Selma grew up one of three kids in Toledo, Ohio. Her father, a Ukrainian Jew, had immigrated to the United States in 1901. He owned a music store and a string of five-and-dimes. When socialist Eugene Debs ran for president in 1912, Selma’s father enthusiastically supported him. Selma learned the book-keeping skills that would later distinguish her by working in the family businesses. During World War II, she served in the Navy, and afterward moved to Los Angeles with Alex Elber, her first husband. When Elber died in the 1950s, she married Bill Rubin, a gifted engineer who not only designed the water system at Dodger Stadium but designed the iconic Van de Kamp bakery sign.

As a teenager, Selma had vowed never to have children – she wouldn’t have been a good mother, she claimed. Instead, she and Bill threw themselves into political activism with un-distracted focus. Selma and Bill were extremely involved with the ACLU, which during the anti-communist heyday of the 1950s was seen as nothing less than subversive. They jumped feet first into the civil rights struggles. And, at a time when the only debate about “Red” China was whether to drop the atom-bomb on it or not, Selma and Bill were demanding the United States extend communist China full diplomatic relations. (When President Richard Nixon established relations with China in the 1970s, Bill and Selma would be among the first Americans invited to visit.)

By 1964, Bill’s health was deteriorating. His lungs couldn’t handle the smog, so the couple moved to Santa Barbara. The idea was to give politics a rest. “Just relax, pretend we’re on vacation,” Selma explained. Three weeks after the Rubins moved to town, a black couple stopped by for an overnight visit. Their arrival was noted by the driver of a pick-up truck, who slowed down to conspicuously rubber-neck as the couple unpacked their bags in front of the Rubin’s home. A few days later, the Rubins woke up to discover every tire on their two cars slashed. Selma looked at Bill. Bill looked at Selma. “Vacation’s over,” they both agreed.

Bill Rubin would die after a long, cruel struggle with Alzheimer’s that robbed him of the brilliant intellect that won Selma over on their second date. Instead of his retreating into an isolated convalescence, Selma took Bill, prone to wandering, with her everywhere. Alzheimer’s would be a new cause, one which united her with the likes of Nancy Reagan, and she never stopped. Two years ago, Selma was presented a lifetime “Endurance Award” by Get Oil Out at the organization’s 40th anniversary celebration. (She almost didn’t get it. The presentation was delayed till nearly midnight after Goleta City Council member Ed Easton fainted and an ambulance was called.) Selma was asked at the podium the secret of her long career. Grabbing the mic, she boiled it down to two simple words. “Stay active,” she said, and then sat down.

It’s worth remembering that values now taken for granted as safe and inevitable – like the preservation of open space – were not just improbable when Selma started, but positively dangerous. And Selma didn’t just change the political landscape. In ways dramatic, enduring, and very tangible, she – and the organizations she fostered – left an indelible mark on the physical landscape itself, beating back repeated efforts to industrialize the coast with offshore oil development, or to commercialize it with massive sprawling development.
The most glaring case in point involved well-oiled plans by out-of-town developer Jules Berman to construct no less than 1,535 new houses along the Gaviota Coast, near El Capitan, back in 1970. The County Planning Commission approved and so did the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors. There was no Coastal Commission to appeal to; it didn’t exist yet. There wasn’t even a California Environmental Quality Act to sue over; that didn’t exist either. Selma Rubin, then 55, along with her friend Anna Laura Myers, responded by launching a petition drive to put the proposal on the ballot. They needed 9,000 signatures; they collected 12,000. When it went to the voters, Berman’s proposal was rejected by a margin of two to one. District Attorney David Minier, then tight with powerful real estate interests, filed criminal charges against Rubin and Meyer, alleging they forged some signatures and tampered with others. If convicted, the two women faced a maximum of 28 years behind bars.

Selma would later recall how frightened she was. But her friends remember her also being gleeful: Minier had played right into Selma’s hands. She made the court case a rallying cry for Santa Barbara’s emerging environmental movement. Selma hired attorney Frank Sarguis to defend her, and he battled it out in an intensely publicized, two-week preliminary hearing with a prosecutor who, it turned out, was ashamed to have been assigned the case. In the end, Judge Jack Rickard – a rock-ribbed Republican appointed to the bench by then-Governor Ronald Reagan – tossed out the charges, making clear his disgust that they were ever filed. Later, Minier’s association with real estate developers implicated in numerous arson schemes proved his political undoing. And one of Selma’s defense attorneys, Roden, pushed Minier out of office in one of the county’s most hotly contested DA’s races ever.

Had Selma not intervened and Berman’s 1,535 homes been built, everything between Goleta and El Capitan would have been paved over. Chances are there would be no Gaviota Coast left to worry about saving. As Selma put it in a recent interview, “It would have been good-bye all the way up the coast.”

Selma’s accomplishments during her nearly five decades in Santa Barbara are beyond calculation. She helped start 42 grass roots political organizations dedicated, in various ways, to preserving the environment and promoting social justice. Many of these organizations have since faded from the scene, their purposes served. But, to a startling degree, many remain very much alive, engaged, and formidable – and so established they’ve become enshrined in the institutional alphabet soup that defines the South Coast left: the Environmental Defense Center (EDC), the Community Environmental Council (CEC), the ACLU, SBCAN, and the Fund for Santa Barbara among them. Taken in their totality, the organizations Selma nurtured effectively re-defined the range of political debate in Santa Barbara.