Stephen Elias died at Sutter Lakeside Hospital on Thursday night after he collapsed from a heart attack at his Lakeport home, according to friends. He was 70 years old.
On Friday friends posted farewell messages to Elias on his Facebook page, thanking him for his contributions, his friendship and compassion.
“He was a proponent of everything that is good and right. And against everything that is wrong. Lake is a bit emptier this day,” wrote Ann White.
Herb Gura, a paralegal who worked with Elias on bankruptcy filings and was a fellow radio host at Lake County Community Radio, KPFZ 88.1 FM, said Elias believed in justice.
“He believed that the system had to work for people,” said Gura, noting that Elias lived according to his ideals.
Elias was well known on local airwaves thanks to his longtime involvement with KPFZ.
He and wife, Catherine, aided in founding the station, helping to nurture it from its days as a low power enterprise in station manager Andy Weiss’ home in Lucerne to a full power station now headquartered in Lakeport.
At one point the station shared space with his law office on Lakeport Boulevard before it moved to its current location on Main Street in Lakeport, Gura said.
Gura said Elias had been “the backbone of the station in a lot of ways,” and was a member of its board.
“He really believed in the radio station,” said Gura. “He really believed in the whole concept of radio.”
He also had a “purist, free speech approach” to radio, and felt that there needed to be room for everybody on community radio, said Gura.
The Eliases hosted numerous shows on the KPFZ, everything from local news and issues, to a weekly veterans hour. Gura said Steve Elias was on the air almost every day, and also gladly filled in for other hosts when they needed to miss a show.
It was because of one of those shows that Lower Lake resident Victoria Brandon first met Elias in 2004.
She had gone to a Board of Supervisors meeting to discuss an issue, and afterward he asked her to come on his radio show.
“That made me feel like I’d really arrived around here,” said Brandon, who would later make numerous appearances on shows Elias’ produced.
She said he always hosted a profession and “very reasoned discussion,” even at times when he didn’t agree with her perspectives.
“He cared deeply about local issues,” she said, noting he wanted to give all different sides when looking at community concerns.
Brandon said she worked with Elias in 2005 on an effort by the Coalition for Responsible Agriculture to convince the Lake County Board of Supervisors to pass a three-year moratorium on genetically engineered alfalfa, an effort that ultimately failed in October of that year.
The group returned in 2008 with a proposal to regulate all genetically engineered crops, with Elias helping draft the proposed ordinance, as Lake County News has reported.
Elias told Lake County News in a 2008 interview that he believed building a GE-free brand for the county would give local farmers a competitive advantage.
“We're just unlike any other county around,” he said at the time.
That effort also failed, and Brandon said Elias later stepped back from the activist role, wanting to focus more on contributing as a commentator on the radio station.
Brandon recalled last seeing him at the Old Time Bluegrass Festival at Anderson Marsh State Historic Park in Lower Lake in September. He and his wife were in the KPFZ booth, doing their program.
A noted legal expert
Elias’ online biographies recount that he studied Chinese and Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1959 to 1963, and received his law degree from UC Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. He was admitted to the California State Bar in 1970.
He would practice law not just in California but in New York and Vermont as well.
He shared with this reporter that he had at one point worked for the state of Vermont as a public defender; specifically, he worked in what he joked was the grandly named Northeast Kingdom, the name for the three Northeastern-most Vermont counties.
However, it was the area of law relating to bankruptcy for which he may have been best known, and became a nationally recognized expert.
In 1980 he joined Nolo press, where he at one time was an associate publisher. The company published numerous books written by Elias on the topic of bankruptcy, foreclosure, trusts and legal research. He even helped coauthor a popular software to help people draw up wills.
“It’s an amazing, revolutionary thing, the whole concept of empowering people to represent themselves” and help them make their way through the courts without lawyers, said Gura, who credited Elias with starting a movement in the country that inspired independent paralegals like himself.
Elias and his work was featured on 20/20 and Good Morning America, in the New York Times, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, according to Nolo’s Web page.
In 1989 he founded The Bankruptcy Law Project Inc., which he and wife Catherine operated to assist people with self-help law materials, bankruptcy petition preparers and legal advice via telephone as an alternative to full lawyer representation, the project’s Web site stated.
In recent years, as the country’s financial problems progressed and foreclosure numbers grew dramatically, Elias would offer legal perspective on foreclosure and how bankruptcy could help those facing the loss of their homes.
“He had a lot of accomplishments and I think most people didn't even know,” Gura said.
Before he met Elias Gura had read his books on bankruptcy. The two began working together on a process for bankruptcy filings for people who couldn’t afford to pay attorneys thousands of dollars to file the paperwork. Gura would do the paperwork and Elias would give the clients the legal advice for a fraction of what it would have cost to hire an attorney.
“He and I did thousands of cases together,” said Gura. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it without him.”
Elias would sometimes go with the clients down to the bankruptcy court in Santa Rosa, which Gura said wasn’t exactly welcoming to their work. “They put a lot of obstacles in our way.”
Gura said Elias stood up to one particular bankruptcy court judge, known for intimidating other attorneys, during an encounter in the courtroom.
Although considered an authority on bankruptcy, Elias had broad legal interests. He had worked both in criminal and civil law, and wrote blogs and commentaries about everything from privacy to the place of detector tests in court.
Elias also often did pro bono work on cases that were of interest to him, said Gura. He didn’t like to work in criminal law, but if he felt someone needed help, he would step in if it felt right to him.
“Sometimes he just really felt like he had to do it,” Gura said.
Even so, Gura said Elias told him he was trying to cut back on such cases, as he didn’t have it in him to go to court daily any more.
He also used his legal acumen to help the Lucerne Community Water Organization and Lucerne FLOW, which relied on his help in fighting a proposed increase of well over 200 percent being sought by California Water Service in 2005. By the time Elias was done, the actual rate increase was far lower.
Elias, who turned 70 in July, seemed as busy as ever in 2011.
Gura said KPFZ recently had started streaming its shows online, and Elias donated a computer for that purpose. He also was paying the monthly streaming costs, doing the necessary reports and training other station volunteers in the reporting process.
Earlier this year he was working with the newly formed Time Bank of Lake County, for which he was a co-coordinator. The organization helps people bank skills and services in trade for the skills and services provided by others.
Just last week, Elias had gotten home from a trip to Mexico that he had taken with his son, Rubin, who works with him in his bankruptcy assistance efforts, Gura said.
The father and son had toured Mayan ruins, visiting places Gura also had visited previously.
Gura said Elias had enjoyed the trip, and it had appeared to revive the traveling bug. They even spoke about taking future trips to those areas of Mexico together, since both shared an interest in them.
KPFZ and its volunteers now must consider how to carry on without one of their staunchest champions.
“We’re all thinking about it. We haven’t really started to talk about it yet,” said Gura.
He added, “I know that the station will survive. I’m not worried about that.”
Gura anticipated that Catherine Elias would continue to do the shows. He said she had called in during a show he did on Friday morning, which surprised everyone.
Unless someone else incredibly dynamic comes along, Gura anticipated that all of the volunteers will have to do more. He anticipates more duties also will fall on Weiss.
In good attorney fashion, Elias wrote a simple and straightforward summation of his life, which he posted on his Facebook page.
“I enjoy life and I feel fortunate to have the optimist gene, whatever it is,” he wrote. “This really is the best of all possible worlds. I like people in small doses but crave more alone time than I can ever manage to get. I work harder than I should, but I enjoy my work, which is essentially educational in nature. I write self-help law books and I provide legal advice and counsel to people who are doing their own bankruptcies. I love our radio shows. Enough.”
For a poignant farewell commentary written by Elias’ friend, Phil Murphy, see Murphy: Remembering a local legend.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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