‘Everyone loved him’: Davis community mourns ‘Tedly’ Wilshusen

“There were times that it felt like the Whole Earth Festival would not happen unless Ted was there with his hammer and his tool box,” said Davis resident Alan Miller, who first met Wilshusen — “Tedly” to his friends — at the festival in 1986. “He was just tireless in building the festival every year. He was always smiling and absolutely loved it.”



Tedly, 68, died last month, his body discovered on the morning of Oct. 19 in the alley area behind the G Street Wunderbar. Yolo County coroner’s officials ruled his cause of death as hypertensive cardiovascular disease.



Friends say he’d fallen on hard times in recent years, but “there was always a really decent guy in there,” Miller said. “Even as he was suffering and things were really rough for him, he always seemed happy, regardless.”



At Miller’s request, the Davis City Council adjourned its Oct. 21 meeting in Tedly’s memory. A memorial service is planned for 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 7, at the Wunderbar, his favorite watering hole.

'He fit right in'

Born in San Mateo, Tedly was raised with his two older sisters in Hawaii, Davis and the eastern Sierras before returning to Davis for good in the early to mid-1980s.

He met Dawn Student, the mother of his two oldest children Sierra and Forest, in the summer of 1985 at the former Los Banditos Burritos bar and grill at Fifth and L streets.

“He was a regular there, and we hung out there most evenings,” said Student, who attended UCD at the time. “He was charismatic. He was charming. He knew everyone, and everyone loved him.”

Student recalled that Tedly also was quite skilled at strategy games, and “he could build or fix anything.” Together, they rebuilt the engine of Student’s 1963 Volkswagen bus.

It was Student who introduced Tedly to the Whole Earth Festival in 1986, when she held the position of karma patrol co-director — an on-site director who recruited and trained the event’s 300-plus volunteers.

Tedly accompanied her to some planning meetings and “he fit right in,” Student said. Although he wasn’t affiliated with UCD, he was offered the position of appropriate technology coordinator, his duties including showcasing solar cooking, windmill demonstrations and the festival’s innovative solar-powered performance stage.

“We both shared a love of music, being at the center of the activity and meeting the entertainers,” said Student, who was pregnant with Sierra during the 1986 WEF.

Forest arrived the following year, and although the couple had gone their separate ways by then, “we remained friendly,” Student said. “He was always the life of the party.”

Tedly would go on to marry Cathy Aubill, whom he met outside the Safeway at University Mall as she sat on a bench, giving away a pair of puppies in need of good homes.

“He sat down and played with them, and we chatted.” she recalled. As Tedly began to walk away, Cathy noticed his jacket was embroidered with half of a Grateful Dead logo.



“Ah, you’re a Deadhead too!" Cathy exclaimed, and they exchanged phone numbers, as Deadheads often do. Many months later, he called to invite her to join him at the Paragon.



Aligned in music, politics and values, their friendship blossomed into something more. They married in Reno in 1988, hurrying off the next day to attend a Grateful Dead concert. 



A skilled general contractor, Tedly specialized in framing, plumbing and electrical work. His nickname arose at a project site, where he was part of a crew building a granny flat for two customers whose first names both were "Ted."



With three Teds on the scene, Wilshusen needed a moniker to distinguish himself from Ted Jr. and Ted Sr. Someone suggested “Tedly,” and “he liked it so much that he told everyone, for the rest of his life, that was his name,” Cathy said. 



Each Mother’s Day weekend, Tedly gravitated toward the Whole Earth Festival, and Cathy said “he got me into it, too” as a member of the stage crew. “He’d found a home there.” 



As the years passed, not only were the couple heavily involved with WEF, they also were active parent volunteers in their daughter Hayley’s extracurricular activities — figure-skating competitions and shows, gymnastics meets, horse shows and more — where they created props, performed logistics, announced and ran lights and sound.




'Attention to detail'

Mike Erickson, the WEF’s longtime logistics coordinator, said he became “vaguely aware” of Tedly and his stage work while attending the event as a UCD student.




“He was always a very handy guy, one of the go-to types,” Erickson said. He recalled that Tedly designed a system for hanging 50-foot cloth banners on the Quad, a feat that involved “some pretty significant engineering. He was somebody who could look at a problem and solve it.” 




That skill came in handy during the early 2000s, Erickson recalled, when the festival staff attended a retreat at the Oz Farm along the Mendocino County coast. One day, someone in the group had inadvertently broken a cake slicer that belonged to the venue.




Tedly “went and found an appropriate piece of wood and whittled a replacement for them,” Erickson said. “He had the skills to do it well and the inclination to take responsibility for our errors.” 




Another of Tedly's friends, Bill Thomas, came to Davis from Santa Cruz in 1992 for a visit. That’s when he made a new pal in Tedly.



Thomas said he was backstage at the Whole Earth Festival when it suddenly started to rain. 


“Hey, we need help!” Thomas heard another man — who turned out to be Tedly — exclaim.

Having worked for jazz bands in the past, Thomas offered his expertise, schlepping equipment from the outdoor stage into the Memorial Union. 


Thomas returned to Santa Cruz but moved to Davis the following year, and spent the next 25 years working the WEF stage alongside Tedly and Cathy.




Both men also worked together as carpenters/contractors, helping out on one another’s residential projects around town. For the Whole Earth Festival, they built wooden arches and sorting tables for a newly launched recycling program in the mid-1990s.




“He had attention to detail and high quality — he really appreciated hard work, taking charge and getting a job done right,” Thomas said. “He had a lot of skills and talents, and I really respected him.” 




Thomas recalled running in to Tedly on G Street about a year or so ago, after he had fallen on those hard times. He offered his old friend shelter, but Tedly declined.




“He just liked to have his privacy and his integrity intact, and didn’t want to be a burden,” Thomas said. “He was just a really good person. He made mistakes, but we’re going to miss him.” 




Cathy agreed. Despite their divorce, she and Tedly remained friends and often met up at the G Street Wunderbar to check in with each other. When she last saw him on Oct. 15, he relayed his plans to move in with a friend the following Sunday.



“He was my best friend. I went looking for him at the bar almost every week to check on him and reminisce,” Cathy said. As they talked, “everybody else just fell away. It was our own little enclosed sphere.”

In addition to his three children, Tedly is survived by two grandchildren by Hayley, Scarlett Robyn and Jameson Gabriel.

— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net