems.

Things that carry the spirit of the place.

What mattered most to me when we sold it was not getting every dollar possible. It was the feeling that the Wagon might continue belonging to this coastline and these roads and this community that shaped it. I was imagining it still rumbling around town instead of disappearing into some anonymous collector’s warehouse hundreds of miles away.

A small, local school is not just buildings and transcripts and financial plans, but stories embedded into ordinary things: a bell, a tree stump circle, a butterfly garden, a school dog asleep under a desk, an old surfboard in a hallway, or a giant blue movable feast carrying young people toward the outerknown.

For more than three decades, that Wagon was our conscience as we practiced a simple idea: Education is not confined to classrooms and it is a freeing thing, not a controlling thing.

It begins when you climb in, slam the heavy door shut, and head down the road together as the stereo blasts out trumpets to “the Low, Low Rider.” We left traces and we changed Encinitas and, I think, education.

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