He’s putting $15M toward helping seniors. It started with dressing as Santa for his mom
Bill Looney was something of an eccentric businessman. He made millions in real estate, biked around the world and owned a pot shop.
At Christmas, the Tacoma resident dressed as Santa and brought gifts to his mother who lived in a care facility. Over the next decade, that simple act will be duplicated for 100,000 homebound seniors across the country.
The William A. Looney Family Foundation is providing $15 million to Santa for Seniors, a program it established with Lutheran Community Services Northwest a few months after Looney died in 2015.
“He had the idea, he had the dream, he just didn’t have the time to do it himself,” said Steve Garber, the foundation’s president and Looney’s longtime CPA.
That first Christmas in 2015, about 110 seniors were visited and given gifts through the program.
“They have grown every year,” Garber said. “Even during COVID, those very abled folks at Lutheran Community Services still made the numbers go up.”
In 2021, more than 4,200 low-income seniors in nine Washington counties and one in Oregon received gift bags, homemade cards and ornaments. The program now runs year round.
This spring 1,700 gift bags are being distributed, according to LCS Northwest. In addition to the gifts, the program connects homebound seniors with well-being resources. LCS Northwest offers fall-prevention classes, dementia services, Meals on Wheels and other support.
“The whole point is to make contact with seniors and make them feel loved and remembered and then connect them with services they may need — in some cases they may not even know they need,” said LCS Northwest spokesperson Matt Misterek.
One LCS Northwest program, Senior Companions, matches trained volunteers with isolated individuals and people with disabilities who need companionship. Volunteers visit regularly to play cards, work on hobbies, go for walks or accompany seniors on short errands or to doctor appointments.
Santa for Seniors
The Looney Foundation already has given $2 million to Lutheran Community Services for the program with $1 million coming in 2019 alone, according to its tax return.
The foundation supports a variety of organizations that assist seniors, but about 80 percent of its funds have gone to Santa for Seniors, according to Garber.
“His goal was to bring happiness, to bring joy to seniors to make their lives better,” Garber said. Eventually, all of the foundations money will be given away, he said.
“He left the bulk of his estate to this private foundation,” Garber said. “The foundation is staffed by essentially his widow and his advisors. He said, ‘This is my dream, you guys make it happen.’”
Looney owned about 240 properties when he died.
“So, we set about liquidating,” Garber said. “We didn’t know really how much money this would generate. It turned out it generated kind of a lot.”
Bill Looney
Looney was born in Missouri in 1939 and grew up in Sunnyside, according to a biography on Mr. Bill’s of Buckley, the cannabis store he owned.
Looney sold real estate in the 1960s. He eventually became a real estate speculator who bought property seized by local governments for failure to pay back taxes. He didn’t like to “pay retail” for real estate, he told The News Tribune in 1992.
“I think of Bill very kindly, very favorably as a bottom fisher,” Garber said. “He owned a lot of little pieces of things that other people couldn’t do anything with. He bought some number of lemons, but he made some lemonade.”
Looney fought a decade-long battle with the state Department of Ecology to pay environmental damage clean-up costs at 1147 Dock St., one of the most historical and polluted parcels on Tacoma’s waterfront. Looney bought the property for back taxes in the 1999 but didn’t feel it was his responsibility to pay for the clean-up.
“I told [Ecology],” Looney said in 2006, “that the only thing I ever did down there is walk my dog, and he did a poop. I’d be more than happy to go back and clean that up. But that’s all I’m going to do.”
Looney sold the property to a developer. The vacant lot is now owned by Metro Parks Tacoma and will become Melanie’s Park. Development of the park could begin this fall, according to Metro Parks.
Mr. Bill’s
While Looney owned mostly empty parcels, one of his commercial properties in Buckley was frustratingly vacant in 2012 just as cannabis was becoming legal in Washington.
“On a lark he applied for a license knowing nothing about marijuana,” Garber said. “Not a user. Not anything. He just wanted the tenant. Damned if he didn’t get the license.”
Looney was a world traveler and avid cyclist. He biked across the United States at age 63 with his grandson in just 45 days.
He interrupted a 2005 bike ride in Iowa, “... to have 2 stents placed in his heart at the Mayo Clinic because he was having a heart attack,” according to an obituary on Mr. Bill’s website.
This story was originally published April 21, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
