Garden Grove Civic Leader Mourned

William “Bud” Wiesner, a former barber, driver’s education teacher and well-known civic booster, was memorialized Wednesday in Garden Grove, where his late wife served as the first city clerk.

Wiesner, who also had served as a trustee of Garden Grove High School District (now Garden Grove Unified School District), died Saturday of heart disease, said his niece, Pam Matthews. He was 81.

The funeral was at First Presbyterian Church of Garden Grove.

“There were about 150 people there,” said Randy Bryan, a fellow Garden Grove Host Lions Club member and manager of Dimond & Sons Mettler Mortuary, which handled the arrangements. “I’d say there were 25 Lions, about 50 Masons, the rest Shriners or other friends in town. He and Gwen had a lot of friends. They were that kind of people.”

Like his wife, Gwen, who was Garden Grove’s city clerk, treasurer, assistant city manager and director of administrative services before she retired in 1981, Bud Wiesner wore several hats over the course of his life. He drove a taxi. He owned a barbershop. He taught driver’s education. But Garden Grove Unified School District spokesman Alan Trudell said Wiesner was probably best known in lodge and civic circles.

“I used to be a reporter covering Garden Grove and know Bud well. That was more than 20 years ago,” Trudell said. “He is as well known in Garden Grove as his wife was. Gwen was the city’s first [clerk]. Together they were both synonymous with Garden Grove. You’ve heard of the grapevine? She was the lead grape.”

Born Dec. 27, 1918, in Milwaukee, Wiesner spent most of his life in California. After his 1937 graduation from Marshall High School in Los Angeles, Wiesner served as a private first class in the Army Air Corps in China, Burma and India during World War II. He settled afterward in Garden Grove, where he became a member of the Lions Club and a Master Mason at the lodge known as Acacia Grove No. 352. He and Gwendolyn Oleta Smith were married in 1951.

“I think because they chose not to have kids,” said niece Matthews, 47, “they chose to be involved in other ways: school, city, the Strawberry Festival board. I found that, while I am a real niece and my brother is a real nephew, there are a lot of other people who considered them an aunt and uncle too.”

With his sister, Bud Wiesner ran a two-cab taxi service and later bought Century Barber. He sold it to a woman who turned it into a beauty parlor--and attended his funeral Wednesday. Sometime in the mid-1960s, Wiesner became a certified driver’s education instructor, the type who rides in the car with students and steps on the passenger-side brake when things get dicey. His niece said it was a job he loved.

“He liked people and really enjoyed it,” she said. “I’m a baby boomer, and I guess a lot of people around my age in Garden Grove learned to drive from him. He was a barber, and there were a lot of guys who wouldn’t have a haircut from anybody but Bud until they went off to college.”