So when did the public get the first inkling that the new college serving Southwest Washington was not going to be a traditional institution? It would appear that Sen. Gordon Sandison, one of the more overlooked among the founders of Evergreen, has the distinction of being the earliest on record for advocating an innovative approach to higher education as the College was being formed.

Gordon Sandison was born in Auburn and raised in Port Angeles, where his father served on the City Council. He attended the University of Idaho and Seattle University. During WWII he fought in the Pacific theater while in the Marines and won the Navy Cross and a Bronze Star for heroism in Guam. Returning to Port Angeles and becoming an active Democrat, his fellow citizens sent him to the Washington State House of Representatives 1947-1959, and to the State Senate 1959-1977. Gov. Ray appointed him Director of Fisheries, 1977-1981. He ran his own insurance business. He was a trustee for WWU from 1980 until his death in 1989 at age 70.

Sandison is chiefly remembered as the Chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee for an astounding 18 years, including the time period when Evergreen was created and opened. Here are the opening lines in his long Seattle Times obituary:

Although he served for 30 years in the Legislature and was state fisheries director under former Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, Sandison is best known as the architect of the state's community-college system and - with then-Gov. Dan Evans - as one of the creators of The Evergreen State College in the capital. As chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee for 18 years, Sandison sponsored legislation creating the community colleges in 1967. A Democrat, he forged an alliance with Republican Evans to put Evergreen in Olympia and to establish its nontraditional educational approach.

Dean Clabaugh, the earliest of TESC employees (he was not a dean, he was a Dean ... oh, never mind) mentioned Sen. Sandison in his document, The Evergreen State College Developmental Aspects Prior to Appointment of the President written Nov. 1969:

... Perhaps most important was the mandate to the college by executive and Legislature for an innovative approach. Governor Evans declared the need for a "flexible and sophisticated educational instrument" as opposed to the "vast and immobile establishment"; and expressed the need to "unshackle our educational thinking from traditional patterns." Senator Gordon Sandison, chairman of the Advisory Council, remarked:

"It was not the intent of the Legislature that this would be just another four year college; ... (the college would be) a unique opportunity to meet the needs of the students today and the future because the planning would not be bound by any rigid structure of tradition as are the existing colleges nor by any overall central authority as is the case in many states."

By the time the Evergreen Study was presented in 1979 by the Council for Postsecondary Education, which called for severely gutting TESC's experimental approach and making the College more mainstream, both Evans and Sandison were no longer in as powerful positions to protect the school as they had through most of the 1970s. In fact, Sandison was Director of the Dept. of Fisheries at the time they stated TESC graduates could not be hired since they lacked the BS degree.

The Evergreen Study itself pins down the very first meeting of the Trustees as the key moment:

The earliest documentable reference to an educational mode for Evergreen that would be other than conventional appears to be in the comments of the then Chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee ... Senator Gordon Sandison. In August, 1967, at a meeting with the newly appointed Board of Trustees for the College, Senator Sandison advised it to study the innovations and experiences of other new colleges around the country. He suggested that the new college be of a "perhaps different type. The present three state colleges were built many decades ago and followed traditional lines. We would like this to be a college that will meet the needs of the State for many years to come and perhaps can be as modern fifty years from now as at the present."

So there you have it. The seed was planted by a Port Angeles WWII Marine vet and insurance salesman, and he was a true son of Washington.