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Mike Wiggins, Vendor of the Week.
Photo by J.P. Gritton |
Let it be known, before I begin, that the purpose of this profile is not sublimated Real Change propaganda. That said, we don’t mean to brag, but some interesting and often amazing things happen in this office.
My strongest memory of Mike Wiggins is a dark night (it felt like night—really it was maybe 4 p.m., but it was one of those sinister, joyless days in late January in Seattle), a night that he desperately needed bus fare.
He had just found a few distant relatives on the Olympic peninsula, members of a branch of his family, people to whom Wiggins had been estranged until a few days before. They had invited him up for the weekend.
Wiggins isn’t the kind of guy to ask you for money. He explained the situation to me, left with some papers he had on credit, and (I found out later) sold them all in time to make a bus headed for the Olympics.
As we begin our interview, Wiggins suggests a headline in that characteristic surfer drawl of his: “Homeless dude finds estranged family members.”
I tell him I don’t think that’ll quite cover it—Wiggins is more—a lot more—than a “homeless dude.”
Though born and raised in Beacon Hill, Wiggins spent a good chunk of his life in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, where he did everything from anti-nuclear proliferation protests at Livermore Laboratory to attending physics lectures gratis.
“These kids were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for this junk,” says Wiggins, who “snuck” into lecture halls at UC Berkeley. “I just hung out.” Since then, he’s had his holdups and let-downs, lived a life so full that I can only say that you should ask him about it yourself.
You can find Wiggins at Sixth and Olive. Expect to laugh.
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